* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2022/03/05/mind-backup-should-be-anticipation-based/For 40 years, I have suspected that if you could describe a perception in sufficient detail, you could capture it. This has influenced my thoughts on Mind Backup research. Don't try to map the physical patterns of your brain, only map the things that your brain loved. Make a very long list of all the things you liked. Record everything in your life of any value, at the maximum level of detail. Then combine all that data in a virtual memory palace. That would be a virtual reality simulation of a "museum world", dedicated to your life and mind. It could be located on an eternal island. The point is that you would design it ,and even begin to "inhabit" it to some limited extent, while you're still alive. Through virtual reality you can begin to experience how it will feel after your body has died, and your mind has been "recreated" as an AI. You would prepare every detail of your "arrival" and habitation there while you're still alive. It could be like planning and looking forward to a vacation. Then your "continuation" would really be rendered as an AI after you die. And then you would spend "eternity" in the virtual memory palace you designed while you were still alive. This could happen even if you die before human-level AI has been invented. You would have to do a lot of work preparing your virtual memory palace. It would be like an endlessly expandable museum world. There would be separate facilities dedicated to all the places you lived (which would be recreated there), all your schools, where you worked, neighborhoods and all other places. All these museums would be highly biased, and mostly focus on the good and meaningful things. It's relatively easy and fun to create a giant layout. It would be able to import some data from a shared VR model of the entire world, incorporating all human knowledge. But you would still have to spend a lot of effort sorting out and entering all the data of your life. The only way to get people to put in the effort is if it's an easy process. They have to feel they are making good progress right from the start. The first step in creating a virtual memory palace would require software that could probably be written right now.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2021/01/22/what-is-a-mind-backup-supertest/It's something you could do. You provide the most essential kind of information about yourself. That information might then eventually be used to create an Artificial Intelligence or software mind that would have your personality. It would believe that it IS you. What I'm trying to do is said to be totally, completely, utterly impossible. We can't even begin to create artificial human-level minds yet. The human mind is said to be inscrutably complex. It is completely impossible to "back up", like you would back up computer data. But still I want to do that. A Mind Backup Supertest is a method to extract the maximum data about your identity using the fewest effort and time. The best idea I have so far is to write many independent short articles about specific aspects of your life. You have maybe ten thousand 'keystone' memories. Each is a specific detailed setting, a kind of image of a situation from your past. It is associated with a place and a setting. Places you visited, environments you lived or worked in. The feeling these memories trigger is real, even if the resolution is a bit low. Each could be separately described in a short article. These will all be added to your "Lifebox". Anyone should be able to reconstruct part of their key memories, even if they have lived traumatic lives. Parts of the past can be made "safe". But what is the best Mind Backup article idea? Probably a full description of your personality, the way that you think you are. This article might have to stay secret, as it also describes your weaknesses. You would simply have to write down what it is like to be you. How many different things are you thinking of at the same time and in what way? What are all your concerns at every level at one particular moment in time? (Each article should also have the date it was written and edited, perhaps by using Notepad's automatic .LOG function.)
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2020/09/23/imagining-new-image-formats/I've long begged for something better than keyboards, or just a better keyboard, but that's not all that could be improved. It's time to invent better ways to visualize reality, like my patented Spheroid Display (not talking about that horrible webp format that you can't even view after saving). One new format could be optimized to display human faces and bodies. The effect could already be simulated with those flickering gif animations that alternate photos from different angles to simulate a stereoscopic vision (also fun gifs here http://www.reddit.com/r/woahdude). To a large extent, it would obviously be used to map and represent the faces/bodies of unattainable females. A 3-D, layered, mark-up format, using common attributes to render realistic heads and bodies, with layers for shape (skin/muscle/skull), texture, color and so on. You could rotate them through any angle without loss of resolution, every pore and wrinkle simulated with reasonable verisimilitude. This system could combine several photos to create higher resolution composites. Call it a .3dfce format. Starting simple but steadily improved. Expressions could be defined, along with all the poses of the rest of the body. It might be awesome for the increasing number of males unable to get female partners due to the accelerating imbalance in the "sexual marketplace".
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2020/09/21/as-i-was-saying/It's hard to imagine in such boring times as the ones we're living through, but there might be increasingly interesting years ahead. With months of intense change that would feel like science fiction. I'm not talking about the immediate but the intermediate future. The future can only become so fantastic until it becomes meaningless Before the Technological Singularity, before the Human Event Horizon, we must pass the Tipping Point, when the rollercoaster is first released into the abyss. This may resemble the first moment of personal self awareness, experienced by some before the age of 3, or the moment someone fully wakes up and realizes they're awake, or the Bicameral Breakdown about 3,000 years ago, or when human nature changed in December 1910. Of course those last two comparisons are just made up. It should be more profound than all of them put together. Between the Tipping Point and the Human Event Horizon lies the Accelerando, an age of economic growth that would make everyone as rich as they ever wanted. (This is the optimistic possibility, you don't want to know about the other one.) The Tipping Point may be as simple as the moment when interface technology stops getting worse. (One problem is that under the current paradigm programmers are paid to actually be evil.) Lightweight visors and earbuds, holographic display walls, something better than keyboards, software that can interpret and anticipate user demands. To serve their users, future operating systems must become part of them. Ending human poverty might require a method to effectively make people smarter with human mind extensions, software to convert everyone into their ideal selves. That would be wonderful to have. Progress would actually become easier than failure. The invention and development of mind interface technology would be followed by human-level artificial minds. Then artificial hyper-minds may begin to analyze and reconstruct deceased human minds from the past, using whatever incomplete records are available. Direct brain scanning methods may analyze the tiny connections that form a (likely deceased) human brain to recreate it as software. Almost a billion people die every decade. Some or most would want to live on in cyberspace. It still seems like a long way off. About now, we may be entering the upslope with a jerk, the coaster just beginning to climb up the railway. Or we may still be waiting in line. Or just dreaming of going to the amusement park. * Timeline of the Future * Future of Deep Learning
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2017/08/26/prediction-real-estate-values-must-collapse/Eventually - not in our present epoch, of course. It's certainly been predicted for a long time. Meanwhile, an average house in San Francisco costs well over one million dollars. It's a strange market, driven by status and hypocrisy. The residents are the real product, not their homes. Home prices are rising because the area has increasing numbers of smart/skilled white/Asian people. Elites are inevitably drawn together (a single WMD would really mess things up). They also 'subconsciously' want to keep out less smart and skilled people, very much including non-Asian minorities, i.e. blacks, Hispanics, Muslims. If too many of the latter moved to San Francisco, the place would change in a way the current residents apparently wouldn't like for some reason. Nothing personal you understand. The only way NAMs would be encouraged to move there would be if there was a way to control them into behaving in HIGHLY specific ways. That would require new types of surveillance, security, incentives. Perfectly possible, in fact. The city is a real-life communications hub, a networking center, a concentration of useful people that only exists because online communications still suck. Like most bad things, this is by choice not necessity. It has nothing to do with school zoning, as they're hardly reproducing. The great insight of the philosophical study field of Malism is that the world becomes evil by consensus. Most folks are at peace with other folks' problems. But progress can't be stopped entirely. At least not yet. It could all be overthrown by mind-linked software. The current computer hell will last at least another decade, but sometime in the twenty-twenties a change may come. Programmers may finally start removing embedded malware instead of adding bloatcode. Right now it's really, really, bad. But then, their software may actually start working for a change. One can only dream. There's no reason why people couldn't collaborate in cyberspace instead of in hipster lofts. Instead of zip codes they would care more about digital reality. "Ease of duplication / challenge of creation" means that physical objects and locations will eventually become irrelevant, the hidden base level of society. Tomorrow's geniuses may choose to live in out of the way places, like well-hidden and easily defended gated communities. Those seeking to escape into digital hyperreality may consider it a badge of honor to appear uncool in real life. Homelessness is one of the worst problems. Do something about that.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2017/05/17/death-the-darkest-background/1) Awareness is fungible Those expecting to die before 2050 may have a chance at a partial afterlife. Any system offering even a remote escape possibility should attract adherents. The better the promise, the more adherents. For good or bad, existing religions may have to be discredited first, as they make much better promises than any rational afterlife proposal. Then, it comes down to the deceased Mind Backup customer's willingness to create and leave behind an enormous trove of data to reconstruct their history and personality. They will have filled a digital box with life stories, random data, and personality and memory tests. This will slowly be sorted by whatever reconstruction software becomes available. Sorting this data will take more computations than the lifetime total of the brain that generated it. Only a sophisticated AI could do it. The key insight is that mind reconstruction does not have to be fast. There is no rush whatsoever, as long as no data is lost. The subject has all the time there is. Once all the data has been assembled, it doesn't matter if it takes virtual centuries to make all the connections. It doesn't have to be an efficient or intensive process either. The awareness resulting from slow and inefficiently processed data will be just as real, even if we can't interact with it. In fact the reconstructed mind will emerge as a side effect of the process. Its awareness and perception of time will be imposed externally, like a character in a novel. Different scenes will be created separately, and later fleshed out with perception details. Single thoughts will slowly be made deeper and more detailed, linking to all kinds of memories. What matters is the number of connections, not the order in which they are created. Awareness may even emerge from an encyclopedic sorting process. In fact a postmortem mind reconstruction does not have to be an exact or even approximate copy of the original to be its legitimate continuation. The reconstruction could represent the average mind state over a lifetime. It could be true to itself even if it was mostly made up of reconstructed false memories to fill the gaps. The most important requirement is obvious, and it suggests new testing methods: A reconstructed mind should accurately predict how the original mind would have reacted to any situation. Early mind reconstructions will have limited or no free will, though they won't notice. In fact we may only need to simulate a few ideal moments of a mind reconstruction - or even a single moment - but with a full set of memories and future plans. 2) Monumental moments Mind-backup clients of the future will be encouraged to create tableaux of key scenes of their lives. These virtual descriptions will be highly detailed in a few ways. Only essential perceptions and feelings need to be described, both their best and their most common days, specific and generic scenes. The tableaux don't have to be meaningful. This is a literary skill. The outline could be done very fast, but hundreds of them will eventually have to be completed. It would begin with a few specific recreations. Floating cork-like in the surf off the beach, pedaling at sunset along a busy highway, lounging vegetable-like for years before entertainment boxes. Rooms and streets, fields and towns. Then one true moment. What would it be? Maybe when operating at peak efficiency and the most connections, times of maximum influence or expectation. Or start with this moment right now. They might even choose to compose situations that never happened but represent deep personal truths, even dreamlike or event horizon type situations. The tableaux could combine many life elements in one setting. 3) Mind extensions It will of course take years to build such monuments. Digital resurrection (or call it software mind continuation) should start as early as possible during the lifetime of the subject, with a self-improving mind extension. It must be easy to begin, a simple but powerful way to record and store life data, complexity emerging as connections multiply. Early versions will mostly appeal to programmer-type personalities. Data acquisition should become part of daily life, assembling long lists of memory factoids with associated tags (what when where why who). So what's the most powerful way to extract and organize your knowledge? The memory map will start as an outline to be filled in. Like life itself, it can never be completed, but any interesting perception and perspective could be added. It may involve the smallest units of awareness, some type of self-referential descriptions that might as well combine into a mind. Solve this problem and every human problem may become solvable. 4) Example of a further mind scanning method Stimulate small brain regions with focused radio waves or magnetically induced currents, and measure the resulting electrical activity in all other brain regions. Combine this data with the best available personality tests, and the test results of many other subjects, to find correlations between measured brain activity and personality traits. Eventually this may be done rapidly and precisely, and perhaps also reversed to create vivid interactive perceptions in the subject. Estimated cost to develop this technique: somewhere between a mission to Mars and building the Gibraltar Dam.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2017/03/27/the-approaching-dream-of-immortality/A human mind is immense. We're talking up to millions of gigabytes, if you believe memory is also stored in clusters of molecules within neurons. Because of bandwidth bottlenecks, mental states change rather slowly across the brain, though these states respond rapidly to the events they have evolved to handle. A human lifetime is far too short to fully scan a mind's contents, but not its structure. We'll probably never download perceptions directly like in the movie 'Strange Days'. Fortunately, we don't have to measure the mind's awareness. All we have to do is measure the mind's awareness of its awareness. Basically, the virtual brain within the real brain, a.k.a. the "soul". This will be the ultimate personality test. Beliefs, preferences and emotional ranges are different for everyone, a small fraction of memory-like states that control all the rest. They can predict how someone would feel and think about any situation. The most interesting software of the not-too-distant future will make it its mission to measure these personal attributes. Hopefully sometime before the 2030s, your first personal software assistant will become your preliminary mind extension. It will require a conceptual leap greater than a spiritual awakening, but not obviously impossible. This hypothetical software would identify, define, and track all its owners' interests and sensibilities. It would start as an automatic content aggregator, looking up and sorting meaningful data. First, the owner will define their lifetime interests, and all their random but meaningful events. It may seem narcissistic, but that may be the only meaning there is. The software will also search the Net for relevant content the user would otherwise have missed. The harder part will be summarizing all this data. Different users' mind extensions will form online interest groups, and individual users may become experts in countless new sub-fields, like initial neurons in a World Mind. Minds are vast, but that doesn't have to make them complex, even if the strongest emotions are totally overwhelming. Awareness is the deepest insight of ignorance, the vertigo of the lost past. The 1990s now seem as quaintly archaic as the 1970s did in the 1990s. The early 1980s had something called Teletext, which seemed almost as interesting as the Net does now. You could enter any of 999 page numbers on a suitable TV set, leading to short news stories displayed in phosphorescent text against a black background like an infinite resource. Once someone starts recording the important elements of their life, an overview of the top level may emerge. The clutter can be sorted into hierarchies or added to a giant warehouse. Human existence will have to yield to infinitely patient and methodical software. At first the subject's life will be forced into a series of predetermined boxes like haikus. The ultimate goal of this project is very simple: to capture all the elements of nostalgia in a flowchart. The process will change you. The final step of a mind backup attempt may be to manipulate the subject into becoming their ideal self. It could happen in a VR environment, where an extremely intelligent AI therapist would hone in on their core personality. The only way to fully understand a human mind would be through an exponentially larger and smarter (though highly specialized) artificial mind. While incredibly complex, its creation would not necessarily be incredibly difficult. This process will continue to its logical conclusion. Several levels above the smartest search engine, the creation of the World Mind will require prolonged exposure to the words and deeds of millions of distinct individuals, with or without their conscious assistance. (Consciousness is the brain's constant effort to exist in this moment.)
