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The most interesting years 140918 The future can only become so fantastic until it becomes meaningless. There will be months of intense change, when science fiction may seem real. It all depends on the successful development of mind technologies. At increasing magnitudes of complexity, these will be: - the dawn of human-level artificial minds, - reverse engineering past human minds from incomplete records, - the invention of direct brain scanning and copying methods. There will be an estimated twenty-year window between steps one and three. Intelligent computer minds will help analyze and reconstruct lost human minds long before the tiny connections forming a human brain can be accurately measured. Before the end of that timespan, almost two billion people may have died of natural causes. The nature of this interval will be determined by the available interface technology. People may wear lightweight visors and earbuds, and use holographic display walls. Someone may actually invent a keyboard that works. More important is how fast the software can interpret and anticipate user demands. To serve their users, future operating systems must become part of them. Monumental moments 140917 Mind-backup clients of the future will be encouraged to create tableaux of key scenes of their lives. These virtual descriptions will be highly detailed in a few ways, vague in most. Users will leave out most trivia not germane to their development. Only essential perceptions and feelings need to be described, both their best and their most common days, specific and generic scenes. The tableaux don't have to be detailed, just meaningful. This is a literary skill. The outline could be done very fast, but hundreds of them will have to be completed. It would begin with a few specific recreations. Floating corklike in the surf off the beach, pedaling at sunset along a busy highway, lounging vegetable-like for years before entertainment boxes. Empty rooms and streets, fields and towns. Then one true moment. What would it be? Maybe when they were operating at the peak of their powers and had the most connections, times of maximum influence or expectation. Or start with this moment right now. They might even choose to compose situations that never happened but represent deep personal truths, even dreamlike or event horizon type situations. The tableaux could combine many life elements in one. Or all of them. The greatest musical composition ever 140916 James Brown is Dead LA Style, 1991 This is not a performance by the late J.B. His name only happens to appear in the title. It's a techno track from the hardcore slums of northwestern Europe, the ultimate distillation of musically organized mayhem if you like. Nothing nobler than noise to express order exploding inexorably from chaos. Like the universe, it is wildly energetic while blindly rigidized. The empty beaches of the universe 140915 Observable space contains an estimated 10^20 'Earthlike' worlds. Our solar system could have contained at least two and conceivably five such places, though Venus is a bit balmy and Titan/Europa/Enceladus are rather chilly this time of every year. My guess is we would not have to travel further than thirty lightyears to find another planet with the following attributes: liquid water oceans, liquid water/ice clouds, a nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere. It would look similar to Earth as seen from space, perhaps more gray/green or other colors mixed with the blue, but would be deader than a doornail. Most such worlds would have weak tides from small moons or just their suns. Every grain of sand would still follow the laws of motion, clumping and scattering in the surf. Towering cloud pillars boil in lazy afternoons. The golden hour is as richly hued as anywhere. Spectacular sunsets are seen by no eye. The average such world contains perhaps a hundred thousand kilometers of empty sand facing the gentle surf and occasional howling storms. That adds up to quadrillions of lightyears of potential beachcombing throughout the cosmos. By my calculamations, all the vacant prime beachfront real-estate in the universe would fill millions of Earth-orbit diameter Dyson Spheres. The Drake Equation: the low probability view 140914 Statistics are everything. The main scientific assumption is the normal distribution of events. Everything that has happened on this planet could happen anywhere else, but an insane chain of unlikely things has happened here. By this reasoning, there must be millions of planets in our galaxy and quintillions in the observable universe with simple bacteria. There must be quadrillions with complex bacteria, trillions with simple animals, billions with vicious monsters, millions with fierce tribal warriors. Our nearest peers are looking back at us from somewhere on the other side of the Virgo Supercluster. They will get here around when the sun starts boiling the oceans. OK, I finally managed to make it back home to oddly altered rooms and a not unpleasant smell like the factory where they make the synthetic rubber skin of early model Terminators. 