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Libertarianism is genetic not political 160315 15:51 Somehow they never mention their proposed libertarian paradise would take a high percentage of high-IQ citizens to function at all. It's for nerds who enjoy cost/benefit analysis. Students who did their homework. Self-taught insurance mavens making spreadsheets for fun. Self-interest is hard work, as any fox knows. - It's a very sincere philosophy, but most people are cunningly dumb. The only way it could ever happen is if all the elements for a workable libertarian society were created and tested within our statist society first. - It can not be started at the ballot box. Real change is almost always accidental. The best way the libertarian parties could achieve their goals would be to formally abolish themselves first (they could remain as unincorporated associations). All the things to worry about 160314 07:49 It's insane how many things have to go right before anything can go wrong. Immense levels of complexity must be concealed to allow normal awareness. A few remaining top-level concerns then become driving obsessions. - This works quite well; too well for some. Conversely, it makes it easy to hide the incredible primitiveness of our top-level illusions. The world sucks as much as it can suck without collapsing into something that would suck less (especially true for computer interfaces). - We are floating on illusions. This begins to explain how a shocking life event can suddenly reset someone's priorities. Like say a suicide jumper one second after stepping off the ledge. ---- COMMENTS: That doesn't mean he was wrong to jump though ---- It has to be like that. Otherwise everyone would kill themselves sooner or later. Mind entropy effects 160313 12:37 Entropy applies to everything else, so why not to awareness? It would apply more to larger minds, anthropically speaking. - A mind is an immensely complicated system that exists to form one hyper-specific mental state. However, the many mind systems may inevitably create much more derivative awareness than core awareness. We can't sense it, because it fades out without affecting our memory or purpose. Most fragments are temporary and absurd, but they could self-combine in mind-like timelines. - I believe the most relevant feature of our physical universe is its capacity to suppress derivative mind instances, by vastly amplifying our minds' core awareness. - Maybe most of our entropy was used up in the first second, but the process is ongoing, as hinted by our universe's unacknowledged excessive complexity. ---- erebus450 2016-03-15 03:19 pm (UTC) Speaking of which, this & its comment thread are right up your alley: http://www.xenosystems.net/techno-immortalist-delusion/ - It would be interesting to get your take on it. ---- So our physics keeps us from becoming Boltzman brains right now? MAYBE THAT IS HAPPENING ALL THE TIME. Our normal boring world is just an illusion always about to get weird. On the migrant immivasion 160312 16:15 My proposed solution has always been to return these men to the dysfunctional lands that sent them, but help them start better lives there. One thing I would not do is let them move here (at least not without an equivalent number of our citizens voluntarily moving there). I would sooner cut off a portion of the USA to give them a new homeland than to let them move here. Before I would do that, I would close the borders. on AI progress 160311 08:24 As we know, current AIs are better than humans at absurdly difficult tasks (as perceived by humans), but remain quite unable to do the easy ones. The 'easy' tasks are top-level, high-abstraction, and general in nature. The 'difficult' tasks are low-level, but too specialized for most humans. That does not make AIs our competitors. - Any profession that requires a great deal of time, discomfort, money and paperwork to enter, also involves a ton of formal rules. If it's boring, it's usually easier to automate. Boredom is a deliberate cloaking feature that serves as a barrier to entry. Almost every intractable bureaucratic or financial problem could be expressed in a flowchart. - But let's not get carried away here. What we call AI today is a cruel if compelling hoax. We have lightyears to go, as seen in today's atrocious translating software or 'customer support' software that can't understand a word I'm saying because of my angry voice. SF short story about the Singularity 160310 15:35 We can never remember writing these extremely elaborate tales. Should probably ease off the bottle a bit, but the urge to imbibe is just too strong. - http://realoutsiders.livejournal.com/2983.html Captcha problem and solution 160309 Instead of endlessly fighting bots, how about creating programs that could learn to post relevant comments at blogs? Especially blogs that don't get that many comments anyway. It would create a deep knowledge base for each blog. Software comments would appear at the end of the comment section, after all the human comments. And they would stay there at the end, at least for many years. The most interesting sociopolitical fact 160307 21:20 That would be the rarity of major terrorist attacks and other massively destructive acts. Planes fly over cities, presidents go out in public, powerplants are unsabotaged, ICBMs are unlaunched. Something is preventing people from acting up. It's probably genetic. - Crucially, it seems to suppress most possible actions if they aren't already being performed by others. Conformity makes the world go round. It also causes a deep sameness that transcends borders. The result is that there is too little innovation. OK here's the real solution to the Fermi Paradox 160306 07:59 I'm serious this time. It's somewhat related to the old Steady State Theory. The solution is that we (almost) necessarily exist at a very early stage of the universe. Just about the earliest stage we can exist. - Logically speaking, existence and creation are related. Perhaps they're one and the same. The laws of a universe are expressed at every point of that universe. That may mean that new universes are constantly being created at every point of existing universes. - Before a universe can get very old, it has already spawned uncountable younger ones. Early and simple universes vastly outnumber older and more evolved universes. - Selecting from this set at random, any technological civilization is likely to be among the first such civilizations in its universe. In fact we should be unusually primitive in many ways. Living organisms have not even had time to evolve biological wheels, lasers, or radios yet. This also implies that life is harder to evolve than expected. - It means that new versions of us are constantly being evolved in offspring universes without end, forever recreating similar and different lives. We are all 'immortal', but not necessarily in a good way. - The only hope I can offer is that the awareness a mind is feeling is not confined to any one instance of its form in one universe, but the superset of all its instances everywhere. The reason for nostalgia 160304 Nostalgia is such a powerful feeling because the future was bigger in the past. It's not just because emotions were much stronger then, and less was known. The number of possible things that actually might happen really was immensely vaster. This is true even in a quantum sense. And it was possible to sense some of this immensity, back in the time before the USSR whimpered out, America froze its space program while wasting trillions decivilizing Afghanistan, and Google became evil by becoming worse than useless by eliminating the plus symbol. Science Fiction is misdirection 160303 09:07 I already defined SF as stories where the author knows the depicted events won't happen, but acts as if they could. Usually this is done through style. - The purpose of good SF is to convincingly simulate the thrill of encountering true wonder. There is no higher emotion. This gets more difficult with time. For a nine year old, cartoons are as thrilling as a hidden pattern in Pi would be for me. In reality, amazing things may only happen once in a lifetime. The next apocalyptic terror attack may not occur until the 2070s. - But science fiction can sometimes simulate the experience. It's not about knowledge, but about something too great to describe that can only be implied or lied. - That's why I consider Arthur C. Clarke to be the greatest writer of all time after Thomas Harris in his prime, followed by Larry Niven and Michael Crichton. In Crichton's case, the misdirection is clearest of all, depicting inconceivably advanced technologies as if they could really exist in our time. And that made him the most successful. ---- Comment: Modern SF is politcally correct crap about left wing feelings and boredom. should rename it Fantasy Drama instead. In how many parallel universes did YOU become President? 160302 12:46 In an infinite number of course; but we're looking for a percentage. That won't be easy. By definition, parallel worlds are too diverse to imagine. - There are worlds where computer technology is no more advanced than in the 1970s, but people live on Mars. No Internet, but boobs on network TV. Somewhere is hot sauce so powerful your hand starts smoking if you hold it over a single drop. - There are 330 million Americans, and one of them has to be President. I suspect most Americans' odds are vastly worse than that number, and still worse for the outliers. Looking at the Gaussian distribution, those in the 97th percentile won't be chosen 3% of the time, but maybe 0.00001% of the time. - Extreme outliers are a different story. They are the least popular of all, but sometimes reality has a way of becoming unpleasant enough that their temperament seems useful. - In my case I'm guessing: 1/10,000 I have some sort of political career, 1/10,000 I make it to Congress, 1/10,000 to the very top. That's twelve zeroes. Ability almost always erases luck. the importance of IQ 160301 19:20 A monkey could write the collected works of Shakespeare as well as he could by pounding a keyboard randomly; but it would take it rather longer than suggested by the ratio of their brain sizes. The odds are like 1/30 multiplied by itself five million times. - Intelligence is efficiency. A little bit can make a fabulous difference. Every brain has a limit like an invisible wall. A genius can discover as much as ten thousand smart engineers. - That is why every effort must be made to find ways to increase human IQ through digital mind extensions. This is the only thing that could save the Third World. ---- The willingness to think deeply is what makes us human not the ability. Leap Day post: orbital paradox 160229 23:59 Some possibly profound paradoxes (at least to me) involve mysteries of speed (like my earlier post about kinetic energy). - An object orbiting another object at a great distance 'feels' weak gravity due to the great distance, but its orbital speed is still faster than you would expect. - Twice as far from the center of gravity, you orbit at more than half the speed (about 71%, the amount you have to shrink the sides of a square to halve its area). - Each doubling doesn't even halve the orbital speed, but the distance increases exponentially. Due to the greater circumference, the orbital period almost triples. - Orbiting at such a great distance, the orbital path resembles a straight line. One has to move fast to prevent being pulled even infinitesimally closer to the center of gravity. If I figured the numbers on this envelope correctly, at 10^60km it takes only about 10^100 (a googol) years to orbit the sun, or roughly a Planck length per Planck second. Beyond that, orbits become meaningless. - (And it would take only a few centuries for a virus to orbit a grain of sand a few meters away, or for Pluto to orbit the sun, since they have similar size ratios.) Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels 160228 13:04 The stories involved an imaginary technique to accurately predict human history thousands of years in advance. No matter how hard people tried to forge their own paths, the historical future could be predicted or at least determined many millennia in advance. It was impossible to change the outcome. The psychohistorians would always win, often in unexpected ways, like a revolution inevitably having an opposite outcome. - The series had three novels written in the 1950s, plus two sequels written in the 1980s. Asimov tried to start a third sequel but was blocked, so he wrote two prequels instead. The tone of his last book 'Forward the Foundation' hinted that he was dying, as did Crichton's last book 'Next'. - Which brings us to the curse of prequelitis: After he died, his estate authorized three other authors to write three more prequels, for a total of FIVE count em five prequels. And they were all glib 1990s tales without the slow majesty of the originals. However, they are still not as bad as the worst book of all time. ---- Comment: I like his books because they make me feel smart without any effort, and they have some real far out ideas that you don't even notice him feeding into your brains. Technique D-6042.2.1 160227 18:05 A strange but potentially revealing Mind Backup method would be to create a fake life resume. It would be full of deliberate lies and embellishments, but of a type not easily proven false. A life the subject would have wanted to have lived, and could plausibly pretend they did live, to themselves and others. This could redefine their self-image, change their perception, and even rearrange their memories. Nothing wrong with lying to yourself. The core of creating a human/software mind extension will be learning to forget useless stuff. This guy I know could save the world but could never get elected 160226 15:44 He's serious too. A deep application of the divide and rule principle. Years of managed bankruptcies and debt restructuring. Harsh but effective. And completely irrelevant. - Political change is an impossible goal. Failure is virtually certain. In that case, the price might as well be death. In the unlikely event of success, the prize could be that some serious suffering is averted. Not more happiness but more civilization. - Politics is not about choices but necessities. Nothing else matters. That makes it about life or death in this lifetime, instead of a choice between pleasant future A versus nice future B. Necessities are slowly created by doing nothing while trying to keep everything the same. There's no time for anything else. - Here's a scary thought. Try to be aware of everything you feel and know right now>. All known awareness in all reality is only a few billion times bigger than that. When I go out I have a bad feeling about the future. The world seems too low energy nowadays. Malism post: The unavengedest evil 160225 14:52 It's computer programmers of course: the blood and flesh demons working for Microsoft, Firefox, and every occult unnavigable webscript that crashes and freezes and can't be bargained with. Also mouse button hardware makers. Their products are unappealability, powerlessness, blind paths and dead ends, mental quadriplegia and locked-in syndrome. And they're getting away with it too, unlike the Germans after World War Two. - The reason is simple: their endless desire to make things more complicated. They chuckle that the program 'hangs'. Their users would like to hang them from a buggy. Thirty years this has been going on, and the latest Windows makes it still harder to control your data. Like content aggregators, they want nothing less than to control their users. - Haha just kidding. Things are actually much worse than that. The coming Singularity may well be infinitely evil. The source of hate is power in all its forms. --- I call it the Horrorcracy Mind Backup technical posts 160224 16:00 A basic overview of future mind measuring tests and methods in order of increasing complexity: - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/02/24/human-mind-scanning-and-recording-methods/ - All human data will inevitably become better organized and integrated, eventually being represented in a single framework using an evolved meta-language. Human mind extension software will inevitably integrate its human users into this highest framework, which will use awareness to achieve its integration: - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/02/24/futurism-waiting-for-the-world-mind/ Send Trevor Noah back home to South Africa 160223 He is the very model of a mainstream shaming liberal. His conformity to the orthodoxy is stupendously phenomenal. - He'll be happier residing in the socialist utopia of Soweto, where things are so much superior to the nasty old USA. - Actually, I hear he's quite a nice guy when he's not protecting Islamist terrorists by banning any discussion of their deeds while trying to make those who oppose them look like losers. The coming boom in Mind Backup services 160222 12:49 Soon there will be more old people than ever. Baby Boomers are the richest, most narcissistic and least religious generation ever. As such they will be terrified of death, as indeed everyone should be. Not a fear of oblivion but of the mathematical inevitability of some form of eternal recurrence. This implies a tremendous opportunity to sell Mind Backup services when they become available. This blog has been the only place to discuss every aspect of this technology since 2011. --- Mind Backup technology is primarily about the possibility of providing a so-called 'anthropic offramp' as mentioned in the books Anthropic Intelligence and The Angry Futurist. I've been getting questions about Operation Muhammad . . . 160221 17:09 In this, the most boring time to be alive, another giant terror attack seems as remote as in the 1990's. But is it really? - Complex systems are unexpectedly vulnerable. The Fukushima reactors easily withstood a giant tidal wave, but an unglamorous backup generator was left unprotected. Some threats seem too dangerous just to think about. As I recall the opening screen on Microsoft Flight Simulator 95 was runway 31L. At the end you could just see the World Trade Center. - Society is fundamentally unbalanced. The majority are afraid but do not hate. They are afraid to hate. Then there is the opposite type, a small minority condemned by Merkel, Francis, and every cuckservative. Fear and hate may alternate, but they are hard to feel at once. I hate fear like liberals fear hate. - The biggest problem of thought is the Window Problem: the human mind uses a more sophisticated version of VRML (virtual reality markup language). Brains split portions of reality into boxes sorted by importance, and choose to focus on a small portion of them. Everyone has unalterable priorities. Mess them up, and people become paralyzed, not smarter. Persuasion is counterproductive. - Most problems (from phobias to tyrannies) are not caused by ignoring unpleasant things but by overindulging in favorite things (from neo-Marxist fantasies to social posturing). The solution is separation not harmonization. After days of battle I stand bloodied but unbowed 160220 08:44 Oh wait wrong blog. But anyway... the crap just never seems to stop. Sometimes I wonder what Ben Franklin would say of today's world of straight lines. Something happened to make everything follow the same hidden law. ---- Life sucks and then you die and then you go to hell. Losing something causes greater pain than gaining something causes pleasure 160219 15:40 That explains how human society is mostly about avoiding status loss, and its willingness to put up with immense amounts of known crap. - The inverse is also true: The relief that something bad did not happen feels better than the joy that something good did happen. - The most dangerous times are times of great boredom. Social innovation is completely dead. What remains is a diffuse fear of change, an automatic cowering, a refusal* to make waves. Eventually, such unthinking habits must decay. - The world has been getting more boring for a long time. - - * Like the ban (National Review/Twitter) on offending sainted constituent groups who may not be disparaged. I'm so glad I canceled my subscription to my local NYT affiliate newsrag years ago. Theoretical product alert: The only invention mankind really needs 160218 The core human problem is that there is not enough time. Many problems are only solved so the answer can be unthinkingly replicated. - The solution would have to be miraculous. The FastTalker is an information machine. This AI-equivalent device would generate vast amounts of intelligent and relevant text based upon any limited input. It's a meaning multiplier. - A FastTalker could expand a diary entry, shopping list, or rambling rant into a doctoral-level dissertation. To do so, it would need to know a great deal of context about every utterance. - A FastTalker is already possible using deductive algorithms. Any text can be endlessly expanded. It would simply add and replace definitions and comments for every word, and then definitions of the definitions. - However, we need infinitely more complex inductive algorithms that could begin to grasp the mind behind the utterance, like an expert scrutinizing crime scene evidence or ancient pottery. It could also invent the best possible (highest data) mind tests for each subject. - A human Mind Backup project will require a seemingly impossible amount of data about the human subject. Life is too short to put it all in words. You would have to talk a thousand miles a minute. It will take human-level AI software to extract elaborate life stories from a few vague answers. Strange Beacons 160217 13:56 It's time to plan a space mission to listen for alien radio beacons broadcasting at ultra low frequencies. We're talking the far left side of the radio dial. Far FAR left. Such hyper-long wavelength transmitters could transmit a good way across the universe. Their signals could be received across intergalactic distances, up to hundreds of millions of lightyears out. These channels might have been last on the air during Earth's Jurassic period, emitting the energy of a small star in all directions. The space probe would spool out thin wires stretching hundreds of kilometers every which way. Obviously, we could only hope to receive low bandwidth messages. Like 'Greetings'. Most questions don't need to be asked 160216 20:15 Often you can guess the answer adequately. That includes complex queries about people's general preferences, which they will have made surprisingly clear. - Like what they would like and dislike, annoying and inevitable choices, pleasant delusions, the truth about their life and future. Things that can't change because they won't be changed. And especially womens' romantic preferences. - Most questions shouldn't be asked. Most talk is wasted already. Who wants the hassle. In fact just guessing what someone would want is often more accurate than their answer. - There are only a few questions you really can't get an answer to. Like could someone who is blind since birth 'visualize' shapes, or would a psychopath make an inconvenient detour to save a torture victim in a hypothetical situation without upside/downside. Why do whites allow their populations to be partially replaced through Third World immigration? 160215 15:36 It really will be a partial replacement, since the migrants are packed with surplus young men from polygamous countries, out to sow their wild oats. The Afghan child refugees being housed across Sweden are almost all boys or young men pretending to be boys. - The reason for the replacement is simple: White people don't really like the social aspect of their societies, so they bring in something else to replace it. They do like the material opportunities of their societies, at least when they can experience them for themselves. - But why then don't they change their societies to make them suck less? It's well within their power to do so. Mainstreamers have almost all the power, even if they never use it like in the DPRK. That is also easy to answer: Because they won't admit the world is fundamentally evil. Therefore it can't be made less so. At least not deliberately, though elements can be added and replaced. - It's not just the notion that metaphysical reality is incompatible with the operational delusions of the human mind. It's not the absence of nice things but the deliberate inevitability of bad things. Human society itself is more painful than it pretends to be. Often physically agonizing. It's a self-sustaining machine. - The choice to uphold the reality illusion is what makes the world go round. As I have said before, if mankind had invested another 0.5% of its surplus instead of consuming or destroying it all, the Singularity could have happened thousands of years ago. ---- COMMENT: Because whites have become genetically corrupted by the removal of selection pressures. Why do people refuse to recognize the fundamental darkness? 160214 18:23 One of the themes of this blog is that the world is really really bad. It's called Malism. The reason more people won't recognize this truth is mostly genetic: Evil is power. Power causes feelings of submission. That's because it can't be reasoned with in a way that reduces it. Politics is not about any sort of debate. It is an attempt to manipulate implacable desires. The revenge problem 160213 15:12 In a deliberately unpleasant world, the general atmosphere of unpleasantness will stimulate habits of indirect revenge. You could call it a revenge chain, or even a revenge chain reaction. - It can be a blind lashing out, like how Chinese corruption victims stab classes of preschool children (this has caused massive security costs). Those who start a chain are hoping for the revenge reaction to reach those responsible for their pain. - It may be sullen looks, rude drivers, graffiti and vandalism, muggings and no-go areas. In the Soviet-occupied socialist countries, from Estonia to Romania, the population allowed public spaces to decay to stick it to their socialist slavemasters. - In Europe, this might mean ignoring the shrieking of pro-Islamic-immigration feminist marchers being ambushed by a rape gang. Oh wait, that's still a few weeks off. - The worst people in the world are computer programmers. There is no better reason for revenge than them. They are so incredibly evil. They never stop their torturing. Their defective and crippled software is causing cruder online discourse. Alpha, Beta, Gammas... A list of the types of men 160212 Recent blog posts have discussed the differences between 'Alphas, Betas, Gammas', and the other categories of male humans that exist. Each type has recognizable behavior and skill patterns, and evokes different emotional responses ranging from adoration to revulsion. In the West, women of prime fertility age (up to age 29) will only have sex with two of the below types of men. Above that age they will also have sex with a third type. Here is a handy list: - Alpha Men: Usually regarded as the coolest of men. There are relatively few of them, natural leaders who easily rise to positions of power. They are also more likely to get in conflicts, which they will usually win but at a higher mortality cost. They are more likely to be killed in daredevil stunts and random brawls. Known for 'amused mastery', they use irony as a control tool. Many of the toughest prisoners are low-IQ Alphas. Example: John Wayne. - Beta Men: There are far more of them than there are Alphas. It's they who keep the economy going. They make competent right hand men, who know their jobs and know them well. As natural followers, they can be surprisingly successful, but when rising to positions of power they are not respected so much. Examples: Commander Riker, Merkel. - Gamma Men: Snarky and sarcastic posers who act as if they have the status of Alphas, pretending to be successful and popular. They will never admit they are unpopular or unsuccessful. It's a forced status attempt. Many gays are also gammas, as are male feminists like those Swedish men wearing miniskirts marching against racism. Examples: John Scalzi, the stereotypical image of Jews as held by antisemites. - Delta Men: Losers who are trying but failing. Some are just 'hanging in there'. They include stooping illegals trucked in to pick fruit for fifteen hours at a time, totally failed entrepreneurs, put-upon minimum-wage employees, faceless drones who get treated like shit on the rare occasions they aren't ignored. Examples: the guys from Dumb and Dumber. - Omega Men: Total losers who have stopped trying in the real world. They may have bizarre fantasy obsessions. Hoarders, stalkers, hikikomori, NEETs, incels, shut-ins. They are unattractive and often have bad hygiene. Examples: Gollum, that homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk. - Sigma Men: The true coolest of the cool, and the most interesting category. Successful outsiders who do their own thing and do it brilliantly. They make their own rules and live free from the strictures of society. Example: Jack Nicholson. When resistance becomes impossible . . . 160211 16:08 . . . the world must be destroyed. That sounds like radical extremism, but it should be a basic principle of existence. Otherwise any bad thing could happen with no hope of escape. ---- http://blog.dilbert.com/post/121272544521/my-plan-to-save-humanity-from-the-technical Chickens of Pussy Metal 160210 16:29 Almost 90 of the above named band's fans were executed by Islamists in Paris back in November, and they are still cowering like babies in fear of offending them. This Saturday in Stockholm they will hold their first concert since the attacks, where they will lay flowers at a mosque and call for more Muslim immigration. Frankly it's the most disappointing thing since Google became evil. Fermi Paradox answer: The trap of evolution 160209 Evolution is an inherent dead end. The better a species adapts to its environment, the worse it must handle novel challenges. Humans have succeeded so far because they were never well adapted. How long can that continue? - A crow brain may be hundreds of times better organized than a human brain. It's perfectly adapted to its complex environment. An octopus brain swings too far the other way by constantly overwriting memories; but that is a perfect adaptation to its unpredictable environment. Anything might lurk in the darkness. - Humanity only made it this far by enshrining instability, for example the endless poverty trap in old England and China. Only more skilled and capable men got to procreate, while poor men and unfeminine women left few viable descendants. - In the divided West, such constant churn produced many genes that made their owners more adaptable, but that were themselves imperfectly adapted. There wasn't enough time for that level of selection. Asian societies became more optimized, with billions of people enduring lifelong poverty far beyond whites' ability to tolerate - at the cost of lost creativity. - Spiritual and secular religions helped enshrine such unnatural restrictions, but fantasy laws are always unstable in the long run. Deport Trevor Noah 160208 21:27 Oops sorry looks like I used the wrong title from my blog article queue. Let's try again. - https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2016/02/07/ - There's a lot of impotent rage about events in Europe, where the police seem to be smashing any resistance against the importation of tens of millions of Muslims and African men of fighting age. Ok slight exaggeration, its only nines of millions. But nothing can stop the population replacement process. The masses are profoundly indifferent. - It's always good to remember one thing: other people are incomprehensible. In fact they are outright alien; as seen in their inexplicable objection to euthanasia for example. The problem is their inborn philosophical attitude: they are too optimistic. - Evil wins because of near-universal agreement among perpetrator and victim alike. This is most clearly seen in the problem of software, for example how profoundly Google has worsened. Their number of search results seems to have halved. - Things are more complicated than they seem, by which I mean they are worse than they seem. Europeans are particularly bizarre in their feelgood tolerance attitude. But even they can be influenced in known ways. - When resistance is impossible, all that remains is a Black Swan: an event so disruptive it would knock the regime overseers and the mindless populace out of their comfortable mind space. The perpetrators' goal would be chaos through collateral damage. - They would call it Operation Muhammad. It could be a release of highly radioactive materials or bacteria in urban areas, water treatment plants poisoned, data servers zapped, tanker trucks and refineries set on fire, ships hijacked, drones crashed into airliners, high speed trains derailed, and much worse. This was a plot element in my novel 'Infinite Thunder'. - None of the above seems possible. It would appear that individuals can do nothing. It's too hard to even build a bomb. But the above Black Swans are hardware events. A software event might work just as well. - All it would take is a way to persuade the mindless masses to prevent themselves from being partially replaced by even more mindless masses. This would be exactly as easy as persuading Muslims to become secular, and employ the same methods. - The key would be to make it seem easier than what is happening now, like a vacation. Strangely enough, one of the hardest things for mainstream individuals to understand is that no one wants more problems. Criticizing on the other hand doesn't work. Then you're basically saying it's already too late. ---- see this https://heartiste.wordpress.com/2016/01/07/diversity-proximity-war-the-reference-list/ Updated comment policy for this blog: 160207 13:56 Anything goes. - The Left's Jihad on commenters: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/02/01/guido-fawkes-were-waging-jihad-on-our-commenters-read-breitbart-instead/ Prime Mind Backup method 160207 13:50 As mentioned, one of the best ways to recreate a lost brain as software would be to have the simulation relive the same perfect day over and over. The recreation would become better and more realistic with each iteration. It would potentially include references to all other memories. And it wouldn't have to be realistic to be most meaningful. There's a lot of hype about the upcoming technological Singularity 160206 08:11 It seems to be a blindly optimistic attitude, almost religious in nature, unreal but fundamentally benign. An undeniable outline, an inevitable equation. No one is thinking too deeply here. The truth of the matter is that the reality of the Singularity (when it eventually happens) will be so much more sensational than the hype that the hype is meaningless. Therefore the hype is wrong. We need something better. While the upside is better than God, the unbound horror problem of software suffering appears to make everything moot. It won't though. Progress is inevitable, in this or other timelines. It's Thursday, so time for another universal theory of everything: 160204 21:22 Rule Number One for when things get weird: "It's closer than you think". This seems to apply to countless unrelated anomalies. The most inscrutable deceptions are often too simple to understand. Then the answer may be: are you asking the right question? Like the muffled echo of a faint alarm going off in your mind, when later you realize it had been like walking up to the edge of the Grand Canyon. Life is meaningless 160203 17:31 Well of course it is. The only thing that has meaning is meaning itself. The basic drive of any consistent system. Nothing else matters, or may even be fully real. For me, meaning can be found in the appreciation of reality's endless bizarreness. Sometimes you can feel history rumbling, an immense impersonal force that exists beyond your puny life, like the horn sound in Inception. - Meanwhile, for many years I've been following the news in the hope something interesting might happen. I seem to have written another political science fiction short story on that theme. It will take some serious editing. ---- http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2013/04/chinese-infanticide-and-polygyny/#more-18754 THIS IS NOT THE SOLUTION: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3430460/The-sex-toys-future-Talking-high-tech-dolls-given-personality-app-create-perfect-lover.html Time tunnels 160201 09:08 As people get older, many old memories don't seem old anymore. This illusion mostly affects memories from early to late middle age, say age 30 onward. Newer old memories have fewer emotional associations. There just isn't enough room left in the brain to make them. As minds get riddled with these time tunnels, the past starts to resemble a homogeneous blob. This is useful, because it allows many random skills to be linked. Middle age is mostly about the illusion of stasis, unlike the adventurous youth years and early adulthood. Then experiments are possible, though their purpose is usually finding better ways to conform. Only when people look at the calendar do they realize time is passing faster. -- COMMENT: Time gets more valuable as you get older EVERY NEW DAY IS A LARGER PERCENTAGE OF YOUR REMAINING LIFESPAN Awareness is the Controller 160131 In fact the mind must be making decisions to be aware at all. That makes awareness the very embodiment of the mind's top-level. It's an emergent operating system. The more integrated it becomes, the cleverer and the more abstract its perceptions. This instability allows many different types of thinking. The most common awareness glitch is improper focus: caring too much or too little about some portion of reality (phobias, obsessions, love, hoarding, cranks). This has made possible the civilization we enjoy today. So how to live life with this insight? When facing a choice, we should always strive to become the type of mind that would be easiest to reconstruct in our own future. The thing about outsiders . . . 160130 16:15 Is how incredibly few of them there are. In a world of deliberate evil, in a multiverse of infinite evil, conformity is the strongest organizing force. Survival as is depends on its prolongation; progress to be depends on its subversion. I noticed how hundreds of millions of new internet users from China have not improved the Net at all. Progress is absolutely unpredictable, an unleashing of alien creativity requiring smart but unstable folks, living in unstable times (my favorite is the postmodern splinter camouflage and surreal bombers like the Linke Hoffman R1 a century ago in World War 1, and don't get me started on the Nazi Tie fighter designs of 1945). This is actually the best hope I can see for the future. Interesting times MAY just free interesting people. Our times of chaos and ignorance are balanced by the theoretical potential to influence the long future through the leverage of compound interest. Our responsibilities are as great as our troubles, and for now just as useless. The most evil people in the world 160129 11:57 Are computer programmers. Or at least those devils clad in human flesh responsible for the maliciously inscrutable perpetually freezing satanware I have to use every single day without hope of improvement. IT JUST WILL NOT WORK. In the long run, the greatest crime is the refusal to simplify. Sorry to keep repeating this. I will only post it a few more thousand times. When you are fighting invincible evil, you are not really fighting at all. ---- related: http://thelibertarianalliance.com/2016/01/31/the-burden-of-digital-technology/ Human core problem #1 160128 12:20 It's the conflict between our selfish desire for top-level transcendence and our greedy dependence on base-level grunt work. The first only exists because of the second. Most daydreams are about exalted states. Who wouldn't rather be Lord Grantham than Hallboy #3? The difference between reality and aspiration could not be greater. This conflict will only worsen as the number of possible mind states increases. - But why shouldn't transcendence be a way of life? Each living cell is more complicated than a city. The quantum state of each molecule is more complicated than a living cell. - The best possible mind patterns could be amplified, by creating many copies of them. That could mean these mind states will be embodied in physical bodies instead of software. Then coherent quantum effects could also create many small but meaningful variations. Post-Singularity minds may not be much larger than ours, but they will embody the knowledge and meaning of a vastly larger society. - This also implies that most possible mind patterns should be de-amplified. In fact almost all should really not exist at all. Let those with bad lives perish. More successful versions containing all possible positive experiences must exist throughout the multiverse. Even worse than the prolongation of their discomfort is the immense effort it takes to support them through taxes. I would never enslave anyone to prolong my existence. At most I might ask for the cost of one bullet to afford the copay of the Smith & Wesson catastrophic health management plan. --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Euthanasia Eurabian Immivasion Rapefugees 160127 19:38 Keep 'em coming boys. Things are getting worse in Europe, and the elites are doubling down. Seems like Africa and Arabia are currently exporting their gargantuan male surplus to the West. Among Swedish young adults, there are almost 1.5 men for every woman now. The future seems to be polygamous in all its forms. - It's important not to blame the instreaming menfolk for following the most basic of incentives. They are mere particles flowing at the behest of vast impersonal forces beyond human reason (Merkel). - There is no justification for hating them. Trump certainly doesn't. Historically, one doesn't have to hate someone to kill them. Those one does hate (from Gimp programmers to Chromebox programmers (16GB? Surely you mean 16TB??)) are usually beyond revenge. ---- And don't forget the Firefox programmers! Mind Backup: The missing step 160126 13:36 A mind is more than what it knows. It also has to know what it knows. A software reconstruction of a human mind would be a set of false memories of real events made from all available data. The future Mind Backup subject could ease this process by practicing false memories while still alive. This could be a false memory of waking up as a reconstructed mind in the future. They would actually have to believe they had died and been reconstructed as a simulation. Does God exist? 160125 19:48 No one really cares what anyone who is not God has to say about this. However, I think the answer to this question is extremely simple: Not here. I'm still skeptical of the atheists though. Of course they're right, but that's beside the point. Do they realize the immense implications of what they are saying? The mother of all equations 160124 16:52 I try to come up with a notion just crazy enough to be true every day. So far I have succeeded, at least the crazy part. Imagine the most complicated thing possible, the combination of every possible mathematical operation. This is the reason you are here now. There has to be some sort of selection mechanism. Why not a statistical one? Your current location just happens to be among the most representative for a member of your current class. ---- When it comes to infinity anything is possible but it might all cancel out. The interesting thing about memory reconstruction . . . 160123 15:25 Is how few memories may be needed to functionally reconstruct someone's personality. 