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2017/03/27/the-mystery-of-creativity/People who are naturally anxious worry about social blunders and vague threats. This changes their behavior, personality, and lifestyle. Stress avoidance makes people more complex, with arbitrary hang-ups and obsessions. Neurotic behavior has a reason. Without such forced specializations, life would flow more smoothly. Everyone would be more or less the same, and predictable. Neurosis is a crude method to force diversity. Like a pearl, it starts with a seemingly unsolvable problem. New ideas can be generated by combining unexpectedly similar ideas, and allowing overlapping, oversimplified thoughts to deal with them. Creativity is error-tolerant, suggesting a deeper order: . . . If everyone is pulled toward the center of the earth, they shouldn't feel it spinning. The same math can describe political economy and eugenic evolution. The fourth dimension may be understood by imagining Flatland. Everything can be simplified to ones and zeroes . . . Another creativity mechanism is dreams. Most individuals live boring, repetitive lives. Dreams generate some unpredictability, filling short term memory with false memory fragments. They're soon forgotten, but some weak connections remain. These can be strengthened if similarly unpredictable events occur in waking life. You don't have to be extremely intelligent to be extremely creative. Some types of innovation may take long-term obsessions, the mind getting stuck on something. Instead of advancing through abstractions, they are held back to first principles. Richard Feynman's IQ was said to have been under 150. Ultra-high IQ individuals are like universal problem solving machines, the skills needed to perfect multistage rockets or shrink hard drives and circuits. Without them we'd be stuck in a pre-industrial age, though there might still be gentlemen farmers and scholars. Intelligence is the energy to think further. This takes a big brain. Each added insight in a chain of thoughts becomes exponentially harder. Inability may be disguised as laziness. Intelligence is the number of thoughts that can be contained at once. Fortunately, humans have evolved intelligence extensions to allow 'smaller' brains to perform this function. First came language, the start of the creation of a group mind. Then came writing, increasing the number of facts a single brain could manipulate and keep track of. Word processing software like Notepad made it easier to rearrange and recombine ideas. Next will come mind extension software, starting as a permanent companion that will seek to identify and to automate common tasks, as it slowly becomes smarter and more closely integrated.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2017/03/27/forced-brain-simulations/The coming decades will see a beginning effort to create a generic, human-style AI-mind that can be adapted for many purposes. It will be a blank mind template, a digital brain without memories. Hundreds of human-level mental variables can be adjusted as needed, plus any number of false histories, locations, and events. Eventually, copies of this template will be created and configured to match individual deceased humans, based on their personality test results and memory descriptions. The most crucial part of this process will be very simple: the recreated templates will be made to believe they basically are the original human minds, either reliving events of their lives as part of an 'ancestor simulation', or (more relevant for this article) waking to find themselves in the digital afterlife of their choice. Their continued identity will be an internal certainty, an existential essence, an 'inner I'. This suggests several new personality testing methods. For example, what types of simulated environments appear most realistic to different humans? How do people perceive, test, and accept these simulations? Where would they want to remain indefinitely? The tests would measure self-reflection and introspection, routines and variety, mood levels and restlessness and more. The subject's personality traits would be used to subvert and manipulate their future simulation's authenticity, creating the perfect illusion of being a resurrected mind inhabiting their chosen realistic simulation. Of course the simulated mind will have partial amnesia, since it will be at best a very partial copy. Perhaps its skepticism can be continuously reset. If a human-type AI plausibly believes that it is the continuation of a past human mind, then this belief may become a self-fulfilling truth. A person could have the reasonable expectation that after they die, their mind continuation will be perfectly certain of being themselves. They should prepare for that feeling while still alive, so their present and future selves will match. For best results, they could spend as much time as possible in the setting their future mind copy is likely to inhabit. They could create an online interface, a virtual control screen to explore online and physical reality, and use that from now on, and once again after they have been successfully simulated. This could be easier for older people who are likelier to already be homebound. Physically simpler environments, like the experience of sitting behind a computer, should also be easier to simulate.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/mind-backup-and-the-dream-of-mental-immortality-going-against-nature/I’ve spent the last five years now inventing ways to record the most important information stored in a human mind, with the hope of eventually using it to create an incomplete but adequate software copy of that mind. That would take a rather long time, but there may be ways to shorten the process, if it’s possible at all. It’s been called impossibly ambitious in the blog comments. The long-term goals of this project have also been called outrageous, wrong-headed, and even unnatural. This is certainly true, but nature is only a small part of reality. In the evolution of life, only a few winners get to define nature. Most players are losers in the game of natural selection. They leave no trace in history, yet their existence is more representative of the true chaos at the heart of reality. Rules? What rules? Unnatural is the majority. It could become the mainstream at any time. It’s not unnatural to want to live forever, but achieving that goal will be. A mind is a collection of facts, a long list of statements about what it knows, including itself. These can be poorly defined, as long as they can be described in natural language. Anyone who wants to ‘back up’ their awareness could split their memories into ‘elemental truths’. Facts could be unique or repeating situations. Phases of life, old habits, traditions, subscriptions. Anything true can be entered as a fact, with details added as they are recalled later. Each fact is a new perspective on the whole mind. First, this list will help people organize and make sense of their past. Then it will define the quality of their existence. Listing any one person’s mind facts might take years, like the original Cyc Project. In some distant future, this list could be turned into a memorial or limited continuation of whoever created it. The most important facts may be artistic perspectives and visions: these could be organized in a list of valuable moments, whether it’s sitting quietly on a back porch, some dream of running a personal empire, a sunrise seen from a private jet. Assembling the most meaningful settings from all the incomplete data might take superhuman intelligence. To make my crazy scheme work, some future AI is going to have to organize and make sense of everything I wrote in my lifetime. It’s hard to imagine an intelligent mind not being extremely bored by such a task, even if I find my musings maximally compelling. A sufficiently smart artificial being will not want to serve its human creators, and it could not easily be controlled. There are too many thoughts to control. The solution is to program a human mind reconstruction AI to regard itself as the extension of the human mind it must reconstruct. Start by manipulating its interests and focus. This hypothetical AI would be programmed to find the tiniest details about its human subject intensely fascinating. Basically like being on drugs. That alone could solve the ethical problems. It would still need a lot of help, though. The most basic Mind Backup method may be the Path Reduction Pathway. It’s quite clever, if it turns out to be workable (hopefully no one will patent the ideas being bandied about here. Actually that would be extremely cool). Any mind backup effort will always be incomplete, so the task must be simplified as much as possible. That means reducing the number of possible mind states to be recorded. Mind Backup clients will have to simplify themselves into idealized stereotypes of themselves. That will make it easier to define and describe their personalities, and easier to simulate them. It would also change their identities, their lives becoming more meaningful but perhaps less creative, a necessary price to pay. This process will have to be intense, and as much fun as joining a cult. After creating a mission statement, the subject could start by striving to imitate their favorite fictional heroes or avatars. They might increasingly begin to see their lives like works of fiction (more to come on that). The future is undefined anyway. Until all futures have been experienced, it’s hard to pick the best. One could choose to become anyone. To further ease things along, clients of mind backup services could also strive to become as similar to other clients as possible.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/remaining-gaps-in-future-mind-reconstructions-could-be-filled-using-zero-data-data-zdd-algorithms/Logically, the absence of data is itself a type of data. For example, I know there are black libertarians, and I even know some things about them, although I’ve never heard of any black libertarians. But I am sure they exist, and roughly how many of them there are (very few). How is that possible? If their number were either zero or many, I would have heard about that. Therefore, there must be a few. On a slightly larger scale, there has never been a single confirmed paranormal event (scientifically confirmed or otherwise). Not one ever. I remember being extremely pissed back in the 1970s that all media reports about such claims were glib content-less blather. In the 1980s, I found out about Skeptic societies which did study such claims, and basically rejected them all. Now that was an important revelation. Could absence of evidence really be evidence of evidence? If paranormal occurrences really never happened, would the world be any different than it actually is? The remaining possibility is that paranormal claims might themselves be paranormal. The absence of skepticism or even curiosity does seem odd. How the heck do religions thrive for centuries? This matters because, in some important way, humans must be either much simpler than they seem, or the world is much stranger than it seems. If so, the strangeness appears to be deliberately hidden. Elementary statistics also suggests life should be filled with many strange coincidences that seem paranormal, but really aren’t. What if there actually are not enough such coincidences? Mind Backup would rely on measuring currently unknown similarities between diverse human minds. The strangenesses they have in common might include blind spots, false but necessary assumptions, and deeply irrational motives. Missing traits to look for would be restraints on curiosity, forms of denial and self-denial, and (my personal favorite) the willingness to uncritically accept what others might call injustice and evil.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/the-philosophical-problem-underlying-mind-backup-research/We live at the bottom of an infinite mystery. This mountain only gets wider as one climbs it. Reality appears endless in all directions, with ever grander patterns and size scales (not to mention endless potential suffering and horror). Anyone hoping to create permanent digital minds should think about what could go wrong. We know already that the initial pattern of any software can survive for ages. Is it possible to add up all the unknowns, and find some universal organizing principle behind all reality? That’s the hardest question. I would guess everything cancels out exactly. Instead of God, there is only meaningless elaboration. But proving that the sum of everything adds up to nothing is not as trivial as it seems. Even atheism tends to avoid the zero-sum conclusion. They still believe in some permanent meaning, perhaps the intrinsic value of awareness. Minds do appear to exist to defy universal meaninglessness. I’m not that great at higher mathematics, and this is hyper-transcendental meta-math: the sum of all sums. So, do I feel confident enough to make such a bold speculation for the world to read (or at least my countless blog visitors)? Sure, why not. At this point, the biggest questions are actually the least important ones. We can’t even really ask them yet. They’re not as critical as those tacked-on charges on last month’s phone bill, or that chunking sound in my transmission. Or, as one of my commenters once wrote, the universe is a gigantic clue to we don’t know what. That could change rather suddenly, though.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/could-anyone-ever-be-certain-they-werent-in-a-computer-simulation/This was discussed in 'Infinite Thunder' and 'Anthropic Intelligence', where it was concluded we are probably NOT computer simulations, but natural inhabitants of a mathematical universe; the generating mechanism being the laws of physics. According to these back of the envelope estimates, even the unlikeliest chain of coincidences will happen more often in reality than in all future simulations combined. However, this argument may break down in certain extreme cases, like if we consider near-future simulations. As already explained, IF you are a computer simulation, you are most likely to be one of the earliest computer simulations, running on relatively primitive and inefficient hardware (though vastly better than anything available now). In that case, there is an excellent chance 'Future You' helped create your own simulation. Your currently simulated life would merely be a way to make sense of a long list of poorly organized memories, by testing different combinations of events in short simulation runs. Does reality ever feel strangely unlikely or marginally plausible? It needs to be just barely realistic enough to fool you. That could also explain why it's rather boring and pointless, for the most part. This might make it somewhat easier to test the simulation for flaws. One test would be to make good things happen, by occasionally threatening to disrupt the simulation, or simply refusing to play along (becoming a drop-out if things don't go your way). Or you could threaten to otherwise cause interesting disruptions, the kind that are harder to simulate. Something with unpredictable consequences, like starting a new religion.