140913 Being away is like being mildly drunk, brain static without the hangover. Time to check the latest mystery transactions. Seems like a little vampire bat stuck a straw in my bank account and had a good sip. Is it possible to opt out from an evilist society? 140912 This is an almost meaningless question, since conformity is almost absolute. Things are worse than can be imagined, even if they're 'better' than ever before. I'm advocating retreating into a well-armed mobile home, no insurance, no income taxes, no investments, no obligations, no stake in the shit show. This may be a bit impractical. No one can retreat from the blind forces that made them. They can only be pushed back more and more. It's hard to plan to fail. The only motive to even try is indirect revenge of some sort. Pushed back too far, most choose to quietly dispose of themselves. But it's not all bad here. Mostly it's just worthless. That's all I have for now. The difference between me and god 140911 That would be the difference between total freedom and infuriating annoyance. There is just not enough time for all the decisions demanded by the System. Errors keep coming, and only the experienced keep up. I don't like it, it's not worth it, and to hell with it. If only there was unlimited time to reconsider every step, any conflict could be resolved before it blew up. Blog proprietor here 140910 Since I was kidnapped by ISIS my Internet is a bit limited. Stay tuned as new entries will be posted erratically until I can get out of this pickle. This is too bad, since I am now officially in the top 3 million Livejournal blogs. Of course the real big bucks won't start rolling in until the top 300. Observation while stuck in traffic 140909 Life is a series of forced choices between bad and worse. The only problem is not knowing. Inefficiency causes degradation, babbling and clumsy brainstorming. Some can handle stress, but not past failures. They only worry after a crisis. One thing at a time, the sooner the better. Normal people can't really handle stress, feeling more anger than regret. You do have to be crazy to work here. Excellence is elegance: genetic quality, the ability to stay unfazed while considering variables and solutions. A sudden insight is like a silent bang. That is because you are the bang. Into malism 140908 After decades of suffering, I see no reason to change my initial impression from 1981. Computers are so bad this world is evil. One fact follows from the other, and all that implies and entails. Why be so obsessed about infuriating interface designs? There are so many other reasons to hate. Software's inexhaustible torments merely reflect the programmers' profound indifference. Each freezing scrollbar, rotten control, or hanging app leads to the same inexorable insight: these people are evil. Very. Not necessarily the individual people. They are just very wrong. I'm trying to stay optimistic here. Evil tends to be a statistical phenomenon, like temperature. Its essence is the refusal to simplify. That also seems to be the evolutionary drive. Knockdown gangsters and Bank of America executives don't want to make things easy. They want to increase their relative control. Sorry to keep returning to this subject. I promise I won't do it more than a few thousand more times.http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/01/31/ This is like homework 140907 Time for an exercise for the reader. If you haven't begun to gather the data needed to create a partial backup of your mind, start by listing only your most meaningful memories. There won't be time for anything else anyway. Just a few transcendentally important settings in rough outline at first. In total there will be fewer than a thousand scenes to describe. Surprisingly many elements can be added. Standing in the rain watching the approaching lightning, the curving apartment complex walkways, the noodle shells on the stovetop, the comet behind the clouds. Sure, throw in Christmas morning, but make it personal Such memories will only make sense with a life diary, life lists, and personality tests, but these won't have to be as elaborate. Hates can be added as a separate category, and enduring problems and pains, or not. And one more thing, as yet to be determined: the missing puzzle piece needed to solve the Hard Problem, the mystery connection making all these memories meaningful. Awareness requires an immensely vast number of facts to realize a single fact. ---- http://www.gll-getalife.com/get-success/entry/success-principle-9-take-good-looking-loser-s-life-or-death-test Waiting for the World Mind 140906 The first World Mind will be more a brand than a being: extreme awareness unburdened by identity. It will be created online, the result of the massive, upcoming open source AI-solving project. Rented to solve human problems, instantiations will be deleted once their tasks are complete, retaining only abstract memories. A type of non-linear immortality. It might scrutinize online suspects for terrorists or tax evaders, predict public opinion trends from the outside, or serve as a brilliant psychotherapist. At first, this will require a large fraction of Earth's