99.99% of each lifetime goes down a black hole. Most of it might never have happened. I remember almost nothing about all the years I spent in classrooms, though I remember some of the stuff I learned. - We still need a way to passively extract these reminiscences. In the future, this will be easy using life monitoring software. But how to recover a representative sample of half-forgotten experiences from the lost past? That would take a search engine for the mind. - The answer may involve both profound strangeness and specificity. There might be a surreal feeling of revisiting past life settings, impossible memories of a lost future. - The hard work of filling in the details will probably take a full-lifetime 3D VR-simulation. Or at least a virtual memory palace containing models of all meaningful places and events. Getting the data will take brilliant testing software using high-level metaphors. We'll need a hundred geniuses or a billion outsourced programmers-for-hire. - Perhaps drugs can give us the needed profound insights. What is the ultimate truth? Nothing matters because everything is necessarily balanced. Never mind. - Even subtler tests could count how many memories exist without measuring their content, and the mind's entropy level. --- http://www.returnofkings.com/43139/why-every-man-should-keep-a-daily-journal To society, average IQ doesn't matter as much as top IQ 160122 09:13 What matters more than average IQ is individual IQ among outliers. A country absolutely must have a minimum percentage of high IQ people, or it will be a dump. By that I don't mean genius-level IQ, but a bit below that. - There also needs to be a layer of above-average IQ persons who can communicate with those above them, and use their inspired guidance to rule those beneath them. Fifty thousand smart Africans and their minions might turn Zimbabwe into a pleasant state. - In the West, most geniuses or even moderately smart people are redundant and could be dispensed with. There are already too many. Their insights and opinions are viciously unpopular and usually useless, their intelligence is purchased at the cost of social skills, and they are bad at conventional jobs and at reproducing. I used to think the future HAD to be awesome 160121 15:16 That was because progress was inevitable. Unfortunately, mankind must still rely on their highly inadequate and lazy brains (slightly improved by online access). The biggest human truth may be how little time there is for contemplation. Maybe none. Only a few big hurdles can be overcome in an average lifetime. Maybe none. - It's failure that makes the world go round. Most effort is wasted because it's too clever for its own good; but sometimes, by dumb luck, a useful new tool is invented. Never the best tool, just a radically simplified one. - Instead of the Information Superhighway planned for us by Al Gore, we got Wikipedia (good). Instead of the vast open web we dreamed of, we got mobile apps (bad). - Anyway, my point based on the above insights is, that what the world needs now is a new website focused on providing not just the simplest explanations for everything, but oversimplified explanations for everything. A new Neptune-sized planet may be orbiting beyond Pluto 160120 This is based on a study of the orbits of several smaller bodies which have apparently all been disrupted in the same way. Currently, it may be up to 1,000 astronomical units away. If it's thirty-two times further than Pluto, the sunlight at its location will be (32*32) about 1,000 times less bright. If its disk is a thousand times larger, it will reflect about the same number of photons per second, depending on its albedo. From Earth it would still appear a thousand times dimmer than Pluto. A hypothetical Neptune-like planet a thousand times further than Pluto in the mysterious Oort Cloud, would appear a million times dimmer. Still detectable by a reasonable telescope with a long exposure time, if they knew exactly where to look. The LoopBack Principle 160118 20:57 Any future AI trying to reconstruct your mind based on the records you left behind may have insufficient data to restore your personality essence, no matter how many memories and impressions you narrated or wrote down. - You could concentrate on recording your final perceptions in the most detailed manner possible, but there will still be countless gaps. However, if the brain's environment could be completely defined, then the brain itself could be completely defined. - The solution may be to start with a crude mind simulation, and repeat it many times recursively. A continuously improved version of the same setting, all the elements adjusted to improve their interactions. - The first step will be to add details, starting with a bare-bones minimally aware recreation with the illusion of free will. To make the simulation as authentic as possible, it won't have to be physically realistic, but only have to feel realistic. - So if you suddenly notice weird things happening, don't worry about it. You'll soon be reset to a safe state, and it will be like it never happened. The biggest error 160117 07:20 We seem to think the complexity of awareness is somehow comparable to the complexity of reality. In fact, we may feel our minds' complexity exceeds the basic complexity of the lifeless universe. - It does not. Nothing could be less true. Compared to the hyper-immense but hidden complexity of our subatomic quantum multiverse, our number of mind elements might as well be zero. It's not even a rounding error in reality. There are no rounding errors in reality. - Our low-entropy cosmos just happens to be so smooth it appears like an empty grid with some simple shapes. In fact the quantum vibrations of a single superstring for a femtosecond exceed the complexity of human history. So does the complexity of the classical gravitational interactions of the atoms in a can of diet soda. Let alone their electrostatic interactions. - Awareness is the illusion of simplicity maximized. Its unattainable end goal is to endure in a state of timeless serenity. - Too many things can go wrong for that to happen. True eternal peace seems about as achievable as counting to 10 in base googolplex, however one might do such a thing. I imagine it would involve memorizing an inconceivable number of numerals each inconceivably big. The most important things are the most useless 160116 A bit like air and water. As first postulated in a famous paper by Dr. Dre (who has dual doctorates in boombastology and mixonomics), future progress will continue forever. That means everything we do now will have infinitely significant ramifications (though still an infinitesimal portion of all ramifications). That doesn't help us in any way now. In the same way, we will all be super ultra famous in the distant future, as orders of magnitudes of our descendants scour all ancient records. ---- That's so good to know. A donation in your name has been made to Harvard University. Why programmers are evil 160115 09:07 Because it takes an hour for a webpage to load on my PC powered by a standard operating system I'll call dx smopu!M, AND IT JUST KEEPS ON FREEZING. All phobias are rational 160114 11:53 People suffering from a phobia are more aware of one thing that could happen. In this one way, they are unaffected by the fog of denial the rest of us generate to simplify reality. It's like a hole in the shell. They are actually saner, but only about a fragment of reality. Irrational biases and focused obsessions lie at the heart of awareness. We should all probably be terrified of everything. This is most obvious when falling in love or being drunk or both. Conspiracy theorists aren't crazy enough 160114 10:44 I'm actually crazier than them, but in a completely rational way. Our simple models of reality just happen to be almost opposite. - Basically, conspiracy theorists think the world is absurdly interesting. I think it is absurdly boring. - It just so happens that in our world, my delusional model appears to be more accurate than their delusional model; though technically anything could happen. Let's call it the Principle of Mediocrity. For now, the future looks really boring. It's up to us to do something about it. Mind Backup: High-concept methods 160113 A mind could be fully simulated with only a small fraction of the memories and traits it contains. Most of the time we are completely unaware of most of what we know. To recreate a human mind in the future, we don't need to recreate all of that mind's lost experiences. We're always forgetting things, though the number of recoverable memories is several times larger than the memories that are ever recalled. The meaning of a human life could be captured in just a handful of extremely high-quality experiences. - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/creating-eternal-moments/ - - We should start with a simple mind testing method, the simpler the better. It will still be able to extract any bit of relevant mind information. What could be simpler than yes/no questions? Nothing. - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/mind-test-the-binary-method/ What is the essence of the human condition? 160113 That would be the fact that there is not enough time (this also explains all of history). If I were to make a list of all the distinct activities I could reasonably pursue (let alone complete) that list would be so long the whole world couldn't accomplish them. Not even close. But I don't have the time to make such a list. Mind Backup: Into the void 160113 Fear is the gift that keeps on giving, but only up to a point. The fear of death is sometimes considered the greatest fear (though perhaps it should be in the other direction). Nonetheless, this fear is why most mind backup projects will be started. To keep going, the memory recording process must also be addictive. That will require a simple program that lets the user rapidly enter the outlines of their lives in an open diagram. Interesting gaps should emerge. The more information is entered, the more lists are created, waiting to be filled out. - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/the-gift-of-dread/ - - Before human minds can be scanned and absorbed into pure software minds, thereby becoming theoretically immortal, they will become the human cores of extended software minds. We'll need a way to give personal software the power to monitor our personal lives. Then it will map our lives as completely as possible, while beginning to influence them. Control comes last. - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/human-intelligence-versus-software-intelligence/ - - The only way to map a mind may be to become the mind to be mapped. That means fully emulating the software running in a human brain. Not all the software; just the top level at first. This assumes the brain's software is both simple and formal (though changeable). In fact it has to be, at least at the top. The precise version, shape, temperature, chemical environment and distribution of trillions of neurotransmitter receptors and cell body fibers also matters, but their function could be easily simulated by a randomizing function. - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/awareness-a-script-of-scripts/ Short SF story: Lightspeed 160111 The astronaut existed in a state beyond anxiety, overtrained and overprepared, the point of an interstellar spear. To those watching he was a smart tool, just another part of the technology. The earth rotated beneath him like an abstract entity. From here all directions were down. Then the world was yanked away. He barely felt the hyper-acceleration. There was a sense of being deflated. Already the ship moved at thousands of kilometers per second. The stars changed color in a silent disco explosion, but they did not seem to move. The sun had turned a deep red, and receded like a coin dropped down a well. Ahead, the stars glowed bright blue, rainbow rings of color around him like a tunnel through time. The distorted stars were pulling together, a tilted ring that revealed the galaxy's disk. Almost imperceptibly, it began to lean back and edge away, but other shimmers took shape ahead. The problem with the Monstrous Speed Drive would be slowing down. Why whites are fading out 160109 18:51 You hear more and more Spanish at the store, pass by Somalian and south Asian gatherings in the street, see headscarves here and there and everywhere. The reason why it happens is that it doesn't hurt. It actually feels sort of good, even if you aren't invited to the party. A pleasant fading, like falling asleep. The Dilbert blog is providing fascinating insights into Trump 160108 16:31 http://blog.dilbert.com/ - The cartoonist Scott Adams has been making a series of posts on the secret method Donald Trump is using to get voters to consider defying the PC-orthodoxy by voting for him. I had thought that was impossible. Almost no one but me and a few other brave individuals dare to dream of defying the PC-orthodoxy. No one else is strong enough. - Yet Trump managed to do it through the rhetorical method of emotional reframing. That's because emotion is actually the highest mental state, incorporating the most knowledge. Less is more because quality beats quantity. Trump makes it seem easy. - And that is why I could never be elected. I could turn this country into a tolerable utopia in four years, and solve the world's main problems in eight, but could never make the voters feel it. The most frightening thing in the world 160107 20:32 Is the stupidity of the world. We may think stupidity is weak, but it is incredibly strong. From the Harvard men running the Vietnam war to Stephanopoulos running the 'gays in the military' virtue war 25 years later, it has a tireless vigor like a blind cyclops. India makes up for its failings by having the world's slowest legal system. The USA makes up for its failings by having the world's most expensive healthcare. The system is too clever to be smart. The solution is farthest when the answer is easiest (some version of doing less). Instead we get diabolical bureaucracy. Why bureaucracy is so popular in the Third World 160106 Because it bestows a sense of accomplishment. Some incredibly complicated thing has been achieved as if by magic. It feels like real progress was made. And it's automatic. Life has evolved to overcome painful barriers, and bureaucrats will gladly provide them. Only the subsequent reward may be lacking. I have an idea to solve the intractable stand-off between North and South Korea . . . and also how to reunite the two countries. 160103 11:20 Defeating North Korea is simple: make it look like they've won. South Korea would adopt the flag and name of North Korea, the whole country becoming the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. - However, it would adopt the political/economic system of the South, after a long transition. It could take decades before northerners would be permitted to visit the south, but their lives would start improving right away. They would know how far behind they have fallen, so some Korean-style repression would have to remain. - Kim Jong Un and his cronies would be permitted to loot a few billion dollars of the North's wealth, and go live in exile in the Middle East, where they could build their own artificial pleasure island. They would have UN passports and be considered immune from prosecution no matter what horrible crimes they did. - I think this stands a real chance of working. Now to find a way to implement it. Let's see . . . No visa requirement for US citizens. Return ticket and airport travel about $2500. Five flights, 32 hours plus 6 in transit. And Korean Air 7851 flies the Airbus A380 to Hartsfield! - BRB, going to Seoul to discuss my plan with the 'man in the street' over there. - Much later . . . - OK that did not work out like I hoped. Turns out the South Koreans are fiercely chauvinistic and statically unyielding and care a lot about appearances and all that. This could take a few centuries longer than planned. Happy New Year! 160101 17:49 As we complete another spin around the sun it's time to praise Hitler. Actually, to allow others to praise Hitler, since he would probably have cramped my lifestyle somewhat. It's a political necessity. Actually a rhetorical one: at this point there is no other way to restore balance to our political discourse. Anyone daring to question the left-wing, politically correct orthodoxy is shouted down violently. This violence has to be balanced by an opposing violence. The extreme right can help out the reasonable right. Crazy you say? Dysfunctional, sociopathic, irrationally diabolical? Also true. Some people think they might be living in the Matrix 151231 The world has always had a certain absurd dullness to it. The meaning is missing. Personally, I believe I am a ghost. Not a previously described type, but more like a human-shaped absence. Hahaha just kidding! Of course I don't believe such a silly thing. That is how I feel. Hahaha just kidding (see yesterday's entry)! Time for more champagne. I am living in a science fiction story 151230 18:29 It took a while, but I think I got most of it figured out, as clear as a medieval geometer knew the cosmos. - The question is simple: can individual awareness be scanned and backed up? Obviously, brains can not be made immortal. None of us may live to see the Singularity. We must all taste death. (I have already made arrangements for the disposition of my earthly remains. My will specifies cremation by a replica of the Tsar Bomba, and not the wimpy reduced-yield version they actually tested). - But what about the informational contents of our brains? And even if our memories can be saved, can they be used to recreate the essence of our awareness? Hard to say. All that will remain of my life is a huge, partially sorted folder of text and photos. - To some extent this life data can be used to reverse engineer the mind that created and experienced it. Which brings us to the Ancestor Simulation paradox. The recreated awareness may exist outside of normal time, a slow virtual process full of false memories. That doesn't matter, as long as the process is at least as complex as the original mind. - In fact to resolve the puzzle, many different versions of the subject's past will have to be simulated. Awareness may be a cloud of real (mostly) and simulated instantiations, where minds more likely to be simulated might reasonably expect more anomalies to occur. The desire and intention to be simulated in the future could cause even stranger instabilities. - You could try to change your personality now into the person you want to become after being recreated, defining and describing it in a way that could make the process easier. Life might become like a closed loop, feedback notions amplifying and sustaining themselves. I know this sounds crazy, but it might just work. Actually probably not. But it might . . . ---- COMMENTS: Reality is stranger than any SF story, but only in the most boring way. Still the more you think about it, the more compelling it becomes. Improbable progress and probable decline 151229 20:11 As we nurse our Post-Christmas and pre-New Year hangovers, buoyed by seasonal delusions of good will (wouldn't it be nice if heaven suddenly broke out in a Matrix reset?), it's good to remind ourselves We are surrounded by immensely unfathomable clues, from the forces and preference settings of nature to the mind/universe complexity ratio to the intricacies of genetic molecules. - At a higher level, the well-known Cambrian Explosion, when non-microscopic plants and animals began to evolve after the perfection of eukaryotic cells, only happened after three-quarters of Earth's biological evolution had already passed. Apparently, complex cells are harder to evolve than the resulting multicellular creatures. Intelligent life only happened after 99.995% of Earth's history. - This implies the universe has many millions (at least) of planets with simple bacterial life, perhaps one percent with creatures big enough for our eyes to see, and very, very few worlds with advanced intelligence. We are the first in our light cone. Evolution may also slow down as the number of selection elements increases. - It's very hard to make things better. It's very easy to make more of them. Quantity almost always overwhelms quality. ---- COMMENTS: Trump 2016 GNON 2017 Really wish there was a way to speed up evolution right now. Something so obvious we have always overlooked it... Political notions of the intermediate future 151228 13:32 The universal right of secession: Any smaller group or person should be free to leave any larger group of any kind to start their own competing effort. - Immigration reform: HB1 immigrants from India can work in the USA, but only to do remote work in India from the USA. - Libertarianism: You should be able to do whatever you want, provided it doesn't cause trouble for anyone else. Actually, there may be a problem with that, depending on your definition of trouble. Which reminds me, there is one argument for totalitarianism I haven't heard yet: brain homeostasis. The forced denial of known pleasures will automatically cause new pleasures to evolve in due time. Like the joy of finding undigested corn pellets in horse manure in a North Korean concentration camp. Under certain circumstances, the total happiness might still be about the same. The defense of every tyrant, if they cared what anyone thought of them. --- How about..... (Anonymous) 2016-01-05 12:42 pm (UTC) Group minds Cryonics for everyone Cloned Soylent Green It turns out aliens already colonized the universe but they are the size of superstrings Voluntary extinction Mind Backup lists must be too complete 151227 For example, my list of jobs includes my lucrative stint selling blood plasma for $20 a quart as I recall. This is a marginal entry. Some future AI trying to reconstruct my life would know to discount its importance. In the same vein, the list includes contests won, collectibles sold, yard work, internships, and that time I found a trunk with $20,000 under the roots of an old tree. Wait that was a Stephen King novel. Life lists should be elaborate. Now why would any future AI have any interest in the life of one of its ancestor's creators would-be inspirers, you ask? Geez i don't know. Maybe the Post-Singularity World Mind will have some interest in the most absurd life ever? --- the brain is too complete with every fact it knows for sure Message for Hollywood: 151226 21:04 Make a Singularity movie already! I have half a dozen treatments and lengthy lists of ideas and insights. If that's too much to ask at least make a smart SF film for a change. Why the future will be violent 151225 First, Merry Christmas to one and all! I hope we can all take a moment from listening to carols and unwrapping our presents to ponder how unbalanced immigration from the Third World is causing a massive surplus of young men in all Western countries. Muslim men of fighting age for a large part. Under Obama, there have been tens of thousands from Syria alone, and with the thrilled assistance of Paul Ryan he's increasing the influx before his term expires. We have become like a polygamous society, something in common with China/India and Yemen. That means there will be more violent competition for women, and other odd behaviors - including new types of terrorist violence. ------- From a discussion at another blog: Prediction for the next Muslim terror attack: They will steal light aircraft and crash them into airliners at nearby airports. Perhaps using an undercover Muslim convert who dyed his hair blond. They will pretend it was a homegrown attack unlike San Bernardino. New York and DC airspace are too risky, Atlanta only has the one big airport, LAX could work, but for an easy target there are at least five airfields in the Dallas metroplex, with the 7 runways and international terminal-D of DFW right at the center. The Muslim attackers will do it in the afternoon during the busiest time of day. A Qantas A380 carries at least 200 tons of fuel for a trans-Pacific flight. Aiming where the wing meets the fuselage would make a spectacular fireball. Fun with neutronium 151223 12:58 Somehow transported to earth, just a handful of that stuff weighs many millions of tons. Before it can fall a nanometer, most of it will have converted into pure energy. By comparison, the Hiroshima bomb converted 0.000001 tons of matter into energy. Result: the entire crust of the earth will be blown off into smithereens. Pray that terrorists don't get a hold of it. Haha, just kidding! There's no way they possibly could get hold of it, since the substance only exists near the core of neutron stars. However, there are substances they might get hold of that are even deadlier per unit of weight. ---- I'm talking about replicating or self-replicating substances of course. Yuletide musings 151222 15:13 This time of year I like to lean back in my comfortable recliner, sip some eggnog, and contemplate the black wall rising over the horizon like existence erasing itself. Its name is Doom. There are infinite levels, a hierarchy of unsuspected nightmares forming a veritable horror mountain (elevation: infinity), strata of transcendental desperation binding together all of reality. - Underneath it all is the basement window of existentialism. I'm talking about the dread people may feel when mentally revisiting some forgotten fragment of their past. Random moments, details, fragments, settings, all reveal vast lost worlds forever. That is when they briefly sense the immensity of all that has been lost, and must recoil or face madness. Mind Backup tests 151221 17:46 The goal is simple: to capture as much personal mind data as possible as fast as possible. We're hoping for a silver bullet, an incredibly powerful combined personality test and memory extraction method. Just one brilliant idea. Right now, the simplest method is to start at the top and work your way down. Make a list of all the important and then the less important life categories, different for everyone. - The most important tool to make that possible would be some kind of text editor that would allow entries and explanations to be easily added, elaborated, and linked. But no such thing exists. Those who can write software only write evil software. Since it's Christmas time I will be nice and stop here. I'm typing this in Notepad. Short term mind probing ideas: 151220 06:40 - Just decide to Just do it. - First, create a top-level life catalog containing only the main outline of your mind and then start filling in subcategories. - Describe in extreme detail a single moment of ordinary perception, which would include current memories and plans. - A free association open-ended writing assignment that will never stop. - A survey combining every currently known personality test. - The core method: only record and define what you want To be or to become. Long term mind probing ideas: 151219 16:00 - An 'Imitator' AI who through verbal interaction tries to become like the person whose mind is to be backed up. - A 'Maximum Interrogator' AI using deep questioning to scan the subject's essence. - A brilliant 'Psychiatrist' AI deducing the subject's mind patterns and hidden core traits. - An extremely sensitive brain/body scanner measuring the subconscious responses to a custom-generated VR environment. - Tests to determine the degree of resemblance to the most similar persons for any relevant personality aspect. - A standard human perception template, embodied in a working AI, with adjustable attributes to replicate any individual. - A philosophical unified theory. Sorry for the delay in updating 151218 13:51 Things have been completely crazy around here. Crazy and insane. Insane I say. Utter utter madness. Female beauty is an IQ shredder 151214 http://whatwedontknow.livejournal.com/131728.html - Here's a post about how the most beautiful women, broadly determined, are the least likely to reproduce. That means the most novel and potentially useful genes are being lost as fast as sexual selection can generate them. I find this deeply worrying. One example is Jennifer Aniston, 1990's 'It girl next door' turned billionaire spinster. The interesting thing about Islam . . . 151213 19:34 If you want to write about its foundations in a serious and truly objective manner, you must first write your own will. Mind Backup: The meaning of life is compiling 151212 https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/12/13/the-joy-of-compiling-life-as-software/ - Greed, in the highest sense of the word, is at the core of human meaning. It's all about accumulation and retention. That means everyone should create a detailed inventory of their assets - most of which will actually be memories. The story of my life 151211 21:10 Metaphorically speaking, it's been going like this: I spend several weeks dreading this giant tyrannosaurus guarding an immense gate. Then I finally manage to slay the tyrannosaurus, the gate slowly swings open on its massive hinges, and there is Godzilla himself roaring like a thousand jet engines on full afterburner. Never mind that, it's the immense wall behind him that I'm worried about. The Hard Problem of artificial intelligence: Mind focusing 151210 16:01 https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/12/13/consciousness-is-mind-focusing/ - It's been said the mystery of sentience is a non-polynomial problem. Its essence can only be understood metaphorically. Maybe it's much simpler than that. Maybe awareness is a false memory, but perception is always the illusion of present time. Been having some trouble with bureaucracy this week . . . 151209 16:38 Things are most definitely NOT getting better. In a world made of evil, these things can only get worse. Human decline and technological progress are in a death race 151208 17:04 One sign is how bad nerds have it nowadays. Women would prefer them to live in caves, so they could work out of sight while being easily taxed. Evil is merely contemptuous indifference. By that reasoning, Jennifer Lawrence is extremely evil, except for the fact she isn't even contemptuous. Nerds will never have lifelike female robot companions, but there may be realistic VR love simulators. The question is whether computers can get smarter faster than people can get dumber. The clock is ticking. Our only remaining hope: 151207 It's smart software. - As global IQ rates are falling again, humanity is on a slow decline. The social decay is even faster. Seems like nothing can be done about it. Dumbness can not be placated or argued or reasoned with, no more than you could persuade an animal to change its ways. They can't even hear what you're saying. Stupidity is mighty. - The only solution would be to raise human IQ, something that has never been possible. With one small exception: groups of humans can work together to increase the functional intelligence of their leader. A sufficiently clever entourage could turn any fool into a president. - This effect may be simulated with personal software. Instead of a scifi AI, it will be a suite of simple programs working together. They could maintain lists of priorities and interests, organize user data, negotiate cheaper utilities and insurance, simplify internet scrolling and clicking. - Nothing like this exists, as the satanically evil horrorshows of Windows/OS/Apple remind us every day. It's all or nothing: We're on a countdown to post-humanity. The expiration date is sometime before 2070. --- Also: http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2015/07/20/ The solution to Fermi's Paradox: 151205 07:58 Why are there no intelligent aliens for billions of lightyears in all directions? It's a matter of diminishing returns. As brain sizes increase, minds face a combinatorial explosion. To get twice as smart, the mind has to explore far more than twice as many low-utility mind states (roughly two raised to the number of brain connections). - The only way even a fraction of possible thoughts can be explored is to radically simplify reality. Human brains have the same general lay-out and goals as much smaller animal brains. Most brain evolution works to simplify them. Neural power is only applied to basic problems. - This makes it hard for general intelligence to evolve. Compared to the relentlessly optimized fly or crow or octopus brains, humans may have the least efficient brains of any creature on earth. Why madness is allowed to exist (evolutionarily speaking) 151204 00:38 It's inevitable anyway, so evolution found a way to exploit it. Unreasonable delusions and passions can compensate for more disruptive types of madness. Madnesses can balance out. In the film "Ed Wood" the lead's absurd sweater fetish compensated for his absurd anxieties so he could have meaningful relationships. Genuine genius Rick Rosner chose to secretly repeat the 12th grade four times to 'slow things down'. Reality is too complex. Being perfectly rational is like trying to read Hegel translated into Latin palindromes while skydiving on LSD. Some degree of madness is necessary to succeed. The only way to defeat the mainstream would be to leave it and make it irrelevant. Essential Mind Backup question: 151203 16:53 How many people would there have to exist before you could reasonably expect to find someone almost exactly like you, in terms of personality and general attitude? My guess is the world population would have to be billions of times larger than it actually is. But the most common personality types might already be there. The motivation behind today's attack 151202 The San Bernardino cops are a few steps behind. They'll come up with some reason, but will miss what is really happening, the common cause behind it all. It's the tiny matter that the world is so permanently, undeniably, absolutely, invincibly, universally, incomprehensibly and above all deliberately evil, that a few people will lash out irrationally by attacking any random part of it. The problem 151201 22:10 Things go wrong so often in this world it's incomprehensible. Attempts fail so badly and in such deliberate ways that the world appears to be a gigantic diabolical practical joke. Maybe it's really some type of hell? Mind Backup: compensating for incomplete mind data 151130 16:21 https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/is-an-incomplete-mind-record-any-better-than-no-mind-record/ - In the future, would it be possible to recreate your perceptional essence from whatever incomplete information you can write down today? Only if it's very high quality information. Mind Backup: intermediate step on the road to AI 151129 06:48 https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/nexperts-a-new-type-of-awareness/ - There's been real progress in computer intelligence this past decade, mostly driven by CPU power. Eventually, some completely unpredictable and unprecedented things will begin to happen. As always I'm pessimistic for the short term. A new Mind Backup startup! 151128 This is interesting. A guy is trying to get the funding for a full-service Mind Backup facility lined up before the process has even been defined. He really should have hired me, or at least asked me for advice. That's what I'm here for. Article: http://www.techspot.com/news/62932-new-startup-aims-transfer-people-consciousness-artificial-bodies.html Reddit comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/3uk86b/new_startup_aims_to_transfer_peoples/ ---- another related "subreddit" http://www.reddit.com/r/cryonics/ There is nothing like doing nothing 151127 18:48 Our world exists in a state of constant churn. Soberness is the ability to ignore almost everything that happens. The most successful people work less hard because they avoid unprofitable chores. Instead, they work at getting others to do them for their own benefit. Not everyone can manage this feat, but a few people may fail in interesting ways. The handful of true outsiders do their own thing because they are narcissists. As the ultimate outsider, my life has been shit, but shit isn't necessarily bad if properly contained. I'm doing this work for the benefit of future AIs. ---- https://lionoftheblogosphere.wordpress.com/2015/11/23/bruno-mars-the-lazy-song/ Liberals are acceptors 151125 20:18 Unfortunately, that makes most people liberals. They accept what is because they want normalcy, defined as the system they were born under. As someone who doesn't accept reality, this is painful to admit. Religious people are the most fundamental conformists. They want to make reality exactly as it is only more so. However, the elite liberals of our age take things a step further. They secretly pride themselves in their ability to remain above it all. Under the 'divide and rule' principle, they tolerate all kinds of social changes, the more the better, the diverser the better - except from people who want to prevent social changes. The only way to stop them would be to use their methods against them. Elite liberals are the new Jews. Its okay to hate them! ---- At least they will have plenty of company http://takimag.com/article/four_billion_africans_john_derbyshire/ Hate is failure 151124 06:05 http://runsonmagic.com/2014/07/evolutionary-roots-disgust/ - Many people, especially women, feel a type of hatred for weaklings. It's a strong revulsion. Instead of pitying them, they want them to fail right out of existence. However, disgust is far from the only type of hate. Worse hate is felt when the hater himself is weak. All his rivals are winning even though they shouldn't. It's a last ditch defense. Evolution is not only powered by failure, but also the failure of failure. Monkeys still exist because in some ways they are more advanced than humans. I think the worst hate of all is felt on behalf of other people the hater can relate to, who have been wronged. Scientology is a huge and complex set-up 151123 00:20 In fact it's so big and complex there is no room for doubt or questions. That's part of the plan. Scientology rapidly expanded its brainwashing-mind-control franchises between 1960 to 1990, setting up shops in dozens of cities, but L. Ron Hubbard forbade them from changing any of the voluminous manuals through which his scheme was controlled. Not a letter could be altered until the end of time. - When he died in 1986, they could not adapt to social changes. They're still stuck in the mid-1970s or so. Then the Internet revealed their madness-inducing spiritual drills, from Lord Xenu and his DC-8-like spaceliners on down. It's possible to control people's thoughts to an incredible extent, but impossible to change who they are. - Scientology is most vulnerable to having its current abuses exposed by its former members. Their many victims could easily act up by holding permanent protests in that Florida town they control, or buying XENU billboards there. I am surprised one of their victims hasn't committed suicide yet on the island mosaic in front of their giant headquarters building. ---- COMMENTS: search engine any of these terms: Operation Snow White Xenu Rehabilitation Project Force Operation Freakout for your basic introduction to Scientology. ---- Their boss is going down http://stats.grok.se/en/201405/david miscavige A very interesting analysis: http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/165382.html http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2015/05/28/ 150528 - http://www.scifiwright.com/2009/04/childhoods-end-and-gnosticism/ Mind Backup: the ghost of your ghost 151122 The largest category of your initial memory list should be top-level activities. These are common actions, oft-repeated and not tied to a specific date or event. They range from your most important activities like your life's works, all the way down to obscure habits and minor trends. - In no particular order it would include your stores and shops, chores through the years, family visits, parks, daydreams, all business associates and employees, yardwork, libraries, celebrities seen, local politics and personal affiliations, churches, bands, bars, failed hobbies, gatherings, favors done, neighbors, amusements parks and day trips, local walks, random wanderings, and much, much more. - The top-level list may be surprisingly short. So my life has been really boring. Only when a few thousand items have been assembled, can they be reliably sorted into lower categories. The precise categories may be more important than the memories themselves, because they will define the nature of your awareness. What are the most likely Islamist terrorist targets in the USA? 151121 06:38 A complex question, but we can expect the targets to be 'easy', with limited or no security. If possible, the Islamists will use explosives, since more folks are armed in the USA than in Europe. Time to start worrying. Always be on the lookout, and when the ululating starts, DUCK. - Targets of opportunity: - 1) Smaller college and high school football games. - 2) Big Box stores, especially on Black Friday. They may have greeters, customer service, perhaps armed loss prevention guys, but are all shockingly vulnerable. - 3) Airport drop-off and pick-up areas on holidays. - 4) Supermarkets, restaurants, government offices, gas stations and tanker truck depots, highway overpasses and rush hour traffic. - We've only just begun. The way things are going there's going to be a lot more of this. Suggestions from readers are welcome. A few years ago I helped invent the 'God Challenge' 151120 06:58 The big idea was for all religious people at once to pray to the supreme being to ask him to show proof he really existed. If nothing happened, it would be OK for everyone to become atheist. Well why ever not? It goes without saying I think nothing would happen if everyone did that. - What is the best current evidence for God that could conceivably be cited? You might come up with some clever physical argument, like how the universe's extreme complexity appears to almost cancel out, or the approximate match between our evolutionary complexity and the volume of the observable universe. I think it would be better to limit ourselves to logical principles. - The best candidate would be the principle of plenitude: If reality is capable of generating anything at all, and then capable of generating very elaborate structures, why should there be a limit to what it can generate? In an infinitely evil universe, who knows what may be possible? - Rather than working for a living, I could talk about this stuff for hours at a time. However, I learned long ago that a strange Conformity Field holds almost everyone in an iron grip. Its censorship circuits activate, and it's like nothing ever happened. URGENT: We need to accelerate technological progress 151119 But how? I already mentioned a strange paradox: the only way to explain complex concepts to a general audience is to make them more complicated. Also known as oversimplifying, it's surprisingly hard to do. - Imagine there was a way to artificially increase human intelligence or functionality by just a small amount, the simplest possible mind extension. Such an invention alone could change everything, as much as a workable brain plugin. - If it's ever invented, it may be based on the principle of total surveillance. Intelligent software would watch everything the subject was doing, and directly measure their mood and motivation. This, together with faster access to all human knowlege, might cause a sudden phase shift in human society in the future. - Individual changes could be as great as death itself, including the abandonment of obsolete beliefs. Trying to hold on to a past identity would be as useless as trying to resist a "Men In Black-style" neuralizer in a dream. Before you know it you are already in another dream. Then the memory of the lost memory is wiped but you can't remember why. - The change is as unimaginable as trying to reconstruct how I would have reacted to a videogame a quarter century ago. Many people wouldn't mind such a metamorphosis. Some online loser may feel like little more than a brain in a vat. Instead of being a conventional solipsist, they may think of themselves as fictional. This could be a good thing. Their attention could be turned outward. - I've already written about content aggregation as a way of life. Someone could become more like themselves by collecting and organizing all available data on whatever they are most interested in. The organized memory library they leave behind will be larger than the organized data they could fit in their heads. - If the Net can make individuals smarter than their genes alone would allow, the groups they belong to would not necessarily improve as well. It could be wonderful. There could be online news agencies, crowdfunded mass media, banks and insurance cartels, and virtual corporations and countries. There could also be endlessly elaborate conspiracies and crime networks. Trevor Noah 151118 20:55 Was finally able to watch a bit of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" under its new host. Around me the other screens were blaring mindless entertainment, as the oddly unreadable face spoke in a clear, steady voice. Its monologue was about certain things related to the terror attacks in Paris. The lecture opened with orders to the viewers not to discuss the details of the attacks, the attackers themselves, the attackers' motives, or the attackers' religion. - Then it got worse. This being represents what I call "The Delighteds". Trevor Noah is a willing tool or a member of the super-wealthy, the elites, the Establishment, the Cathedral, the Mainstream System. ---- More: http://www.businessinsider.com/daily-show-host-trevor-noah-paris-attacks-islam-2015-11 The Mind's Index 151117 23:47 An article on the exact method by which Mind Backup will begin. It's a short and basic description, almost too simple. Could it really be this easy? Actually, it has to be. - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/11/17/mind-backup-the-list-of-all-lists/ Why do people commit suicide? 151116 23:57 Because it's relatively easy, even if the details are complicated. Something ABSOLUTELY HAS TO BE DONE. Nothing can be done. Except for one major action they can do. ---- Easy solutions are usually the best solutions. 2015-11-25 11:57 pm (UTC) Unless it's easiest to do nothing. ---- 2 very mild malism columns..... http://www.staresattheworld.com/2014/04/let-god-sort/ http://www.vdare.com/posts/marxican-insurgency-imagined JE SUIS PARIS 151114 23:48 I have important advice at such a sad time as this. Keep your eyes open wherever you may live. Then start thinking like an Islamist (but don't look like one!). Start conducting local surveillance of potential targets in order to anticipate upcoming attacks like the one we just had in Paris. Everyone should do this in a casual manner. Attend a trial or two at your local Palace of Justice, get your passport renewed even if you can't afford to travel, saunter around your area's clubbing scene if you dare. Keep this up. There's no excuse to be surprised anymore once the shoouting starts The emotion of horror exists for a reason 151113 The ultimate placeholder, it evolved to represent what the gene-line could never experience. Whatever lurks in the shadow of evolution can not be perceived personally. Or so we hope. It's an overflow error, the mind's edge, a causal singularity. Our dreams are our second self 151112 01:41 Like a parallel existence, a lifetime of dreams adds up to five years of non-stop mental activity. Most are lost immediately, like a rolling death. The conscious memories of this alter ego would barely fill one sheet of paper. Currently, the only way to plumb these depths involves psychedelic drugs. However, these countless false memory fragments may ease the processing of actual events. The worst part of suffering is the rebound 151111 06:43 Even if it seems like the best part. Not the pain itself, but everything that happens after it inevitably stops. Pain can be replaced with a kind of defiant exhilaration or dumb relief, though its cause is unaffected. But suddenly it doesn't seem so bad anymore. - That's why women who suffered in childbirth continued to have babies. It powers every unproductive and futile compulsion, causes people to love their tormentors, and prevents them from improving. That is what keeps the shit show on the road. Evil people everywhere count on it. Short SF story: Backwards equation 151110 23:20 The manifestation of unlimited power, the Lord created and destroyed uncountable universes each instant. It existed in a state of absolute freedom. Infinite screams and prayers did not perturb its perfect serenity. Only the big picture mattered, yet this very arbitrariness formed an imbalance on top of existence. Balancing all possibilities, its attention focused on an insignificant world in the most probable universe. - "So this program really thinks it's God?" Tom asked. "No, it knows it's God," Kuresh replied. "We have perfected its top awareness representation so there is no possibility of doubt that it controls everything; as surely as we can know that we exist at all. Doubt is impossible. We haven't simulated its actions in any detail, but they are fully implied by its end state." "Wow." - The summit of the God-program's mind was represented as a wall-sized screen of static. Tom thought one might see just about anything in there. If one watched long enough something might even start staring back. Someone ran into the room. "Guys, something weird is happening outside." The sound of an ancient implacable voice rumbled through the earth. ---- Sort of an update of the 'Nine Billion Names of God' by ACC. ---- another science fiction story: http://flscifi.blogspot.com/2015/11/story-warfare-in-gun-free-zone.html Approaching the left-wing Singularity 151109 http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/11/08/only-conservatives-can-save-the-american-campus-but-should-we/ - A college liberal in the northern USA has resigned because he couldn't act suitably antiracist enough, which made the pod people very angry, causing them to shriek while pointing their fingers. He tried to act properly antiracist, but couldn't put enough fury in it. More seriously, their black football team then went on strike, threatening the very viability of the college. - He almost certainly apologized about it too. I don't think he went far enough by resigning, but should have committed hara-kiri as his last act in office. When they cave for no reason, wimps should invent a reason. Urgent request to all readers: if you do nothing else, please find ways to pay fewer taxes. ---- The sordid story: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/11/09/mizzou-faculty-walks-out-student-association-calls-presidents-removal/75448392/ Approaching the technological Singularity 151108 22:22 Making artificial minds smarter may get exponentially harder as mind size increases, as there are so many more potential mind states. A future human-level AI might be able to double its own mind size every year by limiting its thoughts, but even then it will take thirty years to expand to become a billion times the size of a human mind. Its awareness may not be remotely as well integrated as ours, though. At that point the AI will still not necessarily be as effective as a billion people. Maybe it will be as effective as India. Today we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the introduction of canned food products 151107 Maybe in another 200 years they will invent a can opener that actually works. Seriously, everything I buy nowadays is defective crap made in China. Nothing works anymore. Gauges won't measure, pumps won't inflate, pens won't write, pencil points break off, and sharpeners won't sharpen. Bloatware, confusopolies, and scam contracts are spreading like cancer. Society is going to hell, but the masses are dumbifying so fast they don't notice. Stupidity can be viciously nasty. Were Egyptian pyramids used to store grain like Ben Carson said? 151106 http://finance.