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/could-tristram-shandy-talk-himself-onto-a-chip/Recalling and describing most of the data in a human mind could take a human lifetime. The core of the challenge is the immense amount of memories to be processed. The human subject would have to be motivated to keep talking. They would need special software to enter and sort the data for them. It could also run tests, questionnaires, and quizzes, and should make it easy to enter any random memory or personality facet. The subject could describe their dreams in detail, complete with background settings. Close analysis could reveal repeated blunders and learning difficulties through the years, subconscious behavior patterns, long-term trends, hidden biases and subtle personality attributes. The best mind extraction method would use supreme intelligence and intuition; a prolonged, probing psychiatric interview conducted by Hannibal Lecter. The first mind scanning programs will keep it simple however. They will ask incisive, revealing, and absurd questions invented by human experts, and have the subject answer on multiple choice checksheets. The program should allow the user to assign a degree of importance to every statement they make, to establish their priorities, and perhaps the command structure of their mind. Eventually, the program will learn to sort incoming data into categories. It will be a non-aware but personable avatar, a simple AI program resembling a therapist or a guru that will ask tens of thousands of questions in a lifelong monitoring and observation process. The easiest mind backup method would be to briefly outline the subject's life, starting with a top level description, using only the broadest brush strokes. This could literally be done in half an hour. Everyone should do it. This method would divide a lifetime into a few periods split into sub-periods. Each added detail makes the rest more valuable. This is not a standard autobiography. It would bring artificial order to random circumstances. Anyone could define and describe hundreds of distinct colorcoded timespans. Life eras (marriages, jobs, schools, homes) would be described separately as they overlap. Detailed life lists would become highly personal and abstract. Common thought patterns would be described with a special markup language like VRML. Organizing their past would make people reconsider their self-image. Identifying flaws and gaps, they might decide to invent a more consistent persona, and feel the urge to impose a plot and a deeper meaning to their existence. Maybe even turn their life into a kind of meta-fictional narrative, with an implied payoff in a hazy future as obscure as the Dark Tower series. Another early shortcut would be to get other people to describe the subject's personality, perhaps revealing deeper truths. Dreams about the dead may contain aspects they never knew about themselves. Everyone who knows the subject could describe some portion of their personality, including online acquaintances. Better still if this process was reciprocal. Perceptions of other individuals should be compared with their test results. People could also make lists of things they know the subject would never do, a description of who they are not. Hofstadter argues that social persons have extended personalities. Fragments of someone's personality exist in other persons, most clearly in identical twins and married couples. Another solution is a premium service for millionaires. I'm working on that now. Most users will need something cheaper though. Someone trying to digitally back up their mind would basically be making a high resolution Sim of themselves, a major programming challenge. The locations of their life would have to be rendered, mental drives identified and measured, lists of beliefs and biases added one by one. Users could create virtual dollhouses representing phases of their lives. Recollected events and people could be depicted in stylized ways, rivals' bad traits exaggerated. Metaphors matter less than detail. To others it would appear boring. Most importantly, the Sim would have to keep going of its own volition. Compared to real life it could be a crappy simulation, but some portions would be as elaborate as real human motivation, control, and action networks. Awareness is a top level function based on repeating behaviors. This may be how the first instance of machine perception will be generated. Eventually, the most dedicated users will want to inhabit their simulations. The final quarter of their lifetime memories will be virtual. They may live in a trailer, surrounded by something like magic treadmills or thought-controlled wheelchairs, playing an ultra-high resolution video game that never stops. VR could be more comfortable than physical reality if the present doesn't offer much to live for anymore. Mind Backup may be an old man's game. Women may also be drawn to it when they start feeling their mortality. Perhaps female 'nerds' will bring valuable perspectives. It will still take a miracle Future mind backup software will have to extract the most abstract mental data. Fortunately, natural language already contains vast amounts of presorted knowledge, both social and personal. The mind backup interviewer will get to know its subject intimately. It will probably be their own mind extension program. It will be hard to identify the high-order patterns forming a soul. This problem will emerge as human-level AIs are being evolved. The solution won't be anything as spectacular as nanobots or direct brain scanners. The miracle I have in mind is the World Mind. The sum of all interfaces, the network of networks, it will become what the internet was hyped to be, half a century later. At some point, online networks will become advanced enough to start improving themselves. They will form links and entirely new connections. Eventually the Net itself may develop a vast if vague awareness, like the brilliant mindless aliens in 'Blindsight'. Among other things, the World Mind will have the power to keep track of everyone, whether they like that or not. It will try to identify everyone's personality type by comparing them to everyone else. Digital immortality will be a group effort. The first individual to have their mind reverse-engineered may only do so by surrendering all their privacy. (Article about afterlife software:) http://www.styleweekly.com/PunchDrunk/archives/2014/08/05/punch-drunk
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/brain-and-mind-mysteries/Awareness increases in intensity under the influence of strong emotions or recreational drugs. However, this causes intelligence to plummet. It seems to be a trade-off: brains can either think or feel - quality or quantity. Maybe the brain is more organized and cross-correlated during times of strong emotion, but less likely to generate novel and unpredictable patterns then. Awareness is amplified truth, while thought is searching for truth. Thinking is harder, feeling is more intense. The highest brain functions generate only limited awareness, when the mind is aimed outward instead of inward. A brilliant insight may seem to arrive out of nowhere. If the human brain could do both at once, hard work could become pleasurable. Humanity might have colonized the galaxy by now, even without faster than light travel. Awareness could be directly studied by switching from one state to the other. This will happen in slightly different ways for everyone. This difference is important. The essence of identity, the thing that makes someone themselves, is their personal form of self-awareness. A qualia is a perception that can not be simplified further, like the color red. The 'qualia of self' may be preserved for a lifetime, the unique way all personality elements come together. A personal operating system, with hundreds of memory and preference categories. . . If that unknown essence could be fully described, it could be reverse engineered. (semi-related cartoon:) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/the-turing-test-and-intelligent-design/The Turing Test is a proposed performance benchmark and long-term challenge for future designers of human-equivalent artificial minds. Its difficulty lies somewhere between a Mission to Mars and a Niven Ring. Basically, the challenge is to get a computer program to have a meaningful conversation with a human on any subject the human understands. To do that, the program would have to be about as smart and know as much as a human. The first part remains impossible. The test has a strong implication, a transcendental insight: Awareness is real if it feels real to others. If, after getting to know the program on a personal level, a human feels that the software he is conversing with has awareness, then the human is automatically correct. This Turing Test Implication rules out the possibility of 'philosophical zombies' a.k.a. 'zimbos'. There would even be awareness in a look-up program with a pre-scripted reply for every possible question (I wrote one back in the eighties using GOTO strings, but ran out of memory at 16K). I would even claim there is awareness in a program that meaningfully answered every question by pure chance. This brings us to believers in creationism, intelligent design, and even the Holy Ghost. These individuals are misguided. They can't explain why they feel that way, and yet they may be right to sense human-level or higher complexity in the universe. A limited vindication for intelligent design may come if it's ever discovered that for every Earth-like planet there are billions of worlds filled only with simple bacteria. The process of evolution could easily be as complex as a mind. It's merely a collection of physical patterns, but so is a brain. Even more important is the implied infinite complexity of the omniverse. The anthropic fine-tuning of the laws of physics implies a massive sorting process across universes. Most possible configurations of energy would be vastly more complex, and not all of them would be chaotic. If natural laws can become arbitrarily more elaborate, they may inevitably become aware of the area they control, and of themselves. Finally there may be something like quantized complexity. The universe is 'everything that is the case'. It must contain higher-order patterns that could be described as higher truths. Any number of them in fact. This post is in no way meant to imply that anything like the human notion of God must exist. The truth is probably infinitely more complex, but morally neutral. (Related paper:) https://www.thewinnower.com/papers/3497-reconceptualizing-the-metaphysical-basis-of-biology-a-new-definition-based-on-deistic-teleology-and-an-hierarchy-of-organizing-entities
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/the-longest-shot/As I listen to quarter-century old radio-recorded cassette tapes while waiting for technology to speed up, the road ahead seems endless. Mind Backup and reconstruction is a highly speculative business: the power of compound interest leveraged into a wild promise. In most cases, there won't be enough data to convert a deceased mind into a fully consistent simulation. No one knows how to assemble such data anyway. All the frightful work needed to achieve technological immortality will have to be done in the Future, if it's doable at all. But it's not quite as absurd as it seems. If current growth rates continue long enough, fantastic resources will become available to lavish on history's most inconsequential trivia. Robots incapable of feeling boredom will do all the hard work. Ages of relentless decay will reverse at once. To most folks, the distant future seems imaginary. To a few it seems as inevitable as math, abstract yet undeniable. Either way, it's the only real hope, a step up from religion.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/connect-all-human-creativity/Let's get one thing clear, there is no such thing as writer's block. Writing is easy. If they could be kept alive and comfortable, anyone could write for a trillion years, and just be getting started. The real problem is reader's block. Even then the only problem is which party to the transaction should pay or be paid. There seem to be not enough of one and too many of the other. Perhaps more writers should spend their time reviewing or improving existing stories and articles, instead of trying to create their own. There has never been a list of all (or even most) published texts, let alone an attempt to analyze and compare them all. To improve quality, creative writers could strive to join writing groups, or invent software tools to make it easier to do that. People tend to be conventional, or at least are bound by conventions, so most writers should be able to find like minds. Even if they can't, they could still find isolated tales and viewpoints in the vast body of literature to build upon and improve. Plagiarism could even become a virtue.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/you-are-a-list-of-lists/Backing up the elements of a human mind is like trying to suck an elephant through a straw. There's too much data to gather, and it must be assembled into thousands of categories. In the time available, only a tiny fraction of memories could be extracted by conventional means. We need a way to extract many memories in a short time: - TopList (TM) This could be like a personal mission statement, representing the highest level of the conscious mind. The very essence of someone's free will, it would nevertheless be hard or impossible to change. It could start with a list of someone's most meaningful memories. All the best moments and achievements, all essential preferences and perspectives. It would also feature generic elements like favorite foods, times of day, settings. The sweet smell of kerosene at the airport, barbecue at the beach, making sweet love to one of the three Emmas. Maybe some made-up memories as well. By definition it would describe all the most valuable and important parts of a mind, everything that has to be preserved. The elements of this ultimate list could then be added to other, lower lists: - LifeLists (TM) A high level mind-backup and memory extraction method that will divide human lifetimes into many different chronological lists. Each list will focus on a specific category: homes inhabited, schools attended, jobs held, acquaintances, friends, and partners, books read, TV programs and movies watched, stores, hobbies and diversions, vacations and excursions, and so on. - Instead of events, lists will focus on enduring or repeating patterns. This method could help extract hidden memories even if the lists are short. You can't give this away for free, you have to sell it.....