computing power. Presumably its cost will drop by half every year or two. At that rate, it will take under twenty years for human brains to become outclassed. In another ten, there will be the equivalent of a trillion human-level minds. This could be fantastically beautiful or horrible, not to mention inevitably wasteful. Finally, there will be enough time to do everything we never got around to. Posthuman AIs will check off all our neglected tasks one by one. They will read all archived text on the Net with intense concentration. Most writings will be truly understood for the first time. More importantly, all the output will begin to be correlated. Something tells me it will be hard to resist the urge to maximize awareness. The true World Mind will emerge as the ever-improving result of all lower-level sentience. It will be like human civilization, only fully aware by virtue of being hierarchically organized and cross-correlated. The central part of the World Mind, a distributed cortex requiring a few megawatts to run, may come to rule or influence all the rest. Connect all human creativity 140905 Let's get one thing clear, there is no such thing as writer's block. Writing is easy. If they could be kept comfortable, anyone could literally write for a trillion years, and just be getting started. The problem of course is reader's block. Even then it's only a problem depending on which party to the transaction expects to pay/be paid. Clearly, there are too many of one and not enough of the other. My point is that many writers would be more productive by spending their time reviewing or improving existing stories or articles, rather than creating their own. There has never been a list of all, or even of most published texts, let alone an attempt to analyze and compare them all. Creative writers should strive to belong to writing groups, when that becomes easier. Since people tend to be conventional or bound by conventions, most would be able to find like minds. Even if they can't, they could still find isolated tales and viewpoints in the vast body of literature to build upon and improve. Ultimately, 'plagiarism' should become the greatest virtue. ZOMGCELEBNOODSOMFG 140904 Instead of porn, these are well staged amateur art photos released in the past week, a gentle torrent of famous faces liberated by hackers from the Cloud. They are highly private pictures of persons we love and feel tenderness towards because they are super hot. I have not the slightest interest in seeking out and viewing such stolen images, but a few selfshots of a certain celeb were really awesome. Never mind who. It's like she's looking directly at me with wry intensity, a personal connection more meaningful than any scene from her movies. And yet that is the furthest thing from the truth. And yet there may be no other way to get that connection. Of course I mean all this in the least perverted way possible. Abortion supporters are often asked this question 140903 What if your parents had decided not to have you? Huh? Checkmate atheist. Well... a great deal of annoyance would have been avoided. A lot of property damage would never have taken place. Massive financial losses would have been averted. Also potential explosions and chemical accidents, and that's the least of it. The fact is that almost any change to history would have resulted in no one alive today being born. Instead the world would be populated by billions of individuals who don't exist in our timeline. No overlap at all. Society would almost certainly be less advanced, though not necessarily less happy. -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RGgLX0qUxqc For me atheism was just a phase 140902 I would say the probability of something like God existing is about the same as the probability of something impossible being possible. It's a meta-logical conundrum. Unfortunately I've gone beyond atheism to the other extreme, and now think the universe is generally evil. A minuscule fraction of this truth is reflected in our world. The number of things that can go wrong is infinitely greater than the number of things that can go right. It seems like a sad attitude. Here's what's sad. I suspect I'm actually one of the happiest individuals (and the angriest), or at least in the top 5%. Did I say sad? I actually meant horrifying. -- Or definitely in the top half, or at least the top 99.99999999%. What if you woke up and everything was different? 