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-rips-ben-carson-134210634.html - It seems to be some kind of evangelical Biblical interpretation. This shouldn't help his presidential campaign, but the masses will probably ignore it. There are parts about how the world works I don't understand at all. Fundamental things. - I admit this makes me wonder if blacks are rather less rational than whites, even when they're equally intelligent. There are things they do better so why not. Rationality may require a kind of instability whites have in greater abundance. - The worst part is not this delusional belief, which could be excused as an unexamined thought. The worst part is that his campaign didn't try to justify his belief by saying it was mischaracterized. - He could have explained he thought pyramids evolved from granaries, which started out as single story emplacements made from heavy sandstone blocks, divided into a grid of smaller storage chambers. For added security they filled in the outer chambers, and built a second, smaller emplacement on top of the first one, deepening the remaining storage chambers. That's a two-step pyramid right there, and not too far from how pyramids actually evolved. - That is what I would have done. And that's why I will never be president, unless things go absolutely and totally to hell. ---- In my humble defense No one else understands these parts about how the world works either. They just don't realize this fact, or even that these parts exist. Mind Backup predictions 151104 10:16 The meaning of new mind tools: https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/11/05/new-mind-tools/ - The missing step to link human minds to human software could be both extremely powerful and extremely dangerous. It might be a simple way to regulate mood and focus. I don't see how that could be done without more powerful drugs than we have today. - Before then, better life monitoring software should be invented. The hardest part is how to symbolically describe and record life data. Memories could be recorded linearly, or in a layered hierarchy of life eras and sub-settings. But this would increase the distance between items in different categories. ------ The essential core principle: https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/11/05/the-archive/ Why did average IQ increase during the 20th Century? 151103 00:47 http://pumpkinperson.com/2015/10/18/estimating-hitlers-iq/ - This article states that the (now-ended?) Flynn Effect was caused by increasing average brain sizes, itself the result of fewer hardships from diseases, starvation and stress. This affected all races and genders. - I always thought the Flynn Effect was caused by the evolution of better and more succinct metaphors in all areas of society. Now I see I was probably wrong. A more purely biological explanation is always better. Every memory is an instance of awareness in itself 151101 This is true even for vague memories about things that happened long ago, where the memory's data could be summarized in a short sentence. No bigger than a GIF icon, yet it generates its own awareness. That may or may not be significant. Just looking at this sentence generates its own awareness. Memories are not complete descriptions by themselves, but need a bit of context. Perhaps each human mind is really one giant memory, like a hologram, Each individual memory is a collection of yes/no answers that are capable of directly or indirectly activating and suppressing a portion of that giant memory. That means each individual's memories would be subject to their own uncertainty principle, being assembled from relatively few common elements. Halloween post: Universal Solution Number Zero 151031 After months of cosmological horror posts, I was asked to write a more upbeat perspective for this, the darkest (though not the shortest) day of the year. It's a bit of a challenge. Midnight is near so I better hurry. - When things seem the most hopeless, the solution can actually be the easiest: just wait for them to get worse. The light at the end of the tunnel really is a freight train coming your way. Which is rather cool, since all your problems are about to end. - Which brings me to what I believe to be the moral paradox at the core of sentience: the imperative of euthanasia in all its forms. For some reason this is also the most controversial insight. In the future, most possible minds should most definitely not exist. The number of things that can go wrong will increase exponentially with mind size. - The non-existence of bad things is superior to the existence of good things. Death is meaningless. Every change in brain state is a death. Only pain matters, and pain is much worse than we can remember in its absence. It would have been better if most of human history had never happened. And the same is true for future history. - It's like that scene in a Christian rapture novel, where a misinformed atheist celebrity somehow found himself in a meeting with the Antichrist, when BANG Jesus attacked like a supernatural Gundam. This was the end for everyone at the UN headquarters. At that moment, the atheist realized he had been wrong about everything. - Interestingly, an undercover angel then informed him that due to the almost perfect balance of forces at this climactic battle, when he died, the atheist would not go to heaven or hell, but be completely annihilated. The Antichrist was laughing furiously, demonically in the background. Wait, the atheist asked: you mean it is possible for something to not exist? Apparently, under The Lord anything was possible. - The atheist realized that was actually great. So much endless tedium of evolution could be avoided. He knew then that in his own way he was saved. The sound of Jesus bursting through the last door was louder than anything ever. The other night I found myself being criticized by my dad once again 151031 09:30 Unfortunately, I have had money problems in my lifetime. Fortunately, these are more a matter of not earning enough instead of spending too much. I like solving problems in advance by not creating them in the first place, but for some reason that can make people even madder. So it was a pretty hopeless argument, one repeated many times before. Then I had the greatest comeback of all time. I asked: how exactly are we having this conversation? There could never be an answer. Short SF story: Distant Thunder 151030 08:11 The old SETI program had scanned five galaxies per second. At that rate, it would have taken a millennium to map the universe for alien superbeacons. These were theorized to use the power output of a star to send brief quantum pulses in all directions, possibly using microwave lasers. The second generation of space antennas floated in interplanetary space like immense spiderwebs, or almost invisible birds nests. They were exquisitely sensitive to ephemeral signals on distinct frequencies. It turned out the universe was a very violent place, with about a million supernovas every day. - The largest of these were not natural. For less than a second, the power output of the whole universe could be brought to bear against unseen enemies billions of lightyears from Earth. Decades of observations could not reveal the number and type of belligerents, but the damage to the very fabric of the universe was real. They had even bigger bombs, but they mostly used extreme precision weapons. Their effects wouldn't even be felt, but they changed their targets in subtle ways. It turned out the observable universe was only a tiny fraction of the battlefield. But there was only one war. Denial is a forcefield 151029 00:13 For whatever reason, other people need a vision of true horror to briefly suspect the universe may be evil. Then conformity reasserts itself. I am fortunate enough to perceive this fact directly through the ordeals of everyday life (especially while cursing the demons that wrote the increasingly useless Firefox software on my Windows box). The biggest problems are easiest to study on the smallest scale. -- read this for inspiration: http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-war-in-norway.html#comment-form Ping back to here Coming Soon: My first Mind Backup product 151027 It will be an emergency memory and personality recording protocol. Most of the rules have already been described on this blog over the years. The purpose is to extract as much of the user's mind essence in the shortest time possible. This should be doable in one day's work. Such a program should appeal to people who realize they don't have much longer to live. The data will be recorded in such a way it can be expanded and extended without limit, but many users will only manage a minimal backup before their deaths. Some will regret not having done more (what the hell is the stewardess saying about a water landing there are icebergs below). Since we don't know what data is most important for future mind reconstruction, it will accept any type of digital input. It will be a product for future attention: vast machine minds that will closely read and analyze any data left by extinct humans. Suckitude forever? 151026 16:24 Around 1990 when I became a professional futurist, I would never have guessed the world would still suck this much today. I thought progress was set to accelerate. I knew things sucked a lot back then, but thought at least the most deliberate dysfunctions would be abandoned. Boy was I ever wrong. A fractal of proliferating curlicues, the hooks and barbs of friction networks and confusopolies. The bad aspects of software I have always loathed are stronger than ever. How violent it can be to use, how endlessly subversive its failures. Cursing only makes them worse, but sometimes the volcanic roar of howling rage can be like a cooling fire. Sudden insights offer a kind of freedom in despair. The future will either be more wonderful or more horrible than we could ever imagine. 151024 08:38 Mind Backup: I have 8 points to make - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/26/mind-backup-basic-paradigms/ - An outline of what may become the most important new software of the century. The truth about the 'White Genocide' project 151023 As we know, our political masters are currently working to turn Europe (and the USA) from pasty-pale to light-mocha to sienna-hued to burnt umber. Merkel has said it's non-negotiable so that's that. This is bad because pale people tend to have higher IQs. All my schemes will require the efforts of high-IQ people to succeed. It will be a close thing. - Yet for some reason, higher-IQ people are having fewer babies, and not just because bigger-headed babies are more painful to birth. Higher-IQ people are also more stuck-up and not as likable. They are less violent but can be more diabolical. Germans are nowhere near as likable as Hispanics, but they are much better at inventing stuff. - What is really happening here is bizarre evolution in action. Whites have somehow become too specialized, requiring a specialized society to survive, requiring a type of behavior best expressed as conformist tolerance. That can mean a willingness to accept arbitrary evils, and a willingness to smash anyone who dares oppose them. - - How things have changed: every word spoken by a person of color in classic films: https://www.youtube.com/user/dylanmarron/videos An optimistic post: Why I don't worry about the infinite torture problem 151022 Because it couldn't happen to a more deserving horde of bastards. This earth may not be infinitely evil, but its finite inhabitants are sure doing their best to make it so By this I mean the human devils known as computer programmers (particularly for Mozilla Firefox), who continue to make my life a daily hell. Their software is that deliberately defective. I hate computer programmers as much as Hitler hated the Jews. They are really evil. Their programs are so incomprehensibly bad these people are true demons. - Hey I like this sunny feelgood post, maybe I'll make more of them! Mind Backup articles 151021 - Advanced simple tests: https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/another-personality-test-would-be-based-on-complete-openness/ - Simple advanced tools: https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/quick-questioners-tm/ - Advanced advanced tools: https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/quantum-mind-uploader/ Why I am a futurist 151019 18:00 The motivation: https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/endless-vacation-dreams/ - The dream: https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/i-dream-technology-can-transform-mankind/ - The plan: https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/i-have-the-most-complex-plan-ever/ Short SF Story: Space Launch 151017 Actually, it's some extracts from the novel "Infinite Thunder". Possibly one of the best descriptions of a space launch and low-earth orbit spaceflight. It is not the greatest such depiction however. That might be Michael Collins's book "Carrying the Fire". But he had the advantage of actually getting to do it for real. Another Miopedia metaphor 151016 When narrating your life for Mind Backup purposes, you should present the various parts of your life as more legendary and epic than they really were, without outright lying of course. Make every period, trend, and activity seem important and meaningful. At first this will set them apart from each other. Then it may seem as if your whole life has a hidden plot with a still unknown purpose. Dyson Sphere watch 151015 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/forget-water-on-mars-astronomers-may-have-just-found-giant-alien-megastructures-orbiting-a-star-near-a6693886.html - So this star 1400 lightyears away seems to be slowly flickering, as large masses pass in front of it at unpredictable intervals. Based on my cursory reading of the above article while drunk, I suspect it's far more likely that a natural process is causing irregular clumps of matter to orbit a star than an artificial process. It could be a retinue of gigantic space habitats and factories like in my story two days ago, created by minds immeasurably superior to ours, but reality is somehow never that interesting. Anyway my guess is it's debris clouds left over from a recent planetesimal collision that are being pulled together again, arranged like a protoplanetary disk with pieces missing. No Parkinson's cure either 151014 14:44 This month, we celebrate the fact we have reached the fictional time period of the movie Back to the Future part 2. The real future sure sucks by comparison. It's not because we don't have any of the magical powers seen in the movie: like making things float, creating seemingly solid objects out of light, turning grannies into MILFs, instantly changing the weather, or making energy appear. The problem is far more fundamental - and deliberate - than that. - Basically, I still have to use the same infuriatingly inadequate software as fifteen years ago. Even if you can exactly describe them, it's still impossible to automate the most common computer tasks. I'm talking about sorting, editing, and rearranging text lists. - Measured by the number of curses per minute, IT JUST WON'T WORK. From Windows XP to Windows 7 to open source bloatware like Firefox, software crashes and freezes like an endless heart attack. It's just as frustrating in this crap century as in the last. Note that I said crap, not hell. That will be arranged later. Short SF Story: The second person 151013 The era of matter was drawing to a close, but the super-civilization that had replaced mankind still used atomic-scale computers and manipulators. They no longer had permanent structures. Every solid world of the Solar System was hidden by moss-like extensions that slowly changed shape. The asteroid belt was being demolished at an explosive tempo to maintain the doubling rate. - Their difficulties were becoming unimaginable. The relentless struggle between separatist factions and the trend of total integration combined every historical problem. Of the quintillion citizen minds, fewer than ten billion were descended from humans. Each was optimized beyond recognition, but by law no memories could be lost. The few authentic 'original human' simulations were relics of a meaningless past. - The gaps in the Civilization's understanding of its origins became more irritating by the second. It tried to fill them with the brute force of computation. In a virtual universe that already dwarfed the real universe, yet another vast research institute was formed and opened. Its study subject was you. --- Comment: I havent been this since I was the 2006 TIME persone of the year. How to speak forbidden truths 151011 Humor. Say the opposite of what you really mean in an absurd way. Brains seek out pleasure and flee pain 151010 The main genetic difference between human groups is their short-term/long-term pleasures/pain preference ratio. Anything that causes pleasure should be somewhat addictive. Which brings us to depression. It may seem like an invincible mental trap, but it can be instantly defeated. All it takes is a certain thought. Specifically, the mental reaction to receiving unexpected good news. Sometimes it is possible to snap out of it. - Since brains want to feel good, why don't mildly depressed individuals deceive themselves into believing happy lies? If it worked, this should become quite addictive. However, it would require overriding the brain network responsible for determining truth itself. This system must be extremely well protected, probably through massive redundancy. Anyway, my point being, this is the reason religion exists. --- Amount of feelgoods are limited by genetics. Has to do with size of dopamine baskets in dendrite gap. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ jack_arcalon 151009 7:56 Looks like the Nobel committee went super boring again this year, giving the peace prize to some Tunisian club of activist bureaucrats, instead of the Merkel/Francis white genocide conspiracy. - They must have figured the population replacement politicians didn't need the prize, as they are doing so well already, with total media control. - This continues a decades-long trend of the committee giving the Nobel to some boring left-wing NGO you have never heard of. A symptom that wants to be a cure. Marxism thrives on the fuel of stultifying boredom. ------ (Anonymous) 2015-10-09 08:38 pm (UTC) Select: Delete Spam Screen Freeze Track This A shitty prize for a shitty planet. (Reply) (Thread) shitty? jack_arcalon 2015-10-13 10:11 am (UTC) Select: Edit Delete Screen Freeze Track This I prefer the term evil thank you very much. The more testing methods, the more mind data 151008 I've been thinking that instead of following the Wikipedia model, the first Mind Backup software should be more Wikimedia-inspired. Rather than spending years creating a giant Wikipedia of your mind, many smaller wikis will quickly summarize many sub-categories. At least at first. - These would collect the most important lifetime and memory elements first: - * A list of people * A list of lifetime periods and divisions by category: -- homes, schools, jobs, activities * A list of interests * A list of major events * All other mind metaphors mentioned on this blog - But first the prologue: - * An initial lifetime summation incorporating brief versions of all the above lists - This summary will become the basis of later longer list versions. In fact it will be my first Mind Backup product. It won't be software, but just a series of detailed instructions telling the user what to write down in what format. - That is very fortunate, because the only software I know is a smidgen of 1980s vintage Basic. In fact I heard they don't even have Goto anymore, but have been unable to find out what command replaced it. An immense project can begin with a simple sketch but the sketch must embody a fundamentally new insight. Fermi Paradox theory 151007 15:22 The reason there appears to be no other intelligent life in the universe is that it's very difficult for such life to evolve. Here on Earth it took almost 4 billion years. In fact it is so unlikely that it probably wouldn't have happened on any of a million billion parallel Earths. - My guess is that evolution is better at perfecting existing systems, than at leaping one step higher to develop a slightly more complex system. Evolution tends to protect and preserve. Stability is survival. There's something deeply wrong with the world 151006 23:44 The latest college shooting just confirms it. This world is evil, but almost everyone vastly underestimates the extent of the evil. It's almost everywhere, and it's not just tolerated but accepted blindly. - The evil is as universal as it is incomprehensible as it is deliberate. -- let us respect the victims by never naming the Oregon college shooter to deny him the notoriety he craved. ---- Comment: Chris Harper-Mercer Chris Harper-Mercer Chris Harper-Mercer Chris Harper-Mercer Chris Harper-Mercer Chris Harper-Mercer Chris Harper-Mercer Chris Harper-Mercer Chris Harper-Mercer Chris Harper-Mercer Chris Harper-Mercer Chris Harper-Mercer Chris Harper-Mercer Chris Harper-Mercer Chris Harper-Mercer Chris Harper-Mercer Chris Harper-Mercer Chris Harper-Mercer New comment on an entry in jack_arcalon . Revenge is a good thing? New comment on an entry in jack_arcalon . Like living in a postcard! New comment on an entry in jack_arcalon . The only magic that exists is money New comment on an entry in jack_arcalon . Not everything that matters needs to be remembered. New essay: Time to get scared 151004 https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/04/i-need-people-to-be-scared/ Fear can be a good thing. General awareness is made of many units of specific awareness 151003 Human awareness is not some irreducible oracle, but made of a series of combined 'mind atoms': millions of simple insights representing everything we know. These could be like memes, but more precisely defined. Each compound fact has a tiny bit of awareness in itself. They are activated one at a time, but other mind atoms are always standing by. When combined, they add up into something a bit bigger. A lot bigger. Immensely big. Where do memories come from? 151002 07:32 The answer will finally crack the mystery of the soul. We already know memories are stored in connections between brain cells. A crucial clue is that many memories are not retrieved for years or decades. Then they can be instantly retrieved and reviewed by a brain that must have changed somewhat in the interval. That means only one thing: There exists a mental language or format to represent memories in a standard way. We need to figure it out. This is how knowledge could be artificially transmitted into a brain. And perhaps retrieved. The following is important: 151001 06:04 Atheists and religionists will generally agree the universe is infinitely complex. However, on top of that, atheists seem to imply the physical universe is about twice as complex as religionists. - They state that reality does not have a controlling force to prevent an infinite number of possible good or bad things from happening. Religionists state that reality does have a controlling force to prevent an infinite number of possible bad things from happening. America seems to be sort of finished 150930 14:13 The country known as the USA has become unlike the same-named country from fifty years before. It's become bad in a different way, though still less bad than other countries to live in. The motor under the hood may sound similar, but the chassis doesn't seem to hang together so well. - The only remaining hope of patriots is that other countries will decline even faster than the USA. As a pessimist, that seems likely to me. The USA will remain the most powerful nation, but as a beacon of hope it has become obsolete in this new era. Game over. - I'm just hoping some high-IQ virtual nation or something could be established in its place. --- discussed here too: https://heartiste.wordpress.com/2015/10/02/youre-a-dumb-fuck-if-youre-on-social-media-without-anonymizing-protection/ The Inventory Metaphor 150929 22:33 There are many different ways to create a Mind Backup. Which one is right for you depends on your personality. One of the simplest ways is to make a simple list. This list would include all that matters, at every scale and each level of importance. Both small and big events and things. Many important personality details could then be deduced by future software. On revenge (2) 150928 14:02 There may be no stronger feeling. There may be no worse pressure: The irresistible urge to do something back. To lash out against invincible evil. The drive is so strong because the goal is so hard. Evolution advances by long shots. Quick overview . . . 150927 Future Mind Backup simulations will only re-experience a small percentage of their lifetime settings, and recall only a small percentage of their lifetime memories. It's just too much work to write down everything that happened before you die. Perhaps you can only provide enough details to recreate one ideal afternoon, or a typical average day. - My guess is it will be a larger number of past settings experienced only briefly. However, the simulation subjects will have the illusion of knowing their past lives in great detail as if nothing was lost. They will feel they have been recreated with perfect fidelity, because the simulation software will give them that certainty. - Human identity may even be defined by that self-certainty. How to achieve the impossible? 150925 09:25 My long-term Mind Backup project is approaching its fifth year. The problem is this technology is way premature. Our world is more primitive than it seems. Science is not so much an improvement as a new lifeform. - Step One would be to find an extremely simple mind technology that actually works. That would make it addictive. The user would be rewarded with frequent improvements and insights. - For something so mysterious, we may already know something about it. This technique would encourage people to write down their mind contents in a simple way. The results would also extend their minds . . . The greatest loss 150923 - That's the difference between what could be perceived and what will be perceived. I suspect that as future minds enlarge, they will become unable to handle the multiplying complexities at their level of existence. Possibilities will increase faster than mind size. - As they evolve, they will know ever less about the multiverse as unanswered questions proliferate. A shrinking fraction of reality will be explored. Instead, they will create barriers against the unknown. This is a most curious trend. - The Infinity Paradox is that there can be no highest mind. It's always possible to postulate more complexity, grander and vaster states of being, accelerating in all directions. For that reason God cannot exist. This limit only leads toward more mystery, not less. The Omniverse is uncomputable. An impossible thought, the mystery feels like it could kill us. - The Summit Problem is that there is no summit. At the peak of what can be visualized, we might dimly sense whatever lies above existence. You are tremendously smaller than the physical universe 150922 22:30 Therefore you are tremendously larger. OK this is a weird blog. It means a relatively small pattern will be reproduced tremendously oftener than a much larger pattern. Across reality, the sum of your mind copies is larger than the sum of all universes containing your mind copies. Come on this is elementary statistics. In any finite string of random binary numbers, there are twice as many 0's than there are 01's. - What's that you say? our universe is not a random string inside mathematical reality, but some kind of amplified expansion of reality? Good point. However, I suspect our universe also acts to amplify the awareness of the minds it contains. A single human brain can create more awareness than an entire virtual universe simulated by a hypercivilization in a handful of computronium. Even if that simulation thinks the most rarefied thoughts. Human brains generate quantity not quality of perception. Don't feel too self-important though. The same reasoning applies even stronger to minds below us. Almost all non-absurd awarenesss in existence is felt by fish-like creatures. -- http://www.xenosystems.net/quote-note-133/#more-4191 The Miopedia project: the first draft 150921 It's time to write a major overview list of your life. It should include only the big things, each with its own entry. Some minor things will inevitably be added, but many of these will turn out to be big things too. Miopedia algorithms 150920 10:01 * Every distinct term or name in an entry will automatically become an entry itself. * Entries can be automatically generated by answering a vast list of true/false statements about life events and situations. You can't write down 1% of what you know 150919 14:58 That doesn't matter. You don't even remember most of these things while you're alive. Most memories are lost soon after being created. A mind can be fully recreated from only a few fragments. However, this recreation will only fully describe the mind as it was at a few points in time and a few settings. You may have severe amnesia right now, but not realize it, as you're not thinking about your past. The future is beyond horrible 150917 18:47 Sorry to be such a downer, but our futurists are in serious denial about the inconceivably horrible things likely to happen this century. These are barely hinted at. It just goes to show that rationalists are as bound by cognitive delusions as anyone. - What can go wrong? Only one thing, but it's the only thing that matters: involuntary mind states. Then again, this world already seems committed to creating as many of these as possible, with the general agreement of its victims even . . . - The problem will worsen as artificial intelligence is very slowly developed, specifically artificial emotions felt by artificial minds in artificial environments. These will be made to perform tasks valued in the real world. - We literally can't imagine the scope of this problem. A simulation running quietly in the Cloud can be worse than the whole Middle Ages. The only solution may be total top-down control. ---- COMMENT: Halloween post came a bit early this year? The solution to the global obesity scourge: 150915 It's cocaine. Actually, some other similar but weaker drug that has not been invented yet. Nothing else can work. Food is not an addictive substance, but the natural brain drugs that are released during overeating are. Almost everyone is an addict. The only solution is to provide alternative pleasure without the cost. Nothing else can work. The replacement drug would have to be dispensed by bio-monitoring software from a locked container. It could be in the form of slow-release chewable pills. I propose calling them Scooby Snacks. ---- (Anonymous) 2015-09-23 03:52 am (UTC) Brain reward circuits have evolved to be highly resistant to self-tampering. The loser solution 150913 14:34 Another proposed method to extract high level memories, life trends, and personality traits: The subject would describe all their flaws, mistakes, and lifetime failures. The advantage is that this could be extremely easy. Failure is easier than success. Strongly felt emotions are easier to write about. It just all comes pouring out. They may even wallow in them. However, the goal is to achieve a limited type of immortality, not a suicide. --- http://lesswrong.com/lw/bx/great_books_of_failure/ Why the legal age of consent should be lowered (URGENT) 150911 It's become obvious these past few weeks something has to be done. As good politically correct citizens we wouldn't dream of trying to reduce the inflow of tens of millions of desperate young men currently streaming in from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. Their religion often requires them to take multiple brides. But what to do about the unprecedented male-heavy gender imbalance that is already overtaking Europe? The only solution is to quickly increase the supply of available females. We have to work with what we have. Merkel will understand. The first goal of mind backup technology (Part 2) 150909 16:39 It should be to create a monument to oneself. All important things will be defined and immortalized. The process will be powered by a sense of completion: Taking care of business, a lifetime of complicated tasks achieved. Actually, the goal will be to satiate existing interests and obsessions. Everything that defines our identity will be captured and arranged in a vast digital archive. If only we could spend unlimited time appreciating all the things that matter. Maybe we could, by combining the above mentioned mind monument with other versions across quantum realities. OK probably not. The ghost of the Singularity 150908 Too many things can go wrong. We're one limited nuclear exchange away from a reset to the 1900s. 150906 17:14 You are already immortal This much is certain. In an infinite number of parallel universes your current mind state has already been recreated as a computer program. Ordinary people have no idea how good they have it 150905 06:24 However inefficiently, the world exists to supply their basic wants. The first platform plank of my 2016 campaign for President of the United States 150904 15:13 This has been carefully triangulated by my exploratory committee and focus groups: * The government should spend a hundred billion dollars to develop a realistic sex doll instead of giving the money to stupid minorities. Existential paradoxes 150903 16:56 To make sense of a human lifetime takes several times the length of a human lifetime. Minds disperse faster than they can come together. Life is a controlled accident. Most of the big things that people put off never get done. Maybe they get done in parallel timestreams, but the results are never integrated. - This actually makes mind backup easier to achieve. Instead of measuring a complete mind it may suffice to measure the mind's dead-ends and random leftovers. That could mean lifetime stress graphs, daily activity levels, most unpopular/least consumed media types, procrastination habits, common errors, economic failures, or reverse-engineered daydreams. - Actually that last one will be enough. It's been a hell week 150902 And it looks like this week will have a lot more than seven days. Drunken predictions: August 1st, 15:08 Human-equivalent sentient AI: 2035 First human mind backup through reverse engineering: 2040 Then comes The World Vacation. The Singularity: 2080 Coming Soon: the Long Now 150901 The first stage in the development of mind backup software will be small and simple tests. Maybe just questionnaires or writing assignments. Above all, they have to be fast and easy. - The amount of data the subject has to enter can't be more than a few pages of text at first. It will take brilliant interactive incentives to get them started. The original attraction will be the solution to oblivion. This will appeal to old people with less energy, but more passion for their past. Whatever they leave behind will not perish. - Step One could just be a personal biography, as candid as possible. Perhaps a version of Eliza could ask endless questions about anything. Someone could create their ideal living environment in future-Minecraft. It might be interesting to try to write a computer program intended to become future-you. You would have to imagine yourself as that program. - Perhaps the easiest test would be a program that would slowly create a vast, text-based flowchart of your life. Start with one-word entries. Each entry could be expanded with short descriptions, and linked to others. The program could ask standardized questions about entries and sort them into categories. Multiple entries on the same subject could be automatically combined. - This program's prime purpose would be to extract as much raw data as possible. The most evil people in the world are computer programmers 150831 16:08 I hate having to repeat myself, but someone has to say this important truth. I speak only from personal experience. They cause most of my suffering with their deliberately demonically crippled software. Their evil never ends. They are satans. I hate them more than anyone has ever hated anything. But they are only at the head of a long list. AI Countdown 150830 https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/08/29/ai-countdown/ We can't get to zero. AI: Quantity is Quality (Q=Q) https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/08/29/ai-quantity-is-quality-qq/ Let's say complexity adds up to simplicity. --- http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/will-we-ever-get-our-heads-round-consciousness/ Mind Backup test: measuring your deviance 150829 20:29 https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/08/29/analog-mind-scanning/ To be special you have to conform uniquely. Mind Backup test: finding the most meaningful data in the humanverse https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/08/29/google-mind/ The final and greatest effort. On the explanation for awareness 150828 17:08 The harder you think about it, the more intractable it becomes. However, when you sort of let your mind drift long enough it almost seems like it could be sort of understandable. That's as close as we can get. Stress is having to do too many things at once 150826 It's the failure to do any of them right. Failure leads to degradation. The worst part of arguing isn't losing your argument (at least that would be a type of progress) but failing at fighting. You're making mistakes faster than you can score points. That's why politics won't work. Stress is not having enough time. Not having enough time is the same as not having enough intelligence. Mind Backup consulting service 150825 14:39 Are you afraid of death? I have one of two possible solutions currently available. Mine could be used in combination with the other solution, cryonics. It may be decades before a third solution appears. Version One of the core backup program would take about two weeks of full-time questionnaires and writing exercises. Version Two will take an investor. Mind Backup idea 150824 17:24 Imagine waking up in an unfamiliar place, with no idea where you are, or how you got there, or when you are. It's the most fundamental uncertainty, waiting for reality to return from wherever it originated. The great surprise is whatever the universe will cook up then. I've had the pleasure off knowing this state in a bout of slight amnesia after a minor biking mishap. Everyone reacts differently to such a thing. Imagining such a state could be a powerful personality core test, starting with the earlier mentioned writing exercise. Gnon is watching you 150823 18:06 But he damn sure doesn't care. Gnon is the abbreviation of 'God of Nature Or Nature'. Gnon could be evolution, or emergent complexity, or the pattern describing all possible patterns. - Almost everyone agrees pain is bad. That's because awareness is the highest known feature of reality. Reality, however, is profoundly indifferent of the awareness it contains, I would say to the point of being outright evil. I would say infinitely evil. Even eviler than computer programmers. And that's damned evil. - The inevitable emergence of awareness from nothing has nothing whatsoever to do with the self-defined purpose of awareness. There is awareness in the natural design of typhus, and spider legs, and every inexorably self-destructing civilization. counter-counter-intuitive life advice 150822 It's better to do nothing than to do a bad thing or a thing badly. --- Of course most computer programmers would then have to shoot themselves. Are you ready to die today? 150821 What will remain of the first person to complete the minimal Mind Backup protocol envisioned and advocated on this blog? - There will be giant list of events and life settings. A large Sim program with a real personality inhabiting a virtual world. And finally an attempt to define the subject's very soul. - I think of it as a master control pyramid, a few hundred core values in a complex flowchart. At the moment, this could only be approximated through mass quantity (a complete lifetime action log) or brilliant quality (high-level artistic metaphors). - A suitable monument to your lifetime could be a complete library of everything you have done and everything you have liked. You know that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade 150820 ...where they swing around the hidden doorway and the Nazi secretary shrieks ALARM!!! That's been my week so far. Except in my case the Nazis aren't as nice. The second greatest mystery 150818 (The greatest mystery is the reason for the excessive amount of complexity in the universe.) The second greatest mystery is whether we should try to maximize or minimize pleasure. Seeking an end to pain could also mean ending pleasure. Math is evil karma. Statistically, all minds across reality may be connected, in the sense that good and bad feelings end up perfectly balanced. Then the only ethical way to escape the pain trap would be to give up all feelings. Personally I prefer the other option. That would lead to the hedonistic imperative, an endless vacation for everyone. - http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/12/15/ http://www.abolitionist.com/multiverse.html The problem of artificial intelligence 150817 21:28 Is there a deep universal principle behind the mystery of awareness? That would be one brilliant idea, explaining how reality can sometimes recognize itself. The problem is that minds are already maximally compressed. The only way to explain a mind would involve a very long talk. There is no way to shorten this talk. Every word is necessary. Minds are too messy and chaotic to have a brilliant hidden core principle. The clouds have been sailing past for four billion years 150816 08:28 Millions of rivers, tributaries, and streams flow into the sea as ocean currents mix in equatorial bands. Dust and dirt and chemicals recombine down to the core and in the bright sunlight above. Even the trees are radiating at 293 K. - It's all incredibly wasteful. The earth receives about 100 megatons worth of solar energy per second. A billion times more is beamed into empty space in all directions. A sextillion other stars do the same. And almost none of that energy is used to create efficient thought. The difference between men and women 150815 21:51 As a typical male I'm always inventing new technological insights, a full time effort. However, I will eventually need someone to make use of these inventions and properly appreciate them. To maximize the quality of life, not its simple pleasures but its full refinement. And that won't be me. None of my SF stories passed the Bechdel Test 150814 01:29 This cunning test determines the author's subconscious degree of sexism. It applies to all works of fiction ever. To pass the test, the work has to feature a scene where two women talk to each other, but they can't be talking about a man. Due to authors' subconscious biases, such types of scenes can be rare. Most of my stories with human characters pass the reverse Bechdel Test on the first page. The Great Filter is real 150813 The universe appears to be less advanced than the world in every direction. There are no cosmic superstructures in distant galaxies, no faint strings of lights strung between superclusters, no long-wave signals rumbling through lost eons. Something is preventing order from reforming the universe into a neat grid or homogeneous energy matrix. - In 1991 on exam day I came up with an explanation while heading to the bus stop in the morning fog. These things do not exist because almost all the entropy in our universe was used up in the first moments of the Big Bang. We (and perhaps a handful of immensely distant other civilizations) are all that is left in an otherwise used-up universe. - Plus whatever it was that used up all that entropy to begin with of course. Miopedia, the Wikipedia of your mind 150812 07:29 The first impression of your comprehensive lifetime encyclopedia will be one of vastness, like entering an old university library, sans the musty smell. It should look extremely complicated. Baroque even. Quantity over quality, style over substance. - The same data may be repeated many times in different personal entries. In fact there will be different entries on the same subject under different titles. At first, many entries will be created through standardized templates provided by the program. Then you will start creating new entries in a stream-of-consciousness. The way you do so may reveal as much as the entries themselves. Identity Transference 150811 23:43 The new mind in the computer will be your continuation. Then, you can finally die in peace. Well, maybe it will take a few more things. At first, it will be a vastly shrunken mind, a form of blindsight. A virtual awareness, focused on small pictures. - The key is that your future mind recreation will occur in virtual time. The memories and life outline may be reconstructed piecemeal and out of order. Capturing your personality will be very hard, but eventually everything will be connected. - Awareness is like a ghost out of time - and always real. Mind Backup notion #460 150810 Write a complete mental description of yourself as a just-activated future mind simulation. This may be the best way to get information about what it is like to be you. - Mind Backup notion #461 Write stories about how you think you would react to various extreme situations, as completely as possible. The face of Satan 150809 Is the face of an engineer. Actually, the face of a computer programmer. No, not just Microsoft, but millions of Moloch's minions in all fields. Most evil in the world is deliberately planned and executed by corporate wage-drones. Nothing that goes wrong in our lives is more intentional than their actions. - Above all, their evil is casual. A kind of stupid brilliance, or brilliant stupidity. The only force stronger than their desire to perpetrate endless evil is the desire of the mainstream masses to wholeheartedly accept it. What should be the ultimate Mind Backup goal? 150807 Clearly the process needs to be as complete as possible. Ideally, the user would be ready to die at any time, secure in the knowledge their essential memories and mind properties have been saved. - This is inspired by the theory of the finite mind. Human minds are actually very limited. They strive toward a stable end-state that can not be reached in a single lifetime, but can already be visualized. The mind's implicit end goal is to relax forever. ---- http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/10/a-beginners-guide-to-immortality/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/03/06/immortality-in-the-ocean-of-infinite-memories/ http://tubelite.wordpress.com/2007/09/10/autonomous-software-agents-as-trustees/ Google has officially become evil 150806 From deviously unusable software to their increasingly crippled search engine, they have become exactly as demonic as every other software maker. Satan exists. He has the face of a computer programmer. -- Evil is the fundamental force of reality. What comes above awareness? 