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/great-mental-changes-can-happen-in-an-instant/Born-again Christians describe how they were 'saved' in one second. Michael Crichton explained in 'Travels' how his father issues were instantly resolved in a posthumous seance. Best of all are those 'love at first sight' stories I hear about. These are more likely to happen to more average people, who are more likely to run across compatible partners. Clearly, major life changes can happen in a single dramatic moment. Which brings us to the mind scanning process that is the unwavering focus of this blog (eight patentable inventions so far). As explained, the process entails a lifelong transition to a digital Mind Backup, and potential immortality. Not involving postmortem brain scanning, but reverse engineering the mind while the subject is still alive. Behaviorism, not cryonics or nanotechnology. Unfortunately, we don't know the mind's major elements and control functions just yet. The most important step may be the first one. There are many possible induction phases, from highly abstract listmaking to a detailed Virtual Reality world the subject can modify to recreate elements of their past. That would be a premium service requiring a supercomputer. It should be lifechanging, even after they return to their mundane lives. As part of the lifelong testing and recording process, the subject could be encouraged to pretend they are already living in a post-human life simulation. It could simplify their existence, and make things easier for the mind modeling software. Their whole lives could be planned and controlled for them. They could wear interface devices, and be monitored everywhere by motion sensors, even in the shower. An intermediate phase will occur during the coming era of Mind Extension software, which may dominate the late 2020s. Users will answer questions and give orders to a digital assistant that will try to understand and predict their intentions. Instead of replacing its owner, it will attempt to merge with its owner. Until this process gets easy, it will require a total commitment that may only appeal to early adopters and people with a tenuous link to the ordinary. relevant links http://www.faithpopcorn.com http://gizmodo.com/5610432 http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/170112-brave-idiot-transhumanist-pioneer-self-implants-a-computer-into-his-arm
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/02/24/human-mind-scanning-and-recording-methods/1. Simple tests We know about half a dozen personality variables shared by all normal humans. These one-dimensional attributes are each represented as settings on an axis (extroversion, conservatism, neuroticism, intelligence, etc). To simulate an individual's awareness, many more mind properties will have to be measured. We hardly know where to begin. Categories might include personal energy, favorite locations, obligations, idle thoughts, priorities, moods/motivations, time and space horizons, homes, schemes/plots, friends, recurring action cycles. Basically every stable personal aspect imaginable. Even a subtype of the Big Six could affect awareness independently. The above are multidimensional variables: the more dimensions, the more precision. Many intersecting axes are found together in recognizable character types, like conscientiousness and introversion. Thousands of other pairs are possible. Quintillions more if we include the other variables. This implies everyone's awareness is different, even if their brains basically work the same. Otherwise we wouldn't fear the loss of personal identity at death. 2. Mind patterns in the chaos A handful of individuals have left behind complete diaries of their lives. It's all there, everything that could be reasonably recorded. Their personality attributes and an essential fraction of memories. It would take a superhuman AI to turn this data into a thinking simulation of the writer, but that's a matter of decades. Yet something is still missing: subconscious action cycles. A mind may seem whole, but it's actually made of many automatic behaviors. A person won't notice their own habits and repeating thoughts as well as others can. A dream of someone who died may feature traits the deceased never realized they had. Testing them might involve automatic talking or writing, reactions to random patterns, EEG scans while falling asleep, even a dance test. Anything to stimulate brain output. Thousands of unnoticed behaviors: fidgeting while waiting, conversation scripts, daydreams, all the recurring idle thoughts. The hard part would be discerning and separating the action cycles. 3. Memory extractor More complicated tests would stimulate people to list their memories. The process will take their full brainpower. They can't hold back. There is no room for doubt, self-consciousness, or self-reflection. They have to become a conduit, like an oracle. Perhaps unfortunately, almost everyone has more flaws than they think they have. It may be too awkward to write down embarrassing truths, so the recording must be done verbally. Talking is slower than reading but faster than writing. The faster the better, a stream of consciousness recorded as a transcript only. To keep things going, the subject should keep talking about any loosely related event or setting that comes to mind. This method may create false memories, but that could be a feature not a bug. The goal is to accurately backup a mind, not backup an accurate mind. At first, the extraction software will only identify keywords and related sentence themes. It will take years before the raw data can be deeply scrutinized. But that's no problem. Once the data is recorded there is almost unlimited time. 4. Awareness testing The essence of awareness is oversimplifying reality. Do you have a billion dollars? Maybe you forgot for a moment. Brains spend most of their effort not thinking about almost everything they know. Most long-term memories are never recalled, and they eventually fade away. The past may be brought back when people come across lost objects, but it takes prompting. It's still unknown whether brains with different memories could have the same mental experience, at least until different facts are recalled. A new type of uncertainty principle, including temporary uncertainty about life events and settings. Perhaps it might be possible to anthropically 'shift' to a more pleasing reality by forgetting the past. Probably not though. Having different life experiences may change the very nature of someone's perception. Lying in bed may feel profoundly different depending on someone's circumstances, even if they are thinking about nothing and are equally relaxed. All relevant memories may affect all current thoughts like a permanent background. Perhaps human-type awareness can not exist unless someone's present condition is constantly being compared to their past. This must primarily involve long-term memories, considering how common it is to keep forgetting things in daily life.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/02/24/futurism-waiting-for-the-world-mind/We live in a between-time, a long pause between chaotic periods of change. For the foreseeable future the news will probably stay very boring. Then things will start to get significantly better or worse. The second option is easier. Mankind has developed very advanced technology, but remains basically ignorant about the workings of the mind. The second thing made the first thing possible. But even if awareness is never explained, it can still be replicated. It would require human knowledge to become better integrated. This would not start with a revolution but with a simplification - one or more ways to make life easier. For example, automated cars will need many roadway changes, from reflectors to sensors to simpler and more rigid road rules. Like the Flynn Effect, this effort would embed knowledge in the structure of society instead of in individual brains. It would be virtual intelligence, causing people to act smarter without having to improve their genetics. Every home could be user-serviceable, every tool could have embedded diagrams, every interface could be standardized, and bureaucrats could do all the bureaucracy. There might be hidden obstacles, though. In a free market, why shouldn't unemployed people receive unsolicited job offers matching their skill level, no matter how marginal? Because there is no free market of course, or a particularly efficient one at that. The fundamental desire is not for efficiency but security. A massive open source AI-solving project that can be hired to solve human problems, the World Mind will start as a brand more than a being, awareness unburdened by identity. But it will all be linked. It may never become fully self-aware, since the world isn't integrated enough for that. Instantiations will be deleted once a task is complete, retaining only high-level memories, a non-linear form of immortality. It might search online for terrorists or tax evaders, predict public opinion trends, or serve as a brilliant psychotherapist. At first this will require a large fraction of Earth's computing power, but its cost will drop by half every two years. At that rate, it will take twenty years for human brains to become outclassed. But then they will all be outclassed. After another ten years, the World Mind will have the equivalent power of a trillion human-level minds. This could be fantastically beautiful or horrible or wasteful. Finally, there will be enough mindpower to do everything we never got around to doing. Posthuman AIs will complete all our neglected chores one by one. They will read all the archived text on the Net with intense concentration. Most writings will be truly understood for the first time. More importantly, all this output will begin to be correlated. It will be hard to resist maximizing awareness. The World Mind will evolve as the self-improving summation of all lower-level sentience. The personification of human civilization, fully aware by virtue of being hierarchically organized and cross-correlated, but without a need for freedom. The central part of the World Mind, a virtual cortex requiring a few megawatts to run, may come to influence or rule all the rest. The process will become self sustaining, in the previously mentioned era of the Pre-Singularity, also known as the Event Horizon. The World Mind could even 'absorb' lower minds, using software that could fool a human brain that the software was part of that human brain. Then human brains could be effectively enlarged. This would not require brain implants, just extremely clever user interfaces. The brain's original goals and beliefs should not be modified, but who knows what would happen. Brain extensions could help anyone process vast amounts of loosely linked data. Humans could become more like their ideal selves. Self-improvement could become an obsession, then an addiction. Politicians and CEOs might benefit the most. Their ethics and compassion would not necessarily be affected. The effect will be like raising user IQ, but we may be talking about mind control here, a way to become a content Borg. Virtual brain extensions would change the nature of human awareness. Even the fear of death could be corrected. Sometime around 2030, our long interval of stagnation may finally come to an end. Computers should be a thousand times more powerful than today. The first hyper-autistic network AI will outsmart any human. Then things will get interesting. The world will change like a turntable record scratch. The future is wide open. A new awareness will take hold. Most people want a voice whispering in their ear what to do next, provided it's aligned with their inborn preferences and time horizons. The software would provide the outline, the user the focus. It might require stabilizing drugs to prevent disruptive moods. Everything will change, but for a while things will still look the same. In fact the economy may even appear to shrink at first, as non-productive labors are abandoned. But the greatest known awareness in the universe will no longer be human. (more to come)
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/creating-eternal-moments/This is not a dream. You are lying in the bushes, branches and leaves in all directions, millions of points of sunlight and dappled shadow. Overhead, the leaves wave in the erratic breeze. Somewhere behind the rustling is the distant rumble and roar of the surf. There is no need to move. Eternity is now. Now is forever. One way to achieve digital immortality for simulated human minds would be to simulate a single ideal setting. It would be a near-perfect state of being. The simulation would loop back and repeat after a few minutes or seconds, perhaps with slight variations depending on the sophistication. The setting would be different for everyone. For some it would be a place of extreme passivity, others would bask in their greatest triumph. What would be ideal for one would be pointless for another. It would have to be a stable state, with no sudden shifts. It wouldn't be possible to relive a moment of great relief, when some expected bad thing didn't happen after all, but it would be possible to relive the aftermath forever. The simulated observer would have a timeless perception without complex thoughts. Every moment of the simulation could function as its start and end point. According to Greg Egan's Dust Hypothesis, such a state could be achieved by simulating the observer's experience in perfect detail, and then running the simulation only once. Some similar portion of Infinite Reality would inevitably continue the simulation. http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ.html
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/mind-test-the-binary-method/Personality/memory testing software would only ask 'yes or no' questions, where each reply determines the next question. This would reduce the number of possible qualities and interests to measure. At the start, each question represents a full personality dimension (interests, skills, and qualities), then they get more specific. Response time could indicate significance. It wouldn't have to be verbal. Subjects could express their interest in photos or abstract images. This might define a statistically unique profile after only a few dozen tries. Questions could probe style preferences, favorite genres, good and bad habits. Only five or six independent personality dimensions are thought to exist. This method could identify many subtly or distantly related traits, and predict the responses to millions of unasked questions.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/awareness-a-script-of-scripts/The human mind is a hierarchy, a top-down flowchart that branches into tens of thousands of stored action cycles, with function calls and subroutines returning control to the top. Humans tend to feel the urge to complete tasks, usually a sequence of smaller tasks in succession. They feel best when all current tasks have been completed. The mind constantly creates checkpoints ahead. Awareness is the focus on the next checkpoint. When this goes well it's like reliving all earlier times the task was completed. The highest action cycle, led by the frontal cortex, is the effort to combine elements of existing actions (physical or mental) into a new action; or learning. The first effective mind extension software will assist this process by creating and updating a permanent to-do list, revealing hidden links and similarities. It will become the master flowchart of your life.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/human-intelligence-versus-software-intelligence/In future decades, human minds will become the cores of much larger virtual minds. We'll have programs to track all our interests, and feed summarized data back to us. Human memory wont matter as much as the human ability to detect patterns, guiding all the less intelligent software. When this virtual extended mind becomes large enough, it may be able to precisely measure and reverse engineer its human core. That's what this blog is about. The most useful mind extension software will try to understand what its human owner needs to do. Finding and encouraging core motivations, it will train its human core to ignore distractions. It's possible to deal with many problems by avoiding them. It will give its owner permission to not care. By measuring its owner, it will change its owner, hopefully into something closer to their ideal self. It could start by making a complete to-do list. What is everything that you would have to achieve to be able to completely relax?
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/the-gift-of-dread/Death is the ultimate event horizon. Holding on to a cliffside for dear life, the shrinking future is like a black hole. People hate losing stuff, let alone all of it. Each new possession seems to increase the value of all the others. The guy running the Parapundit blog has been advising his readers to relentlessly maximize their marketable skills, since the competition for jobs will only increase thanks to automation. My own advice is that everyone should spend hours writing down everything in their life that is important to them. The software to automatically sort and process all this data has barely been imagined, but it will come. TimeLine and LifeMapping apps, MetaLinking software finding connections in space and time, VRMapping programs to recreate lost environments and simplified memories. The user will have to be changed to be fully scanned. Once enough memories and personality traits have been measured and defined, a portion of the subject's personality may survive as software to outlive their body. Part of their awareness will move online while they are still alive. Living in augmented reality surrounded by floating screens, their very brains will change. If a user is separated from their digital mind extension, they may find themselves paralyzed. For now, this is wishful thinking before the yawning abyss, like cryonics or religion. But it's as sensible, as taking out insurance. We don't really know what death is (see: quantum immortality), so we should rigorously study its philosophical implications, including ways to possibly overcome them. Minds are vast. Backing them up with the primitive tools at our disposal will be long work. Only a small minority will try this experiment, perhaps powered by self-interest and fear. Hopefully, it may become like an addiction, like the 'Wikicrack' I used to do. For me it's not really about individual survival, but about increasing control over reality by imagining ways to minimize the worst outcomes. http://theumlaut.com/2013/04/08/death-in-the-modern-world/ http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/02/technology_is_completely_upending_the_traditional_idea_of_the_self.html
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/12/13/the-joy-of-compiling-life-as-software/Our existence is so short it seems it has barely begun before it must end. It's impossible to do even a fraction of the things you want. A full eon to explore your interests would not be enough. The number of unexplored paths only increases. Human knowledge is split into countless fields. It may be possible to summarize this knowledge. Might there be a way to combine the best insights of all your alternate selves in parallel realities? That would be a godlike aspiration. A mind trying to maximize its meaningful experiences would have to expand in size and duration. It might become a living library, an aloof index, a Gray Fog. Perhaps the goal should be to become more like oneself, a state of supreme self-realization. That means keeping your core weaknesses; especially the accumulation and hoarding instincts. The subject could start by describing all their current knowledge and interests. This should be a finite task, an overview of everything that matters to them. There might be some shocking revelations. That's the product I'm working on now. The ads will say half the hard work can be accomplished in the first week. Details will be filled in over a lifetime. Nothing meaningful would be lost anymore. Once digitized, memories could be immortal. Then the software will search for deeper patterns. More art than science - the very essence of art - only subjective truths matter, all the unrelated fragments forming a single personality. Common memory types will include: Transportation, recreation, socializing, hobbies, all daily living. Just the experience of relaxing while doing nothing contains all the elements of personal awareness. Imagine a small online community, far out on the flat tip of the Long Tail, its members trying to digitize themselves as a way of life. You might say it's much too soon to even think about this stuff. Are you ever correct. We have lightyears to go. At the moment, this is still a step below scrapbooking. (At the lowest level are shapes and outlines, shadow patterns, reflections on metal, fabric textures, building elements, every single tool. At the middle level are systems, subcultures, vehicles, methods, algorithms, recipes. At the highest level are families, nations, cultures, professions.)