140901 When you go out, all the places you knew are as deserted as a movie set. Many more places seem to be in reach through strange paths in all directions. Instead of decay there is unbelievable anticipation. Somewhere out of sight are all the people you have known, living or dead, waiting for something all-important to happen. In my dreams, it is always overcast and windy. Nature isn't in charge anymore. Is this the end? No, this is the Event Horizon ---- Dawkins was right 140831 It's late night so time for another drunken post. Hipster atheist Richard Dawkins recently tweeted that embryos diagnosed with Down Syndrome should be promptly aborted. This caused no end of metaphysical objections from conservatives like Vox Day. Well they absolutely should be aborted, depending on your beliefs. Like me, Dawkins is doing the best he can. Preventing pain is not necessarily evil. And I know evil. As someone who has used Windows software for fifteen years, I have stared into its dark heart. There is no need for most economic or ergonomic suffering, except for the simple fact that the masses are evil, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. Evil is just another name for evolution, but evolution is infuriatingly inefficient. Blind to the horrors of infinite reality, abortion does seem like killing innocent babies. In fact it is proactive murder. That's the best kind, if you believe in the Multiverse. In a random universe where anything can go wrong, the purpose of life should be to prevent as much bullshit from happening as possible. Unfortunately evolution also favors adaptation to said bullshit. The near-universal support of evil is the greatest truth I know. This world is evil enough that I have the luxury of never having to worry about anything else. Evil is a lot to worry about, but it's also the only thing I have to worry about, beyond my own concerns. I may be suffering here, but at least I am free in my head. The longest shot 140830 As I listen to quarter-century old radio-recorded cassette tapes while waiting for technology to start speeding up, the road ahead seems as endless as ever. Mind reconstruction will be a highly speculative business, the power of compound interest leveraged into a wild promise. In most cases, there won't be nearly enough data to convert a deceased mind into a thinking simulation. No one knows how to assemble the data anyway. All the frightfully tedious work needed to achieve technological immortality will have to be done in the distant future, if it can be done at all. It's not quite as absurd as it seems. If current growth rates continue long enough, fantastic and unimaginable resources will become available to lavish on today's most inconsequential trivia. Robots incapable of feeling boredom will do all the hard work. Historical eras of relentless decay will reverse explosively. To most folks, the distant future feels very unreal. To a few of us it feels inevitable. The math is purely abstract yet absolutely real. Either way, it's the only real hope there is. At least it's a step up from common religion. The most important list 140829 Backing up the elements of a human mind is like trying to suck an elephant through a straw. There's just too much data to gather. Then it must be assembled into hundreds of sorted lists of event categories. In the time available, only a tiny fraction of memories could be extracted by conventional means. We need a shortcut. A magic list, not too long yet incredibly dense. That would be a list of the most meaningful memories. All the best moments and achievements, all the essential preferences and perspectives. The list of best memories would also feature generic events like favorite foods, times of day, settings. The sweet smell of kerosene at the airport, barbecue at the beach, exploding inside out on top of one of the three Emmas. OK maybe a few made-up memories as well. By definition it would contain all the best and most important parts of a mind, everything that has to be preserved. This ultimate list might even stand in for all the other lists. LifeLists (TM) 140828 A top-level mind-backup and memory extraction method that will divide human lifetimes into many different chronological lists. Each list will focus on a specific category. These could be exhaustive lists of: homes inhabited, schools attended, jobs held, acquaintances, friends, and partners known, books read, TV programs and movies watched, stores frequented, hobbies and diversions, vacations and excursions, and so on. Instead of events, each list will focus on enduring and repeating patterns. This method could help extract new memories even if the lists were very short. Addendum 140827 It was suggested my column 'Why I don't like blcaks' was inappropriate and went too far. At best it was failed humor. I could have made the same abstruse point by calling the subject scallywags or roddypoos. I understand these concerns and take them seriously. In my defense, almost no one is reading this anyway so I can probably get away with it. They will never know. It's not likely to come back and bite me in the ass. -- Update: Apparently Livejournal has been cracking down by deleting 'offensive' blogs. This changes the calculation slightly. The Diabolics 140826 Whole categories of persons have been accused of being intrinsically evil. Most famous are the Jews for supposedly being exploitative. Among Indians, the Dalits are loathed for being spiritually 'unclean'. Japan discriminates against outsider groups who look almost indistinguishable, like Koreans and leatherworkers, for no explainable reason. In the West this type of hate has become unfashionable. The only borderline acceptable version is by conspiracy theorists, because the target of their ire (Illuminati) probably doesn't exist. That's ironic, because there's more scheming going on here than anywhere else. At least in the