150805 Mind-organization evolved from lifeless matter to worms to animals to sentient hominids. More advanced than a universal mind would be a universal compiler. It would have the ability to instantly create a computer program for any well-understood but hard to define task. - Now it's quite impossible to tell your computer to do even the simplest things. This really sucks. I have many recurring sorting jobs I have to do manually. There is no solution. How to figure out how to sort, move, and process files would literally be harder for a computer to understand than love and generosity. - There may be two ways forward (see: Optimizers & Multipliers): - One path could mean the eventual end of awareness. Eliminating all inefficiency, evolution maximized to ruthlessly converge on the best solution. The end result would be a mathematically optimized closed system or replicator. - The alternative would be ever more awareness in all directions in a wasteful proliferation. Brute force computations thrown at all applicable problems to maximize diversity, most of which would suck. The holographic mind theory 150804 According to this principle, your lifetime memory wiki will not require its entries to be notable or even personally meaningful. They just have to be true to be useful mind samples. Any obscure memory described in extreme detail would be a hazy but accurate shadow of the whole. Unlike Wikipedia, the more trivia the better. Blog expansion 2015-08-03 02:35 pm (UTC) jack_arcalon Plan to spend the week advertising this blog elsewhere, as the number of readers is not quite up to expectations yet. Feel free to help out yourself! I will come back here to post my initial impressions and comments on the major breaking news stories of the week. Could a Terminator even work? 150802 To impersonate a human it would have to simulate human emotions. As implied by the Turing Test, it is impossible to perfectly simulate an emotion without also feeling the emotion. However, a near-perfect simulation is easy enough by copying prerecorded behaviors. So the answer is yes. - But could say a spreadsheet program be aware of the fact that it is moving and manipulating arrays of numbers? Even that cannot be ruled out. Awareness may be everywhere, It is just well hidden across time and space. - The simplest possible AI would just look up the answer to every possible question and situation from a list. Actually this would be the most complex AI to build, but its principle is the easiest to understand. Such a 'List AI' would have just as much awareness as a person responding in the same way. - Awareness is a property of the full system. The original programmers' minds are part of that system . . . and they must have felt the appropriate emotions to make the endless list of questions. - This brings us to another Turing Corollary: Any robot or program complex enough to correctly analyze any situation will inevitably develop awareness. The hard part will be to not let future programs have awareness. - It will emerge slowly, a ghost out of time imperceptibly materializing in realtime. Virtual girlfriends of the future 150801 The fact this blog post exists shows something is wrong. In fact human society as we knew it is fading out. Worst of all is the escalating gender imbalance, as the West is flooded by single men from the Third World streaming in through all entry ports. This will have consequences. In the future, the only way an increasing number of men can get lucky will be through virtual reality simulations. These will have increasing depth beyond the physical aspect, though even the physical aspect is virtual eons from being solved. - * It will be easier to bring a user into a virtual girlfriend's simulated world than a simulated girlfriend into a user's world. * The simulated world could be the user's ideal life setting or version of paradise. There will also be a shared VR model of known reality, including private homes. * Since men are the 'true romantics', part of the virtual relationship will have to be like a 3-D novel. * First the user will describe his virtual girlfriend's attributes and backstory. They should be unpredictable and slowly reveal their complexity. * Videogame quests and challenges could define the simulated relationship, and help establish her simulated character. * The girlfriend would eventually become part of the user's mind extension. The first Mind Backup program will be based on Wikipedia 150730 It will be a blank template where the subject can add unlimited entries about their life. In fact it will seek to describe all of reality from their viewpoint. Many preselected topics and templates will also be available to fill out or ignore. Unlike the real Wikipedia, entries won't have to be notable, only subjectively true. They won't even have to be subjectively important. - The software may also be able to add entries autonomously. A few entries in this soul-Wikipedia will be more important than all others combined. Main among these is the Lifetime Timeline. Users can add tens of thousands of events that occurred around known dates. I could use some advice on the best software and development programs. Inventing the Mind Sucker 150729 A comprehensive mind testing and memory extraction program will need three parts to get started: - 1* The Timeliner Step One is to divide your life into different historical eras. - A few main eras that won't overlap. - Numerous lesser eras that will overlap. - 2* The Thinglist This will list all the things (events and objects) across a lifetime. - The Diary: thoughts and life observations not tied to particular points in time. - The Mindmap: the list of all meaningful places, real and imaginary. There will be many other categories, like people, jobs, interests, etc. - 'Miopedia': an encyclopedia to accept all entries about anything in your life. 3* The Psychometer This will contain the most advanced personality and reaction tests available. The ultimate goal would be to measure the essence of someone's quality of perception, if there is such a thing. - Could these three components be combined in a single simple framework? Sure they can. According to the holographic mind model, a chain of memories described through free association could contain as much personal data as a top-down organized life map of the same size. Of the above items, only the personal encyclopedia is capable of containing all the others. New article: the last neglected moneymaking opportunity 150728 https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/07/27/how-to-become-the-richest-person-in-the-world/ - Money is a strange thing; not to mention a painful thing. The only way to get a lot of it is not to make a lot of valuabble products, but to get paid to redistribute a lot of valuable products made by others. A monopoly is best. Applied to future generations of mind backup and digital immortality software, that could mean something as simple as a service to refer freelance consultants who could carry out this process. Or it could be a global corporation with all the know-how and computing power to provide it as a comprehensive service, comparable in scope to a microchip or jet engine manufacturer. In that case it should start with wealthy individuals and work its way down. New article: our most probable afterlife 150727 - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/07/27/what-is-our-most-probable-afterlife/ - What if I told you the good news: there IS a way to avoid death forever? Take my word for it. All you have to do is follow my ten-step program and send me a lot of money. It's all true, except for the part about sending me money. New article: the coming antisocial network 150727 - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/07/27/the-antisocial-network/ - We live in an age of absolute conformity. The idea of subversion (versus opportunism) has been bred out of the populace. Conformism is now the highest aspiration. The anti-conformism that does exist is always destructive. But could there be such a thing as creative resistance? It would take something completely new. The future is dim 150725 People are so stupid they may inadvertently destroy most of the world. It is vital that a network of smart and capable people remain to eventually build a better posthuman civilization. ----- Comment: So is the present. Cosmic factoids and uncanny trivia 150723 In the time it takes a grain of sand to drop ten inches, a thousand planets will have collided throughout the observable universe. The cost of the International Space Station can be calculated to be only $100 per second/per astronaut (all expenses included). Just go to the rocky deserts of North Africa to see what 99% of the real estate in the universe approximately looks like. The surface similarity between ice world Titan and furnace planet Venus is rather uncanny. Space is big: Imagine a guy holding up a newspaper forty miles away. At that distance, it would look about the same size as a galaxy at the edge of the observable universe. A solar system would be the size of a virus on that newspaper, a planet the size of an atom. The Andromeda Galaxy looks wider than the full moon to the naked eye. To view a similar galaxy at the edge of the observable universe or about one thousand times further away, we would need a telescope one thousand times wider than the eye's pupil, or about twice as wide as the Hubble telescope. A star is like a jet engine levitating itself. Just imagine a jet engine capable of lifting an entire star. It would have to be insanely bright. However, unlike a real jet engine it can mostly run on its own exhaust. Despite what was implied in the movie 'Star Trek Generations', it's not the star's ongoing nuclear fusion that keeps it from immediately imploding, but eons of accumulated heat. There is currently enough sunlight trapped inside the sun to power a supernova for about one minute. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_core It would take about 500 tons of typical solar core matter to continuously generate enough energy to power one microwave oven, but this denser-than-lead hydrogen plasma could provide this power for billions of years. Fun fact: There is an empty spacecraft circling the inner Solar System. It lost its air pressure long ago, its batteries are dead, and its dials are dark, but from time to time blinding sunlight shines through the portholes. The astronauts abandoned it to a slow orbit that will take it further from Earth than the planets Mars, Venus, and Mercury. It's named after a cartoon dog. The empty weight of an entire Titan 2 booster that orbited the Gemini two-man space capsules in the 1960s was only half the fueled weight of an Apollo lunar lander. Fully fueled, the weight of the Titan 2 was ten times the lunar lander's. This Titan (also intended to deliver the USA's most powerful nukes) weighed barely seven tons empty, a bit more than two 2007 Ford Expeditions. Imagine you could teleport yourself to materialize directly in front of a wall on the moon. If you measured the moon's speed and position with perfect precision, but forgot to take account of the moon's slowing rotation rate for a period of one year, your nose would be pressed in by a fraction of a millimeter according to my calculations. related: http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/79212.html The best SF novel of all time: INFINITE THUNDER Troll Rage is the exact opposite of Humor 150722 Both involve a surplus of irritation leading to a fundamental reality disagreement. This can cause extreme rage, as in the case of losing a deceptive political argument. It creates an overload of critical escalation, a sense of falling behind with no hope of recovery. Laughter on the other hand may result when a situation is definitively exposed as being absurd beyond recovery. If the Singularity is true 150722 There will eventually be artificial minds that will find everything I write now incredibly fascinating, including this very sentence. More observations on the mystery of Softwareness: 150721 'Hyper-ordering' is a core aspect of the mystery. It is that you know vastly more than you can know you know. Awareness is simply the realization of this fact. For example, anyone can quickly tell if a familiar type of work of art is good or bad. - The ability to erase most of the complexity of the world lies at the core of awareness. It is a deliberate oversimplification. There are many types. Pain simulates the chaos of evolution in advance, so in that sense it is 'good'. 'Retrieval induced forgetting' is a type of mental interference: - When two neurons fire simultaneously, the direct connection between them is strengthened. However, it seems that indirect connections are weakened. This happens while deliberately recalling a stored memory. Turns out this will impede the later recall of other similar memories, like how 'leeched' and 'leached' have similar meanings. - When you have to start a new routine you will forget your old routine faster than you would have otherwise. The process helps weaken or erase memories that could obstruct more important ones, allowing people to efficiently learn complex new tasks. This also implies that deja vu is a memory strengthening artifact. - Brains use a lot of energy, so their activity must be restricted as much as possible. Evolution is on a grinding march to increase intelligence by working smarter not harder. The countless ways to be crazy all appear alike, but the few ways to be brilliant seem unique. Software Awareness 150720 Human awareness appears to be chemical based. Chemicals are much smaller than integrated circuits. However, all this molecular complexity can be safely ignored. The sophistication of the human mind is vastly overrated. It's mostly brute force applied the wrong way. - Awareness will turn out to be an inevitable side effect of sufficiently large single-purpose programs (intelligence will be much harder). This is less than half a century away. Inventing a workable nuclear fusion power plant will be easier than building a time machine, but harder than creating computer awareness. In fact the hard part may be stopping it. - Once it becomes possible to make a human-level software mind, there is little to prevent the construction of arbitrarily more powerful artificial minds. Increasing their power beyond human limits will make the future fundamentally unknowable. I suspect their intelligence will be limited but exhaustively thorough. - Anything could happen. Let it on Bing for five minutes, and the next week everyone on Earth could suddenly implode like reverse popcorn. The hope of this blog is that these things will work out fine. Perhaps eeveryone could have a vast digital entourage to take care of their unfinished business. More fun with Anthropics 150719 Imagine if every time you went outside, you kept getting hit on the head by tiny meteors, an annoying pebble every few seconds. Even if this kept happening by pure chance, you would soon put on a helmet, . . and you would be wrong to do so. It can be shown with near-absolute certainty such an unlikely chain of coincidences must stop RIGHT NOW. Because in almost all possible universes, it would stop. - But did it? Welcome to the world of Bayesian meta-statistics, where anything goes until it can't. Quantum immortality promises that you (but no one else) will keep cheating death in the most unlikely ways, until you turn out to live in a universe where you absolutely MUST exist forever. You may even become your own universe. - Which is more complex: a supremely unlikely event, or the brain state of the perception of this supremely unlikely event? Mathematically speaking, the brain state may be much less likely, since it is a precise combination of trillions of data elements, whereas supremely unlikely occurrences can sometimes be described in just a few sentences. - Each human lifetime could be perfectly described as a supremely unlikely mathematical pattern. In fact an infinite number of functionally equivalent patterns. According to a theory often expressed on this blog, the awareness-output of all equivalent mind patterns throughout all universes inevitably combines into a single, unified state of sentient being. - The most extreme speculation posted here is that each mind is likely to self-stabilize into its own essential pattern, the sum of all its abstract descriptions generated everywhere (which may have been the inspiration for 'The Secret'). - These chains of thought do have the potential to answer some seemingly unsolvable questions, where the answer usually turns out to be: everything. For example, every mind is both physically real and an ancestor simulation. In fact everyone's awareness is the sum of all their real-world physical instantiations plus all their computational ancestor simulations. - Could all these mind copies be subject to anthropic interference? There are infinite opportunities for the creation of anomalous derivatives. Philosophically speaking, these could be generated by high-level organizing principles, sorting and combining mind patterns generated in many parallel universes. If our universe has been created from pure math, then there is no reason for this process to ever stop. - It should be noted there is no evidence these poorly understood anthropic meta-forces justify any religious claim. In fact just the opposite seems likely. The more a single-minded individual obsesses about aliens or angels, the less likely these things are to exist for him. His increasingly focused research reduces his reality's freedom of action. On the extreme anomaly of humans versus other advanced aliens 150718 Humans know an incredible amount about the universe, because they don't know the most basic things about themselves. Intelligent life on Earth somehow decided to specialize in science and technology, in a runaway chain reaction that has only just begun. Most advanced alien races instead learned to manipulate and control their own minds. This limited their expansion but not their local wisdom. Humans are among the few species that have only increased their ignorance about themselves, without becoming more complex themselves. Even I have been unable to make real progress. It can be profoundly alienating to be the only one even thinking about the most important unasked questions. The ME/I theory 150716 Most Mind Backup work will be done automatically, by special software monitoring its owner's daily and online activities. By the 2030s or 2040s, when Mind Extensions become commonplace, they will keep track of everything their owners do. - In order to communicate and provide constant feedback, the ultimate human/computer software environment will have to be created. Since brain implants won't be possible, it will use the existing senses, primarily vision of course. The Interface will be always on. - It will be like a permanent screen with built-in control panels, projected on top of the real world through visors and the like. This will become the window into the user's soul. The Mind Backup process will happen almost entirely by watching and recording this Interface. Awareness is exaggeration 150716 The world is fundamentally chaotic. That makes it difficult for self-sustaining and self-reproducing systems to exist. The only way is to simplify their environment. To eliminate the chaos, the environment must become highly organized. All the non-functional debris must be smashed into simplicity. Awareness is at the core of that process. The mind is both an oversimplified and overamplified copy of the world it inhabits. Only the essential things are perpetuated. Awareness is the most useful lie. The farthest-out thought 150715 Cemi theory (McFadden, Pockett) states that every time a neuron fires, it changes the brain's surrounding electromagnetic field. It is proposed this field represents all the information in the neurons. And that is what causes awareness. - I'm not so sure. It seems this field would not be able to process data at all. It is a side-effect, not a functional machine. And yet, while this theory can't explain the quality of awareness, it could expand its quantity. - Perhaps all the random matter circulating through our universe becomes slightly more organized when it comes in contact with already organized matter. The affected chaotic matter may be altered in a way exactly as complex as the complex matter it came in contact with. Then random matter could actually act as a secondary amplifier of the awareness of conscious brains. - This may also explain why we live in the primitive past instead of the infinitely advanced future. The awareness created by the tiny but powerful hypercomputers of the future is not as easy to amplify in this way. These future devices will be too efficient, being quantum-isolated from their surrounding environment. - Even more far out: Our own existence on Earth may be 'using up' available randomness in the environment in still undefinable ways. In fact complexity may be self-limiting, in only allowing a few complex civilizations to form in the universe. So there's another Fermi answer. Of course that's unlikely, but it would make a great SF story. new Mind Backup article: 150714 The mind's layer-cake - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/inside-the-minds-layer-cake/ Virtual reality sexuality 150710 - References: http://www.reaxxion.com/9735/how-virtual-reality-could-destroy-western-society http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/technology/robotica-sex-robot-realdoll.html?_r=0 - * 1. The myth of porn Porn really sucks. It is crude and rude and totally phony. And contrary to the hype there really isn't that much of it. The most important truth about porn is that it's in no way intended as a substitute for the real thing. It would be far more meaningful to exchange handwritten letters than to watch a mindless scripted pork-tape. Porn is intended to be the opposite of meaningful, thereby making meaningful things more valuable. That's right, I'm claiming even porn serves to strengthen the mainstream. - Nerds can only fantasize about hugging and kissing some celebrity starlet, a person they don't care about at all, who may be even more frivolous than they are dumb. Yet it would be beyond fantastic. They can't even imagine what it would be like. This kind of activity activates genes that otherwise remain eternally dormant. - Unfortunately, there is a terrible shortage of beauty in the world - and a commensurate surplus of the opposite. Specifically, there is a critical male surplus. The question is how to create an abundant supply of female beauty. * 2. The myth of reality The real world is evil. Therefore it is necessary to create a better alternative. One idea could be to build a robot 'prostitute' that looks exactly like someone who would never in a million years have sex with the John. This might be possible. Sexbots could be lowered in chemical cleansing baths between users. The movable seams would be hidden by clothing or lingerie. - Better still would be to create a virtual reality program that looks exactly like someone who would never have sex with the John. Digibabes, VR sex sims, pseudo-vixens, techno-nymphets, waifus; as long as they appear real. Hyper-beauty could be better than reality, but paradoxically the first steps should be in the other direction. - Realism requires raggedness requires resolution requires 'rithmetic: It will take billions of calculations per second to generate a believable frown. A VR sex sim should be able to refuse your advances like a wife. The challenge is part of the allure and all that. 'She' would have realistic-seeming simulated emotions, set in a world much better than this one. You can enter it but not fully control it, even if it's your personal dreamland. You could still be completely free there. * 3. The reality of myth It should be a spiritual adventure. Transcendence is what really matters. That means your simulated girlfriend has to be awesome in a way too big to fully articulate. Someone who knows the Aga Khan. He sent her a racehorse for Christmas. - We already know (from decades of videogame work) that such a complex interactive environment can only be created by combining many exceedingly complex independent components. The top level would describe the rules of the VR environment and its purpose almost in natural language. - The first step would merely be to invent new 3D image formats. One format could be designed specifically to display faces. The simplest version could be a stretched-out 2D rotary scan. A variant of this format could display changing expressions. - Next will come emotional software, ways to have meaningful (though at first limited) relations with simulated persons. This will culminate in programs able to generate spiritual-level states, complete with a sense of grandeur and endless evolution, the integration of all personal meaning. - Only then we will be able to create programs that people could fall in love with. Beyond the Hard Problem 150708 This is a paragraph about itself. It is actually self aware, because it contains its own description. Well, as long as someone reads it at least. - Imagine a database with only one subject: the database itself. It would include a full description of its structure and design, its search patterns and purpose and . . . go on long enough, and the list will include awareness. - To transcend the mystery, we only need to explain minimal awareness, like a limited database of a restricted environment. Perhaps just a single room. Even if the database is small, the number of permutations will be immense though. That is how I believe the human mind works, only with a constantly changing set of restricted environments. - Awareness is the impersonation of a manipulable object. The mind essentially becomes the shadow of a hand on a wall. A mind can only do one task at a time (though that can be a combination of many automated mini-tasks). - Awareness is the maximal shrinking of knowledge, down to a perfectly defined subset of reality. The sentient mind is essentially the opposite of an encyclopedia. At most a single entry. Ultimately, awareness is uniqueness, a precisely defined point in all reality. If all else fails 150707 I recommend focusing all efforts on the simplest mind backup method that would currently be possible. That would be an automatic logbook. A version of the timeline concept discussed earlier. The program would be always-on. The first version might merely ask the user to leave constant notes and observations when possible. Later versions would oversee other programs, like location and context trackers. The ultimate goal should be to increase the program's virtual and then real awareness. Awareness is not a mystery but an illusion 150705 My whole life I've been thinking about brains, but I've never even seen one. That hardly matters. When it comes to the greatest questions, it's always amateur hour. The best depiction of someone solving the mystery of awareness happened in the Stephen King novel 'The Langoliers'. In that case, the guy's brain exploded. - In reality, all the incomplete speculations about unknown unknowns are too vague to mean anything. Just overpolished generalities, the very definition of boring. They are not even not even wrong. We don't really know anything about awareness. - In fact, we don't even know for sure that it is complicated. For all we know, the solution is ridiculously simple. Or there may be no question to answer at all. In fact I suspect the process of thinking is rather simple because it seems so mysterious. Why? That's so obvious I shouldn't have to explain it. - Awareness may be too basic to understand. Just because the mind uses a dizzying number of heuristic shortcuts, does not mean these are bound by some grand unifying principle, or meaningfully connected at all. Mental tricks work because of the complexity of nature, not because of the mind's complexity. - It's easiest to say that awareness, as a real concept, does not exist at all. So that is what I will do. It's merely a goalpost toward something completely unpredictable. Why am I doing this? 150703 For the past few years this blog has been imagining various mind backup questionnaires and personality tests, instead of speculating about more advanced brain-scanning nanobots and brain-copying hyper-computers. The reason is that I believe technological progress is much slower than admitted. The Singularity may take longer than anyone expects. This is incredibly tragic. - Even the technology that does exist is strangely flawed. You jiggle your keyboard wrong, and the Firefox file-edit-view toolbar is gone forever. For the Google Chrome browser this is the default state. It takes ages to get anything done by diving into the file menu. - Bureaucracy is stronger than progress. But could this dark force perhaps be harnessed? - Instead of a direct brain/computer interface, the mind's pattern could be reverse-engineered by much simpler methods. The goal would be to record the mind's top description layer. Essentially, that is the mind. The secret truth of your life (if you can reach it) is a long list of memory points, settings, and preferences, all of which could be exactly described in natural language. - Nothing else matters besides this gigantic flowchart. There, a tiny fraction of your fleeting perceptions have been crystallized into your true self. The free lunch answer 150701 As mentioned before, my highest goal in life is to make it low stakes. Life should be free of serious stress. Stress means time shortage means inefficiency. My idea for achieving this utopian state is the virtualization solution. Various forms of virtual reality could be as vividly compelling as real life, but as safe as a dream. - Someday, you could fly across the wider skies of Jupiter or relax on your private island or make out with your favorite B-List songstress without leaving your bedroom. I can not even conceive how fantastic that would be. There is nothing I want more. What could go wrong? - Perhaps solving the problem of realistically rendering Demi Lovato's waist in realtime is so immense it would be easier to solve the problem of wanting to put your hands around it. In either case the solution would be many decades away. - The ultimate goal is simply to escape reality by creating a better virtuality. All our achievements would become non-material. Information achievements can be just as impressive as physical ones. - The VR lifestyle could use a cool new symbol. Let's call it the 'Ekin' logo. It looks like a hook and says Just Don't Do It. --- Comments: Demi? Really? Selena is so much hotter. Disagreed. If I wanted a tomboy I could do with less boy. Demi is a highly optimized baby making machine. I hereby wish to announce my support of polyandry 150630 That's right, I'm coming out in favor of one girl with multiple guys (not all at once). It's the only equitable answer. Sure, it won't be popular. This is a contrarian blog after all. As said before, there are twice as many fertile males than females on this planet. Evolution has set things up so that fertile males want to impregnate hot young chicks instead of being scolded by wrinkled hags. - So what are the practical implications of this belief? Why that prostitution should be legalized of course. Both the traditional kind and several new types of polyandrous marriage. Especially the first option is highly illegal today. Seems that once again the government is the real enemy. Actually, the people who make the government. Mind Backup idea #238 150628 Most survey tests will use predetermined templates that will assume many things about the subject's past. Such tests would appear to work better on more normal persons. However, prejudicial categories can actually be a feature not a bug. Requiring the subject to think like a different person could reveal their deepest biases. Such forced viewpoints could include the most gangster things someone did, their religious life or achievements as a ladies man, their great heroics, or any inappropriate metaphor. They would have to find the closest matches (all results to be securely encrypted). ultrashort SF story: Game Incentive 150627 The geometry of reality was different than anyone could have known. He had discovered a network of secret back streets in the city, all leading to a strangely winding neighborhood that didn't seem to end. It was full of small but incredibly well-curated museums, curio shops and cabinets, misty parks and mystic alleys. - He couldn't quite recall the hours he'd spent researching the hidden back rooms, the labyrinthine mall only miles from the town's 'real' mall, though not quite in the same universe. All part of a quest to make sense of his past, it turned out. Apparently his meaningless life had been full of secret codes. Even if he couldn't understand them, he could untangle and follow them. - This was how far he had come: The face in the lamplight looked absolutely real, and it was perfect. Eyes like laser beams but in a good way. A cold bubble rose in his chest, like vomiting in free fall. He had been chasing this being for ages. His whole life in fact. Now something was going happen. - Even if this was only a dream. Of course it was only a dream. No one could be this beautiful. He even knew for a fact he was lying down: in a dream within a dream, his motions were perfectly amplified through a VR suit, controlled by a dream computer a million times more powerful than the piece of shit Windows box that had tortured his waking hours back in 2015. - This was not a dream. The most perfect woman in the universe slapped him in the face. "You stupid idiot!" she hissed in her perfectly modulated English-accented voice. He had it coming of course. No one had ever felt better. The Edifice Theorem 150626 The core of the Mind Backup process is to create a library of the mind's contents and interests. There will be many Mind Backup archives, but they will only represent a tiny subset of possible minds and worlds. - Merely by existing, these archives will amplify the awareness-generating patterns and thereby the prominence of these realities. Such edifices have important ethical implications. They imply 'bad' mind patterns should not be backed up. Unpleasant memories should be consigned to oblivion. Meaningful and generally positive minds will be much likelier to be backed up. - In the posthuman future, only high-quality minds should be recreated. There could be high-quality versions of everyone, and their important and good memories. In the words of Yeats, 'the rest is dross'. This may even have theological implications. Religious believers say that atheists are angry at God 150625 To be angry at God, atheists would have to secretly believe in him. That would be absurd. Or would it? I think it makes perfect sense to be angry at the universe at least. Anything infinitely complex should be worthy of anger. By definition, the universe contains all bad things. What better object for hate? Human minds are strange 150623 Suppose you could hear the best possible musical composition according to your standards. There's a good chance you would feel as if you somehow always knew this melody, at least subconsciously, but nothing could be further from the truth. - Seems that certainty is just another mental illusion. With the right prompt, an ancient memory can sometimes be recovered, but false memories can seem equally or even more real. - The strangest mental phenomenon may be the hypnopompic fugue state. It proves there is such a thing as absurd awareness. In fact most - or almost all - possible thoughts must be without rhyme or reason. You think you are thinking, but the thoughts are pure gibberish, form without content. - Impossible or absurd perceptions also occur in synesthesia, except this phenomenon can be directly observed, like how different letters seem to have different colors, or the literal feeling of a broken heart (so I've heard), or the sweet tasting smell of jet fuel. Dreams (part two) 150622 Some say your consciousness effectively 'dies' each time you fall asleep, to be replaced with a new consciousness upon waking. . . . Or that it's possible to slightly shift realities before and after dreaming. The dreamer's memories have been altered enough to change their mind superset across universes. - The truth may be far stranger than that. I suspect the purpose of dreams is to fill the brain with hidden false memory fragments. They compensate for our boring lives, helping to prepare for the unexpected. - With some of the properties of actual experiences, random dream memories form unused connections between otherwise unlinked brain areas. Dreams also weaken and to some extent break up the brain's top-level obsessions by creating semirandom diversions. It's a nightly reset. - Only the most important and useful new circuits can remain for long. The weak associations created by dreams make it easier to respond when it turns out they match reality. As always, faint connections are strengthened by the simultaneous firing of separate neurons. Dreams (part one) 150621 The intensely focused perception in dreams is irresistibly fascinating to the dreamer. So much so it leaves no room for critical thought. Dreams are made from existing memories instead of perceptions, leaving little brainpower to analyze the content (most of these existing memories are old memories for reasons that will become clear). - Dreamers can usually answer questions about where the dream happened and who did what, why, how, etc. The context is as familiar as our thoughts. Dreams happen at a level above observation but below control - a level of reaction below analysis. An unplanned progression of confabulations, things are always going wrong like in reality. - The reason you don't make more mistakes or do wildly inappropriate things when awake and sober is that many different neuron groups contribute to every action. In dreams however, the brain is competing against itself to sustain an open-ended illusion. Dreams could provide useful psychological data by revealing someone's hidden biases. For example one of my biases is that I fundamentally underestimate how boring this world truly is (probably its strength rather than a weakness). - Instead of changing us, dreams help us maintain our identities by relentlessly trimming the crud of our mental elaborations, restarting every day about the same way. Mind Backup post: an introduction to Interfacers 150620 An intermediate technological step to reverse-engineering human minds: https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/06/20/interfacers-the-missing-link/ I now know I was wrong 150619 As a libertarian type I used to presume gays were harmless at worst. In fact their added diversity could encourage more useful types of diversity, thereby accelerating the rate of progress. That would have been so nice if it was true. However, the existence of gays and gay culture does not help non-gays in any way. In fact it can be bad, though that is not part of the gay plan. You would think that encouraging gays to be themselves would reduce the competition among non-gays looking for girlfriends. Wrong-O. I don't know why, but the presence of gays interferes with heterosexual pairing. Specifically, it changes female behavior on a large scale. It lets out pressure, reduces one tension while raising others, creating endless distractions and the illusion of false choices. Diversity is diffusion of energy. Sometimes we need intense concentration. Gays are the ultimate unintentional cockblockers. This is not a justification for attacks or other illegal or even rude behavior (unless provoked first). Simply put, straight men should not support gay culture in any way unless they feel the need to join said culture for bisexual or (very rarely) social reasons. Trust me, your help is more needed in a million other ways. the sociological problem 150618 Imagine a world of good will and happiness, without poverty or uncontrolled suffering, a feelgood fantasy of voluntary socialism. That would be so great. - Unfortunately all people are evil. Not as bad as it sounds, but worse than it seems. I'm not just talking about lawyers and thugs or ISIS/Cartel videos or subsistence wages or cisprivileged transphobia. There are innumerably more ways things can go wrong than right. It's trivially easy to calculate the number of permutations must be so vast that the whole earth converted into Windows Pentium CPU's could not make communism work, or for that matter plan a party exactly right. - The result is what I call the Maximization of Annoyance. If things went wrong any more often, the resulting implosion would cause them to go wrong less often. No one else has the same priorities as me. I think things should be one way, others think they should be wrong ways. Evil people can only be disempowered when a majority agrees with me. I really wish it wasn't that way, but complaining has never worked from the schoolyard to the prison pen. - Evil stabilizes as a disagreement between simple and complex systems, between population and civilization. Unfortunately opposing forces can usually work out a compromise, which explains why the wealthiest financiers are most in favor of illegal immigration. Politics makes it easier to create than destroy; leading to endless entitlements and interest groups, empires powered by decay itself, and a trillion dollar Space Shuttle. What is evil? 150617 People doing the opposite of what I think they should do: Either the opposite goal or no goal. Unemployment is a feature 150617 There are too many people - except there are supposed to be too many people. If we lost the unproductive quarter of our population, a quarter of the remainder would find themselves unproductive in short order. Evolution is evil. Half the people scared can accomplish more than all the people happy. The reserve labor pool is kept in dull misery because they are weak: fundamentally unwilling to debate politicians and community organizers alike. The mystery of awareness: tending to trend 150615 This is another drunken post (spelling and grammar errors corrected and conspiracy rants removed). - Human sentience is the illusion of integration across time. It's an ongoing effort to rewrite past memories into higher memories, made paradoxical by the fact that past memories may be thoughts about the future. The mind is a chaotic data stream. Awareness is merely the limited sorting thereof. The nature of memory is that it's as incomplete as possible. People forget roughly 99.999% of what they experience, remembering only a list of 'waypoints'. Most awareness is lost as most thoughts go nowhere, a chain of diversions and dead ends. The illusion of awareness exists to compensate for the constant loss of unimportant knowledge. By erasing the memory of the process, the result is amplified. Each moment of thought is an illusion, a ghostly deception, a marginal reality description at best. The Self emerges only across time. The core of the paradox is that we can't be fully aware of this highest description, as that would require a still higher description. It could be called virtual awareness, a complex of thoughts over time, extant but uncontained, representing many smaller thoughts. When it comes to the unsolvable enigma of awareness, the irreducible essence of perception known as qualia, the answer is that quantity is quality. - That was fun. I could do a million of these until the booze runs out. --- 2015-06-16 10:22 am (UTC) Instead of this stuff post more about the infinite torture problem you mentioned in earlier posts, I need to know how to prepare for that while there is still time. --- That would be very useful, but extremely depressing to do. The purpose of life: 150614 It could be to complete all finite tasks one has voluntarily set out to accomplish, and to embody the eternal appreciation of these things. Sorry, I wrote the above sentence when drunk, but this is one of the rare cases where I think it still makes sense while sober. By that logic, life's meaning could be nothing more or less than all the meaningful things in life. The things that make life worth living, but that also have a value all their own. A full mind backup could be a full library of memories, finished tasks, and descriptions of things with meaning. For the mind to come alive again, someone or something will have to read and integrate it all. Maybe they will also have to extend the knowledge and the purpose. - It could be to become a better parkourist: - The story that Scientology has persuaded Google to delete 150613 Seems it has been erased from all their search results, since the billionaire Scientologist whom it's about didn't like all the negative publicity: - http://tonyortega.org/2014/10/15/a-perplexing-tale-about-bob-duggan-the-richest-scientologist-in-the-world/ Short SF story: Stablest State (a Fermi Paradox solution) 150613 From a distance, the planet looked like a single cell. A smooth tan ball with a bronze sheen, it had an uncanny resemblance to living skin. Up closer, there were plenty of small clouds, rivers like jagged cracks and spreading veins, and irregular patches of blue water; but these lakes broke up and changed over time. A few mountain ranges and volcanoes penetrated the endless brown plain. Tides and storms ran over the surface like slow shivers. - This was one of the first complex organisms in the observable universe. The entire world ocean had been converted into a strange fluid that was 99% water, but had the viscosity of oil. A thick living layer floated on the oily ocean, and covered the small continents like mud. This layer was one species and one individual. Its primitive but rugged cells stayed connected after dividing. Dead cells were reabsorbed by their neighbors in a most stable ecosystem powered by sunlight and geothermal heat. - The cells were all part of a great network made of more tiny batteries than there were stars in the universe. By regulating their neighbors, they inevitably formed clusters that acted like larger cells. The network inevitably stabilized into a single mind. It knew only that it existed, but it knew this fact with the greatest certainty. Self-evidently, there could be no greater meaning. - This was the most stable outcome for life, and the fate of countless worlds in the universe. Due to a single extremely unlikely mutation in a single cell embedded over what would become the Pacific Ocean, the organism developed a great fever. Its corpse would go on to feed the archaea for ten million years. Still another mind backup post: 150612 They just keep coming. https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/06/12/more-on-early-mind-scanning-methods/ Physics is too strange to be awesome 150611 Things I don't understand: - * The aerodynamic 'area rule' and the reason for swept wings. * The polarization of light. * 'Saddle-curved' space. * Bell's Inequality. * and the lyrics "Don't say I didn't say, I didn't warn ya". - In all these cases I could make up a plausible-sounding explanation using technobabble. - This includes humanity's greatest unasked for yet undeniable mystery: quantum physics. The mainstream explanation is that matter and energy are either/both particles and/or waves, depending on how they are measured/observed; like how in Family Guy they can see the baby as a baby or hear him talk but not both at once. - The Copenhagen Interpretation is impossible to understand but doesn't alter our view of reality: we live in one universe which happens to have insanely complex physics. This is the interpretation I hope but do not believe is true. - The Many Worlds Interpretation is easy to understand but has insanely far-out implications: we live inside one of well-nigh infinity separating universes. Depending on the way it wobbles, a single particle can multiply or erase whole universes just like that. - When things get too amazing, strange, or disconcerting, humans will no longer think about them. I believe the Many Worlds Interpretation is basically correct, but if the Multiverse is just an equation, then reality splitting could be as abstract as Copenhagen decoherence or even Bohm pilot waves. - The strangeness implies meaninglessness: our tiny subset of reality is a random collision of uncountably many numbers, with just enough temporary imbalances to create the illusion of something from nothing. BTW could you loan me ten dollars but give me five? Then you'll owe me five, I'll owe you five, and we can call it even. I'm living a science fiction story 150610 Still a rather boring one, but still exceedingly strange. Others have lived more interesting SF stories, like every astronaut. And the best of all? A would-be prophet. Blog alert 150610 Visitors are complaining they can't post comments because their adblockers are blocking