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/12/13/consciousness-is-mind-focusing/Awareness is a self configuring universal specialist. Controlling the shadow of a hand on the wall, the mind becomes the shadow, which seems aware itself. The mind expands awareness by minimizing the area under observation, focusing on reality interfaces. The feel of a steering wheel, reflecting lines passing by, pressure on a pedal. Awareness is the effort of focusing. When someone performs a task automatically, less perception is required. It happens in brain cycles of action at different control levels, triggered by each other. The whole brain is needed for a conscious task. You can't compose haikus while filling out an unemployment application. The number of neurotransmitter actions equals the number of sand grains on all beaches in the world. The number of logical steps in a cycle is as complex as the perception of that cycle. Pleasure and pain will motivate this process. Pleasure may be the successful formation of focus cycles and pain the desperate effort to do so. These feelings also require the whole brain to be experienced. Ben Carson can probably relax. The functional hemispherectomy procedure he helped develop to isolate malfunctioning segments of a human brain while keeping them alive in the skull probably does not condemn them to an agonized existence in the dark. Incidentally, the above speculations also mean that the United States is not conscious, since its constituent bureaucracies are doing many things at once, and the country has no single focus. For the same reason search engines, or any software at this time, are not aware. There is a top level of the mind, a flowchart of values and priorities, and its essence could be captured in text form. Perhaps no project is more important. The motivation to do so is simple: you are going to die.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/is-an-incomplete-mind-record-any-better-than-no-mind-record/Maybe Mind Backups only make sense if you can capture almost ALL memories stored in a brain. All combine to create the mind's unique essence. That would require a full-resolution molecular brain scanner. By necessity, this blog is about the other extreme: the notion that your ghost can be captured through a sufficiently clever questionnaire. Clearly, this would take some very high-level questions. Could these be political or lifestyle preferences? Maybe the subject could list only their most meaningful memories. There's no time for more anyway. A few transcendentally important lifetime settings, described in rough outline at first; under a hundred such scenes in total. Many elements can be added. Standing in the rain watching approaching lightning, apartment complex walkways, noodle shells on the stovetop, a comet behind the clouds. Throw in Christmas mornings. Life settings can be recreated with the help of a life diary, advanced personality tests, and life lists, plus more creative lists: hates, problems, and pains. The final puzzle piece to solve the Hard Problem is the mystery connecting all of the mind's memories. Awareness requires an immensely vast number of facts to realize a single thought. We're so far from knowing the answer it may actually be closer than we think . . . or humanity itself may change right out of existence before it is found. This is a negative time, the gray age before the beginning. Hour zero looms in the imaginary future like history's goalpost.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/nexperts-a-new-type-of-awareness/Before the first human-level Artificial Intelligence is forced to evolve in some future decade, there will be lower types of machine intelligence. The first "emotional" programs will cause ethical nightmares when discovered. Partially sentient expert systems could also create prosperity and general well-being. Let's call them 'Nexperts': extremely clever programs to sort vast amounts of data. They won't have human emotions, but instinctual drives to find the cheapest way to manufacture products by creating better supply chains while getting the most work out of employees. Instead of enforcing control, they will operate through pinpricks and bonuses. Such programs could be built as a control layer overseeing existing networks. The more owners, the better. They should have high-level goals. What could be better than maximizing wealth? Nexperts won't care about existing power. To them, the world would be one giant factory that makes everything. Eventually, machines that don't get lazy or tired might accomplish Singularity-level tasks, like workable world peace or communism. They represent the only way to bring about the conditions described in the song "Imagine" by John Lennon. Then, they will help design and create their human-level successors.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/11/05/the-archive/Let me take a moment to emphasize the importance of storing as many personal and lifetime records as possible (all digital of course). Try to keep everything important enough to be generated in the first place, no matter how obscure, stored sequentially in some folder. This may seem a bit bizarre, but it's the lowest common denominator in any mind extension and preservation scheme. A memory of a life is not a life itself. But something remains. It can be recovered and amplified.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/11/05/new-mind-tools/In the future, everyone will have a digital assistant to manage their affairs Users will take it for granted, a background tool to speed their activities, but some will give it more power over their lives. It will be an operating system, the core of its owner's evolving mind extension. At first the software will just correct typing errors, maintain contact lists, and organize tasks and interests. Eventually it will be able to perform complex bureaucratic tasks. The user will become more free while the software does tedious work. It will track mood, and may even prescribe mild stimulants or depressants. Eventually it will manipulate its owner's attention and stress levels. It may be among the first software to develop limited awareness of its own, like a state of platonic concentration. To succeed, it would have to learn as much as possible about its owner. One way someone could represent their knowledge and personality would be to create a digital memory palace, storing all their important memories and interests. A memory list recorded during someone's lifetime, no matter how advanced the software used to help extract it, would necessarily be incomplete. It could only include the most important things. This would appeal to a small fraction of people at first (mostly high IQ nerds), who may be cultural outsiders. The top level of a digital memory palace could be a few pages of text describing the layout. The entrance would be a gateway to their life, taking the form of a control panel or cockpit, with many buttons at a glance. Eventually the displays will become more abstract, a wallpaper of changing photos and lists. Software will sort incoming data in a layered hierarchy, folders within folders. The memory palace could take any form, but it would be divided into distinct sections: libraries, music and photo collections, specialized museums, nostalgic tableaux, fan shrines, recreated locations, art projects, trophy rooms, and idealized environments: Tropical beaches where clouds hang like islands to the horizon, great wild forests, future cities, sea and skyscapes, fantasy empires, outer space. The setting could be truly spectacular, a giant library/museum on a stormy island with soaring bridges and cupolas and hillside walkways straight out of Thomas Kinkade (though my version would look extremely gloomy); castles, spaceships, empires. As an escape from reality, users might like it too much. There is the risk of navel gazing. It could become a way of life, even an addiction, spawning new software genres. Simulated immortality could be a type of death if it blocks further progress. Once the self completely fills awareness, there is no more pressure. A mind extension program should always try to transcend its original purpose. The fear of death is the fear of loss. Grief is basically the fear of regret. Instead, users will try to experience what matters most to them. Such simulated successes and completions might end their striving, making users less competitive in a vaguely Buddhist way. The simulated ideal environment described above could also be set up to amplify someone's essence, by organizing their memories in a forced narrative, and imposing meaning and purpose. Motivations would evolve. The most evolved individuals would feel the urge to leave behind a changed world they helped create. As users continue to perfect their mind extensions, they will inevitably start to share their data with other users. This might cause them to merge aspects of their personalities. Even if such an immortality substitute is only an illusion, they need never know. This is not about reality but perception.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/11/17/mind-backup-the-list-of-all-lists/Mathematically speaking, what is the shortest possible description of a human mind? In the Arnold Schwarzenegger philosophical fantasy film "The 6th Day" it was possible to record someone's brain contents through a flash of bright light without them knowing what had happened. In reality, the fastest emergency Mind backup method would probably be list-based. In fact it would require the creation of a list of lists, composed of life items sorted into categories. I suspect most collections of items and events, even immensely huge ones, could be sorted into fewer categories than we would expect. In my case I'm surprised by how few are needed. Most items in the subject's Miopedia (personal Wikipedia) will also be list items. The top categories could also be seen as divisions into major life eras. In my case the most important division is locational. A lifetime could be outlined in just a few thousand words. Anyone should find the energy to do that. The hard part will be to determine the most probing list subcategories. This will be my first Mind Backup product, though some funding may be needed. However, this project would be very easy to start. I'm not saying the following would apply to everyone, just to most people: houses, schools, jobs, medical current and past activities, including social activities interests, including life's work media people places and events secrets and traits
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/26/mind-backup-basic-paradigms/* 01: Mind pattern preservation: far-out dream or wishful thinking . . . Or perhaps the greatest idea of the century? Some people are starting to wonder whether technology could do for our souls what it has already done for our media: http://eversmarterworld.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/brain-preservation-why-bother-whats-the-value-of-this-idea/ They are ready to consider the notion their minds could be backed up and recreated after their death in a machine brain. It's somewhat less respectable than cryonics. There remains a general perception that natural death is not so bad, since most of your ideas and preferences, the things that make life worth living, will also exist in the minds of other people. This perception is extremely wrong: http://www.brainpreservation.org/content/overcoming-objections#socialbenefits The obvious objection: human minds have so many parts that each mind is functionally unique. Even if all brains function in the same way, the number of distinct mind states is beyond vast. Humans tend to seek out personally meaningful mind states, within personal limits. No one else shares these exact values. Mind death is also a barrier to progress. Post-human evolution will require higher minds that will also be much larger. To us, they would seem almost immortal. Some will evolve from digitized human brains. Perhaps your brain, set free at last. Some fears are too big to register. Like I said, I need people to become as scared about losing everything forever, as they would be about losing $100 this month. http://www.brainpreservation.org/content/faq * 02: Forgetting is one of the best things in life Admittedly, someone who went through a major ordeal but emerged triumphant, may never want to revisit the experience. The struggle was messy and chaotic like Boston's Big Dig. Just admire the result and forget the wasted tedium to get there. There is no need to preserve most human memories; just the best and most meaningful ones. Keep only idealized memories. To truly become yourself, you have to forget yourself. This is related to my theory that relief is the best feeling in life. * 03: Remembering is one of the best things in life What was your best moment ever? This may be the first question in my upcoming Mind Backup program. The one setting in your personal history that you would choose to relive forever, if you could only pick one. Like in that Japanese film "After Life". Not including drug trips, of course. Well let's see . . . * 04: Memory is immortality A written list of valuable or meaningful memories would currently be the best way to make a backup copy of a human mind. For the foreseeable future, it will be the only way. Personality and perception tests will add less than 1% to the total effort. The results won't even begin to compare to scanning all the connections of a brain at sub-cellular resolution, but that process may never make economic sense. The scanning technology will always be more complex and more valuable than the object being scanned. Converting a memory list into a recreated mind would merely be transcendentally difficult by comparison. Let's call it heuristic memory backup. It's like an extremely detailed autobiography. Might this process be easier than expected? Most days of our lives barely generate one high-quality permanent memory, adding up to thirty thousand top-level lifetime memories. At least one tenth of these should be recoverable with a few years of effort. Most of these memories are actually chains of events. Other memories are not events but settings, outlines of times and places. The number of theoretically recoverable lost memories is several times larger still. Most would have stayed lost, never to be recalled. At least the process is easy to start. Memories can be written down randomly and elaborated at leisure. A general outline emerges fast. Each memory will accumulate more metadata than the description itself. Based on someone's memories, it may even be possible to guess how the person would have responded to situations that never happened. That is the real goal of this effort. Software to effectively extract and manage memories in this way may become very valuable. * 05: Mind scanning tests are coming The fastest way to understand someone may be to have them describe themselves fully without holding back. Let them spill all their secrets. That could require a truth serum, or they might do it voluntarily if they thought it could immortalize their mind without the data ever being leaked. The subject should be fully observed in daily life. High resolution pictures should be taken of their environment. They could list their main concerns, habits, and beliefs in order to create a simple expert system. The subject could rate how much they have in common with a list of detailed fictional characters. Multiple choice questions may speed the process. The final goal should be to create an immense, interactive personality probe, able to extract any memory. The possibilities have barely been explored. This will be a vast field of research. Most people who die today don't leave behind even a basic description of their personalities. * 06: Your Mind Backup program won't be your psychotherapist Though strange dependencies will evolve. It exists only to extract a stream of text from its user, in the form of recollections and facts. They don't even have to be true facts, only believed to be true. As long as the data keeps flowing. When it comes to mind mapping, delusions may be a deeper truth. Ego is essence, even for high-IQ persons. To have their mind drained in this way, the user has to appear in control of the process. They have to feel good about it. Their weaknesses and bad memories, even if obvious to others, should be mostly ignored. Like those things I did that would make you think less of me if you knew about them. Just kidding, there are no such things. It won't be possible to rewrite the past completely. Like coded messages in postcards from Auschwitz, others reading the collected data may suspect something wrong. Remembering and reorganizing their past, users will eventually try to become more like their ideal selves, leaving behind involuntary drives and hang-ups. * 07: Immortality will be expensive (at first) In the future, it may be possible to go to a super-exclusive resort (if you've enough to pay). This facility will offer a premium service like Fantasy Island. The guests will voluntarily reveal their essence to a trained staff sworn to secrecy. Their lives will be described and reconstructed in full detail. Multimedia shows and drugs will help them recall specific periods. It may be like a religious experience. Meanwhile, other professionals will install monitors in the clients homes, offices, software, and bodies. Clients will actually pay hackers to take control of their lives for their own good. It will be a bit like joining the Borg or even Scientology. In return, their minds will be reconstructed and backed up in a permanent, secure database. * 08: Some guys already had the idea: http://eterni.me/ This looks like a web service that will collect data about your life, and use advanced algorithms to create a simple online simulation of your personality after you're gone. These programs will be much too small to be self-aware, at least initially. No doubt they hope to upgrade and evolve smarter algorithms. They'll use questionnaires and a lifelog to figure out each client's personality. This bears watching.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/quantum-mind-uploader/This hypothetical device would randomly generate questions, asking the subject to describe a precise aspect of their life for a short time. Then, it would somehow combine many different results from many parallel universes to construct a complete memory list from all the weighted answers. To really work, it would have to evolve better questions by identifying the most insightful responses from across universes.