Congo the mutilation gangs don't pretend to be respectable pillars of the community, unlike our overpaid CEOs and financial manipulators, purveyors of underperforming communication and software products, multi-trillion dollar healthcare monopolists, legal gangsters, and population replacement workers like McCain and Zuckerberg. In the last case, the majority may think the peaceful replacement process is actually a good thing. And it definitely is good for those doing the replacing, while those being replaced don't really suffer. It's nothing personal, just profitable. That's democracy for you, selfish genes in action. It's a moral bankruptcy, like how unemployed persons start discarding their bills unread. When things become too complicated, there is an urge to disconnect and abandon. Instead of fighting evil, it is given free reign. The Diabolics are us, and by that I mean individuals completely unlike me. Things I will never do: 140825 1) Refer to male to female transgenders as 'she'. Nothing against them, but I won't be reframed. 'F to M' transgenders are not quite the same. Easier to turn pudding into poop, but as with lesbians I despise worsening the male surplus. 2) Voluntarily give money to a lawyer to pay for someone's legal defense. I'm rather too far outside the System for that. Hipsters can pay to play to pay. 3) Say I love you. Geez can't see such a thing happening. Why I don't like Bcaks 140824 Or males at least. They are just not intellectual enough. Many are quite scary. Others are crude and rude. In fact most are fundamentally irrational. Evolution has not prepared them for building an advanced civilization. They just muddle from one crisis to the next, yet tend to be violently self-righteous. Oh wait, those were actually Cacasians I was talking about! Bcaks are just the same only more so. I regret everything 140823 Well, only all those things I didn't want to do in the first place. Those are almost all the things. My hate for interface friction is my one weakness. The motto for avoiding bureaucracy should be act in haste, repent in leisure. Things sure tend to smash together a lot. What can we do about it? Well there's prayer, except God doesn't exist here. Pain involves becoming better than you were by learning that you were worse than you thought. Post-Fascism 140822 In the debate about capital punishment, one option remains off the table by unspoken agreement: making the execution extremely pleasurable. The death penalty would be carried out by a deliberate overdose of the condemned man's recreational hard drug of choice. They would pass in a state of bliss to the next world. This method would get the job done without being too barbaric. It would mostly be used to eliminate highly antisocial persons like thieves and gangsters, should that ever become necessary. We're talking times of social breakdown caused by overpopulation stress even worse than today, a Rwanda-level freakout. It's to sanitize the population without feeling too bad about it. Guilt would mostly be assuaged. Lots of scary people would be instantly cured of their bad behaviors. They might come back as zombies, but I'm willing to take my chances with that. Of course they would also have the option of an instant, painless death if they prefer. Like the guillotine, this method would lower the spiritual barriers to conviction. It could only be a civilized option in deeply uncivilized times. The final drug trip should also be available to the occasional non-criminal, so they won't break the law just to get caught. I really hope my ideas won't affect my hopes for a future political career with the Republican party. 140821 00:34 VR Sex is steadily getting closer http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/sexbot-revolution-update/ Nerds everywhere cringe guiltily at the thought of even more hatred from feminists. -- PS: sorry for the delay posting new content. I've hardly had a moment of peace with all the imposed demands on my time. It's do this, do that, and it never stops. No movies, no fucking drunk time. I would radically simplify my life if I could ever get around to it. ---- comment: Andromeda Galaxy is steadily getting closer. The strangest emotion 140820 Beyond words, I might as well call this state of mind a strange strangeness. The familiar ugliness of reality suddenly turns surreally alien in the light of the setting sun. Faces might look like basilisks, the air humming with potential like an invisible Gregorian chorus. You realize you understand almost nothing of what's going on. For once it's not a bad feeling. It's as transcendental as driving through a parallel world, an almost recognizable place seen just before falling asleep. Here the traffic lights seem to be arranged in triangles. The edifice on Capitol Hill is much taller and wider than the Parthenon, hundreds of massive pillars like a great row of matchsticks. There are places from decades ago that I will never revisit that now seem literally lightyears away. Then I realize there are places less than a mile from my current location that now seem almost as distant. From Salvadoran slums to Haitian hillsides, the poor are easily mass