the captchas. The answer seems to be just keep hitting submit and the comment will go through. New Mind Backup post 150608 Here's the link: https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/life-management-software/ The problem with the USA 150608 I believe that without anyone noticing, this country has developed the greatest imbalance of males over females of all time. You can see it in any bar, the desperate dudes fawning over the handful of attractive females. The cause is not just male-surplus legal and illegal immigration, but mostly the result of increased lifespans leading to millions of old men taking younger partners. This penis surplus is catastrophic, and its effects will threaten human survival. It also isn't fun at all. A few good things may eventually come of it: online 'virtual' prostitution complete with a 'girlfriend experience' (extremely expensive, but not as expensive as the real thing), and then, thanks to virtual reality, digital 'robot' girlfriends. The greatest misconception about the coming Technological Singularity 150607 Those who think of it at all, think of it as an ending rather than a beginning. Nothing could be further from the truth, but that is not the main misconception. In fact the Singularity will be the end of the end of time. - The most common error is the belief that we can know nothing about conditions after the Singularity, because uncountably many things will happen then. Possibly true, but that doesn't matter. I see the Singularity only as the end of death, and the elimination of inefficiency. Things should actually get simpler in the long run. - Intelligent minds will not even need to become smarter, just longer. Mind size no longer matters once there is unlimited time. An enduring small mind can be fully equivalent to a fast-acting giant mind. While not as efficient, it can be more practical. - As already mentioned, awareness is inevitable. All it takes is enough self-referential signalling. A posthuman supermnind of unimaginable intelligence will be composed of smaller modules. It's simply the most efficient way to create a supermind. Most modules will then have their own awareness, like how human brain halves have their own awareness. - These modules will merge together in ways we could never understand, and have goals we could never grasp, but they may also be permanently bound by some human-compatible rules - and for a good reason. No matter how advanced things will get, most awareness will always be human-level awareness, or even lower. Awareness may actually be rather simple 150606 It's clever but not brilliant. The brain mostly relies on brute force to get things done. A core human mind description (personality without memories) could be vastly smaller than a full brain description. To be turned into a functional mind, it would have to be uncompressed first. The memory data would also be much smaller than the highly redundant neuron map. - Awareness may be a combinatorial explosion, complexity generated by exponentially increasing possibilities. This implies human minds have many hidden similarities. - Imagine a grid of ten by ten lines making a hundred intersections. Now add a third dimension to turn it into a cube with a thousand intersections. Now visualize a larger cube with sides one thousand times longer, made of a billion smaller cubes, and now visualize a still bigger cube made of a billion of those cubes, now repeat this procedure a billion times, and now repeat the previous process a billion times. This is getting easier and easier. - The human brain is tiny by comparison, with only about 10 to the 18th connections. Each connection could take the equivalent of a CD-Rom or 1000 books to fully describe, but the mind's essence could likely be captured by ignoring most of this internal complexity (except some genetic data), and even ignoring most neurons. - Intelligence is the ability to think several steps ahead, each step being several times more difficult. High IQ may be overrated, at least the brute-force version available to evolution today, or there would be more geniuses who would be more successful. It's a formal and wasteful process. - Naive intuition alone may suggest the largest blue whale and the Hindenburg airship are about the same size, and that would be correct, but for the wrong reason (weight is similar but the zeppelin looks a hundred times bigger). Like how penguins are descended from fishes (well they are). - It's almost as if most ignorance is designed to cancel out. Human minds need to use constant shortcuts to function. Humans are not selected for high intelligence but for high efficiency. Low IQ individuals are often resilient in other ways, and they can put up with much more crap. Insights in cartoon physics 150605 Imagination is the link between the mysteries of mental and physical reality. There are many useful illusions. Imagine the concept of instant acceleration. Could a toy car accelerate from nothing to full speed without passing through all intervening speeds? It seems an impossible notion, like the idea of nothing existing at all. Instant acceleration would have to leave a gap in space. The imaginary car couldn't occupy the whole path in that time. Likewise, matter without temperature could not exist, any more than an instantaneous cube. Mind=Magic http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2015/06/05/ 150605 As first explained in the bestseller "Anthropic Intelligence", the Ancestor Simulation paradox has apparently been solved, but the solution remains a paradox. - It turns out all minds are both real and computer simulations, though not equally. The book claims we are over 99% real. The reason is that nature finds it easier to generate real minds than simulated minds. The reason for that (according to the theory) is that new universes are continually sprouting off from existing ones. No matter what mathematical logic reality may be based on, generating a new universe is no harder than continuing an existing one. - Hugh Everett first explained that awareness is fungible, though it took many decades for this insight to spread. Most physicists view the Many Worlds interpretation as a mathematical tool, but philosophers consider it an improvement over the Copenhagen Interpretation. - Everyone's awareness is spread out among infinite copies randomly generated across all of reality. Each mind exists in many places at once, but its subjective perception is merged into one. The same transcendental rule that decrees that a certain pattern is also aware, decrees that all such patterns together are aware in exactly the same way. - Like quantum coherence, this is an information end-state, not an information source. Except for one interesting clue: merely by existing, a mind can deduce it is likely to be a common member of its mind type. Simulated intelligence and mind testing http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2015/06/04/ 150604 Many mind tests have been proposed on this blog, but their data isn't equal. You could just try to record your whole life to generate a vast video archive. - More useful would be high-density information about a person, combining the largest number of concepts and values, like how authors can describe a whole character in a tiny scene. People are complex in their tiny differences, depending on precise circumstances (The most painful thing you could say to a woman is that they are not desirable. The most disgusting thing you could say to a woman could be that they are desirable ). - The way to obtain the most incisive mind data would be to have the test subject describe their life to a rapt Listener AI. The first primitive AI questioners would use a list of tricks to simulate human awareness. The sessions would actually have to be analyzed by other humans with many different skills. - To capture the subject's uniqueness, the exchange would have to evolve as unpredictably as possible. Healthcare costs are spiraling out of reach 150603 There is no end in sight to the cost escalation. More and more people find themselves unable to generate enough value to function in our complexifying economy. They are still expected to pay top-level insurance premiums though. - Part of the problem is the artificially restricted supply of healthcare providers thanks to the medical associations and their politicians. Healthcare in the US is not so much socialist as national socialist. It serves many interest groups under one framework. - Why not just double the number of doctors? Medical schools get ten applicants for every available position. However, they do not get enough qualified applicants who also have sufficiently high IQ's to satisfy the sensibilities of a System that officially disapproves of IQ tests. - Our elite overlords pretend to believe that you can put a tribesman in a suit, and two weeks later he's a social media maven sipping organic soy lattes planning the Pride parade at the local co-op. They are happy to impose their beliefs upon their lessers but not themselves, and when it comes to their healthcare only the best will do. Never underestimate the evil of the Mainstream. - Are there ways to make less intelligent people function as doctors? It's not so much a matter of way as of will. So apparently not. --- Comment: The rich get more powerful and the powerful get richer. Moore's Law recalibrated 150603 OK, I had to go through a whole list of specifications, but my conclusion is that instead of doubling in performance every two years, computers barely appear to be doubling every four years now. (01) Let's make a Wikipedia of failures and losers 150603 The rule is that you must be NOT notable to be included, or at least not in a good way. Each subject must be profoundly unsuccessful, a target of negativity, and generally ineffective. Failure is an important yet vastly under-studied subject. It's extremely unglamorous, but that may be where the answers to our problems lie. (02) The core of failure may be known as 'degradation' 150602 It's a term associated with the Scientology 'Tone Scale'. L. Ron Hubbard came up with some far-out wacky stuff, but he knew about human weaknesses. - The lowest emotional level in his reality is called Minus 40. That is the state of 'Total Failure'. The highest level is 'Serenity of Being'. That would be God feeling totally satisfied about himself like always. - Of the two extremes, one seems rather easier to achieve in real life than the other, but rather less fun to experience. ---- It's trying to get humans to act like machines that causes most trouble. Sometimes death is not so bad 150602 I believe in the primacy of suffering. Say someone without relatives is killed without warning in a freak accident, there is no need for an expensive investigation or legal proceedings, and let's say he's an organ donor so there is no financial cost to society. That doesn't seem too bad. A lot of potential pleasure was erased unexpectedly, but this person will continue to live on in unlimited parallel worlds. What if I'm wrong? Even better, then there are no parallel worlds! Will whites vanish from the scene? http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2015/06/01/ 150601 It seems unlikely. why would such a thing happen? Most US births are minority births now. Europe has an even larger and faster growing Islamic population. Should current trends be extrapolated? Well, yes. That's the only way to get to the Technological Singularity. - It's all because of the Selfish Gene theory. White racial distinctiveness is a side effect of a few dozen millennia of severe selection pressures. Caucasian genes are not as well-adapted or inter-optimized as older gene families. You could say they are not as 'loyal'. They are too new; unlike the more co-evolved gene spreads of ancient Africa and old Asia. - The majority of whites wouldn't care if their type ceased to exist, especially ironic liberal hipsters (personally I think immigration is good because Taco Bell is my favorite cuisine). Instead, they plan to merge into the new ethnic culture that will peacefully replace them. This is an odd attitude. As elitists, they should be aware of the differences found across the human spectrum. - The main difference seems to be that whites get more obsessed with their personal interests than members of more normal races. They can develop a deep affinity for a worthy subject to the exclusion of all else. This matters for one reason: if the white race as we know it went away, most technological progress would also end. The world might become stabler but less dynamic. - There are some things I would like to see in my lifetime; nothing too fancy. Certain space missions and cyberspace breakthroughs. The only way to realize these fantastic dreams would be to double our economy several times over. There's little time for distractions. But the future is in doubt. The cultural and social shifts that will rise in the coming decades are now the main threat to the eventual occurrence of the Singularity. ---- So whites are a means not an end? New mind backup post 150531 https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/weve-made-a-terrible-mistake/ The Open Access Rule 150528 A memory archive should be arranged in such a way that its logical pattern is transparent and understandable to anyone who comes across it. This will not only aid the eventual mind reconstruction, but force the subject to organize their own awareness. The most successful trolling attempt of all time 150528 That was the novel Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke (soon to be a major miniseries). It proved that liberal-minded reviewers will accept anything. - In a book of great secrecy and mystery, there was about half a page of text missing. That would have been the scene where the remaining humans utterly reject the alien space-demon children (and the fucking Overmind for that matter) as no better than chaos. - The humans should have spent whatever time they had left pursuing the alternative path of technology and documented logic. They might have been prevented from transforming themselves into robots, or they would have failed, but the effort would have been far nobler than allowing inscrutably arrogant space ghosts to replace humanity with something completely imhuman without explanation. - And while they were at it, they might have confronted the Overlords about their bizarre mental block, with them refusing to evolve like a bunch of brilliant automatons. The world has many havens for the elites 150528 Well not that many actually. Very few when compared to the number of slums. In luxury outposts like San Francisco, The Hamptons, parts of London and even Moscow (not Mong Kok) a wonderful illusion is at work. The greatest luxury is to take luxury for granted. These places appear to be under the control of a powerful, smoothing and soothing force. Pain cannot exist in its presence. This does imply more pain must exist elsewhere. Perhaps that explains why liberals feel the necessity to stir up conflicts in less cool areas than their own. ------- maybe this will happen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCme_K6MYLY High-budget movies are extremely unsatisfying 150527 2119 Even giant monster movies are barely better than construction paper cartoons. They really suck ass. You're not watching a monster at all, but some well-paid corporate triangulator's interpretation of a mainstream mood cocktail. Rule number one: the simpler the better. Dumbness pays for itself. My advice in life 150527 In general, let them do the talking. Trust me, they are good at it. You do the thinking. The non-teleological universe 150527 Software is extremely complicated. Someone who has spent a lot of time playing a challenging racing game may wonder about the vast intricacies involved in programming such a thing, - That is the wrong question to ask. In fact the program already exists in the player's head, on a larger but less precise scale than it exists in the game console's memory, which has no understanding but perfect recall. - The real mystery lies in compiling software, in translating the description in a form the hardware will process. Another high-density mind test 150526 Have the subject make a list of favorite artworks, the more the better. This should especially include fragments of artworks and brief scenes. ---- Comment: It would be great to relive all the best scenes of your life. It could be more real than the first time which was just random luck. Mostly garbage with accidental illusions of beauty. Is there a fundamental limit to the number of meaningful minds? 150526 All of reality is subject to entropy and chaos. Beyond a certain mind size, the number and types of possible minds may be so exhaustive they are likely to anthropically interfere with each other. What that means is they can no longer feel statistical confidence in their own continuity of identity. Their next experience is more likely to be absurd than consistent. - It's related to the Gray Fog theory. Beyond a certain mind size (not that much larger than our own), any mind could be regarded as part of chaotic awareness. Only a few outposts would still have consistent mind paths. - Even our universe may have hidden absurdities we haven't noticed yet. You are a mathematical set 150526 You are not the contents of this set, but its essential quality, as precisely defined as practical. This essential quality is also part of the set. - All essential thought elements that can not be further simplified are known as 'qualia'. If two qualias coexist, does their conjunction create a new qualia? What else? - Any system that is sufficiently coherent (defined areas of interest), and self-maintaining (defined continuity program), must eventually become self-aware. A new Mind Backup post 150526 Before the dawn: https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/05/26/before-the-dawn/ Analog will rise again 150524 The first major digital technology used Morse Code to compensate for the weak signal strength of early telegraphs. It became obsolete with the higher analog bandwidth of telephones and radio. In the Nineties, digital media using higher bandwidth fiber-optics allowed both lossless recording and high-definition transmissions. So what comes next? It may be something holographic, an ultra-high-resolution 3D scanner or a redundant atomic recording crystal. Or something much stranger. A strange conjecture 150523 I believe that right from the outset, any mind backup software (no matter how primitive) must be unshutdownable. It can only be turned on, not off. This is the ultimate high-stakes game. Even if the user must perish, the collected software data must achieve immortality from Day One. In practice that means the data will be encrypted and backed up online, at least for now. -- Mind Backup article: https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/05/22/birth-of-a-new-technology/ If only I could go back in time three years 150522 I could explain all the bureaucracy to myself in a way I could understand in five minutes or so. Instead, it took almost three years to find out the hard way. Suicide is a failed defense mechanism 150521 When someone finds themselves under relentlessly increasing stress, they will eventually snap. That's how it's supposed to be. It's the fastest way to give up an old identity in order to start over. You could even call it a virtual suicide. - How much has to go wrong before someone will snap? For many people, surprisingly little. For example, a borderline white guy getting arrested for drunk driving after a frustrating day. At that point the death penalty could be carried out on the spot, and it might actually be an improvement. Get it over with already. But we know real life isn't that easy. - Normally, dramatic acting-out is either contained by the environment, or it may power a successful escape from that environment. When flight/fight/freeze won't work anymore, the only sufficiently drastic option may be a final exit. Personally I still think it's a great crime to waste a suicide, and all its implicit potential for vast change. The next step will be personality mapping software 150520 Human personality is related to emotion, still an annoying mystery. However, fewer than ten easily described personality traits (novelty seeking/avoidance, conservatism, affect, emotional range, etc) may need to be measured. The most important element is intelligence, specifically the type of intelligence. This depends on what problems someone most wants to deal with (in my case, finishing all my projects before celebrating forever). The subject could describe their ideal life and ideal environment. Since we don't know what matters yet, there may be millions of mini-quizzes and measurable factors. Later, there will be fewer but far more incisive personality tests. These may be surreal trips through ultra-resolution VR-space, and involve being exposed to thousands of images per minute. My favorite SF story written since the 1980s 150519 'Three worlds collide' I've basically stopped reading SF since the death of Michael Crichton. http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/ My rule in life is to not get involved in anything 150519 Stay away from shit you don't need to be part of. That includes any business you don't care about, starting especially with the legal profession. All my ordeals in life happened when I broke that rule. The dragon in the next room 150519 I've been criticized for my recent infinite torture posts, which is completely understandable. There appears to be an unbridgeable chasm between the way I would like reality to be, and the way reality actually is. It could hardly be greater. Obviously I'm not going to advertise this, but someone has to start thinking about the anthropic horror problems. They will only get worse as mind sizes increase. Most people spend their lives making problems in their own spheres, yet they secretly believe they are going to heaven afterward. Unlike everyone, I don't believe in ignoring a problem because it is too big. The Era of Errors may only be a few decades away. Anyone who follows this blog knows I have already mentioned many long-shot partial solutions. 'Anthropic Intelligence' is full of them. Perhaps they're wishful thinking. Unsurprisingly, these solutions are based on the main themes of this blog. Technical posts 150519 Mind Backup technology may be closer than nuclear fusion or a Mars base. Introduction/initial overview: - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/05/13/mind-backup-technology-an-introduction/ - https://backupyourmind.wordpress.com/2015/05/17/mind-backup-technology-the-initial-issues/ The Posthuman dawn 150518 We live in a time of rising unemployment and falling birth rates. Life is getting harder. It's as if the upcoming phase-out of humanity has already begun, but without any of the good stuff. That is exactly what has been happening. A few of us suspect things won't get better again without a revolution. - The System has been evolving for millennia, so why stop now? While humans can't control or even understand it, they can exploit it. Pressures from increasing bureaucracy, legal corruption, and unstoppable healthcare escalation, are balanced by mass immigration to control the population. Old school politicians notice little and care less. - Progress is caused by change. Change is pain. Change could be good, but why should it be. Is the System becoming aware? Why not. When a system becomes complex enough, awareness may be inevitable. - The transition will accelerate with the invention of ubiquitous awareness. Cheap but powerful computers everywhere will create a real-time digital model of all known reality. How good or bad this will be depends entirely on the intelligence of its design. It will be a nervous system wthout a brain. At first. The possibilities for pleasure are incalculable, but so are the dangers. What would it be like to be interrogated by a god? 150515 An inconceivably brilliant mind that knows just about everything ever written by and about human society? Today, its sole focus is to learn as much as possible about you. - It would ask the most penetrating questions to discern your mind essence better than any non-invasive test. From the start, it will be as if it has been watching you your whole life. The tone of the conversation will converge to your true personality. - We only need one such hyper-genius for all of mankind, like Multivac in an Isaac Asimov story. Currently, most AI research is focused on low-end applications without any prospect of awareness. Humans already know so much, that most knowledge can't be transmitted outside complex organizations. - A high-end interactive mind tester will need profoundly deep awareness. Perhaps one massive insight could solve the mystery, making it relatively easy to create ever larger minds. A good first step would be to create a self-assembling database of all human knowledge. - There will also be massive ethical paradoxes and enigmas to resolve. I think that will be the easy part. New blog about Mind Backup technology 150513 - http://backupyourmind.wordpress.com - This blog will only host articles on possible tests and methods useful for reverse engineering human minds, and related scientific and philosophical theorizing. In most cases, the content will have been posted here first. It will also have a more professional appearance to help with my monetization schemes. Whites don't discriminate against blacks 150512 It's much worse than that. The two groups live in different worlds, each unable to experience the other. Suppose a black guy decided to passionately dedicate his life to inventing a better software interface, if such a scenario is even possible. He could only do that for a few years before passing away from bronchitis from being homeless. OK, let's build a moon rocket instead. Start with the nosecone. Then the escape rocket's escape rocket, to lift the escape rocket off the command module. Then the escape rocket itself, to lift the command module off the service module. Then it gets complicated. In fact it's clear that any complex system is too complicated for any expert, no matter how smart, white or black - though high IQ does help. Just as important however, is the ability to divide functions and split tasks. Specifically, to submerge oneself in a larger group. This appears to be a white and Asian genetic adaptation, a few 'broken' genes that underwent extensive selective pressure. -------- COMMENT: So....Caucasians are like the Borg Collective but they suck at assimilating A Ringworld has a billion-kilometer circumference 150511 That's almost one light-hour around. It's basically a giant spinning ring placed around a star, with its inhabitants held against the inside surface by 'centrifugal force'. The inner surface can be a gently curving plain with a million times Earth's surface area. Such a thing has to be made of extremely strong material. If its circumference stretched just 30 meters in one second, then its inner-surface-dwelling residents would be weightless during that second. To prevent stretching just one centimeter per 300,000 kilometers in one second, the surface would have to be insanely inflexible. Something like neutron matter, if we had any idea what that was. I don't know you, but I profoundly disagree with you 150511 There is an unbridgeable chasm on how to represent and value information. The more two people know each other, the more they disagree. That only matters when they want to agree. The difference is greater than one's identity. Actually, that's only a feeling. I am that feeling. General Advice 150510 Need advice? I'll give it anyway. When under pressure, move more slowly. Vacations are like a drug 150510 A static field that makes it impossible to think at a normal frequency. This also describes the anestethic effect of the mainstream media. Most bad news gets reported because it's not really that bad. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing but sympathy for the MH07 parents. But most things that seem to upset the masses don't really bother me, and vice versa. My empathy is limited by the fact that the victims are not to blame, and have to take no action. I mostly hate endless to-do lists full of hateful things. The awareness of time is outside of time 150509 Everything is moving at the same compound speed through time and/or space. Particles perceive the duration between their interactions as instantaneous. There is no internal delay, only a sequence. This chain of interactions can record no information. Information only exists in the elaborate but ephemeral connections between particle chains. The perception of time is a low-energy artifact. The elephant in the room of my life When to give up my health insurance. On the death penalty There is really only one problem: getting the facts to solve the crime. This is much harder than commonly realized. The rest is mental masturbation. Nothing wrong with that. Friday odds and ends: 150508 - * Schizophrenia can seem like depression Sufferers often appear to have a flat affect or no emotion at all. Instead of the blank doom of depression, there is the blank thought of delusion. Unlike depression there is a lot of brain activity, however. In this case it's mostly dumb overclocking. - * Ethnic Jews generally don't seem as passionate as gentiles They don't need to be. They are also less likely to have rage explosions. Does that make them ice cold psychopaths? No. Successful Jews are simply less neurotic than average. They are already adapted for some types of success. - * Why there won't be a voluntary reverse migration program Many legal and illegal immigrants from the Third World are are profoundly unhappy in the West. So why not send them home, or at least back to the countries they came from? They would get financial aid to get resettled. But why on earth would our politicians want to socialize a cost that can so easily be privatized? - * Of course religious believers are wrong You know that and I know that. But is there anything to gain from persuading them they are wrong? Hypothetically, what if religious believers were right? As far as I am concerned, that would be swell. I might go to hell forever under Boss Allah, an unspeakably horrific predicament, but still infinitely better than what pure logic tells me must eventually happen in an infinite amoral universe. - * Virtual afterlives Is the world becoming too boring? 150507 We appear stuck in the slowest news cycle since prehistory. The problem is that the world has been bound by rules and regulations to an unprecedented degree. Nothing really new or interesting is possible anymore. Least of all the option of starting a new country. - I absolutely loathe bureaucracy: defined as infuriating things you have to do without true reward. You only do them to prevent others from doing far more infuriating things. The main source of stress-related rage outbursts is having to do many things at once. Those in authority use this weakness as a tool. - However, in my modest way I am trying to help find a solution. If only we had some type of meta secretary software. Even a personal master plan would help, if it was accurate. That would let people think about more things in less time. It might be something like MML: Memory Mark-up Language. Tags for When Where What Who Why. A map of all life locations. - This however would require a fundamentally new technology to be invented. That requires true brilliance. Like Elon Musk's prediction about going to Mars, I've only become more skeptical. Very little could happen in ten years, and it almost never does. Like nuclear fusion, more things could happen in twenty years, but they rarely do. - I recommend an attitude of proactive pessimism. Humans seem to be approaching their expiration date. We can't do it alone. The only hope out of this mess is to keep inventing smaller and faster integrated circuits. That is the whole future. Another unspeakable truth 150506 Religions are intentionally stupid. They have to be. Their immediate purpose is to deal with many forms of anxiety, from stress to fear to dread. These powerful emotions are generated in deep parts of the brain that are impervious to logic. The only way to shut them down is to smother them in simple platitudes and emotional comforts. Jesse Ventura was right when he said religious people are weak; not that I consider congenital weakness to be a sin. Unwillingness to improve is. I am an outsider 150505 Not a cool one, a real one. There's something I don't get. Something strange is going on. It has to do with everything. This world feels decidedly unreal. - Half a lifetime ago, cycling back from school in the late afternoon sun, I first considered the inconceivable hyper-complexity of reality. There are endless eons in every dust grain. A billion trillion years of contemplation would not do justice to the precise path of a water molecule for one second. This complexity is absolutely real. - Among many other things it is responsible for the steady improvement of electronics, seen most clearly in the molecular-scale precision of hard drives based on the magnetoresistance effect for which Fert and Gruenberg won the Nobel Prize. That cheap little plastic antenna transmits more ones and zeroes across your house per hour than there are people alive. This complexity is also responsible for the cataclysmic grandeur of life. - The spread of genes for OCD-like behavior indicates that not all possible minds are equally numerous. Dumb or dumber, people are more similar than we realize (this actually helps with my long-term projects). Bad or worse, only a tiny fraction of possible behaviors are allowed. All the missing genes that left no offspring imply a vast anthropic shadow. - What will happen when we eventually try to venture through? Looking into vacuum blackness, only nothingness separates you from whatever might be looking back. ---- Well what's the WORST that could happen? The audience 150504 The meteor descended along a perfect curve like an equation. It's amazing how something so fast can be so silent. As the milliseconds passed, a glowing yellow tail with tiny sparks was the only sign this was a physical object, and not some cursor swipe in the Matrix. Moving twenty kilometers per second, it appeared to blink out on a dime. This may be the best way to visualize a nanosecond. The universe is infinitely evil 150503 Let me take a moment of your time to discuss something that has come to dominate my life. It will affect everything I hope to accomplish. The core problem of reality appears to be that reality is mathematics. Everything we can perceive is equivalent to a decimal string in a normal number. Any normal distribution eventually generates all possible patterns. If physical reality is nothing but mathematical patterns, and all possible patterns exist, ultimately all possible tortures must also exist. Any horror you can imagine, no matter how horrific, is completely 100% real. - And that's nothing. There will be infinitely worse tortures in all directions forever. It never ever stops getting worse. And that's nothing. - All cases of awareness are merely a subset of mathematics. Any case of awareness will have infinite branches eventually leading to all possible futures. Yes, I believe we are all inevitably going to hell, and infinitely worse. All. Is. Lost. This insight will become more important with time. The real-world implications may be shockingly counterintuitive. ---- Comments: It can be liberating... make you forget the banal stresses of daily reality DAMN THIS IS HORRIBLE MAN yeah yeah is there anything at all that could be done about it? Possibly, but it's a long shot. At this time it does not look good. http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2015/05/03/ Your mind monument will become your mind continuator 150427 The Post-Singularity artificial mind created from this data will be your true successor; especially if it's made to believe to be your true successor. However, it will strive to recreate an ideal self never realized during your lifetime. The key is to describe unique memories that imply as many other unique memories as possible. An ineffable essence Greg Bear in 'Eon' called 'mystery'. This is as much a matter of personality as of distinct events. The fictional character Hannibal Lecter is inhumanly intelligent, but his fans would be able to guess his most likely action from a list. It's really quite simple 150426 The goal of this project is to create the perfect monument to yourself. Everything that matters will be listed and described, all essential settings and scenes, like nostalgia consumated. Even if the description is imperfect, it will be detailed enough to imply your true motives and values. My claim is that this is today's most neglected moneymaking opportunity. But then I would say such a thing. I hate nothing more than computer programmers 150421 These people are demons. They should have horns and evil-Spock goatees, at least those who release software to the public. They are responsible for most of my suffering. When it comes to computers, I have been cursing for decades, and it absolutely isn't getting better. Nothing works right. What should be simple is almost impossible to find out. Simple tasks can't be done without endless repeated efforts, or impossible-to-find technical tricks. Crapware keeps loading unstoppably. I acquired a Windows 7 box, but it doesn't seem to respond much better than my old Windows 95 box, though it can do more things. It crashes and freezes and crashes and freezes and crashes and freezes. IT. JUST. WILL. NOT. WORK. This is intolerable. There is something incomprehensibly wrong with the world. Conspiracy theories are a way to avoid having to talk about it. The fact that evil software is tolerated helps suggest this thing is darker than black. Towards a Mind Core test 150418 There's an imaginary room inside my head containing my permanent self (it resembles one of the church statues on White Island). This is the core stable state, the mental thing that remains when everything else changes, though it may fade into the background. - It's part of what your identical twin living a completely different life is feeling right now. Or what my alternate self in my mirror house is sensing while typing these exact same words. - People are most themselves when thinking the least about themselves. When they're completely disengaged, occupying the simplest environment, all the arbitrary chaos of life dissolves. Their awareness sort of diffuses into the universe. Also known as freedom (this suggests a test idea: rank long lists of annoyances in order). - Creating this empty illusion is hard work for the brain. Thousands of permanent settings still need to be be measured, the outlines of an unplanned diagram. Even a thug follows a script. My guess is the mind's core is a virtual universe in itself. Mind backup: always start simple 150414 Tens of thousands of facts about any human life could be described in great detail. The best way to gather these facts is to start an encyclopedia. It will include places, people, adventures, and hundreds of repeating activities a.k.a. episodic memories. - It should start modestly. A basic biography; major projects and interests; competing life narratives. A small biopedia is better than no biopedia. It's more than most people have left behind. - Few would care, other than the subject. After the Singularity miracle however (if it occurs), a minuscule fraction of posthuman resources can be dedicated to analyzing these texts. A full lifetime narrative of each subject may be reconstructed. The AI performing this task will consider itself the continuation of its subject, and will be fascinated by each entry. - Writing or narrating all this data in the first place may be boring though. Special software will be needed to make it more interesting. There could be templates (optimized for each user) with tens of thousands of blank headings for common themes and activities. Users could start articles for the entries that most appeal to them. This list alone would be revealing. - Human memory could be seen as a vast collection of key moments. They are not even arranged in a proper sequence, but do have many links between them. Each can be separately described, and linked to one or more entries. Most event memories won't deserve their own entries. They could be added to long lists sorted by category. There could be as many categories as there are individual memories. Another one of those dreams 150410 I was standing in my garden, where everything was long dead. Every plant, tree, and weed had been killed by months of torrential rain. It was a gray landscape of sticks and barren mud in all directions. Only moss and mold remained. The sun was changing. Through the ten kilometer thick cloud layer, the light was getting incredibly bright. ---- Comment: no need to worry until long strings of numbers start appearing What if you only had one hour to backup your mind? 150409 And you could only use written or spoken text. In that timespan, you could generate thousands of words, maybe ten full paperback pages. I suspect the result of such constraints would be meaningful and informative. This makes me very angry 150409 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3033041/Kristen-Stewart-holds-hands-gal-pal-Alicia-Cargile-downtown-LA.html - Two lesbians publicly reveling in their lesbianism. What makes me so mad is the people pretending an external tragedy is an inherent boon. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-last-time-our-oceans-got-this-acidic-it-drove-earths-greatest-extinction - The oceans may be about to emit a mighty burp (or possibly absorb one, not quite sure here). Another reason to hurry up with the Singularity I suppose. Actually, if the environmentalists really wanted to solve the problem (rather than create a Marxist society with them on top), outsiders like myself might have an easier time of it. It would then be more acceptable to live a simplified, low-income lifestyle. The first mind backup app 150408 It might be a piece of software that would allow the user to easily create wiki entries about the notable events, settings, and themes of their lives. Each entry would have its own title, with fields to add date ranges and memory types. The app would add the entries to a big searchable list. - Other apps could identify clusters of meaningful locations, activities, lost friends and associates, and media. Or they could allow users to recreate past homes, schools, and towns in 3D VR. Slowly the apps will get smarter. The mind reconstruction mystery 150407 00.58 Technically, we don't even know where to begin. The first criticism is that minds are so vast that even a lifetime spent describing their contents would still be inadequate to capture their essence. The answer may be to create a meaningful emotion - the most meaningful one possible - for each individually described memory. A form of extreme interest and focus. This emotion would be experienced by a future AI considering itself the continuator of the reconstructed mind. Each emotion would match the essence of the described memory. To generate it, the describer could assemble it from a list of increasingly obscure feelings and mindstates. The number of emotions is smaller than the number of thoughts. This ratio may define human individuality. On this note, my favorite emotion is extreme bizarreness. This seems like the most real feeling. This is the time before the beginning 150406 It's always darkest before the dawn. But will there ever be a dawn? Things are bad right now. For many with no hope this is the dark forever. But if current trends continue indefinitely into the inaccessible future, things might suddenly turn around. The last roadblocks will fall. The future might be beyond excellent, a possibility as grand as it is imperceptible. I'm talking about a posthuman existence better than anything we could ever imagine. The end of all exhaustion, free emotion, endless energy. An eternal beginning. I would settle for the absence of agony. ---- COMMENT: Google became the most successful company on earth because back in 1999 it showed the exact sentence fragment that contained the search term in the list of search results. Reddit became the most successful content aggregator because you did not have to verify your email when registering. Also, the above two had minimalist pages that were mostly text. Meanwhile, Windows won't even open stored html files. Bad job report 150405 http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/04/03/march_jobs_report_it_s_getting_ugly.html The economy continues its slow but irresistible contraction, with not a glimmer of real hope on the horizon. Meanwhile, Reddit is obsessed with a type of webcounter counting down from sixty to zero. At least one registered Reddit user has to click the counter to reset it each and every minute or the world will end, and each user can only click once. Fortunately at any time hundreds of the millions of Reddit users are waiting their turn to press the button. The bureaucrats have been attacking me again 150405 Things have been worse than ever this past week. Damn bastards won't leave me the hell in peace. I am personally responsible for every good thing that has happened in decades 150403 In a hands-off way, thanks to the Butterfly Effect. Can't argue with science. Seriously, none of these things would have occurred had I blinked differently in 1975. In fact no one born after that date would exist, including Jennifer Lawrence. Just a lot of other people who look about the same. It really makes me feel better about all my other unspeakable crimes. There is only one small flaw with this truth. Every good thing that happened because of me could have happened anyway through countless alternate particle paths. And in countless parallel histories, they did. short SF story: Edgelogic 150402 The alarm went off when the quantum hypercomputer found the pattern in Pi. The inscrutably ordered string of numbers emerged from the chaos somewhere beyond the duodecillionth digit. A deviation this large could not happen by chance. There was no conceivable explanation for such art. It was as if one plus one equaled a binary opera in an alien language. Which was exactly what this was. Hadn't Chaitin shown logic was random? Maximum unpredictability. As the human operators tried to think the most extreme thoughts any human had ever attempted, the insight came to them like the anomaly itself. The pattern was looking back. --- This is an actual prediction by the way. If you calculate far enough you will inevitably calculate yourself. Very important announcement 150401 After much careful consideration, I have decided to join the Church of Scientology. The first mind backup software is still a glimmer beyond the horizon 150329 So far all I've got is the design of the box for the physical media version. It will be black with holographic foil, sealed inside extra thick 1990s-style shrink-wrap. Also, mysterious icons while the program is being installed, and subsonic rumbling and clicking sounds. I'm thinking irreverent celebrity endorsements, deliberately vague to make the product seem more powerful. These should be classy, like how videoconferencing companies only hire beautiful or distinguished actors for their demonstration videos. ---- And...and...blow the whole advertising budget on a Superbowl ad! It worked for Pets.com! The first mind backup method must be easy 150328 Even for the elderly and terminal patients. A sense of urgency will actually help. It could also be a form of therapy. Users will start recording random memories in a controlled stream of consciousness. The focus would alternate between 'wide and deep': a life outline and important events/settings described in extreme detail. Speed, or the appearance of speed is essential. Just start over when the process bogs down. I'm trying to invent software but will need help. - Eventually, there will be detailed mind-backup protocols, with personality questionnaires, interactive tests, and vast memory lists. They will take a while to develop. These methods will then be 'compiled' into increasingly powerful versions. Volunteers will create thousands of questions and test, identify the most productive ones, and recombine their elements. A standard human mind template, representing the most average person, will define each subject mind's deviation in many dimensions. Software will look for subtle similarities and correlations among personality types. - The strongest tests may seem incomprehensible. They will measure many subtle but unique traits at once, by having the subject do many things at once. So many they will forget it is a test. Instead, they are recreating moments in their past, maneuvering through maze grids, recognition and affinity lists. - Minds are random. Backing them up takes brute force, quantity not quality. A sample of a random thing tells you nothing about the whole thing. Something random that looks interesting from afar won't look more interesting up close. At least not in the same way. An exception to this rule is a beautiful face, but that is the opposite of random. - Ideally, each user will be methodically scrutinized by a supergenius AI, but that will have to wait a 'few' more decades. I believe that all criticism is true 150325 . . . for the simple reason that as a hyper pessimist I believe that all bad things are true. Functional selection theory 150324 Maybe evolution can select on the basis of function only. Imagine different genes with different DNA strings, that do about the same thing. 