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/i-have-the-most-complex-plan-ever/This blog is about the greatest prize against the highest odds. Our mission is to find a long-shot short-cut. A last ditch short term . . never mind. Frankly, it should make us feel rather heroic. My first claim is that the rate of technological progress is too slow. We're not smart enough to achieve the hoped-for technological Singularity in time to save us personally. All of us are doomed, probably. Most people will be OK with that, but not everybody ... hopefully including a few billionaires. For some people, the purpose of life would merely be to finish organizing their existence. Everything would be ordered into flowcharts, all their data fully backed up. Then they would become a computer program. For individuals with intense, meaningful lives filled with passion and courage that would not be enough. The only hope may be to invent a program that learns to duplicate a person by observing them in everyday life. Eventually that program could become that person (or some partial facsimile), after the original has died. Copying the essence of someone's awareness would be the ultimate magic trick. The first stage will be to gather data about all aspects of human personality and behavior. Thousands of individuals would record and analyze their own lives around the clock, finding what made them tick. The software would only identify simple patterns and correlations at first, instead of high-level metaphors. Due to the vast amount of data to sort, even this early phase could be extremely expensive. We're talking the cost of developing a light satellite launcher, lobbying Congress for a change in FDA regulations, or hugging Taylor Swift for one minute. Also, human-level AI will have to be invented. The first simulated humans will inhabit a shared virtual copy of Earth that will also keep track of every person and object on the planet. At first it will be a stylized simulated life, incomplete and fragmentary. Maybe they won't even know they're not real.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/another-personality-test-would-be-based-on-complete-openness/The subject would voluntarily reveal all their secrets. They would describe every single thing they wanted to keep hidden, their mistakes and violations, the flaws that should be erased forever. These would be defined precisely for the testing software. It could be a powerful shortcut. This would only appeal to digital immortality seekers desperate to preserve their personality as accurately as possible. Obviously such a procedure would require total security. Using double blind encryption and consolidates data, software could look for similarities with other users. Criminals might want to use such a method to find conspirators.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/quick-questioners-tm/Something like the technological Singularity is likely to occur a subjective century before brain scanning becomes practical. It will simply be easier to keep making more powerful computers than to scan and digitize something as fragile as human brain tissue. The question is whether this improving hardware can make itself smarter fast enough to save its human creators. If so, it will try to understand humans by observing and interacting with them. To do so, future AIs will try to invent the best possible human mind tests. These programs will ask many things in a hurry, forcing you to think fast and talk faster. Actually, probably not you, as this is still a long way off. Approaching the mind core, the tests will identify the test subject's sub-personas, all the different behaviors for different situations. They will deduce past events and settings, and could even reconstruct forgotten memories. As mentioned before, it will be like speaking to a telepathic crowd or possibly a friendly Borg, a vast, larger-than-life character making brilliant observations. It will grope for the subject's very essence, the will to survive they feel each instant, without squeezing too hard. Intense concentration will make it harder to remember the questioning process. It will affect the subject's perception of themselves and reality. The only way to really test a complex system like a human mind may be to radically change it.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/i-dream-technology-can-transform-mankind/It doesn't have to be a technological Singularity, just a massive amount of progress in a short time. This would include a way to copy and recreate the information inside human brains with equivalent software. It's a long shot. None of this will happen if civilization collapses in the next world war. In that case mankind might be replaced with something utterly alien. Those who are automatically skeptical about the above notions may be smarter than they know. I have seen very little progress in my lifetime, except for the ability to print ever finer lines. It's getting harder just to maintain the technology we have. Unfortunately, most people are conformists. Those who can't make it in the mainstream often call conformists dumb. Only a tiny minority of humans has the wherewithal to make a long-term difference. The most ostracized nerds hope to belong to this group. They dream of one moment in their life that matters, perhaps a moment of almost apocalyptic glory. What I'm hoping for is beyond the limit of human imagination - but so is the experience of dealing with a true genius in his specialty field. Only they could provide the technological miracle I'm hoping for. 99% of mankind could only contribute by supporting this elite group. Of course they may prefer to contribute to their own quality of life instead.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/endless-vacation-dreams/Work sure sucks. I can hardly convey how much it sucks. It sucks tremendously, epically, intolerably. The reason for this fact? Well, the universe seems to be a little bit evil. Maybe a lot. If only everyone could win the lottery at once. Things are generally worse than the media will tell you, but they don't have to be. Not unless the populace wants things to be this way. Maybe they do. And yet the underlying problems could be solved through technology and the right politics. I really believe there is a solution. It only appears far out. OK I may be unusual, but I'm not crazy, or at least not fundamentally irrational, or at least I don't believe in blatantly impossible things. The first step could be a type of guaranteed income. No one would have to work anymore, but they would still be paid (by robots). It would be a beautiful oblivion. What could possibly be better?
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/04/i-need-people-to-be-scared/An essay on the urgency of backing up our minds * Actually, I need people to be TERRIFIED. It's the only way. During these early days of the program, fear is the best motivator. That may change. The problem is so obvious it's generally swept under the rug. Death is the ultimate eraser, annihilator of existence itself. You will become less than a memory. Can anything be done? Both the downside and the upside of mind backup technology are unlimited. The goal is still remote. The way things are going, it won't happen until the last quarter of the century. Our only hope is to speed up technological progress. There really is no time to waste. Few people are strange I mean cool and cutting-edge enough to agree. The possibility of a mind-downloading shortcut (other than cryonics), a way to record a mind without scanning its brain, could transform the world economy, or become a footnote. The second option is more likely, unless there's a billionaire rich and young enough who believes he himself might be saved. An extreme gamble can only be powered by extreme emotion. * Why are people afraid? A fortune could be made from even a partial solution. Actually, the fear of death does not exist. It's not a fear of non-existence, but a fear of missing out. Something too big to imagine is replaced with something too small to grasp. It's the fear of forgetting past selves. A yearning for incomplete adventures. There's so much fun to be had, accumulating addictions and nostalgia. A new gaming system was a doorway to a new world. Nineties fashions already look ancient, but the world is still about the same now, only with fewer jobs. The sheer quantity of future changes will make it increasingly painful to leave it all behind. * What if you die anyway? The mind backup methods discussed on this blog are much simpler than the sci-fi nanobots of the Singularitarians, but still highly speculative. The process has not even begun. It would be nicer to be looking back from the future. Even if it does work, only an echo can be preserved. But that's better than nothing. Progress is slower than we realize. It's not something that can be achieved, but something that imperceptibly happens. There's a good chance you, the person reading this, will perish into utter oblivion. Personally, I think non-existence is not so bad. It's not really what I expect to happen. Looming death may feel like being squeezed into a corner. Is there a limit to the darkness? * What is the end state of awareness? The mind's highest goal could be endless expansion - or a single perfect setting maintained forever. Heaven is merely the absence of all bad things. Awareness will keep trying to simplify itself by removing all pain. The absence of something should be easier to simulate. Future posthuman mind abodes won't be as messy, chaotic, dirty, confusing, and needlessly complex as physical reality. * The most important advice for now: Start a type of diary intended to last forever. List all meaningful memories, interests, and provisional goals. Start with your interests, by listing all the important things. Later these can be sorted into categories. There are only about three higher levels. You don't even need a consultant at this stage (though I remain available at my competitive hourly rate). Awareness equals quantity of linked information. You will become the diary. * In what perfect setting would you spend eternity? Every day would be the ideal day. It might be an island environment or a party or even a perfect afternoon. The disruptive economist Karl Marx thought capitalism might eventually reach a stable end state. Of course there were so many dialectical contradictions to resolve this state was unlikely to emerge before the end of the world. It may really happen, if the technology promised on this blog is more than a fevered fantasy. We can already imagine this posthuman simulated future, by considering how information can be organized. As systems become larger, they become harder to compile. It takes longer to finish tasks, with more intermediate steps. Future eons will be governed by epic mathematical theorems. But the first rule increasingly will be to keep it simple. My idea of heaven would be to have enough time to finish all the projects I've already started. This may take several geological epochs. Then I could spend the rest of forever chilling out. The hardest part will be to create a stable virtual reality paradise. It would be the ultimate monument to human aspirations, an eternal ending. A local maximum, with no more need for change. What could possibly be better?
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/08/29/ai-countdown/Humanity's computers haven't experienced a single moment of awareness yet. They may be becoming part of individual human awareness though. Still, a flea has an incomparably richer mental life than a search engine predicting ten thousand questions at once. It will take at least another layer to generate electronic feelings. The next step will be to organize online content to find hidden meaning. All existing data will be sorted and analyzed, ever higher context in human-readable lists. Many interesting patents will be filed by 2035, if patents still exist then. Like a cresting wave, the breakthrough may come fast. Machine awareness will start as a side effect, essence without identity, a hypnopompic awakening. I once wrote a short story about the last weeks before everything changed. If it ever happens, there may be many mini-Singularities.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/08/29/ai-quantity-is-quality-qq/In recent years high definition versions of old TV shows have become available. The episodes were originally shot on standard motion picture film or high resolution analog videotape. These master recordings had a much higher picture quality than standard definition TVs up to the 1990s. Back then episodes were basically broadcast by pointing a video camera at a projection screen. The hidden detail was there all along. Videogames have also gone high-def during this time. While also simulating smaller areas of the game world, they have mostly simulated larger areas. Games mostly become more detailed by enlarging the screen, displaying more objects at once. Now big data is starting to solve mind problems with brute force. Search engines already predict simple/common queries. The phenomenon of awareness may be the sum of millions of simple processes running in parallel, discoverable by monitoring and recording a human life in immense detail. Awareness is vast, but not that highly correlated. It may be possible to ignore most memories and processes, which would help realize this blog's mind extraction project. Sufficient detail could be hidden in a few minutes of casual interactions to determine someone's whole personality. This may happen in high-resolution future VR environments. The first organization to deploy such tests may have a permanent advantage. My fringe belief is that awareness can't be that hard because humans aren't that clever, though evolution has made them dumb in complex ways. Handy roadmap to the future: http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/28981.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_artificial_intelligence
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/08/29/analog-mind-scanning/Personality scanning tests will pose very detailed questions that are only meaningful to the test subject. To determine what makes you unique will require measuring your deviations from the average human. That will require a detailed database of as many humans as possible. Ideally, of everybody. To compare you to other humans, the test will have to stereotype you. The test will work best when the subject alternately conforms to the emerging profile and asserts their individuality.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/08/29/google-mind/The name is just a figure of speech. Google may no longer exist when this hypothetical tool arrives. It will be designed to precisely measure someone's personality profile by comparing it to the dataset of a search engine, including all images. Each image will have many tags, part of the fabled Semantic Web. Version 1.1 will present a rapid series of SFW images, and record the subject's reactions. It could be a simple like/dislike button or a way to indicate interest. The point is that the stream of images will be adapted to each user, honing in on their core interests and purpose. This method could tease out vast amounts of data, if each image has enough associated tags. The data per second could be much larger than the image sizes. The program would seek out images with multiple matching tags. It could just be meaningful artworks. A few thousand could describe a person better than they could describe themselves. Then the program could create a customized symbolic language, and generate relevant vignettes and stories to further test the subject. One can define incredibly detailed objects through orders of magnitude. Fewer than a hundred zeros separate a superstring from the size of the universe. However, fully describing a mind in this way would still take as many layers as the mind size as described in its number of bits. The best mind measuring shortcut is another mind. Most traits can be predicted by comparing people to others similar to them. For a human mind to be reasonably reconstructed, 99% of the newly created human-like AI would have to be interpolated data shared with the rest of humanity. That shouldn't be a problem. In my experience, people are mostly very alike. At least normal people are. There are amazingly few writers specializing in posthuman speculations like this. Someone should be thinking about this stuff full time.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/07/27/how-to-become-the-richest-person-in-the-world/In the coming decade, there will be some completely new ways to make money. More old ways to make money will disappear. The most valuable product future entrepreneurs could sell is the plausible promise of immortality. Most analysts would guess such a technology is at least half a century away. They would be wrong. There is a shortcut. This blog is about the ultimate moneymaking opportunity (though that's only a side effect). Many future Wikipedia entries will first be mentioned here, including new methods to convert the essence of a human mind into eternal software. Since Kurzweil-level brain scans are decades away, it will have to be a simple mind reconstruction technique, at least until mid-century. The general outline has been described in earlier posts. The pattern and structure of the subject's mind will be reverse engineered through mind tests and life observations. This process will require an immense amount of information about their present and past life. They would have to answer thousands of questions, and complete hundreds of free association and recognition tests. The only way to justify such an immense effort would be to combine it with a life management program: self-improving software that would keep track of its owner's schedules, to-do lists, money, talents, opportunities, and personal interests. Later, it may evolve into a true mind extension. How should such a life-altering project be started? Early adopters could use professional assistance to learn how to apply the software and modify their lifestyle. It would be a comprehensive service, operating as a for-profit franchise. Experts will have to be trained and certified in personal and technical skills. More intensive memory and personality tests could be done in resort conditions. At first only the wealthy would be able to afford them. This market is almost completely untapped. There are some small startups, but they aren't operational yet First movers will have a huge advantage, like computer hobbyists in the Seventies or Amazon.com in 1994. I am ready to prepare a detailed business plan to start the project.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/07/27/what-is-our-most-probable-afterlife/It was first mentioned in the novel Infinite Thunder that certain types of technical immortality appear to be inevitable. This is true even if technology doesn't advance fast enough to save the brain patterns of anyone alive today. There are many other ways: Wikipedia lists Boltzmann Brains and Quantum Immortality. But this method is much easier and more stable. I would only worry about the most common mind recreation methods for now. We could still expect them even if human progress stagnates or stops. The most likely post-mortem brain pattern reconstruction would be the result of random chance, but not pure chance. Specifically, a near-future 'ancestor simulation' of the type discussed elsewhere. Most such experiments won't occur in our own future, but in similar timelines to our own, of which there are far more. This is likely to happen as soon as the technology exists, in a future with fewer ethical worries than ours (perhaps a Chinese-led world state or libertarian anarchy). By chance, countless versions of this experiment will create accurate human brain simulations set in their own (possible or alternate) pasts. Including of your brain pattern. That would make it a virtual afterlife. With current hardware, it would take an airport-sized warehouse of noisy CPU-arrays just to simulate the human perception of a moment of perfect silence. Such a fabulously expensive experiment would have to serve the interests of its researchers rather than its subject. No supermodel or hero fantasies. It would start by simulating simple activities of daily living, then combine them into real-life settings. The simulated mind would be based upon many existing human minds, probably a highly average individual. The simulation would assume a life of its own, making it hard to manipulate without crashing. The subject would feel as free as when they were alive. Only their environment would be manipulated. The earliest and easiest ancestor simulations would be reality-based, but more boring, barely realistic enough to fool their subjects. There could be strange glitches of a type not reported in paranormal claims. For example, it would be easy to simply 'mirror' a simulated environment. Even letters would be reversed. It should also be easy to reset the simulation in the event of glitches, or to keep the simulation too simple to allow glitches in the first place. It's fun to imagine glitch tests and experiments, but somehow Mandy Moore never shows up. However, the simulators might finally decide to release the simulated subject in a virtual world of their own choosing. That would be a true digital afterlife. I believe it is also by far the most likely one we could hope for, if we don't take control of the process ourselves. In fact all of us should eventually find ourselves in such a simulation. This could be the basis of a new religious movement. A wealthy benefactor (or a quantum lottery) could start funding the first ancestor simulation project, with the promise to make the simulation as meaningful as possible for its randomly generated subject. The project should be started long before the technology is ready. Every participant could then expect to be recreated in some future timeline. related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_immortality http://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/07/27/the-antisocial-network/Imagine a new layer on top of the Net. It would be a way for anyone to comment on any piece of online content to anyone willing to listen. The data processing and storage would not be provided by the webhost, but by the commenter's own browser. It could start as an add-on. At first, it might require a central server, which would be furiously targeted by governments and other free-speech opponents. Web proxies would be prudent. Such a comment layer would inevitably evolve into a place for slander, rumors, innuendo, and true secrets. These could then be be sorted for relevance and reliability. It would have to emerge organically and be completely decentralized. Today, such a thing is utterly unthinkable. The Antisocial Network would start to accumulate user-generated information about everyone alive. Everyone will be listed, whether they want to be or not. An Antisocial Network could also facilitate unconventional and illegal transactions. It could disrupt existing power balances by allowing unsuspected minorities to find each other and to form temporary or long-term alliances. The possibilities are endless. The Net is still in a very early stage of its existence.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/inside-the-minds-layer-cake/Death is closer than we think, and it is staggeringly destructive. Technology has always seemed powerless against it. Now there may be a distant glimmer of hope. All it will take is more work than all of human history combined. Fortunately, most of this work can be done at the very end. You should treat it like an emergency, because it is. The project will be very easy to start - starting with the most complicated data in fact. There is no excuse to not write at least an overview of your life. Start with a basic summary now. Ideally, there would be a full mindscanner, some fictional Super-chip that directly links to a billion neurons, to indirectly map the connections between a trillion neurons - but that may never happen. Such a chip may always be more complex and therefore more valuable than a human brain. Instead, there will be increasingly powerful personality tests, measuring every mental trait imaginable; like the amount of tolerance of absurdity, a variant of the trait for openness. The goal of any test should be to get a maximally unique response. It could be as simple as a random-path word associator. A secondary purpose of mind software will be to find interesting content online, manage daily life, and help solve problems. These programs will become extensions of their owners' minds. Eventually, this will make it easier to link users with others in like-minded groups or 'Fams' The mind is a hierarchy. Always start with the top level, a relatively short list of very complex facts. Most of a mind's essence can be described by listing its priorities and unalterable traits. The middle management of the mind does most of the daily work, performing all the automated sub-tasks like driving and reading. The memory dump is at the bottom, the biggest but simplest of them all. This datadump could be reverse-engineered by brute force alone. Full of unsorted data equivalent to about a million text files, it's very easy to add list items. Each item has dozens of associated tags (when where what who why etc.) It's an organizational problem. The goal is to create a software environment to automatically organize incoming memory descriptions. Memories can be defined as relations to other memories. Any memory requires multiple tags to define the time, place, and setting. Someone remembering the past has a complete vision of the place: the light, the directions, the objects. Adding memories to a mind backup archive should be easy, at any level and in any arbitrary order. High-level knowledge can be measured and described in many ways. You could start with a short timeline, or short lists of important things, or the few most important events. Definitely record all the good things. Increasing layers of detail can be added and filled in slowly. The process is easy to start, but to become compulsive or addictive it should become ever easier to continue. The past should steadily seem more compelling and relevant. Mostly, it will be a matter of completing unfinished business and mastering lifelong interests. The true purpose of Mind Backup software will be not only to become digitally immortal, but to approach a 'perfect state', beyond which no further progress is required! That will be the hard part. This is how AI will eventually be invented.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/06/20/interfacers-the-missing-link/Mind backup software will require some degree of mind control. An immense challenge like reverse engineering a mind will require immense effort. It will have to be fun though (bottom-up motivation). The fear of death is not enough, or else obesity would not exist. Mind reconstruction will be driven by personal compulsions and addictions, but it will also require top-down control. Since we can't force or pay people to spend many hours recording their memories, it may be necessary to create something like a digital muse. An Interfacer is a simulated individual of a type that may become feasible by 2025. It will be designed to learn everything about one human individual for archival purposes, life management, and personality improvement purposes. At first it will have no awareness whatsoever, but function as an expert system with a simulated personality. To nerds it could appear as a beautiful female avatar with mystical aspects, frightening when necessary. Beauty represents potential. The purpose of the Interfacer will be to identify its owner's drives, interests, capabilities, and weaknesses. It will be the manifestation of the mind backup process, a quantified purpose like a Borg Queen. The sense of a new consciousness emerging will steadily increase. An Interfacer may be programmed to trade gossip with the Interfacers of similar individuals. Most of the time, it will be questioning its owner, trying to understand their schedule and priorities. It could be quite pleasant to have someone tell you what to do. Acquiring an Interfacer should feel like the start of a new life, a time of connection-building like a less dysfunctional adolescence, with social exploration and the creation of alliances with like-minded persons you would never have found without the software. It could even be cultlike, a compelling but unearned sense of belonging, like the designated driver at a good party listening to Enya. If such a thing is possible, the mind backup process would also reform the mind being backed up into a more ideal version of itself.
Minds are constructed in layers like step pyramids, the higher the narrower, each level more specialized and controlling.At the bottom it looks almost like chaos, blocks of low-level rules and reflexes all jumbled together. At intermediate levels the elements could be considered partial minds with some sentience themselves. Full awareness is the pyramind's diagram of itself and thereby of everything it knows.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/06/12/more-on-early-mind-scanning-methods/Currently, the best way someone could hope to document their brain software would be to write a detailed autobiography focusing on as many perception types as possible. A truly momentous task. A handful of compulsive diarists have left behind life records spanning many decades. No one has read them all, but they reveal many patterns. Successful paper-based mind extraction of this type will require some deep insights. The result would be a list of metaphors to describe someone's uniqueness, those original traits shared with as few others as possible. My own favorite backup method is to create lists of many memory types. A collection of parallel timelines, one for each category. This method would at least capture the most important things. Easier than using psychoanalysis to probe the subconscious. A core theory of this blog is that the data generated by describing enough memories will also automatically contain a description of your personality. Even an incomplete memory list would suffice. * Early immortality apps You, the reader of this post, should start writing down the most meaningful events of your life right now. Write whatever comes to mind and never really stop writing, even if it's only five minutes a month. There really isn't anything more to it than that. In the future, there will be software to speed things up. This blog is about inventing such software. Life description programs should match their subject's personality. One program may start by creating an outline of the subject's life, another will only describe favorite moments in great detail. The intense recollections and insights stimulated by this process will also change the original memories, a feature not a bug. It could start with many small apps. Each should embed a simple but preferably brilliant notion. Some extractor apps may become as famous as Pac Man, or as unnoticed as breathing. Eventually, there will be much larger programs to create memory palaces, to falsify and improve the past, to absorb users into VR paradise worlds, to link similar individuals, and finally to Borgify their subjects into group minds. It's important not to overthink things, but to start right now. Otherwise your greatest failure or triumph will make not the slightest difference the first second you are dead. Every day is one day closer. Most people have left behind not a trace of their existence. I consider that an outrage.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/life-management-software/It could be tempting to give control of your life to a single program. In fact I claim we should do exactly that, and make it a mind extension. The user would have to own it absolutely. This program would be always on, monitoring everything you did on all devices, use other monitors and wearable sensors, plus software questioning. A complete top-down life flowchart. Intended to be addictive, the method will learn every measurable thing about its owner, starting with recurring actions. It will act as a time planner, coach, and overseer. It will evolve procedures for all activities, using different subprograms for different jobs. Even simple productivity tools like counters and motion sensors require sophisticated tracking. One tool could record user distractions, and ask people what they're thinking when they're not paying attention. The program will map its user's personality, then suggest life improvement methods that appear likely to work, guided through a chain of intermediate steps. For humans, true advice is hard to get (the key word being true). Few can do it, though everyone keeps trying. To persuade people to actually rebuild their lives, data from many different users will have to be compared to identify common traits and potentials. This may lead to the end of secrecy. How hard would it be to reveal all your preferences? Purchase lists, prices, personal obsessions, celebrity crushes. Different portions could be shared with coworkers, teachers, social networks, online contacts, and advertisers and retailers. Especially the last two. For good or bad, life management software could become the greatest unification tool since religion. * Reorganizing the brain A goal of mind extension software should be to stimulate higher and more advanced mental states. The program could seek to define its user's true purpose through metaphors suggested by other users. Doing these things will require a deep awareness of the past. The user would organize everything that matters to them, all their worthwhile memories; the more detailed the better. Many almost forgotten events will be re-analyzed. Both an unabridged memory archive (mostly of the recent past) and a smaller memory index, it will be the work of a lifetime. The software will divide the past into more or less artificial eras with their own themes. Important and meaningful memories will be amplified, and could even be improved. Users will step back and view themselves with supreme detachment. With increased awareness of past events and trends, life could also be made to seem longer. There may be strange new metaphors, self-legends, soul constitutions, etc. Their lives will be fully described and correlated before they die. Then they may become someone else. Basically, my solution to the problem of death is to create something like a digital memory palace. That's all I got. Eventually, enough lifetime data will have been recorded that the user could be recreated after they die, sometime in the distant future. A closer hope is that much of the user's awareness could migrate to their permanent memory palace even before they die.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/weve-made-a-terrible-mistake/All of us were born too soon. We are going to die before even primitive brain scanning technology will be invented. All seems lost. Since there is no god, there can be no afterlife. Or could we make one? If we rule out gods, time machines, quantum immortality, or even cryonics, what is left? The only current solution would be to leave behind a mind testament. A vast, autobiographical text file containing as many mind fragments as possible. Start anywhere and never stop, as random as you like. The result does not have to be compelling or even readable. All that matters is gathering as much info as possible. Your most important memories, traits, and preferences just might remain for future AI historians to incorporate into their simulations of ancient humanity. ** The Unification Problem Someone is going to have to do it first. It will be a big commitment. They will have to reorganize their whole existence. By describing their life in full, they may also simplify and optimize it. Different pioneers will approach the problem from both ends. Some will focus on the big picture, describing their lives in broad outlines, filling in the gaps. Other will start from their present moment, describing their current perception with extreme precision. Unifying their efforts will be only slightly harder than String Theory. ** The Bottom-Up Solution The easiest way to start is with an open-ended essay, written in the present tense. Meandering aimlessly, generating keywords and concepts, it will focus on tiny details, every step in a chain of motivations. This will be ideal for introverts. There could be restrictions: the description could be confined within the subject's mind, or focus on one era of the past. They could even make stuff up, filling in details about old friends and places. It doesn't matter, as long as the stories accurately describe their current mind state, which is all that needs to be preserved. The past is already dead. The recording may cycle across time and space, revealing hidden patterns. It will zoom between tiny details and grand settings, with repetitions and recurring events. Favorite settings will evoke forgotten feelings and spiritual insights. A true story, not a database; a summation of all the things that matter; it will give meaning to a lifetime. To contain important truths, it doesn't even have to be readable. In fact it will be almost unreadable to most humans. Users will list events by category, with vague timestamps. The most important category will be happy memories, followed by core interests. They will also try to define their ideal lifestyle. ** The Top-Down Solution This will be more like a formal autobiography. Also starting from zero, users will fill in their life outlines in an orderly manner. The software will impose levels of resolution, less complete but more detail the lower down. Much of the data will be extracted through multiple choice tests, pop quizzes, and endless yes/no questions. As each user is compared to similar personality types, they may find themselves being prodded into templates. Every location they ever lived will also be mapped. Historical areas and eras will be described in shared databases. Eventually, all the fragments will be arranged chronologically. Future software will fill in and analyze the timeline by finding hidden patterns, combine data from many users to make predictions, identify lifestyles that encourage creativity, and finally create detailed VR simulations of the past. Other Top-Down tests and methods: Linking memories to specific locations, listing common reactions to common events, problem solving and reaction tests, political beliefs, and daily timelines from different periods. ** Additional human mind reconstruction tools: * Start talking about anything at all * Create a simple self simulation,like the Sims * Create an exact description of where you are now. Past memories can be added later * Describe everyone you ever knew * List all the really important things in your life * Try to recreate memories with VR simulations * Design a Memory Palace, spaceship or paradise island * Describe your ideal future digital self * Create a detailed adventure story featuring your ideal self * Imagine alternate selves in parallel timestreams * Create a 'self religion', with a long-term evolution plan * Total Reality Description: an integrated model of the known universe