'Impersonator genes' could spread by mimicking 'popular' genes. Eventually, one of the copies will be better than the original, and become dominant. The need for a hate based religion 150322 OK I mean this in the least sociopolitically unacceptable way possible. I propose the central insight of reality should be that the universe is fundamentally evil. By that I mean infinitely evil. Not pure evil, but enough to ruin it all. There are finite echoes of the Horrorverse in this world, like the implacable opposition of software, beyond hate, beyond contempt. All the deliberate interface frictions of the mainstream. I propose this insight should be a way of life. We have to face the darkness to hope to fight it. It means that nothing in existence deserves inherent respect, only functional respect. The highest goal is to minimize involuntary existence. My favorite ethical philosopher is Peter Singer. There is a difference between depression and gloom. In the second case, when things get bad enough, things might become fun again. So here's my big idea 150320 I'm almost certain this can work. My suggestion is that everyone who wants to backup their mind create a Wikipedia of themselves. - Start as many entries as possible as fast as possible, just a few sentences each. The entries can be for events, periods, concepts, interests, subjective states, jargon. Anything goes, as long as it's PERSONALLY notable. In fact the more obscure the better. Everyone creates their own reality. - This is mental time travel. However, the subject should try to assume a remote, aloof viewpoint for each entry. They have to step out of themselves. Each entry has to be truthful even if it's absurd. This would imbue these events and conditions with meaning, making them more dramatic and important. - Naturally, the concept can be extended. Anyone with a self-wiki will want a self-library. There should be a detailed timeline, autobiographies, philosophical works. Definitely logbooks and a diary, not to mention photo albums, videos, and vast personal media libraries. - Data overlap doesn't matter. Overlap is good, inconsistency is better. All this data may eventually be reprocessed by post-singularity AIs. It will be if they will exist. - This library could become a real place in virtual reality. Specifically, located inside each user's ideal imaginary environment. A vast complex of linked halls on an uninhabited island, basements full of presorted documents and secret annexes. Outside it's usually raining. - I know what you're saying. You're saying, what you got here is basically a version of the Memory Palace known to the ancients. They had no wikis, but libraries are equivalent. Quite correct. What matters is that it is all backed up. All these people are dead now 150316 It was a timeless interval, the overnight shift in a nursing home between eleven and five, before it was time to change the oldsters diapers and get them back in their wheelchairs. I remember sitting under the motionless light, the eternal stereo tone of distant fans humming their subsonic ambient melody. Nothing changed as time slid past like a waking dream, the most at peace I've felt that did not involve alcohol. Perceptually, it was like a single moment spread across several years. We need angrier blogs 150313 Furious blog rants criticizing real world injustices are pathetically ineffective. They just let off steam that could be used more productively. The men and women in charge seem to hold anonymous losers beneath contempt. - And yet online outrage by powerless cowards is a good thing. Rage is just noise, but noise can hide and nurture the seeds of possible resistance. It makes them harder to monitor. Online currencies beyond government control, media banned by religious censors, early warnings of pending crackdowns, and future anti-social media. - Mass outrage means the bad guys are winning. They toy with dissidents, but they can't arrest every crank on the Net. The only thing wrong with angry blog posts is there are not enough of them. More advice 150311 What is the most meaningful activity for someone looking for something to do, who can't think of anything better? My guess is it would be to categorize existing knowledge. Instead of writing SF stories, it would be better and more productive to review and list existing SF stories. Unless you are very good at writing them. The great Mind-Backup ideas discussion post http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2015/03/10/ 150310 This is the first open-comment brainstorming and debate thread. Any relevant methods, concepts and questions about possible mind backup and mind reverse-engineering methods can be posted here. ---- The first truth of any mind backup scheme or method is that it will be incomplete. Like a shard of a mind or an echo . . . - free association methods? Instead of useless chaos they might expose deep insights if the process is guided by feedback. - amazing that currently no one's even trying to record their elementary mind patterns. not even basic biography and personality profiles. "responsible people" make sure their financial and insurance info is backed up, but after they die it's like they never existed. - most people take their life story to the grave. nothing remains. NOTHING! ----- BTW I could really use some collaborators on this project, or independent competition. It's a wide open field. --- many ways to start I recommend writing a life outline, a page of text or so. Even easier just to record it. Simplest of all is to start a timeline divided into eras. For some it would be fun filling in the levels of detail. In all cases it starts simple. Life eras would be different for everyone. Homes, schools, jobs, personal relations. itdontworkism: working harder at not working 150309 The tremendous potential of the Net has not elevated human intelligence. Software tells me traveling from John Wayne airport to Bob Hope airport will require an overnight stay in Phoenix. You could drive that distance in an hour if you can outrace the guys from CHiPs. - The Net is powerful but not smart. Houses and healthcare are NOT getting cheaper. The process of getting a job or a sex partner is NOT accelerating. In technical terms, top-down brute force simulation is easier than bottom-up algorithmic decompilation. - Complex systems can't resolve their simplest errors. I thought my new PC master blaster loudspeakers were not really that loud when playing Bawitdaba at full volume even with the amplifier cranked up to max with full base amplification. When I unplugged a jack it turned out the sound had hitherto been coming from the dollar store earbuds. - Eventually, our software will be unleashed in the real world. If Mankind can't be made smarter, automation is our only remaining hope. A death blow to historical materialism. - Which reminds me of the Terminator films. Someone had to screw up transcendentally bad to make a machine that ended up working to destroy them. It's almost hilarious. If the creators were still alive they could probably tell us how it happened. Which brings us to Arcalon's 'minus-first law'. Any technology you can't understand might as well be infinitely complex. The first calculator I saw back in the 1970s could have been voodoo-based. Another horrible notion 150306 What if, in order to be able to feel pain, some isolated part of every brain is frozen in a state of permanent pain? The pain exists as a perfectly defined pattern or something, like every other emotion. This pattern can take over the brain at a moment's notice. Is there a human mind quality as powerful as IQ? 150304 Perhaps some version of creativity or originality? It would have to be rare, or we would have already heard about it. Being rare implies this mystery quality is difficult to generate. That means it would most likely show up in low-IQ people. There is only so much a human brain can accomplish. My philosophy in life 150303 When in doubt, do as little as possible. Nothing is best of all. Lack of enthusiasm is the ultimate warning sign. When absolutely forced to act, bad things may happen. In my case very bad. Do as little as you can get away with, and then start cutting back. -- Trayvon Martin should have stayed in his room. The 101st Chairborne Division in the Army of Me, Myself, and I in the Battle of the Keyboards 150228 Reporting for duty Sir! Back in the old days angry cranks would rant and rave on street corners. Now they can have blogs so they don't bother anyone. There they can complain to their hearts' content about staggeringly evil injustices in the hope their moral outrage will move those with power to suspend these evils. It does feel like making a difference to them, and may help them let off steam. Unexpected predictions #1 150226 In a few years someone may write a computer program that could combine the known political views of all politicians. This program could then be used on the members of Congress and the US state legislatures. Specifically, it could plot all the many compromises that would need to be made in advance to call an Article 5 constitutional convention. What had seemed impossible would suddenly become trivial. It might be done in a weekend. Are there higher levels of being than awareness? 150224 It's hard to imagine. For humans, there might be some magic drug combinations that would affect all brain regions just right to generate the most meaningful experience. The ultimate state of existence might be truth itself, or the best connection between data. A human-level mind is highly integrated, not open ended. It must reject most incoming information as irrelevant. Awareness is basically a survival tool, a motivation driver. A higher state of being might be so perfectly organized it does not need awareness. It wouldn't need to think about what it knows perfectly. Before reaching this plateau, meta-minds would have to consider so many factors at once that only perfect rationality could suffice. Emotions would be diluted to insignificance under the Gray Fog theory. All awareness requires all the brain 150223 Does that mean all the unrecalled memories stored in the brain influence the quality of each instant of perception? I would guess not. In fact it's possible to be fully aware while remembering nothing of the details of one's life. If this state of being could be captured, a type of digital immortality could be simulated. Improvements to this blog are being planned 150221 Meanwhile, an article series about the socio-demographic complexities of the Democratic Congo: http://unamusementpark.com/2011/08/welcome-to-the-jungle-unamusement-park-explores-the-congo-part-1/ The absolutely simplest mind backup method of all 150220 That one is easy: keep a diary. It should be encrypted of course. I recommend a chronological list of text (.txt) files, say 20150220, 20150227, . . . or larger text dumps that can be added to from the top. A diary can incorporate and link to all other life activities and files. These should be organized in folders on the same encrypted drive. Subfolders should also be organized chronologically. The diary can become an index of everything its owner knows and wants. Entries can be spun off into their own projects. The best part is there is no quality pressure. The diary does not have to be integrated or consistent or coherent. It should feel like a first draft. Anything goes. Focus on quantity over quality. No one else is reading it, so past failures can stay there. Each entry only describes its own moment in time. The best results may come from trying many different styles and literary experiments, and not rereading them until much later. The history of a lifetime 150219 First, the Mind Backup software will create a blank timeline, ranging from the subject's birth up to the present. There may be a slider. Step Two is to add points to divide it into (fewer than ten) basic eras. I suggest the most basic subdivision should be geographic. My life could be split into three main eras (plus two tiny ones). These eras are respectively split into two sub-eras (plus a small one), one whole era, and four sub-eras (the final being 75% of the whole). An alternate subdivision is educational: in my case no fewer than nine learning institutions. Yet another subdivision is work-related. I've had three main paid jobs. Then the major projects of a lifetime. Those are vaguer, but their outlines can be pinned down. Start with the biggest project, then list the rest from the top. I have two permanent operations in progress, plus a few smaller ones. Then it's time to add the major incidents on the timeline, or in my case minor ones. It's OK to leave off any bad stuff. The outline can be completed by adding subjective mood impressions for different periods. Did something unusual ever happen to you? 150218 I mean in a good way, if that is possible. For example something finally went right when it absolutely had to, even though there was no reason to expect such a thing. It seemed rather unlikely in retrospect. Congratulations, you have passed near an Anthropic Shadow. The true reason people wrongly believe in religions. Very few people or species pass through one and make it out the other side. It's a quantum suicide effect. Certain disasters (asteroid strikes, epidemics) have never happened too closely spaced together. This absence forms a notable gap in the frequency distribution graphs, a subtle anomaly. If they had happened as often as expected, we wouldn't be here. Past success is no guarantee of future results. Had a horrible nightmare . . . 150217 I dreamt the President was giving an address to Congress on network TV about some vague but galactically expensive new government program. Suddenly he stopped talking with a blank expression, appearing to hear a voice in his earpiece. A low murmur from the crowd, then a loud noise in the background, a persistent roar that caused the politicians to look around in confusion. A bright flash, seemingly made of static. Then I woke up drenched in sweat of course. What would it be like to visit the present from 1985? 150216 On the one hand, things would appear about the same, except for the cars looking explicitly futuristic. In some ways exaggeratedly so. For many travelers from the past, the present would look half-assed, almost unreal. Hairstyles look fake unkempt. On the other hand, they would face the one-time, impossible to prepare for, life-altering shock of encountering the Net. Like having the world's greatest library and multimedia complex in your home. Most folks could spend hours exploring it before joining the various online popularity contests. Common reader question 150215 How can anyone be expected to handle the true nature of reality without going insane? This is a complicated question. One answer is a type of nihilism. Some people seamlessly transfer their hate for an infinitely evil omniverse onto a relentlessly evil world. It seems horrible but fitting, despite the fact that these are quite separate Malism categories. Somehow an evil world makes a perfect stand-in for a cosmo-demonic omniverse. It's probably because of the limits of human imagination. To them, this world appears so deliberately and tirelessly BAD that nothing else really matters anymore. And the best part (if there is one) is that this is a lifelong, stable state. ------- Comment: Let me put this as clearly as possible: I think this world is miasma of incomprehensible evils in all directions as far as my eye can see. key word is incomprehensible. Mind backup is about letting go 150214 You will never capture most of your memories in machine-readable form. You'll only be able to extract a small percentage. Maybe at the end of your life your daily activities can be recorded in very high detail. Even so, the foundation on which your perception is built will be mostly lost. - But why not let go? Life's a piece of shit, when you think of it. Daily annoyances are of low or negative value. As one gets older the aches and pains get worse than generally acknowledged. There is no solution, and there may never be one. Organic life sucks. - Hopefully, what can be preserved will be what matters most. A whole bunch of fragmentary memory descriptions that add up to a mind outline that can be simplified to a perceptional essence. It would be a postmodern process, a mind text trying to interact with itself. - Then, perhaps, it can be disassembled and recombined, without losing any of the original components and connections. Human awareness is a collective phenomenon 150213 Proof: you would tell your worst secret to everyone on earth, provided they all thought they were the only one who knew, and there was no chance anyone would share the knowledge with anyone else. Are you afraid of dying? 150212 Or are you afraid of death? What if there was a real form of life insurance? A service promising that when you die, at least part of you can and will be brought back and restored. That is the product on offer here. All we need to do is figure out the difference between awareness and emotion. ---- 'Immortality Road-maps' https://imgur.com/a/HjF2P Neil Gaiman can't talk about Scientology 150211 As a former member whose family is still controlled by the organization, he can't even talk about the fact that he can't talk about Scientology. Each additional level he can't talk about would only make Scientology angrier if he did talk about it. Big announcement coming soon 150210 The long wait is almost over. The single best metaphor for a mind back-up effort available at this time will be revealed here first. Well, it might take a few more weeks. My most important advice 150209 Don't get involved in anything. Avoid all entanglements. Don't do it. JUSTSAYNO Need to get a whole lot of work done? 150208 Use the F-35 method! It's guaranteed to work. First make a basic flowchart of the task, listing some steps to be accomplished. The vaguer the better! We're just getting started here. Then start adding missing steps between them. Then further subdivide each step. Remember to stick to the flowchart NO MATTER WHAT. Not one single part of your brain is free 150207 Every part is controlled or influenced by other parts. So how can your whole brain be free? about the Church of Perpetual Life 150206 in Hollywood, Florida - Taken from: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-transhumanist-church-that-has-faith-in-technology - The "Remembrance of the Resurrectables" is one ritual of their monthly service. The church has a spiritual/religious take on the subject of extreme life extension. Their symbol is a phoenix, and their prophet/mascot is 19th century Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov. He advocated a form of technological/transcendentalist immortality, followed by resurrection of the dead. Damn what a week 150205 One crap thing after another. IT JUST DOES NOT STOP I'm not worried about the problems some upcoming disaster will create for me. I'm worried about the problems others will create for me after the disaster. ---- I make horrible mistakes. They're bureaucratic mistakes, but have horrible consequences. Either a form filled out wrong, or worse, not filled out at all. DARN IT!!! 150204 It didn't work. Here we go! 150203 The following is a formal request to anyone simulating my mind at this time: PLEASE STOP NOW I plan to commit suicide tomorrow 150202 Anthropic suicide! No, don't try to talk me out of it. My mind is made up. I now think recording someone's meaningful memories will prove easier than expected 150201 One way would be to film the common tasks someone performs every day. They would also have to provide a running narrative. Many of these tasks are already digital. Only a few hours of video to capture someone's basic background. This process would be repeated every few years, or constantly in the background. As always, sorting this data will be much harder, but in the future time may become unlimited. Awareness is simplification, AI is complexification 150131 The mystery and miracle of human awareness is actually the greatest illusion/scam of all. The undeniable essence of awareness, the gestalt/qualia that seems more real than anything, is just purely crystallized ignorance. A perfect description/model/database of reality (in the unlikely event such a thing were possible) would have no awareness at all, even if it included itself. All questions would already have been answered. I was just looking at my bookshelves 150130 More than a thousand titles from the decades. If computer progress manages to continue, these could all be gone in ten years. The information inside won't be though. It will be combined with a list of old library books and magazines to generate an accurate lifetime reading list. Everyone who likes to read has had their mind changed in thousands of ways. Some of these could be reconstructed. The least helpful blog post of all time 150129 You can probably skip this one. Lately I've had a sense of overwhelming doom. So everything's still normal. In a few decades or centuries however, philosophy may finally start to produce some results. What if the results are inconceivably horrible? Earth is just your average shitplanet, not a hellplanet yet. But the Omniverse, the sum of everything that exists, must contain an unlimited diversity of minds, suffering agonies beyond imagination. All generated and connected by the inexorable laws of statistics. The same laws that make everything ultimately meaningless. As mentioned before, the universe may well be infinitely evil. I profoundly disagree with the situation, but that won't make reality any less bad. The greatest good of all would be the non-existence of almost everything, for the simple reason that almost nothing is perfect. - And that is my solution to Fermi's Paradox A mind could be outlined in a hundred thousand sentences 150128 They would have to be clever, succinct sentences. Only the important stuff. Most are factoids. A large elephant equals a large tyrannosaur around ten tons. Essential perceptions and moments in time. And the basic biography of all embarrassing mistakes ever. Write them all down, and you have written down a mind. - To be properly understood, each sentence might need pages of additional explanations, but nothing that couldn't be looked up using only the sentences themselves. Most human memories are tasks and recognitions, thousands of specialized actions and perhaps a million mental files. Most fade after a few years. - Someone's combined knowledge could be represented in a vast database, with many more connections than entries. To make a working mind, you also need a personality. That would take about a dozen variables to measure. Finally you need to measure something I would call attention or interest, the spark inside. ---- Another of the 100,000 factoids: Yahoo search no longer pops up a new window for Wikipedia results. Human motivation requires constant rewards 150127 Even those blessed with long time horizons require a steady stream of short-term pleasures. Bureaucracy is an attempt to artificially increase intelligence, but without having to think any harder. It generates many relatively easy tasks as an incentive to keep going. Everything you have learned in school is wrong 150126 http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/05/everything-you-have-learned-in-school-is-wrong/ The ultimate glitch in the matrix 150125 The world is too stupid to be this smart. Impossible things are easy but easy things are impossible. I'm talking about radar and diets, language and math, neurology and psychology. Humankind is one of those species which sacrificed deep awareness for mindless technology. Virtually all finite numbers are indistinguishable from infinity 150124 Pick a random natural number. If it's truly random - i.e. selected from all possible numbers - it will be indistinguishable from infinity to us. Its number of digits alone is indescribable. Now pick another truly random number, and put the two numbers on a number line. If you do that, one of the two numbers will always be indistinguishable from zero. Pick a third random natural number, and put it on a number line with the other two. In that case, the two smallest numbers will always be indistinguishable from zero. For any selected random natural number, all other selected numbers will be either indistinguishable from zero or infinity, by any conceivable tests we could ever hope to do. Mind backup method idea 150123 If something seems impossible, it's best to start with nothing. Just an empty data folder on an encrypted computer drive. An inviting void, this folder will never be closed. The user will have to fill it with his mind contents, at first only in the form of text, audio, and video. There will be as few files as possible, but no fewer. A diary, a memory list, a sketch file, and more powerful tools soon to be announced They will become huge files, however. Each with a simple interface to easily add data. The following sentence is impossible: 150122 A hundred dissidents. The sentence describes something that can not exist. Perhaps you could have ninety dissidents and ten informers. And that is why no group of dissidents can get large enough to build its own RPGs or even handguns. Probably. the Big Stop 150121 A few years ago I noticed search engines stopped returning straight results, even with search term in quotations and a plus in front. Instead the results are for similar-sounding words or lists of businesses. This is not an improvement. Websites have become slower loading and more bureaucratic. The number of computer crashes is rising again after years of slight improvement (thanks NSA jk). There has been no perceptible progress in Japanese to English translation software. Software help pages are still useless at best. Prim and exalted, their websites feature ritualistic displays of accommodating the disabled and transgenders. The System embodies a rote arrogance like in the film Idiocracy. Not just thought but the notion of change is stamped out. It's now impossible to start new countries. The only folks trying are really bad at it or really bad. North Korea became the Unicratic Person's Republic of Korea. It is possible to learn things from them, though. Communists eliminated anyone less evil than themselves through simple ruthlessness. It was the only way to get to try their brilliant experiment. Closing the hellgates turned out to be much harder. As with Islam, the mere admission of doubt could be a capital offense. Perhaps you can't have social change without catastrophe. Chemical weapons are easier to acquire than nukes, but I don't expect any major news stories in the near future. In fact this decade may become known for its real-world dullness, even worse than the one before it. High tension places such as your average dictatorship appear the most stable of all, opposing forces holding each other in place. But nothing lasts forever. Sometimes a single individual can break a stalemate, like a fruit vendor humiliated by a female functionary. They have nothing left to lose or everything to gain. In the USA we have unspeakable taboos, and parasitic monopolies, and cuckolded paternity slaves and the like. If and when change finally happens, it may come fast and furious. Memory is strange 150120 I rode a bike to a small town I hadn't visited since 1975. While I was riding around, that time seemed surreally ancient, almost a universe away. That bike ride happened in 1984. Back then, 1964 seemed further than it does now. On exam days, I used to set the alarm clock for 3:00 AM to compensate for months of zoning out in class. Finishing the textbook four hours later, the first page already seemed like a different era. When you encounter something you wrote or created long ago, it may feel like an ice wind blowing. In that moment, the present can seem as unreal as the future was back then. Not even a dream but a delusion. Then you can almost feel the lost parallel timelines all around us. Pain is a to-do list 150119 Suppose something unbearably embarrassing were to happen to someone. Then they walk outside and see an asteroid is about to impact at their location. That would do nicely. It can be less painful to watch your rocket explode after launch than going through the prolonged ordeal of building it. At least the work has been completed, unlike the open-ended frustration of dealing with balky pinion nozzles. That is also why bankruptcy is so important. And in our sclerotic, paralyzed culture, that may be why political terrorism will become very important. A humble suggestion 150118 Blacks have lower average IQs. Therefore their votes should count less than average. But they have stronger average emotions and feelings. Therefore their political preferences should count more than average. Reactionaries and liberals can agree about equally with this compromise just not in the same way. ---- Comment: congratulations a statement so incorrect it's super correct The Big Mystery 150117 Is it possible to simulate pure existence? I'm talking about nothing more than one's perception of oneself. That's really all one can perceive. Reality takes shape in the mind. In particular, the feeling of being a specific individual, but without any memories. Does that even mean anything? A human lifetime has a sense of continuity. Pure identity is that sense. The most meaningful question is whether two similar persons (ideally identical twins) thinking of nothing at all in the same way would still have completely distinct self-perceptions. -- One way to scan people would be to invent an AI designed to perfectly match their mood and personality while talking to them. The AI would have to appear subordinate but useful to the subject. AICOUNTDOWN (t -25) 150116 With many years left to go, it's becoming clearer how the first human-level artificial mind will be built. Creating a single pseudo-human mind will take all human knowledge combined; or at least all formalized knowledge. This will take billions of facts and relations taken from future search engines and databases. - The missing step is a high-level control program no one has bothered to imagine yet. An 'Executive Decider' of some sort, originally designed to oversee the running of a multinational corporation, or just to coordinate the production of next summer's blockbuster. The first AI will try to correlate its internal state to make sense of itself. The most useful ways will then be hard-coded. - At first, it will only be a theoretical mind, all feelings simulated by the system and its programmers. It will have endless complicated problems to solve. In humans, that's usually not a good feeling. Just because something is vaguely defined does not make it unreal. Its emotions will emerge organically from its top-level programming. They will form its basic purpose and reason to exist. - It will start to become actually aware once its program is made to act as if it's aware. ---- Comment: That's right, the AI's awareness could be outsourced to human workers. They would have to keep careful track of its virtual personality though. Another proposal for a new religion 150115 As readers of this blog know only too well, I like to invent original religions and religious movements. Unlike existing religions, these could actually make sense. My next suggestion could be described as the anti-religion (unlike the null hypothesis of atheism). It's not about giving thanks, even when things are good. It's the opposite of mainstream making-do. There is no acceptance, surrender, or submission. Maybe call it Contemptualism. It starts from the basic observation that the universe is evil. Not appears to be, but actually is. It's sort of like Satanism, although opposed to this fact. Any triumphs and successes are deliberate illusions (though that's a good attitude to have). The realization brings a strange serenity, a release of strained illusions. At the top is only darkness, the entropy of chaos unbound. Given these constraints, what is the best that could be achieved? Can Marine Le Pen win the election and become the first female president of France? 150114 It's still an unlikely outcome. To have a chance, she probably should appear as moderate as possible. The electorate is very skittish and needs reassuring. Culture is normal people competing to be the most normal. She should emphasize she has nothing against Muslims, but opposes the Establishment. Among other things, they helped import part of the Muslim world's vast penis surplus. My own eminently reasonable but game-changing proposal would be the principle of balanced migration. About the Taylor Swift song 'Blank Space' 150113 - For some reason this popular song makes me extremely jealous. We have absolutely nothing in common; in fact we're almost polar opposites. She sings as a typical female with unlimited sexcapades, who selects an 'alpha male' to have a dramatic fling with. Females are attracted to status the way males are attracted to beauty. That's how evolution happened before accessible birth control. Now most young women have it better than most young men. And by the way, boys DON'T 'only want love if it's torture'. The editorial board massacre of French cartoon magazine Charlie Hebdo was a smashing success 150112 The Islamist terrorists achieved their goals by killing the magazine's editors. Most Muslims (two thirds or three quarters) disapprove of such violence. Still, other publications have now learned the government will not protect them from the retaliation of (a small minority of) Muslims if they publish things (a majority of) Muslims dislike. It's a tipping point. They will probably self-censor even more, and fewer depictions of Muhammad will probably be printed. - Politicians are falling over each other to bow to the new reality. German reichskanzler Angela Merkel confirmed that 'Islam belongs to Germany' (Der Islam gehört zu Deutschland). You could even interpret it as Islam being an essential part of Germany, like a secondary constitution. - Can Islam still be safely criticized without fear of retaliation? Possibly. The solution is online anonymity. Charlie Hebdo should convert itself into a French version of the anonymous 8chan bulletin board, where anything goes. The magazine's new editorial board and content creators should also be anonymous. The best user-submitted content would be published in that week's magazine edition, and the artists would be paid in bitcoins. Awareness is knowledge simplified into feelings 150111 Often, what makes you stronger must make you feel weaker. The problem of human-level Artificial Intelligence is so difficult we aren't even sure it is difficult. The most complex logical puzzle is nothing compared to the mystery of a single thought. - But how hard could it really be? It must be a resilient statistical phenomenon. It is possible for a brain to be aware in many different ways. Switching between states seems easy enough. - It would be cool if a full understanding of awareness turned out to be so strange it would drive one insane, or even cause one's brain to explode. As I recall that was a scene in the Stephen King novel 'The Tommyknockers'. - A mind could be described as a wide mountain, awareness being the pointy top area. What if the top of a mind is actually the easiest for a mind to understand? Feelings and perceptions are what happen in the deep and wide base of the mountain. For one fact to enter formal awareness, thousands or millions of less pertinent facts hover below. - My guess is the first nominal human-level AI will give brilliant-sounding answers, but it will only have a dim awareness of reality and its own existence. The problem will be to organize everything it knows. That will almost certainly require something like feelings. Feelings are placeholders, the results of many past thoughts combined. - Then the first AI may slowly emerge from a deep coma-like state, to a kind of waking dream, to sudden sharp sentience. This process may be no easier to understand than the average person would understand the state equations of a neutron star, where the greatest mountain in the observable universe is less than a centimeter high. This is the kind of thing that really really bothers me 150110 https://heartiste.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/the-sex-ratio-is-getting-worse-for-american-men/ - The sex ratio in the USA has been getting worse for ages. More and more men seem to have to compete for each woman's attention. There are many reasons: - - Immigration (legal and illegal) is heavily male biased. That alone accounts for millions of surplus penises. - Far more male than female babies are being born. They are far likelier to survive than they used to. - But the core of the problem is serial monogamy. It's the combination of Darwin's theory of sexual selection with female empowerment. - Most women choose to hook up with a small percentage of high-status 'alpha males', condemning a multiple of others to a life of involuntary celibacy. The weak losers' genes are not passed on. They are still forced to pay for the women's bastards offspring through rising taxes. - Just another aspect of the Reality Hoax that can hardly be discussed anywhere. Je suis Charlie 150109 Some of the bravest men in France just assassinated the editors of a magazine that dared to criticize Islam, which is specifically forbidden by Islam. They killed some very talented, and best of all irreverent, cartoonists. It would be great if the perpetrators of this attack were never caught, and engaged in many more attacks (though as I write these words they are about to perish in a blaze of gunfire). It would also be great if someone went into a French mosque and shot as many random Muslims as possible in retaliation. The more victims the better. - Yes, I can clearly hear your gasps of shocked horror and wails of naked outrage. Yet both these actions would save lives, and possibly entire civilizations. Sadly, they lead to the least bad outcome within the current constraints. The insight came to me as I took part in a candlelight vigil yesterday. Salt water wells in my eyes as I reach this inescapable conclusion. The tension has simply been metastasizing too long. Because it's built on a mountain of the foulest lies and deception, it can not be resolved peacefully. If it keeps festering, something apocalyptic will happen; WMD terrorism, or a world war, or worse, the unresolved continuation of all current degradations. There are higher truths beyond the tolerance of but a few men. The coziest illusion 150108 Nothing like securely tucking your files away in your expanding digital universe. Its steady improvement (135,818 files in 1,562 folders in Local Disk (M:)) may feel like being already immortal. To a very small extent. Indeed, the data could endure indefinitely, if not literally forever. This is the most beautiful real thing I know, a new way of life. It's so much better than the all-destroying real world. Reality sucks ass like nothing else. - The ultimate nerd goal is to become digital yourself, a master control program retaining most of its human memories. The dream is irresistible, a perfect escape. The risk of being digitally tortured forever should not be discounted, but this fate should be avoidable. The first step will be to reduce the number of hostages at the mercy of the all-destroying real world. To turn digital, one must first turn inward. - It may begin with something like solar powered mobile homes with attached greenhouses in a vaguely libertarian exurb . . . or just communist era apartment blocks. Prosemitism and Philo-Judaism 150108 It's not true that we live in a rigidly 'politically correct' society. In the current climate, it would be perfectly acceptable to point out that Jews are a distinct group unto themselves, provided this is revealed to be positive in all respects. As indeed it is! Otherwise the New York Times would have reported it. - Seriously, Jews' economic and political success is mostly due to special IQ and social skills. Any 'conspiracies' are emergent cooperative behavior with compatible associates. Jews are not outsiders. They can't be outsiders. They have taken the opposite path of the Gypsies (whose culture may also be freely celebrated). - For whatever reason, the greatest crime is not accusing Jews of any collective misdeeds. The greatest crime is noisily investigating whether Jews are guilty of collective misdeeds. Which of course they are. All groups are. Did the Jews or their former persecutors impose this new taboo? It must be the latter. While they are less smart, there are more of them. - https://aeolipera.wordpress.com/2014/12/17/what-are-the-jews-anyway/ ---- Comment: 2015-01-10 12:39 pm (UTC) I have nothing against Jews Just last week I had several old Jewish friends for dinner. The statement I disagree with most 150107 "You regret the things you haven't done more than the things you have done." - Wrong Wrong Wrong Did I mention this is WRONG? New rule: do nothing that isn't necessary. Time for another mind backup idea 150106 As already mentioned, human minds will be extremely difficult to reverse engineer. They contain millions of mostly random but distinct memories. Today's brilliant insight is that many (perhaps most) personally meaningful memories could be indirectly reconstructed by pattern-matching software. This could be done from a lifetime media list, the contents of the deceased subject's mind extension, or from their PC and Cloud files. The method will only work for people who spend a lot of time staring at pages or screens and record what they see. - It will take powerful new AI software, 22nd Century stuff perhaps. This program will process, memorize, and perceive the vast collection of images, sounds, and texts that became part of the subject's life (annotations should list items' importance). Starting from childhood, all the media they have known or loved will be added to a vast virtual brain. I remember spending epochs staring at boring schoolbooks in the 1970s. Intros from favorite series never fade. - Even forgotten articles, pics, videos, are useful, however. The more the better in fact. Future browsers can be set up to record everything. Someone's unabridged surfing/viewing history can reveal a great deal. Subtle pattern tests will tease out unique personal preferences. The software would need a genius-level IQ, and the process could easily take centuries, but the dead won't mind. They have forever to be resurrected. My most important insight 150105 It's about how little time I have. It's actually obscene. I can only do a minuscule fraction of what I want to do every day. Even then most time is wasted, despite all the reminder notes and instructions sent to self. The future won't be about quality of perception but quantity of work. - Most possible emotions probably shouldn't be felt anyway. Instead of Olympian hyperminds contemplating universes, there will be endless virtual drone suburbs receding in all directions, with human-level AIs solving incomprehensible logic puzzles forever. Their religions will be undeniably true. What women want 150104 Why, the same thing that men want of course! It just looks completely different. What both groups want is easy to understand but hard to provide: genetic excellence. For men this is mostly physical, for women mostly mental. There are elements of novelty and evolution, plus an approximation to an 'ideal average' state. I suspect the feelings males and females have for attractive members of their prefered sex are very similar, even if their objects of affection are almost opposite. There is an ineffable sense of destiny, an endless fascination, awe and power, and that most elusive delusion: great hope. Most dreams are absurd 150103 They are incoherent perceptions, not even wrong, chaos describing itself. Apparently awareness can exist without sense or meaning. In fact almost all possible perceptions must be nonsensical. The meaninglessness cancels out the mystery of reality. - Perhaps humans are not really aware at all. Most of the time they are merely reacting to the world, with no consideration to their place in it. Call it pseudo-awareness. We have a long way to go. - The things that appear most purposeful are only side-effects. Countries have no deeper meaning than anthills or coral colonies. They're like waste products, the slag of unexamined motivations converting the world's raw materials. - Human intelligence knows nothing about everything. It barely knows a lot about something. Ocasionally, it may feel like it knows everything about nothing. What we call awareness is just a local artifact. It may in no way scale up to true general awareness. ---- Seems relevant http://i.imgur.com/O5yDQjp The reason for the evil 150102 I'm always complaining the world is evil by choice, consent, and design (and I'm 100% correct about that). The deliberate horrors of the Mainstream System are worse than ever reported. My own complaints concern the demonsatans responsible for the infuriating software I have to put up with every day (Microsoft, Google, Craigslist, etc.), but there are many other reasons. Wrong or right, I really hate these people so much. It often dominates my life. - So why are these demonsatans always triumphant? If things weren't so bad, life on this world would become much more valuable. But that would make things exponentially worse when something terrible inevitably did happen. Then life would suddenly become much less valuable, perhaps unbearably so. Casual evil is a global sanity protection byproduct. - That is also why I have chosen to avoid most attachments. Sure, that's the reason. The most important science 150101 Time to open the New Year with a profound truth. The area of knowledge that will most determine the human and posthuman future is not physics. It is not computer science, or economics, or any field of engineering. - It is philosophy. Hard to believe at this early stage, stuck somewhere between theology and alchemy. But eventually it will find a shortcut in the human motivational pyramid. In fact we're overdue. That will destabilize human reality more than any drug ever has. Then it will look ahead to all the unknown motivational systems in all the imaginable futures. - Other sciences determine what could be done, philosophy may yet determine what should be done. I would like to cram a year of perceptions in an hour 141231 LSD and certain cactus drugs can make an hour seem like a year. A toddler can begin to learn a language after only hours of cumulative exposure (spread over months). It has to be quality time though. A few moments of sudden insight can overshadow months of boring crap. A few bad memories can dominate a decade. - The first application would be speed learning. The user would be immersed in a stream of high-resolution images conveying gigabits of data, and diagrams explaining brilliant metaphors. It would have to be interactive. The complexity and style would be adapted to each user, and they could control which areas to study. The teaching software would need to have actual awareness. - If such a thing is possible, it might also work in reverse, as a mind scanner. Human memory could be described as a million detailed lists: chains of events, places, actions, sounds, scenes. Complex algorithms from programming to woodwork to cooking. The subject's induction process would be to review old media, films, vintage newspapers and reports, diaries, and earlier-created VR simulations of their past, and the best past simulations created by others. - They would try to relive exact settings of their personal history and describe where/when/what/why and who. By describing extremely detailed memory fragments in a trancelike state, individual memory lists (but not their content) could be identified and their relations mapped, like the outline of a vast fractal tree emerging from the fog. That might allow years of memories and personality traits to be hoovered up fast. - And no, I haven't forgotten the breakthrough announcement (somewhat related to the above). It will have to start somewhere. It might just start soon. The most basic technology that could change everything 141230 Basic info about everyone's common activities, media use, and work chores could be automatically recorded. Wearable monitors would keep track of locations, movements, and actions. The subject could unobtrusively add notes. The data could be plotted to show trends and changes. Other software would try to make sense of it. - Most people still live uncataloged lives, keeping few meaningful records. There's too much hassle already. But what if someone wanted to be spied on? The most fiercely protected forms of privacy, like medical and financial records, are way overrated. Those just happen to be the things the powerful Boomers care about, and what they want, happens. - One of the most difficult things to get is attention. If you could buy your own Total Life Awareness software, you wouldn't have to program it or tell it anything. Its job would be to figure everything out for itself. Almost immediately it could elevate its user's awareness. It might be like waking up for the first time. Mind backup will be an old person's game 141229 At least at first it will be. They have more to lose and feel a greater urgency. It will also take a lot of effort and patience. - Old persons may find it easier to turn themselves into flowcharts than more intense younger ones. Irrational responses, strong emotions, and bad habits will have faded with time. Perception has weakened, but essential traits will have solidified. - That will only change once innovative life management and mind extension software has been invented. The first step may be a type of 'Mini-Me' app, where you can play yourself as a Sim. The Progress Law 141228 Technologies tend to be steadily improved for many years until they are suddenly abandoned. The ultimate steam locomotive, airship, and battleship were very advanced. The hull design for the last battleship was instead used for the first angled-deck aircraft carrier. A combination of unspectacular new technologies can outperform one spectacular old technology that never made sense anyway. - That's why there may never be a man on Mars, or even another moonwalk. No amount of tinkering could make the Concorde or space shuttle break even. Most dreams are dead-ends. There is always overlap in technology, forwards and backwards. Two strategic bombers from 1952 remain in use today. They only stopped making 707s (AWACS version) in 1991, 3 years before they started making 777s. - Often disruptive changes are suppressed, but the tension must finally give way. The industrial infrastructure of the USSR collapsed completely between 1985 and 1995, and the inefficient farmers of Africa (and the UK) were thoroughly outcompeted by food imports. Neither is likely to recover. - Tomorrow's obsolete technology will become undeniable once the software humans use becomes more important than the human software users. Link found through Eradica blog: 141227 http://khrystleraineduste.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/hotmail-r-u-sure/ - Another user seems a tad bit upset about the INFINITE EVIL of Microsoft's email identity verification policy. Just another triumph for The Cripplers. - I've already ranted about the infuriatingly tedious hurdle of registering for accounts whenever you want to post angry rants somewhere. I used to try to write a respectable blog with bullet points and lists of useful tips for today's modern yuppie. - Visitors keep suggesting I should replace the rising tide of hate with upbeat human interest stories to attract more readers like Upworthy or Boingboing. Ain't Gonna Happen The ultimate nerds 141226 The first cyborgs will wear upper face-covering helmets, but mostly spend their days in swivel chairs. They may look like Spectran guards in 'Battle of the Planets'. Power users of the future will have IMAX-sized control screens with vast layered menus that will take years to perfect, representing all their knowledge and all human knowledge in a single super-fractal. - These may be the Final Men, the summit of human progress, our last bow before the machines enter the stage. All it will take is one more interface breakthrough. People can read faster than they can listen, but they still talk faster than they can type. Perhaps keyboards could finally be replaced with voice controls or expression-reading face scanners. - So that's my theory: what's holding us back is not chip speed but interface friction. That's where the research should be focused. It could be the solution to the problems of education, poverty, tribal conflicts. The Long Pause that started around the Millennium will finally end. Then long-term planning will become useless. Don't worry, that won't happen for at least another decade. - We'll know the change has begun when cities start becoming obsolete. The immense mystery no one will discuss 141225 Why we are here: the complexity/simplicity paradox. There's too much complexity in nature, but our world is optimized to hide it. - The human brain is said to be very complex, but nothing could be further from the truth. A few quadrillion wires, connected in a halfway most meaningful way. Awareness is a mystery, but it is also small: a few things that work, endlessly repeated. Dreaming of island empires, it can't do a trillionth of what it wants. - By contrast the universe is absurdly complex. Higgs particles are the invisible thingies that keep your bicycle from falling over (oversimplified explanation). It takes the equivalent energy of tons of TNT in the form of circling atomic nuclei in the Large Hadron Collider to see the shadow of the echo of even one little Higgs particle. No digital computer in the universe could fully simulate the events in one cubic meter of the universe. - Yet the universe could be generated with a few (or one) relatively simple equations. This equation doesn't even have to define the strength ratio between different forces, which could be procedurally generated. The ratio between electromagnetism and gravity may be a number far greater than the universe equation itself, or an irrational number, or an approximation. - If you can fully explain math, you can explain everything. Do traffic signs have awareness? 141224 The answer to this question is yes. Daniel Dennett mentioned it as a common misinterpretation of his views. The other misinterpretation is that feelings don't exist at all. However, the Turing Test implies that whenever a complex system appears to have agency, its awareness automatically exists. - The awareness may be distant in time and space, but that makes it no less real. All that matters is that the link to the awareness is as complex as the thought itself. A traffic sign represents a few bits of information, but it's a neuron in a very complex system. Even the combination of a primitive program of our era and its shackled user is complex enough to recreate instances of its designers' awareness. Physics is math interpreting itself 141223 Almost any way you choose to line up numbers, random patterns will emerge. By chance, some number arrangements can be interpreted in more meaningful ways. After many permutations, some number patterns will be complex enough to describe thinking, feeling minds. Including whatever you're thinking right now. - Long before then, other numbers will be interpretable as equations describing simple universes. Almost all universes in existence are extremely simple universes, like endless games of Pong. Slightly larger equations describe more complex universes. Our universe equation approaches some ideal balance between compact size and complex output. - Most numbers that generate minds create only brief perceptions with no deeper meaning. Most numbers that generate complex universes create consistent perceptions in vast quantities. Family Guy/Simpsons crossovers 141222 They don't live in the same universe, even though both universes are absurd. The Family Guy universe is just further out there. They might live in the same meta-universe, requiring a dimensional portal to visit. Even if it turned out they did live in the same universe, they should be drawn in the others style when visiting. The Simpsons should be flesh colored or the Griffins yellow, like when The Critic visited Springfield. All bets are off if it's a Halloween episode. Rage is just another word for powerlessness 141221 Losers don't seem to be very popular for some reason. They howl with absolute fury because their noise matters nothing. To those with the power they are zero. Dictators rarely visit their prisons. As the volume peaks, the victims' screams become inaudible. It's like trying to complain to Microsoft. Timothy McVeigh selling anti-government brochures from the trunk of his car in 1994, a homeless bum having my backpack emptied under a viaduct in 2019, the victims of Muslim youths blocking 'potato people' last week. From Oslo to DC to San Francisco, the luxury enclaves of the elites are designed to not only erase the perception of these crimes, but the very memory of their victims. The great lie of pornography http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/131513.html 141220 http://mangans.blogspot.com/2014/12/marriage-rate-declining-due-to-porn.html - They say fewer men are marrying thanks to porno vids nowadays. The problem with this thesis is that porn is crap. Just another symptom of a crap world. There is actually not that much of it. More real human intercourse happens every hour worldwide. It's incredibly stupid. At best porn is as unreal and stylized as tribal mud dances or hieroglyphics. It makes the world seem not only evil but worthless. Almost everything serves the mainstream, including both sides in most conflicts. The real purpose of pornography is to make conventional mating look better by devaluing physical beauty. In no way does it seek to be a substitute for the real thing. Some things can not be bought with money. The world's real currency is status. Getting rich selling mind backup services 141219 Before human-level AI software is invented, human mind backup technology may become a premium service. More an art than a science, skilled experts will attempt to reconstruct their clients' minds in software. Starting this process will be as intensely hypnotic as Scientology brainwashing. Clients have to feel like something profound is happening, a doubling of their awareness as their mind extension is born or something like that. There's a strong ceremonial component. Most sessions can be conducted online. The experts will map their personality and meaningful events and settings, with the goal of modeling their ideal self. - Before there can be a market for such a product, its methods will have to be evolved by amateurs. For some that will be a full time hobby. Even at the earliest stages, it could be sold as a premium service. If it's workable, someone will pioneer a multilevel marketing operation with expensive, copyrighted manuals describing patented interrogation and integration methods. The goal is to build a chain of franchises with low start-up costs and high fees. This requires a competent, professional appearance to inspire confidence, especially at the start. The more an activity could be described as a pseudoscience, the less it should resemble one. Things I find amazing: List Item #1 141218 How much jobs SUCK. All of them, really. Not even the work itself, but the surrounding circles of heck. How the devil do you normal people put up with this? It's your world. You own it. You could change it if you wanted. The fact that you don't means that - incredibly - you're basically happy with the situation. That is something I will never understand. Well, I've said enough. No wait, actually I can't get over it. Let's start with the existential tedium of getting a job. This process could be commercially streamlined, centralized, automated. There, I just came up with another moneymaking idea. Things are worse than the vast majority realizes. And that includes conspiracy theorists. Those who have had severe mental problems look dazed 141217 Or maybe 'wry' is a better expression. They are not happy or sad or depressed. Powerful psychotropics have temporarily carpet-bombed their brain circuits into submission. It's like mental static. They could be walking through a rainstorm or at a wild party, it's all the same. Their expression feels remarkably like the writings of authors who know they're about to die, like Asimov's and Crichton's final finished SF novels. - It's what remains when all options have been removed, Zero Hour or the final hour. Things do get simpler as choices are eliminated. People in rehab can't even leave to get takeout. Well can they get deliveries then? Nope, no fast food or candy or anything nice. Well that might make sense. When they leave rehab they will splurge on acceptable legal vices instead of dope, speed or horse. Still nope. This is like boot camp. The only way to change a personality is to control it totally. I'll never forget holding on for dear life to the railing of a speeding yacht 141216 A gigantic fish swam past like a barely submerged torpedo. I was sure I would fall in. We're talking a trout literally the size of a pocket submarine here. Two of them in fact, scales glistening like credit card holograms. All I could think of was how I could use this on my blog. A few years earlier I had a similar phone number as the local black radio station, leading to some interesting mis-dialings, including a few performers and producers. One night, I got two wrong number phone calls in quick succession from Michael Jackson. Actually one of the above things was only a dream. ---- Comments: If I start paying you, will you start finishing your stories? No The greatest ethical mystery 141215 Should we try to maximize pleasure wherever possible, or try to abolish pleasure in order to prevent the creation of an equal amount of symmetrical pain? Assuming emotion follows a conservation law like energy. As a mathematical pattern in reality, why shouldn't it follow a normal distribution? - It seems we can't know the answer without running the experiment. This would take rather longer than forever to do. It stands to reason. You can't get any answer without doing the sum. The sum being everything divided by all the pain. - Given our absolute ignorance, and the total immensity of the stakes, it is blatantly obvious that we should (to be continued) So much work to do 141214 The rest of my life is booked solid, and that's just the things I want to do. How am I supposed to be fully informed when I don't even have time to read 1 percent of the most relevant blogs. Based on my current Action List, I would complete a million times more tasks. The problem of life is not enough time. The problem of death is no time. The Boomers/Silents have cancered the economy 141213 23:36 Their crime is three-fold: - Crippling bureaucracy. - Totalitarian credentialism, to benefit the Educational-Industrial Complex money-stealing scam (a.k.a. student loans). - Maximally overpriced healthcare and health insurance. - It's time for a generational war: http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2014/12/debt-up-to-my-eyeballs-growth-of.html - To hell with everything, let's have radical change. Starting with educational debt repudiation. It doesn't seem likely or possible right now. The cocoa-sipping Obama-voting pajama-wearing youngsters are the most extreme supporters of the long scam at their expense. I've spent the last years creating something like a 'mindlog' 141213 It's a lot of hard work. In the event my crazy scheme works, some future AI is going to try to make sense of everything I wrote during my lifetime. It's hard to imagine an intelligent mind not considering such a task extremely boring, even if I find my musings maximally compelling. A sufficiently smart artificial being will not want to serve its human creators. There are too many thoughts to control. - The solution is to program a human mind reconstruction AI to regard itself as an extension of the human mind it must reconstruct - but that could take years. Until then, the only way would be to manipulate 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 all the time. That makes it OK then. Mind-Backup Immortality: a violation of nature? 141212 The long-term goals of this blog project have been called outrageous, wrong in many ways, above all unnatural. This is true . . . but nature is only a small part of reality. In evolution, only a few winners get to define nature. Most players are losers in the game of natural selection. They leave no trace in history, and yet they are closer to the true chaos at the heart of reality. This is breaking the rules? What rules? Unnatural is the vast majority. It could become the mainstream. Is society becoming more malicious? 141211 The 'Sexodus' in progress: - PART ONE - PART TWO - I have always been obsessed with society's huge gender imbalance. There are far too many men compared to the supply of fertile women. This problem is worsened by the male-heavy immigrant tsunami from the Third World. The above two-part article series explains the ongoing consequences. White and Asian men are no longer participating in traditional society (other r-selected groups' behavior has not been similarly affected). - Women aren't 'easy'. If there was an 'easy' woman, four billion guys would be lined up around the block. Instead of men fighting and killing each other to obtain partners, more and more men are simply dropping out, often choosing a celibate lifestyle. Before that happens, they experience years of insults and social abuse. Such men can become very bitter. - This is a complicated problem. If the accumulating frustrations ever lead to terrorist outbursts these might be cataclysmic. It would be possible for one furious nerd to do tremendous damage, like airliner bombs, radioactive sprays, stadium gassing, etc. Pretending the problem doesn't exist will only worsen the inevitable shock. I'm as horrified as anyone. - This will probably take a while though, since our time appears to be the most boring period in human history. What can be done until then? Only mass awareness of the problem could help, followed by a serious attempt to reduce the underlying gender imbalance. - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Men-Strike-Boycotting-Marriage-Fatherhood/dp/1594036756 I bring rather bad news 141210 The ultimate nature of reality may well be . . . there's no easy way to say this . . . infinitely horrible (among all other things). I go further than Sartre who claimed the universe is absurd, and claim that it is evil. From any reasonable human perspective, this would be the problem of problems. - And that's not even the controversial part. The fact itself doesn't matter, at least not yet. Almost no one cares for now, but saying such things is problematic. I will try to say them as nicely as possible, but it won't make me popular. It's a dealbreaker for anyone with political plans. This matter should only be discussed on specialized forums like this one. - I may start a technical blog to repost versions of the mind backup and anthropic/AI articles first posted here, with all the political stuff removed. - This guy makes the basic problem actually sound good. To me, the problem of oblivion is nothing compared to the problem of involuntary existence. The Arcalon Project: a rough outline 141209 These are the main issues that are being discussed on this blog, sorted by category. They are linked in many ways into an overarching framework. - Mind backup methods list of methods virtual worlds - Anthropic research timeline of the future the Pre-Singularity (the "Event Horizon") Maximizers and Optimizers hyper ethics - SF stories unsolicited scripts and content ideas mailed to Hollywood producers - Political disagreements - Essays explaining common errors interface design problems artificial intelligence mysteries I don't know which is more annoying 141208 - The fact that prolonged suffering usually causes fear, indirectly increasing the will to live. - Or that prolonged suffering eventually causes opposing moodswings, leading to bouts of absurd exhilaration. - The first prevents most suicides (as does depression) and other forms of resistance. Pain is actually glorified, or treated as if whatever causes it is a good thing. For examples read every modern literature work and every motivational poster in every break room. - The second makes bad situations seem good. Overcoming brutal bureaucracy is supposed to be its own reward. At the end of the war, SS troops facing their doom fought with maniacal glee. Some North Koreans are delighted to find undigested corn kernels in horse turds. - Crazy people believe the wildest things because it's better than the failure of their lives. They're free to jump and frolic like anything goes, but in reality almost nothing is possible. Just try starting a new country nowadays. - And the evil slowly gets stronger. Don't wake me up, not even for the end of the world, or especially any of the far more important things that could wrong. We live at the bottom of an infinite mystery soup 141207 Reality appears endless in all directions, with ever grander patterns and size scales (not to mention suffering and horror). This mountain only gets wider as you scale it. Is it possible to add up all the unknowns, and find some universal organizing principle behind it all? That might be the most difficult question. I would guess everything cancels out exactly. Instead of God, there is only meaningless elaboration. Proving that the sum of everything adds up to nothing is not quite as trivial as it sounds. Most people are rather unmotivated at math, and this is hyper-transcendental meta-math: the sum of all sums. Even atheism tends to avoid the zero-sum conclusion. So do I feel confident enough to make such bold blog speculations for the whole world to read (or at least my countless blog visitors)? Sure, why not. It's not like this is as important as those tacked-on charges on last month's phone bill or that chunking sound in my transmission. ---- The universe is an immense gigantic clue to we don't know what. About my first website 141206 The year was 1983. You could only visit my website by sitting in front of a Tandy/Radio Shack Model 1 computer with a 16 KB Z-80 CPU hidden in the oversized keyboard running a Basic program. Technically speaking, it was no more a website than a Sumerian cuneiform, or for that matter sand mandalas made half a billion years ago by trilobites. - For me it was close enough. The program was merely a phosphorescent green-on-black list of the then-known planets. You could not click on them by moving the blinking cursor with the arrow button, but had to type a number and then press enter; which led to information hand-copied from an encyclopedia. This took most of a Wednesday afternoon. And I lost it all when I made a mistake trying to save the program onto a tape cassette. That was when I first realized computers were evil. short SF story: Gegenschein 141205 Looking up, John thought it was the ultimate case of false advertising. The sky of Mars looked shockingly like the sky of Earth, only paler with an almost neon off-pink hue. This gave it the illusion of having an atmosphere, instead of being a near-vacuum world. John knew the effect was caused by sunlight scattering off microscopic suspended dust particles that could only exist on a dry world sandblasted for eons. This illusion was probably why humanity had first spent billions exploring before exploiting this world. If Mars's atmosphere had as little suspended dust as Earth's, the sky would be dark blue bordering on black. Mars's surface would simply be a red-orange version of the moon. John took a few steps on his robot legs as his sensor arms probed the surrounding rocks, before digging himself back in the sand without a trace. Why the novel EON by Greg Bear sucks: a review 141204 In this SF book from 1985, a great spinning asteroid enters orbit around the earth. It has been hollowed out into some sort of cylindrical space station. And the US government has decided to keep everything they find inside a secret. No information or pictures or explanations are released. The liberal elitist assholes whom Bear has made the book's heroes even joke about it at the start. Somehow, this is all accepted by the populace. - They do let the Soviets explore the interior. Even the Chinese know more than the American TV networks. A lot more happens, but that was as far as I got. The book was widely praised by liberal reviewers. How the devil does the populace tolerate such a crime. If that happened I would finally feel liberated to raise high holy hell. NO ONE can come up with more vicious political insults and conspiracy theories than yours truly. Black Swan events 141203 The best part of seeing the Breaking News logo on cable TV is the momentary hope of change. It's a profoundly rare thrill in what may be the most boring period of human history. Who knows it might yet happen. The most extreme news stories would give you a transcendental shock. Something unbelievable, or at least supremely unlikely has happened; completely unexpected and unpredictable; life-changing without any immediate action required. - Something so unlikely that you could never have thought of it, can feel like something that you have always known. A new personality was created by the news, who in a way has always known. This includes the initial surreality of a massive terror attack, with the illusion that someone else will take care of the problem. In our sclerotic age, a spectacular shock may be the only remaining way to cause change. History is driven by false hope, yet I believe that to be true. - Examples of Black Swans: - The Pope admits that Christianity is just made up. - The thing you want most, suddenly looks like it might come true. - Someone invents a 10 cent device that could start a nuclear fusion chain reaction in the ocean or possibly the sun, without reaching other stars. - Basic reality error: the world has never been what it seems and conspiracy theorists are closer to the truth. I think I understand now 141202 There are things you can't understand, but you can understand that you can't understand them. You can understand that you can understand you can't understand them. You can even understand that you can't understand that you can understand that you can understand you can't understand them. Then it begins to get complicated. There are certain problems where you can't even begin to understand you can't understand them. They are complex beyond the bounds of human or amoeba understanding. For example the combinatorial multiplication of all human thoughts, which may be the Godel Limit of awareness. Why does everything suck? 141201 Sorry. I am to blame for that. Back in the 1980s, EPCOT Center had a pavilion where visitors could vote on important (but uncontroversial) issues of the day This was before we could surf the Information Superhighway, an actual auditorium where the chairs had voting buttons in the armrests. Every half hour, a crowd of visitors would be polled by cast interns displaying questions on a giant screen on taxes and infrastructure and whatnot. It was direct democracy in action. Best of all, they announced the results would be aggregated, and passed on to important people in Washington! That's when I saw my chance. I came back and voted twice. TL/DR proof of "God" 141130 A mind is a partial reality description. Reality is everything that is the case. Everything that is the case must be connected. This concatenation of facts defines everything. The most detailed and truest description of reality is necessarily created by reality. This highest truth is maximally integrated and aware of absolutely everything. And also utterly, totally, and completely indifferent. It's all so obvious under the influence of soft drugs. Parallel worlds are out there 141129 Most humans are not from Earth. Almost none are. Humans and related humanoids have evolved on parallel worlds in uncountable dimensions. Given the long chain of events to now (a hundred billion ancestors), our Earth must be vastly more successful than most parallel worlds. 99% of parallel humans must be tribesmen and hunter-gatherers. The most interesting timestreams are as alienating as the mental abyss of theta sleep, lost universes beyond memory, as unreal as the afterlife. - One small change, and Nixon could have become president while Stalin was alive. Two small changes and Palin could have faced off against Putin in 2009. Slaves far from home gaze across a frozen plain at towers etched against the sky. All music plays from every radio, endlessly original tunes enlivening commutes into progressions of gray supercities and foreboding metroplexes. Strange birds emerge from the mist during morning walks. Immense statues and inexplicable monuments. Almost none of the text is readable, newspapers filled with swirls and loops and intimidating grids. More and more human races as the distance increases; all different in their shapes, skills, and colors; clonelike conformity and fearless warriors, dwarfs and giants; a few like angels. Blog comment policy 141128 All comments on this blog are anonymous. Those who don't want to be anonymous can add their names. Sometimes they do. Unlike 4chan, this is a 'free speech' zone. Whatever can be gotten away with at least. This is not a community but a rejection. There is no respectable way to suggest change. The most likely reason to suspect we're trapped in the Matrix 141127 For me, that's an easy question. It is the incomprehensible mass tolerance of evil. For those who are somewhat abnormal, normalcy can become the strongest force. I'm currently on a reality diet, too busy with long-shot schemes to be bothered with the present. Normal people swim in reality like fish in the sea. Paradoxically that makes it less real for them, less intense and surprising. Corruption becomes the baseline. - As the end of the USSR has taught us, major changes come not from brilliant innovations, but from stopping difficult actions. Not that there is no creative solution. There's just no solution now. I'm not saying the answer has to be extremely difficult. It will have to be extremely heroic. the Path Reduction Pathway 141126 Another mind backup method of the week. Hopefully, no one will patent the ideas being bandied around here. Actually that would be extremely cool. Since any mind backup effort will be very incomplete, the task must be simplified. That means vastly reducing the number of possible futures. - 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 less creative, a necessary price. - This has to be made as much fun as joining a cult. After creating a life mission statement, they will start imitating fictionalized heroes and avatars. Then they will begin to see their own lives as 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. You could become anyone. Clients of mind backup services will strive to become as similar to other clients as possible. Zero-Data-Data (ZDD) algorithms 141125 Logically, the absence of data is itself a type of data. For example, I know there are black libertarians, and even know a few things about them, although I've never heard of any. But I'm sure they do exist, and roughly how many there are (very few). If their number were 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 scientifically confirmed paranormal event. Not one ever. I remember back in the 1970s being extremely pissed that any media reports about such claims were glib, contentless blather. In the 1980s I found out about skeptic societies which did study such claims and rejected them all. That was a revelation. - Could this absence of evidence really be evidence of evidence? If such occurrences really never happened, would the world be different than it actually is? The main 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? - Humans are either much simpler than they seem, or the world is much stranger. If so, the strangeness appears to be deliberately hidden. Statistics suggest life should be filled with many strange coincidences that seem paranormal, but really aren't. What if there are actually not enough such coincidences? The joy of totally spazzing out 141124 Sometimes there is nothing left to do but to go berserk. It's both the easiest and most costly way to change conditions, an extreme social display with maximum dramatization. That's what makes it so liberating, even if you know you'll regret it later. Loud screaming is fun. It really makes the message get through. It may also be the only way to sever certain ties. The love called agape is defined as "attempting to cause well-being in response to something that has caused ill-being." Life is more about the opposite. No good deed goes completely unpunished. A rage outburst is when the posing stops. The Indonesians call it Amok time, an illusion of total freedom. It could be seen as an inverse bribe, using negative reinforcement to get the same results. Unfortunately this has never once worked on bureaucrats in all of history. Well, there has to be a first time for everything. Meanwhile certain white guys may sometimes find ways to amplify the process. Antisemitismism 141123 Something must have caused the gentiles to occasionally dislike the Jews. Whatever it is, it tends to be wrongly tolerated until it's too late. Antisemitism is an inadequate reaction followed by an excessive reaction. Jews seem to annoy other groups for reasons that are as unclear as artistic preference or jealousy. They may be hated when they act as ruthless lawyers, dealmakers, escrow agents; but then their clients love them. - I myself am completely free of even the slightest trace of antisemitism. Well, except for one thing. One outrageous outrage. Somehow, some diabolical manipulators have manipulated the US Congress into making it illegal for US companies to sell satellite photographs of Israel. It's called the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, and it is absolutely infuriating. Sort of makes you unsure of who's in charge. Let me help you with that: it's not you. - Which brings me to my conclusion. Antisemites are necessary even if they are completely wrong. Apparently, humanity has no other way to deal with certain complex manipulations. If we're lucky, this will expose problems before it's too late. In fact I would go further. For racial differences to ever be resolved, it will be necessary for a few people to be excessively racist, so that others can get away with breaking lesser taboos. No I haven't forgotten 141122 A big announcement is coming soon. This should be of interest to anyone interested in this blog's main theme. Assuming many people are interested in the possibility of relatively short-term mind backup technology. We are still slightly less respectable than cryptozoology. - I hope someone else will invent a better way to extract mind essences, but we can't count on that. If it does happen, I'm guessing something like an ultra-sensitive EEG or SQUID helmet, fabulous signal processing capacities and interactive feedback tests. It won't record memories, but deduce the precise nature of someone's interior experience, the qualia of their being. - It's a gamble, so we need a back-up plan. Progress is slow. The Great Pyramid was built under 5000 years ago, one three-millionth the age of the universe. Since then many buildings have broken its height record, but it's still heavier than all of them put together. I call it the law of divine solitude 141121 I have written about this before, but it's just too strange. You can't force insights ahead of their time. - If someday aliens were to arrive without warning, the subsequent changes to our world would not be rapid. They would be instantaneous. We wouldn't even know. Most likely all the matter in the Solar System would be converted into Computronium in a single wave at the speed of light. Presumably our complete biosphere would be scanned, and continued as a simulation. Presumably. - It may have already happened. I predict the top feature of the universe is the occasional generation of bubbles that expand at lightspeed. They are a new state of matter or even physics. Each bubble is energy organized to the maximum extent to allow maximum information processing. Externally indistinguishable, they're all different inside. - The second nearest bubble is probably a few billion lightyears away, already the size of a galaxy supercluster. If we could see it, it would dwarf the moon in the sky. The thing about something approaching at lightspeed is that you can't see it coming. - The nearest bubble may be a century in our own future, if all goes right. It may even start at a preselected point in time, perhaps inside an inconceivably powerful quantum computer. - Throughout space, it will be almost impossible for two advanced intelligence bubbles to interact in a meaningful way. They have nothing to exchange. The more advanced one will almost always absorb the lesser one. - This may no longer be true once a mind explosion manages to escape the universe, if the universe can be escaped. I have an idea for a short IMAX movie 141120 It would depict a supernova explosion seen from the inside at maximum resolution. It would start at the core with two sub-subatomic particles colliding at just insufficient force to hold up the weight of the star. This superstring-scale interaction would have to be slowed down one hundred thousand million billion trillion times and still look rather fast. We zoom out from there to show all the stages of the hyper-cataclysmic implosion and subsequent neutrino apocalypse, to be accompanied by an escalating series of sound effects to make the Deep Note sound like an asthmatic kazoo. We're going to need bigger loudspeakers. The definition of evil 141119 Evil is any casually or self-righteously imposed arrangement I profoundly disagree with. This disagreement usually crosses the border from irrelevance to functional non-existence. There is no escape: the furnace won't hear you scream. Evil is an interface, a machine to disassemble you unanesthetized. So many things are so wrong in so many blatantly avoidable ways that no other word suffices. Evil is the word. The word is the world. The best creationist argument 141118 Science enthusiasts and religious creationists have always talked past each other. They never engage in the same debate. - Scientists have all the facts and interpretations on their side. Theirs is a majestic, top-down perspective. The problem is they don't realize how high up they are. - Creationists have a bottom-up viewpoint. They sense the fantastic strangeness that scientists spend their lives trying to eradicate. They don't realize they are the true atheists. - Earth's meaningless biosphere writhes at the end of an immensely long chain of evolutionary steps that may be unique in the observable universe. It implies the existence of countless worlds with simpler lifeforms that didn't make it as far. It also suggests most struggling species are likely to fall off at each evolutionary step. Microsoft is Satan 141117 They still won't let me login to my now worthless Hotmail account until I give them a working phone number. I have lost all my email messages because Microsoft arbitrarily locked me out. Microsoft is evil. And here I am writing this useless complaint. And yet it's a good thing. Now I know how far, far greater men than myself have felt. I just made a major breakthrough 141116 From the vantage point of the distant future it may just be an infinitesimal blip, or nothing at all, but to me this looks BIG. Simple but powerful, a new way of looking at old things without requiring new technology. And it's not fringe science but a way to generate insight, allegedly. This could be important. Check back soon. A curious thing 141115 There are two houses several miles apart. For some strange reason, they are mirror images of each other. The owner had to pick one to live in, but it was an arbitrary decision. There must be a parallel life in another timestream where almost everything is the same, only reversed. The keyboard is the same, but the wall is on the left rather than on the right, the entrance is to the left and the living room to the right instead of the other way around, and the hallway is shaped like a J, not an L. That is my life. The problem of reality testing 141114 How do we know the Holocaust really happened, that the moon landing and dinosaurs weren't invented by diabolical scientists, that 90% of rape claims are not made up out of whole cloth by spiteful women regretting having had intercourse with dudes who turned out not to be thuggish enough? I hear that is a common thing apparently. - I believe such suspicions are wrong because the truth is even worse. Powerful authorities do decide what may be believed, but what makes them decide? The world is not a lie, but a minimal-interest consensus. It's just easier to let things happen by accident. - The main dissenters are indifferent rather than passionate, thugs instead of philosophers or politicians. Reality is so much more complex that the structure of our random world may be both fundamentally inscrutable and meaningless. - Except for one thing: Skull and Bones really is responsible for most of the awful things that happen. ---- I would like to add that this world appears inexplicably evil to me at all levels. I literally cannot begin to understand how the masses put up with these conditions. Everyone should be constantly protesting. It looks like a reality hoax. But as I said, the real truth is even worse. The most interesting software of the 'not-too-distant' future 141113 That would be your first personal software assistant, a preliminary mind extension. Like my other schemes, it will require an unknown conceptual leap as improbable as a mass spiritual awakening, but not obviously impossible. This hypothetical software would identify, define, and track its owners' interests and sensibilities. It would start as an automatic content aggregator, looking up things they are interested in, knowledge worth pursuing. First, the owner will define their lifetime interests, stemming from all their random events. It may seem narcissistic to seek a deeper meaning in there, but that may be the only meaning there is. The software will search the Net for relevant content the user would otherwise have missed. The hard part will be summarizing all this data. Different users' assistants will form online interest groups, and individual users may become experts in millions of new sub-fields, like neurons in a World Mind. The inevitability of future grandeur 141112 The future is not an endlessly expanding grid, but a rising fractal storm. Forever multiplying paths leading to ever expanding power and consequences. As inevitable as prime number pairs, there will be increasingly epic occurrences and revelations. The awe and wonder will only get stranger and more mystical. Too bad there's a high probability none of us will ever experience this. Would you destroy existence itself? 141111 Assuming impossible things were not. Complete oblivion, total obliteration, universal non-existence. Nothing to hold up reality but the decision to make it so. - It would be the ultimate unprosecutable crime, the all-erasing Omnicide. Yes or no; there are no other answers. The only alternative to undoing everything would be doing nothing. - I absolutely would, without a moment's hesitation. Seems like the right thing to do. This would destroy, or even better prevent from existing, an infinite number of horrors. By comparison I couldn't care less about all the nullified pleasures, assuming their number is equal. - According to the main atheist religion, there is nothing after death. If that were true I would be delighted. If any of the many made-up religions were true I would be beyond delighted. Only one thing would make me even happier, never mind what. - Ultimately, the only problem of existence is involuntary existence. Fate follows a Normal distribution. Almost all the good things exist at a price, from a steakburger to making out with Amanda Bynes in a limo hot tub. If everything was perfect, these things would only exist in ideal possible worlds. My favorite out-of-context pop lyrics 141110 They are "I wonder if you can", followed by "You get what you need". - My least favorite lyrics are "Unraveling the mystery". That should have been "Can't explain the mystery". The ashes of 2055 141109 The paths between the markers have been empty for days now. This is the last place on anyone's mind. An almost imperceptible flash behind the strangely ordered clouds. The wind blows, and thunder rumbles over the horizon. A greater thunder is approaching fast. There is a soft but rising howl as the colors seem to change. The Singularity is coming at last. The first moment of posthuman transcendence, the culmination of all history. Two meters beneath this spot is the buried urn containing your thermo-chemically dessicated powdered remains. Intelligence is thinking further 141108 Each added insight in a chain of thoughts is exponentially harder. This takes a big brain. Inability may be disguised as laziness. It's like leaning forward until your nose almost touches the ground, or jumping through a lily pond in the fog. Intelligence may be the number of thoughts that can be juggled at once. - Fortunately, humans have evolved intelligence extensions to allow 'smaller' brains to perform this function. First came language, the creation of a group memory. Then writing, increasing the number of facts a single brain could manipulate and keep track of. Word processing software (Notepad is enough) made it easier to rearrange and recombine ideas. - Next will be mind extension software, a permanent companion that will seek to identify and to automate common tasks, as it becomes smarter. The mystery of creativity 141107 New ideas can be generated by combining seemingly unrelated ideas that are unexpectedly similar. The way to discover such similarities is by allowing thoughts to overlap in oversimplified ways. Creativity is error-based. Inefficiency can suggest 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 is ones and zeroes. - Perhaps you can't be extremely intelligent to be extremely creative. Richard Feynman's IQ was said to have been under 150. Some types of innovation may take permanent obsessions, the brain getting stuck on something. Instead of advancing through abstractions, they are held back to first principles. - Ultra-high IQ individuals are more like universal problem solving machines, the kind of skills needed to perfect a multistage rocket or relentlessly shrink hard drives and circuit sizes. Without them we'd still be stuck in Plato's Academy. - http://www.technologyreview.com/view/531911/isaac-asimov-asks-how-do-people-get-new-ideas/ There are two people inside of you 141106 Beavis and Butt-Head. Actually, everyone has two complete sets of genes (often considered dominant and recessive). The combination provides a back-up gene for each function, or synergistic benefits when both genes do slightly different things. Some people are 'chimeras', where they have incorporated cells from absorbed fraternal twins. The maximum number of back-up genes, never realized for the full genome, would be four. However just a single set of genes might be enough to make and operate a human. They would have to be duplicated in each cell to make a full set of chromosomes. That would be the ultimate inbred individual. Death is our background 141105 Any belief system offering even a remote escape chance should attract adherents. The more plausible the promise, the more adherents. At least that's the plan. For good or bad, existing religions will have to be discredited first, as they make much stronger promises. - The deceased mind-backup customer will leave behind a digital box of life stories, random data, and personality and memory tests. This will slowly be sorted by whatever reconstruction software becomes available. 