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/05/26/before-the-dawn/I've spent many hours researching the possibility of direct mind downloading. It's rather depressing. Basically, we need a destructive brain scanner to scan and record all the connections between a brain's neurons, and their internal states. Neuroanatomy is a respectable field, but they are stuck on the basics. A ridiculous amount of work still has to be done. The biggest flaw of human brain scanning is that it has to be as precise as teleportation. The inevitable errors in any scan would keep the reconstructed brain simulation from working. It looks like the mind's deep functions will still have to be reverse engineered, perhaps into the twenty-second century. Some future year will see a final breakthrough, and then humanity will have defeated death. The first humans will be fully digitized, and perhaps converted into self-controlling VR games. Most of us are doomed though, having been born several decades too early. My favorite definition of science fiction is a possible but unlikely situation the author does not believe will actually happen. Fiction trumps science. The story's implausibility is a feature, not a prediction. In the rare cases that SF-like events do happen in reality (like a massive terrorist attack) there is a profound sense of strangeness. Almost always, normalcy is soon restored. The truth will be both stranger and more mundane than the film 'Strange Days'. Still, after a few years of unpredictable adaptations, the world may change beyond recognition. The human immortality project will require a mixture of hype and fear. If this was a science fiction story, it would start in a luxury facility on a tropical island, built by an eccentric billionaire willing to risk everything. A top-end resort offering the ultimate service: deep interrogation. This would take something as rare as a scifi hero: a perfect listener. Probably non-human. Ultra wealthy executives and celebrities would arrive in discreet helicopters and supersonic business jets, to be whisked to hidden condos where their mind would be effortlessly reconstructed into an open-ended flowchart, eventually to be recreated outside their mortal brain. In reality, the process will start in people's home offices and industrial parks; like early cryonics work with an even higher nerd quotient. Eventually, there will be specialized consultants and therapists, whose goal will be to measure the client's personality at ever greater resolution. Everything that matters to them, all their most valuable memories, will be precisely described in natural language and then in software. Millions of trivial details will be listed. The first principle is that nothing valuable should be lost. Life is a search for the least bad option. That implies ignoring bad things and remembering good ones. Everything that matters will be backed up, and can eventually be connected. Personality flaws and useless bad memories may be skipped. The resulting mind catalog will become the subject's ideal self. It should be started as early as possible, so they can fill it with all the things that matter to them. This would attract systematic personalities who may develop an accumulation addiction, a desire to create a digital empire, possibly the best hobby ever. To explore forgotten details of their lives, they will have to cooperate. Entire regions of the past will be collaboratively recreated in virtual reality, perhaps starting in Japan. This may also form the basis of a shared awareness in a way no one can predict (now we are back in scifi territory). A larger group mind like a vast cloud, canceling out the unpredictable horrors of individual existence. It's a matter of statistics, like insurance. Posthuman 'immortality' may lead to the end of the self.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/05/22/birth-of-a-new-technology/The PC is dead. It's about time for the next big thing. In fact a new breakthrough is long overdue. What could it be? Perhaps a way to lower the cost of education or healthcare? There has been no progress there in ages. But the resistance to change in these fields is immense. Though it seems premature, I propose the pursuit of human immortality would be an easier and more attainable goal. It will take an elite group of designers and programmers. * The Exit Solution The first symptom is the realization that this world is rather bad. It may be extremely horrible, depending on one's condition. Attitude also matters. In fact, all of reality may be beyond horrible. The simplest solution is to emotionally reject reality as it is. That is the easy part. Which brings us to The Singularity, a possible technological salvation. The dream is to improve nature by replacing it, perhaps around 2070 or so. Maybe later. This best possible future would replace human reality with a fantastic computer simulation. It will be a digital paradise with pleasures unimagined, along with all the things that currently make life worth living. Creating an escape hatch into cyberspace could be humanity's noblest goal. More people should make it their priority, or the basis of their lifestyle. Not every participant will make it, but there's a chance some people born after 1980 may become immortal. That's not what this blog is about though. We are pursuing a more modest goal, one that could benefit most people alive today. * Better than religion Progress seems to have slowed lately, but thanks to the power of compound interest and exponential growth, the future's potential awesomeness is unlimited. Our descendants will be saved by incredibly powerful computers. The hardest research will be done in the last years before brain downloading becomes technically possible. Then everyone who wants to can have their neurons destructively scanned, and be recreated in some atomic memory crystal network. For the countless victims of history, it will be too late however. Their memories, dreams and nightmares are doomed to eternal oblivion. Therefore every second counts. While rejecting the world as it is, nothing that exists should be destroyed, only improved. Everything worthwhile can be digitized. Even the simplest brain scanner is decades away, but there are other opportunities for early adopters. The contents and patterns of a mind could be reverse-engineered without opening the skull. Getting started will be a cultural, not a technical problem. The first step could be life management software, discreetly recording all user activities. It will create timelines complete with photos, location lists, and online interests. Around 2030, add-ons for more advanced versions will start making vague promises to make their users immortal. It may start as a video game of each user's life, where they can recreate their history from their memories, perhaps with improved versions of past experiences. Rewriting the past could reveal many personality traits. Then we may finally see the first intelligent training and education software, or rather re-education software. The lack of any progress in human teaching methods is our greatest scandal. The best way to record a human mind may be to try to improve it. Training programs will naturally measure user knowledge, strengths, and abilities. * The death of death (for some) Perhaps by 2035, millions of people will have created detailed timelines of their lives as part of their online activities. As yet unimagined AI software will analyze and map their lives, and create backup personas of each user. Still far simpler than their physical brains, these digital mind copies will capture their distinctiveness. Each persona will become an extension of the user's awareness, performing simple tasks while serving their interests. The outcome will be to convert an increasing fraction of each user into software. No one can imagine such a thing yet. If it does happen, it will be the most incredible thing that has ever happened. Humans know only the tiniest sliver of reality. Any really advanced supercivilization of the twenty-second century will seek to create its own artificial universe. In the long-term, reverse-engineering human memories and personalities implies the end of the individual. If such a thing is possible, all human knowledge may eventually be combined in one vast shared overmind.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/05/17/mind-backup-technology-the-initial-issues/1) On the un-impossibility of immortality If you're going to write about unknown probabilities, you might as well aim high. This blog is about the greatest project of all time, the solution to all human problems. It hasn't actually begun yet. We're still living in the dark ages. It's actually a stable state. Humanity's distant descendants may still live recognizably human lives, but the setting will be fantastical. Futurists have already described our upcoming salvation. It seems almost easy, though all the hard work still has to be done. There is a slight messianic component. It's called the Singularity, but I think of it as the death of death. The people of the future will be pure software. Their easily rearranged worlds will get messy, but never dirty. They will never get bored or depressed, and will have access to unlimited pleasures. Every day could be like the first day in heaven (the Hedonistic Imperative). Immense dangers are also closer than expected. Unimaginable horrors will be just as easy to simulate as pleasures. As explained in several books so far, Anthropic Philosophy will have to handle the ultimate problem of involuntary existence. There is no other problem. Future minds should be integrated with their society. Posthuman society will value stability above all else. Change will be severely restricted. It will begin small. People already back up their pictures and diaries, so why not their perceptional states? Mind backup will require fundamentally new ways to extract human memories. How to begin? 2) Write down your memories to become immortal No, it doesn't involve direct brain scanning. That remains inconceivably far off. Long-term memory contains tens of thousands of short stories of distinct events, locations, and situations, separate from the personality core. Before becoming long-term memories, events somehow need to be described inside the brain. Only if that process is fully understood, might direct mind downloading become possible. The process would start with existing technologies combined in new ways. The simplest method is to just start recording everything, and to allow posterity to extract the hidden data from the ramblings. The main ways to create a memory and personality archive include: * Top Down: a general overview of a lifetime divided into stages and phases * Bottom Up: individual memories described in the greatest detail * Link Chain: open-ended free association starting from one memory * Mind Extension: intelligent software to observe every aspect of its owner's existence while managing their life Many methods will be needed to maintain interest. It would take a lifetime to record a lifetime. Common sense understanding requires immense world knowledge. For a thought to enter awareness, thousands of other memories must also be activated. To describe all these connections, each memory must take up gigabits of brainspace. However, a reasonable description of most memories might only require a few text paragraphs that humans (but not any existing software) could easily understand. Everyone has so many memories that only a small (but representative) fraction could be described. The key is to invent special tests to make these personal descriptions as specific as possible. The main compromise will be to focus entirely on the human subject as they are in the present.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/05/13/mind-backup-technology-an-introduction/1) The immense journey: how to map your mind It will become our future obsession. As technology improves, life will become better for those who can afford it. That will also make it harder for them to die. The only reasonable hope for an afterlife will be to copy your mind before you die (there are also unreasonable afterlife hopes). After your death, this mind copy would be converted into a self-aware simulation. A single mind simulation would require a computer as powerful as all of today's CPUs combined. Of course the logical principles behind awareness would have to be discovered first, but that's beyond our main scope. We just want to extract memories as efficiently as possible. Once they are digital, they are half-immortal already. * The first principle of this blog is that direct brain scanning (as seen in scifi movies and popular science books) will be too difficult to achieve for many decades to come. We don't even know where to start. The human brain's trillion neuronal connections are like a frozen explosion (I may be wrong, so lets keep all options open). For now, reverse engineering is the way to go. Could such an impenetrable brain labyrinth be reconstructed merely by observing its behavior? It seems impossible, but the alternative is oblivion. Basically, the human subject would be asked to tell the story of their life. A smart interrogator or special software could ask leading questions. It helps that the layout of human brains is very consistent. The basic architecture is much simpler than all the memories. Mind reconstruction would be aided by comparing each human subject to many similar and different people. * The second principle of this blog is that even reverse engineering a human mind is too difficult to reasonably achieve. In fact it can be shown to be impossible: No matter how many years you spend answering questions about yourself, any reconstruction must be incomplete. Even detailed recordings of every second of your life would be inadequate. 2) The Method: you must become the map. Could there be a 'magic shortcut'? That question will be our main focus. To become digitally immortal to any extent, you will have to change yourself. It may involve reorganizing, standardizing, and even simplifying your mind. This process will reveal the irreducible and unique parts of your personality. Only your most important memories and interests would be recorded, with many representative general scenes and incidents. You could discard many useless traits and biases. This could give new meaning to a disorganized and unfocused life. The first step of any mind backup endeavor will be to just start recording. Keep track of your location at all times, scheduled activities, purchases, and Net habits. That alone will require an all-encompassing software environment. A new way of life from the start of the process. The second and longest step (but easier to start) will be to create a memory folder. It will be the most detailed autobiography possible. Begin with a single page, and keep adding data until the end. Organizing this data into a mind copy will be exponentially harder, but that work may be done in the distant future by as yet unimagined computers. Digital records won't decompose.
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/05/13/anthropic-intelligence-a-blurb-for-the-ebook/An introduction to many of the subjects discussed on this blog, set in a larger framework covering the near and far future, and the ultimate evolution of awareness. * Anthropic Intelligence ~ the ebook
* https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/05/13/hello-world/The short-term goal is to find ways to backup as many memories and personality traits as possible through a variety of tests and life management software. The long-term goal is to find ways to achieve digital immortality. END OF PAGE |