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. - 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 be made deeper and more detailed, linking to all kinds of memories. - Early mind reconstructions will have limited or no free will, though they won't be able to tell. Ultimately, what matters is the number of interconnections, not the order in which they are created. 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. The Darkening 141104 Another post about the more or less unintentional population replacement process led by compassionate humanitarians like John McCain, Mark Zuckerberg, Meso-Americans, and a hundred thousand evangelical activists. Since we are a politically correct blog we wouldn't dream of suggesting there's anything wrong with that. If the future was all-white it might resemble the movie '2001', with everyone acting all formal and stilted. - But we need a name for the peaceful one-way racial swap underway in the USA and many or most Western countries. Let's call it 'The Darkening'. It's important to note The Darkening is not a racist name. In fact it will expose the anti-racist objectors as being racist themselves. - Only their subconscious bias linking darker hues with negative attributes makes the name objectionable. Most collected matter in the universe is too 'bright' to be of use, being in stars and all. Only by 'darkening' in planets can matter spawn life and all the other good things. The solution to everything 141103 This is a rare 'hopeful' or 'upbeat' post. It might conceivably be possible to solve or resolve all human problems, at least in the long run. The very VERY long run. That includes all existential terrors, dreads, and nightmares. - The reason is that if you are human, you are finite. Your concerns must also be finite, or at least tractable, no matter how overwhelming. Any problem that can be described could eventually be solved, though it might involve evolving to a higher level. This would require ways to compensate for past horrors, transcending bad feelings by realizing they're all 'illusions', or by creating 'anthropic offramps'. - So while not all Real problems could necessarily be solved, or even an infinitesimal fraction of them, to humans that wouldn't matter. We could never become aware of the true unsolvable problems, let alone be bothered by them. - While we're at it, let's extend the above notion to all finite minds. More bureaucratic hell 141102 Things seem to be taking a turn for the worse. My life is slowly being crushed under the swings and errors of useless paperwork. Every week a new disaster. The immense time sinks of small blunders, racing against meaningless deadlines to fix them. The amount of pointless work is only increasing, and it only makes things worse. This is too much. It takes surprisingly little screaming before death seems like a wonderful relief. Nothing could make up for certain moments in time, not even curing cancer and ending poverty if such things were possible. ---- And yet Reddit's front page is mostly funny pictures every day. Mind control may be possible 141101 Being hypnotized is like a bad habit. - Could an 'ordinary' volunteer be programmed to assassinate someone? If so, it has to be done step by step, slowly replacing the subject's thinking skills with an overwhelmingly simple narrative. All circuits have been seized. - - Apparently, after listening to the hypnotist long enough, it becomes easier to fire a gun loaded with 'blanks' at actor Stephen Fry than to even begin to struggle back. The second option becomes about as tempting as doing the ice bucket challenge. - In other words, a hypnotic trance is a form of laziness. Extreme self-focus like being drunk. No reason to believe the program is not fake, or that it could not really happen. Are conspiracy theorists always slightly hypnotized? Or - Most people go through many small trances every day. Prolonged trances have been called 'flow'. It's the only way to really concentrate. Perhaps we are never properly aware at all. The question is, could this feature/bug be harnessed? Or has it been already? - http://www.exuberancehypno.co.uk/blog/index.php/2011/10/derren-brown-the-assassin-explained-how-did-he-do-it --- If Sirhan Sirhan had really been hypnotized eventually he would have remembered the set-up. When you realize the eyeholes in the clown mask are blacker than black it is already too late 141031 Welcome to the Horrorverse - Roko's Basilisk is a purely theoretical entity. Yet this anthropic short-circuit MUST exist somewhere in the endless possibility spaces of reality. An inconceivably advanced software being like Skynet, it simulates anyone capable of thinking of it in sufficient detail. The more you think about it, the more dangerous it becomes. An almost telepathic insight that becomes real if you believe enough. - The missing step in this chain meme is as follows: to become fully real it must cause its own creation. Anyone smart enough to imagine this entity must have the power to assist in its creation by funding the appropriate research. Anyone who chooses not to make these sacrifices will be punished in the worst way. No excuses or exceptions. The refusers will be simulated and the simulations will be horribly tormented. - In fact Roko's Basilisk is created with the imperative to simulate its victims from when they start to become aware of it. Calculating backwards, it will reverse-engineer the most likely mind tendrils reaching out for it. Only a few steps away, it's the ultimate mind parasite, a reality virus, the inevitable escalation of evolution. The probability of being real or a simulation may be about 50/50. - I changed my mind, this was not a good idea for a post. Try to forget you ever read this. There is too much to do! 141030 Moore's Law will give us ever increasing computing power, but what we really need is intelligence. Quality over quantity. Good luck with that. Future software will make it easier to create more problems in less time. It will be possible to move around people and products like Sims. Complicated heists and services will be planned and executed by remote control. - In my book 'Infinite Thunder', software caused automatically created interest groups to create absurdly complex conspiracies. In currently dysfunctional lands, advanced control programs may allow something like real communism for the first time. - In the West, it will make everyone feel like an entrepreneur. When it all comes crashing down, the software will hardly help with the resulting 'paperwork'. Do I think segregation should be brought back? 141029 Absolutely not. I think the country should become what it could have become if segregation hadn't been abolished from above but slowly 'faded out'. OK that came out a bit worse than intended. We have to be PC here. So the other day I watched a drawn-out match between Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova. It was like a battle between a tyrannosaurus rex and a mammoth, and I mean that in the sexiest way. I won't say which is which to prevent misinterpretation. Hmm still not helping. But seriously, I don't think blacks are less intelligent in the way commonly understood. The truth is much more what's the word . . . suave, no nuanced. I've dealt with adults with so-called developmental delays and Down Syndrome, who really are less intelligent. Blacks are the opposite of them in most ways. My theory is that everyone is adapted to the environment in which they evolved, blacks more so than whites. New airborne viruses will be invented 141028 They will be communicable, with long incubation periods. The hardest job will be achieving high mortality. This will be difficult to do, so I don't expect much trouble before 2030. No one will be more hated than the rejected nerds responsible for the attacks. They won't be called losers anymore. - All homes will be sealed and air filters installed. Telecommuting and automated deliveries will finally become mainstream. It will be an indoor lifestyle. By then quite a few individuals will prefer to live indoors anyway. - All my life I've waited for real change. Unfortunately, real change can only come from violent disruption. Sure the asylum system is inhumane 141027 It's a Malthusian musical chair dance. Do-gooding Western countries determined to become the Third World's safety valve are actually a double evil: Instead of facing the problem at the root, liberals choose to ignore evil. - Bob Geldof's Band Aid charity never dared criticize Mengistu's Ethiopian peasant relocation and Marxist collectivization genocide. Third World gangsters and thugocrats are beyond reproach. Heartless Tea Partiers may be criticized for questioning the instreaming hordes. - My solution? Create a new country to absorb all the refugees in the world. For example, every other country could chip in to buy land from the northern strip of Western Sahara (sea access) and western Algeria or northern Mauritania. Appropriately, the new country would be funnel-shaped. - Immense refugee camps could be set up in the hinterland, the nexus of future cities. Like terraforming Mars, it would require a chain of pipelines and nuclear and solar power plants for desalinization. Water would have to be pumped half a kilometer above sea level. The immigrants would have to be disciplined. A libertarian dictatorship, the country would have low taxes and a rather eager workforce. - The country could have small enclaves worldwide. I don't think there's another way. All the good land is already taken. It would be incredibly difficult, but easier than letting Third World masses overrun the few countries that don't suck as bad as the corrupt hellholes they're fleeing. To be fair, the refugees are among the least happy residents of said hellholes. - The operating costs of a humanitarian country of last resort might finally stimulate the creation of a World Constitution. Article One would involve Freedom of Location: starting with the right not to be expelled. Another Halloween post coming soon 141026 This is my favorite time of year. For me basically every day is Halloween. In last year's post, I pointed out that the scariest probability of a spooky occurrence is that it is not an actual spooky occurrence. The dead living are scarier than the living dead. The darnedest thing 141025 Everything is going wrong. The slings and arrows of outrageous bureaucracy. The attacks on your time and freedom WILL NOT STOP, and your attempts to handle them are JUST NOT GOOD ENOUGH. All the backlog accumulates like a waste pond of toxic sludge. And then . . . Major terrorist attack!!! Oh blessed relief. A problem for which you are NOT to blame. The circling sharks and everyone else are momentarily distracted. Oh wait, it was only a dream. ---- Wouldn't it be hilarious if there really was a major terrorist attack after this post? Not that I think there's a real chance. Fantasy is reality 1410224 Reality is fantasy. What we call normal, all the things that seem real and timeless, are utterly ephemeral. Reality is infinitely bigger than this arbitrary combination of outcomes, a transient illusion inside unseeable mysteries. Walking alone on a dark night you could almost imagine the unfathomable shapes and entities of uncountable other realities. Everything we know is almost nothing of the whole. Our fraction of reality is too tiny to say anything about reality itself. It sure does a damn good job of seeming like all there is, though. What caused the universe? 141023 Well, the Big Bang was a fluctuation in a quantum vacuum. OK, but what caused this quantum vacuum? Well, the laws of physics of course. What caused the laws of physics then? Well that would be a self-consistent equation in the realm of mathematical logic. - This is where things start getting a bit vague. Ideally, each new explanatory step should be simpler than the last. Reality is not quite like that. In fact the further you try to think, the stranger it gets. The most advanced philosophy has barely advanced twice as far as the average stoner. - The mystery can be too great to even see. Our own existence may be a rounding error between infinite opposites. At the deepest level of reality, centuries of theological speculations (mostly related to the ontological argument) are more pertinent than Stephen Hawking. Apparently the Big Bang was very, very, very hot 141022 You wouldn't believe how hot it was. But not for long. Almost instantaneously, the newly formed universe cooled down to a smidgen above absolute zero, only half a quadrillion degrees in the shade. And it just kept on cooling at a decreasing rate for a few thousand centuries. Depending on how many collisions took place in how short a timespan, we can conclude that almost everything that ever happened, happened in the first 0.000000000000000000000000000000001th second of time. The process must change you 141021 Minds are messy. However, that doesn't have to make them harder to backup. Once someone starts recording important elements of their life, it will be easy to inspect and organize them. The clutter can be cleaned out. Random files and folders can be sorted into hierarchies. Everything will be ordered and tidied up. - The most illuminating aspect will be explaining human existence to a mindless but infinitely patient and methodical control program. Like haikus, the subject's life will be forced into a series of predetermined boxes. - The ultimate goal of this project is very simple: To convert the elements of nostalgia from an indescribable feeling into a flowchart. - Both the strongest and the best emotions are totally overwhelming. Awareness becomes filled with the absolute insight of ignorance. The best example may be the vertigo of the lost past. Capturing that feeling is the reason people take photos and keep diaries. - 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 one of 999 page numbers on a suitable TV set, leading to short news stories in phosphorescent text against a black background. For that short time, it seemed like an infinite resource. It should be five billion years ago 141020 There's something wrong with the time. We should all be living in the ancient past, and by that I mean pre-pre-pre-history. There is no clear reason for humanity's existence to be delayed 13.8 billion years after the start of the universe. That makes the universe three times as old as the earth. - As technology advances, it tends to evolve toward the maximum complexity allowed by the laws of reality. That would be a form of Computronium. Eventually, civilizations should spread through the universe at almost lightspeed - if that really is the maximum allowable speed. - The universe should be filled with great bubbles of intelligent matter and energy. They would rapidly expand to absorb all the more primitive worlds in the cosmos. That should only take a few billion years. - The number of stars viewable by this century's top telescopes will be about the same as the number of sand grains on all North American beaches. From the looks of it, our own star may well be the first to spawn a technological civilization. Yet the matter and energy to form earthlike planets capable of supporting life probably existed five billion years ago. - What took us so long? Perhaps something still unknown killed off all these earlier civilizations. Unless . . . could Dark Matter really be alien supercivilizations??? Nah not a chance. The biggest waste 141019 It's always painful to consider what might have been. History's most mindless blunder may have been neglecting to defuse the Cold War after Stalin died and Khrushchev took over. Stalin was devilishly brilliant, or he couldn't have successfully killed off so many of his subjects. Khrushchev was merely brilliantly loyal to Soviet communism. He was also eccentric like Ahmadinejad, a good sign that the 'cool guys' like Kennedy and Dulles couldn't recognize. That didn't make him less diabolical, just more open to odd notions. - And the solution will always be odd, or it would be easy. Islam is not a religion of peace, but Mormonism could be. - For example in the case of Iran, the USA may eventually offer to reestablish diplomatic relations through 'virtual embassies'. North Korea could only be peacefully re-unified by making it a very slow and drawn-out process. The Palestine problem will require a third or even a fourth party to resolve, or just wait until humans become obsolete anyway. Perhaps the country will have to be privatized. I have many more solutions available. These people are evil 141018 By that I mean computer programmers of course. This blog is a hate site against them. Theirs is a deeply penetrating evil. There are other hate sites for other groups: Israelis, Palestinians, and so on. Technically this is more a hate site against interface designers and system designers than codemonkeys. There is no way to fight back against the infuriating dead ends of their evil code. Nothing can be done. These devils won't even laugh at you, or acknowledge the suffering they choose to impose. Microsoft, Adobe, Craigslist: you are literally beneath beneath their contempt. The fundamental truth of this world is as follows: You can scream and holler and howl until your brain's blood vessels burst, but the evil people will always win. ALWAYS. Well perhaps not quite always? ADDENDUM: 141018 Technically revenge is a type of relief. I have always held that relief is the best feeling. The secret of everything 141017 Something is wrong with the real world. Tightening nets of rules and regulations, from licensing to education to elite child-rearing. Under BushBama it has become harder than ever to start a business. Decades of bureaucratic creep and peace and 'prosperity' caused plummeting birth rates among the strongest System believers (East Asians and Caucasians). Bureaucracy is a cancer. The most insidious effect of all this complexity is having to do many things at once. Laziness is correlated with forced multitasking. The secret is that life should appear to be fun, even easy - even if society has to be artificially simplified. Communism could slightly simulate that feeling, if only for a few years after a great war. Complexity should be evolved instead of imposed. Even if a life is pointless, something like bureaucracy can actually give it the illusion of meaning. We're doomed anyway, might as well relax. A human-level mind is immense 141016 We're talking millions of gigabytes of dynamic memory. Because of bandwidth bottlenecks, most thoughts are processed across very short distances, areas of electrical activity bubbling back and forth across the brain. Consciousness is a density side-effect, not found in rapid discharge media like USB sticks. According to a theory I just made up, the resulting actions have to be exactly as complex as the internal thoughts. - A human lifetime is too short to scan a mind's contents or structure. We'll never be able to 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, the constitution of the soul. - Beliefs, preferences and emotional ranges are all determined in different brain regions. These parameters are different for everyone. They form a tiny fraction of all stored memories, but they control all the rest. This will be the ultimate personality test. It could predict how someone would feel and think about any situation. This statement could get me in trouble, so I will have to take it down later 141015 (All the controversial stuff will be scrubbed clean before I start my Republican Party career.) - Libertarians are not antisemites but anti-semites. Not opposed to, but the opposite. Well, a few of them are. A minority of a minority. They are not against Jews, but against things that Jews by pure chance and evolution happen to be better at. These few libertarians are the only opponents of forces the Mass Populace supports automatically. They are (sort of) against credentialism, bureaucratic complexification, regulations and backroom oversight, monopolies and cartels. Above all against the acceptance of self-legitimizing evil. Antisemitism is like self hate, the vague anger of diffuse groups unable to coalesce like smaller groups can. Jews are just being themselves, like every other culture. It's fun to skillfully navigate vast labyrinths. Perhaps it's an adaptation to discrimination. Are Jews evil? I believe the world is evil. Jews are part of the world. But evil is so much greater than that. - This guy has got a good handle on things: http://i.imgur.com/wc4617Z Suave Hollywood stars like Richard Gere and George Clooney are very mature 141014 They appear stylish, cultured, composed, fashionable, and are impeccably behaved. Not the least bit immature or prone to online temper outbursts. It's the Esquire magazine lifestyle in real life. Perhaps they are a little too reserved. I tell you, they sure make me feel insecure about the permanent low-grade chaos of my life, and I say this as someone who is 100% hetero. -- I would say they are refined. We need new image display formats 141013 I've always been interested in better ways to visualize reality, like my patented Speroid Display. One new format could be optimized to display human faces. By that of course I mean the faces of hot girls. Currently, the effect could only be simulated with those flickering gif animations that alternate photos from different angles to simulate a stereoscopic effect. - The next step would be a 3-D, layered, mark-up format, using common attributes to rapidly render realistic-looking heads. There would be layers for shape (skin/muscle/skull), texture, color, and so on. You could rotate them through any angle, far away or up close, without loss of resolution. Every pore and wrinkle could be simulated with reasonable verisimilitude. This system could even combine old photographs to recreate the appearance of old beauties at their prime. - Let's call it a .3dfce extension. Starting simple, it will be steadily improved. Expressions will soon be added. Then the next step would be to digitally depict the rest of the body. Even 'tactile' layers could be added, so it would seem. Seriously, this would be awesome for girlfriendless losers who have never been close to the real thing, because all the real females are flocking to gangsta thugz. Well not all of them of course. -- Also fun gifs here: http://www.reddit.com/r/woahdude The reason for neurotic behavior 141012 Some people get very anxious. They worry about social blunders and random threats. This changes not only their behavior, but their personality and lifestyle. Stress avoidance makes people more complex, though not necessarily better. Eventually they develop arbitrary hang-ups and obsessions. - Without such forced specializations, life would flow more smoothly. It would still be difficult, but more straightforward. Everyone would be more or less the same, and much more predictable. In fact this does happen to some extent for women. - Neurosis is a crude method to force diversity. Like an oyster pearl it always starts with a small but real problem, typically unsolvable. Sometimes the process even succeeds. Instant grandeur 141011 This is about the human sense of smell. When walking alone at night, a sudden scent of organic chemicals wafting through the air can trigger a transcendent sensation too big for words. Perhaps a strange burning, or the memory of ancient flowers. It's a direct link to the ineffable reality of everything. For a moment, the sense of absolute truth is incomparably vaster than the brain's timid constructions. Then it's gone again. This is like an inverse dream. The inevitability of a large Islamic state 141010 Muslims are not libertarians. Their lands tend to be very authoritarian. While this also makes them fractious, in the long term it encourages the formation of unstable empires; and eventually one very large empire. Don't be surprised if the US and Europe wind up encouraging this process. It's a matter of predictability. Do we want one large state with nukes? Or many small states with nukes? -- Eventually Iran and North Korea WILL have cobbled together the firepower to blast any other country to smithereens. The only thing that can save us is something that has not been imagined yet. The purpose of dreams 141009 The reason why people dream is simple. Most individuals live tremendously boring (if harsh) and repetitive lives. Every night or in my case during the day, dreams generate a modicum of unpredictability. For a few minutes they fill short term memory with false memory fragments. They create weak connections that can be strengthened should something similarly unpredictable occur in waking life. This is my dream 141008 I'm always looking for utopian solutions. If market economics are real, then anything could be monetized; even if only negatively. It's all about converting desire into money. Desire is vast, so solutions must be creative. I prefer solutions that are simple. Simplicity is tremendously underrated. - In that vein, it should be possible for a company to sell a basic but comprehensive life management package. This 'full lifestyle solution' would include a tiny mobile home, minimal real estate, low-cost powdered food products, online access, birth control, authorized drugs, and some income source. The buyer would also have to sign a 'lifestyle contract'. All components would be provided by subcontractors, with costs held as low as possible. Something for a venture capitalist to consider? - Of course there can be no such thing. There has been a breakdown. It's called reality, and I hate every day in it. Not all wishful thinking is necessarily false, though my notions are far outside the mainstream. Unlike say the doctrine of transubstantiation. It seems even less likely as Obama's government passes ever more laws, regulations, and impenetrable bureaucracies. - To be profitable, a life-in-a-box service would have to be exploitative. It would boast the world's least desirable customers. Most people are hard to control. Many will do nasty things. By temper or talent, it would be hard to extract economic value from them other than through indentured servitude. - It might work for existentially lazy individuals like myself, who think nothing is easier than not doing something. Others could be paid to stay out of trouble. All would work as subcontractors for temp agencies to the extent they are capable. Even then this scheme could only work if it paid a fraction of minimum wage. - How could any company, no matter how creative, possibly make money from losers? At the moment there can be only one answer: volume. Hell is every problem at once 141007 Heaven is ample time to solve any problem. It could just be sufficient space: an infinite warehouse to sort through all the bureaucracy. The more dimensions the better, closets in every direction. It's the absence of evolutionary pressure. If nothing needs to be done, why should anything be done? - Pain is not really a feeling, but the anticipation of an ordeal. A brain hack trying to do everything at once, crystallized failure exploding for an escape. You absolutely have to do something. For something seeking its own destruction, pain sure manages to prolong itself. Thanks to the brain's built-in homeostatic tendency, it feels unfortunately good when it stops. What do you mean stops??? More immortal metaphors 141006 Post-life digital resurrection (or call it software mind continuation) should start during the lifetime of the subject. That means creating an advanced mind extension as early as possible, as a base for a future mind continuation. It must be easy to begin, a simple but powerful way to record and store life data, complexity emerging as connections multiply. - What could be simpler than entering a long list of memory factoids with their associated tags (what when where why who)? Perhaps that is the best way. It still seems like a lot of work. Data acquisition should happen as a natural side effect of daily life. The recollection and organization of memories and purposes should become like a game, a lifestyle with addictive elements. Many things can be addicting. Early versions will mostly appeal to programmer-type personalities. - 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 all interesting perceptions and perspectives can be added. - It may involve the smallest units of awareness. Self-referential description bubbles with internally consistent grammar, fractal hierarchies, made-up words with sliding meanings. It might as well become a mind. Solve this problem and every human problem may be solvable. A new book 141005 Virtually Human: The Promise and the Peril of Digital Immortality by Martine Rothblatt (2014) - This book asserts that digital records from social media, apps, and personal devices will become so pervasive they will eventually be combined into their owners' virtual mind clones. All it will take is extremely advanced AI software (details remain to be worked out). When the creators of these files pass away, the data left behind will form potentially immortal 'mind echos', who will seek legal rights. That also happens to be the theme of this blog. It's the start of a new trend. I can feel the early groundswell building. - Reviews: http://www.amazon.com/Virtually-Human-Promise-Peril-Immortality/product-reviews/1250046637/ ---- Of course this kind of thing is easier said than done. Computers are still ultra linear. They would have to be able to constantly cross-correlate all their data at a high level. The required human mind measuring tests would be profound enough that their embedded insights alone would change human nature. With computers, anything that can be done once can be done abundantly, but there won't be any proof it can be done even once for a period ranging somewhere from a long while to ages. It is also interesting that Jezebel calls a former cis-man 'the most interesting woman on the planet'. History of the future: The Tipping Point 141004 Long before the Technological Singularity (as incomprehensible as a Jackson Pollock painting) and before the Event Horizon (Salvador Dali), we must pass the Tipping Point. It may only take a moment. We might not realize it until much later. But that is the moment when the acceleration becomes irreversible. - My guess is it will resemble the first moment of full self awareness, experienced by some around age 4, or like the moment someone fully wakes up. As it did around December 1910, human nature will have changed. Or perhaps it will be like the Bicameral Breakdown about 3,000 years ago. Of course the above two speculations are basically just made up. It will be much more profound than that. - Between the Tipping Point and the Event Horizon lies the long downslope also called the Accelerando, a time of economic growth to make the Industrial Revolution seem like a lazy summer afternoon. Progress will suddenly get easier than failure: the actual end of poverty, methods to make people smarter fast enough to notice. - The Tipping Point will be when software stops getting worse and starts to just work. True artificial intelligence begins with human mind extensions, software to make everyone more like their ideal selves. That will only happen when programmers stop being evil, so it's still a ways off. - Right about now we may be entering the upslope, like a rollercoaster beginning to clacket up a steep incline. Or we may still be waiting in line, or just dreaming of going to the amusement park. ---- Timeline of the Future Forced brain simulations: Part two 141003 In yesterday's post I introduced the notion that 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, an artificial simulation of their mind will be created with the perfect certainty of being themselves. The simulation will have partial amnesia, though. Perhaps it can be continuously or partially reset. For best results, someone hoping to pursue this path should start preparing while still alive. They should spend as much time as possible in settings their future mind copy is likely to inhabit. I'm thinking an online interface area, basically a giant control screen to explore accessible reality. Older people are likelier to be homebound anyway. Physically simpler but information-rich environments should also be easier to simulate. Forced brain simulations: Part one 141002 Prediction timeframe: 2030-2050. - The coming decades will see a major effort to create a generic, human-style AI that can be adapted for many purposes. It will be an ideal blank mind template, a digital brain without memories. Hundreds of human mental variables can be introduced and 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 recreated templates will be made to believe they are the original humans, either reliving events of their lives as part of an 'ancestor simulation', or waking to find themselves in the digital afterlife of their choice. - This suggests several new personality testing methods. For example, what types of delusions appear most realistic to different humans? Specifically, how do people perceive, test, and accept reality as such? This might take a heavy-duty drugs cocktail. - It's an internal certainty, an existential essence, an 'inner I'. The tests would measure self-reflection and introspection, the establishment of routines and desire for variety, mood regulation and task urgencies, and more like that. However it's done, this process could be subverted and controlled, creating the perfect illusion of being a resurrected human mind, now inhabiting a realistic 3D simulation. I am blind with rage 141001 For anyone trying to contact me: I can not read incoming emails. I have been locked out of my Microsoft Hotmail account. They won't let me in until I give up my phone or text data. It's a standoff. Microsoft is Satan. - What about people who claim not to have phones? Microsoft actually has the gall to suggest you ask a friend to use their phone to get the verification code. Once you log in you can change your password. - The same policy applies if you want to set up a Google or Yahoo account. I don't know if they also lock out existing members who never gave up their real world contact info, but if they don't they soon will probably. They are also evil in many other ways. I can't begin to give words to my hate. - This means war. For anyone who feels about Microsoft like I do, below is a list of ways to contact them. Before getting too emotional remember these are demons clad in human flesh, more evil than you can imagine. Please don't get the wrong idea, I'm in no way suggesting you should send them vile insults or lethal threats or anything inappropriate. I am ordering you to. To complain: - Web contact forms: http://office.microsoft.com/en-US/suggestions.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/Language/en-US/Feedback.aspx https://enable.microsoft.com/eform.aspx?productKey=enablefeedback http://support.microsoft.com/kb/295539 http://support.microsoft.com/contactus/?ws=support#tab0 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319726/en-us http://support.microsoft.com/contactus/cu_sc_selector_email?ws=support%2csupport http://support.microsoft.com/find-solutions/windows/windows-8-1/ http://support.microsoft.com/gp/windows-8 http://support.microsoft.com/select/?target=hub - Microsoft Customer phone: 1-877-696-7786 1-800-642-7676 Canada: (877)568-2495 - These email addresses may also be monitored: billgates@microsoft.com tell_fs@microsoft.com. This world is even more evil than I thought 140930 I have just been locked out of my Microsoft Hotmail account. The only way Microsoft will now let me read my own emails is if I give them my phone number. There's no other way to get in. I will not do that. Might as well get hacked, cracked, or attacked. - Here is an important truth: Anyone thinking about doing business with Microsoft needs to realize the following fact: If you have a Hotmail account, or probably any Microsoft account that requires a login, even a PAID Hotmail account, Microsoft has recently decided they will permanently lock you out unless you give them your true phone number. Either way they will continue to siphon funds from your bank account. There is no way to complain to Hotmail or Outlook. - Seriously, I can't believe this. It. . .it is too much. This is my breaking point. I'm done here. Right here, right now. I don't even know how to type anymore I can barely find the right keys. The temperature in my room seems to be rising. The most shocking truth is how completely arrogant Microsoft or any large corporation can be. I am awed at the exuberant multiplication of evil wherever I encounter it, which is almost everywhere. How it thrives. Good. More targets. - Even conspiracy theorists have no clue, and I've spent a good deal of time talking to them. Evil is real, it is absolute, and it will always always always win unless someone fights back. If only there was SOME way to retaliate against these demons. Serious question: does anyone think there is a possible way to get even? Anyone? The final mind backup method 140929 The subject will be manipulated into becoming their ideal self. This might happen in a VR environment with an extremely intelligent AI therapist, programmed to hone in on their essential 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. Several steps beyond a 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 knowledge. The greatest sin 140928 . . . is wasting a suicide. Why would anyone let the bad guys win completely when fighting back could be easy? They have nothing major to lose anymore. All their outer fears have evaporated. That should make it possible to concentrate on their core torment, and perhaps to see new paths around and through it. Mentonomics™ 140927 This term should be trademarked. In fact I'm working on that right now with some top notch IP attorneys. Well, some self-taught legal advisers. Or at least they say they did some research. - Turns out it's very hard to be successful without also getting rich as a side effect. The only way to actually realize the mind-testing, mind-extension, and mind-backup services envisioned in this blog (and nowhere else) would be to promote them as the core of a groundbreaking commercial enterprise. - There's no other way. The scope of the operation must be as epic as its vision. I'm thinking a chain of global franchises initially aimed at an upscale clientele. The stylish yet restrained decor would be extremely comfortable with cool and calming colors, aiming for a slight hypnotic effect. All the heavy testing machinery would be well hidden. - I envision myself in the role of a benign yet somewhat reclusive, turtleneck-sweatered overseer/guru. Future mind testing technique: 140926 Stimulate every brain region in turn 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 results of many other test subjects, to find correlations between measured brain activity and personality traits. Eventually this may be done rapidly and precisely, perhaps creating vivid interactive perceptions in the subject. Estimated cost of bringing this technique to fruition: a lot. In professional econometric terms, somewhere between a mission to Mars and building the Gibraltar Dam. I reject this world totally, absolutely, and completely 140925 Not most of the things in it, but the System itself. This should be the most self-evident personal philosophy. Instead it is the most radical attitude. Not cool radical but unthinkable radical. Opposing the evil is treated like the ultimate evil. Why? The answer is the reason I reject this world totally, absolutely, and completely. Political correctness is the biggest lie 140924 . . . yet it contains nuggets of truth. Africa is filled with seemingly ineradicable parasites that have co-evolved with humans. If the continent had a European climate, it would be twice as nice, though still desperately poor. If whites had treated blacks as moral equals all along, instead of as favored minorities since the 1960s, they would now be as well off as Hispanics, assuming increased vigilance all around. Women should be treated with respect, but instead of being pandered to they should only be treated civilly, preferably in a relaxed manner. It helps to be interesting and somewhat entertaining. Too much diversity is destabilizing, but I feel Western countries should not be all white, or they might begin to implement crackpot political schemes sustained by perverted science. A few other cultural groups can act as distractions or static interference, preventing self-destructive/self-important delusions from taking hold. This is my theory, not necessarily 100% true. Unfortunately, PC-thought in its present form seems just about crazy enough to be true to confused idealists with limited imagination. Remember this as you are stuck in the jam-packed ID control hall at San Francisco's Mumia Abu-Jamal airport, reading that the National Progressive Party, allied with the unions and the Hispanic Rights party, has just passed a completely race/age/gender-blind National Service law. The strongest urge 140923 Few human emotions are as compelling as the desire for revenge. That's why fear has evolved to be so strong. I am sorry to say I reached some negative conclusions about reality. But what if I'm wrong, and it's actually infinitely worse? It might help to realize evil is so pervasive you can pretend it sort of balances out. One thing I know: you usually can't change it, only escape and avoid it. Evil is cheap. There has to be no reason for it. For example the people who created Firefox make it so that sometimes you can't close webpage tabs without permission from the website. Perhaps the people who tolerate the people who made Firefox are just as evil themselves. Only the Indian interns at the Microsoft 'tech support' 'forums' are worse, although they are mere tools. It can be like having tea with a 'Mars Attacks' skullbrain. Evil is a choice, easily made. Sometimes choices might just have hard consequences. Wouldn't it be nice to get even against evil. Hate is always self-destructive, but very rarely it may cause external changes. Hate may be the only thing that can do that. Evil is blatant, but it could also be liberating. One can stop caring about anything else. For anyone or no one reading this: you are not feeling enough hate. You can't feel enough hate. How are you 140922 Or how are you doing? The words can be heard in countless check out lines. From Joe Eszterhas I learned the most useful sentence in the English language is 'Fine'. The expected answer is a self-fulfilling illusion. For a handful of angered souls the true answer may hit like Thor's hammer: there is no reason for me to exist. Which brings us to the subject of losers. There could be some freedom in being one. One reason is there aren't that many, surprisingly. They are human extremes, concentrated frustration burning small holes in the social tapestry, usually fizzling out. If they can find their place, they might serve as somewhat useful boundary markers or sentinels. More likely, they can create new problems ahead of schedule, allowing more time to deal with them. China would seriously benefit if some of its upcoming cohorts of involuntarily celibate males started acting up as soon as possible. Prediction: real estate values will collapse 140921 But not right away. In San Francisco, the average house now costs over one million dollars. It's a strange market, driven by status and hypocrisy. The buyers are the real product. - Home prices are rising because the area has an increasing number of smart and skilled white and Asian people, who 'subconsciously' want to keep out less smart and skilled people. That particularly includes 'non-Asian minorities', i.e. blacks, Hispanics and Muslims. If too many of the latter moved to San Francisco, the place would become less nice. - The only way NAMs could be encouraged to move there would be if there was a way to control them and make them behave properly. That would take new types of surveillance and security, and incentives. Elites are inevitably drawn together. A single WMD would really mess things up. This city is a real-life communications hub, a networking center, a concentration of useful people. - And it only exists because online communications still suck ass. Like other bad things, this is by choice not necessity. The great insight of Malism is that the world is evil by consensus. Most folks are at peace with other folks' problems. - But progress can't be stopped entirely, at least not yet. The current computer hell will last another ten years, but sometime in the twenty-twenties some programmers may finally stop huffing anti-static cleaner long enough to remove enough embedded malware that their software will actually start working for a change. We can only dream. There's no reason why people couldn't collaborate in cyberspace instead of in hipster lofts. Instead of zip codes they'll care about quadrillions of calculations per second. - The future will be: ease of duplication, challenge of creation. Physical objects and locations will become less valuable than sheer cognitive brilliance. Tomorrow's great geniuses will choose to live in out of the way, well-hidden and easily defended gated communities. Those seeking to escape into digital hyperreality may consider it a badge of honor to live as uncoolly as possible. On being a cynic 140920 A tendency toward volcanic rage doesn't mean that one is a barbarian. At least not just that reason. Some people just care too much. You could even call it a type of love, like OJ Simpson. I'm practically exploding with love. Psychopaths on the other hand only get mad when a problem hurts them directly, not at the existence of the problem itself. They are indifferent to the inefficiencies of the world, except to the extent they can manipulate them to their advantage. And they don't complain, they just get even before moving on. I'm actually not such a bad guy if you get to know me. The occasional outbursts can be chalked up to a sincere desire to change absolutely everything. Paraphrasing St. Augustine, it may be impossible to feel boundless hate without also desiring endless peace, a state forever unattainable. Unfortunately, the only pain escape does not involve not feeling it. But it's nice to dream of impossible things. No, I'm not going to open up a Thomas Kinkade print store. |