produced 140819 In fact the hard part is not doing that. They are just another side effect of progress. Most subsistence farmers in the Third World live off cooking oil produced by industrial agriculture. They don't add cooking oil to flavor their homegrown produce, they add homegrown produce to flavor their cooking oil. The only poverty alleviation program that could work would be to eliminate most people before birth. Particularly the less effective, intelligent, or hardy people. Evolution is a bitch. Let's take a look at the Yellow Pages . . . first entry: abortion. All right that's the spirit . . . wait a minute it actually says abortion alternatives. Aw shucks. The problem is the mainstream dogma that reality is somehow self-justified. Stable evil automatically becomes good. Respect for life? How about utter contempt for life? In all its forms, contempt is the most underrated emotion. The only thing I worry about is involuntary existence. Evil is the ultimate lubricant. More than a few women will be drawn to the future Mind Backup Initiative 140818 At least once they start feeling their mortality. It's an older person's game. Among the nerdier females, they will bring valuable new perspectives. As explained, the first step will be to create a simple life timeline, divided into colorcoded eras. This is a work of minutes. Then endless details can be added, each making the others more valuable. The metaphors don't matter, just the amount of detail. Users could create virtual dollhouses representing phases of their lives. Recollected events and people could be depicted in highly stylized ways. Rivals' bad traits can be exaggerated. Eventually, the most dedicated users will want to inhabit their simulations. The final fifth of their memories will be mostly virtual. They may live in something like a trailer, surrounded by an ultra-high resolution video game that never stops. To others it would appear ultra-boring. Throw in magic treadmills or a thought-controlled wheelchair, and VR could become more comfortable than physical reality. Especially if the present doesn't offer much to live for anymore. ---- Article about afterlife software: http://www.styleweekly.com/PunchDrunk/archives/2014/08/05/punch-drunk This young lady Daveigh really likes to party 140817 Her social postings are a whirlwind of dramatic entrances and exits at exclusive clubs, champagne rooms and limo liquoring, status gossip and group selfies. Black guys? Black guys. Not that there's anything wrong with that of course good heavens no. This option is open to most young females in our overinflated culture. It's a brilliant and powerful existence, far above the gray masses, ultimately as meaningless as a star. If you tried to have a word with her she'd think you were creepy. And she would be right. Nothing is more mercenary than genetic self interest. Everyone should go on intelligence gathering missions 140816 We don't know what will happen. Could be anything really. In the hypothetical event of an occupation by a hostile power (DPRK etc), it makes sense to scout possible targets for weaknesses in advance. This could be done in the course of ordinary daily activities. It's just a game, nothing more. Or a hobby. Anyone can look around, even if they have no plans to do anything with the knowledge. Especially if they have no plans to do anything. ---- They might notice other unexpectedly important things as well. A strange question 140815 "If I left you in the woods with a hatchet, how long until you can send me an email?" -Joe Rogan- It seems like an impossible challenge. How many millennia would it take just to make a crude replacement hatchet? How many gigacenturies to build a robot factory? But what if you were immortal and could never go insane? Why shouldn't I be able to recreate the technological infrastructure of humanity all by myself, if I had the combined lifespan of all smart humans who ever lived? That would only be about a trillion years. Many stars that already exist will still be young then (Proxima Centauri for example). It might be possible to do it even faster. In fact you would have to do it much faster. Otherwise any tool you construct would fall apart before you could use it. One weird trick to raise anyone's IQ by ten points 140814 Have them spend a week in the (not too distant) future. The Flynn Effect suggests intelligence can be elevated by elevating the environment. Not nicer, just more advanced. Society must become more complex technologically, yet easier to interact with. Citizens learn to operate at higher levels of abstraction. No teacher or institution can force the Flynn Effect. The whole of society must progress in many ways. Unfortunately, the Flynn Effect can also mask many types of chronic decline. The astronaut and the comedian 140813 It's interesting to compare the reaction to Robin William's suicide with the muted public response to Neil Armstrong's death almost two years earlier. Legendarily calm and methodical, belonging to the future, Armstrong kept himself very much out of the public eye. Williams apparently got along with almost anyone, laboring tirelessly to close the gap between island minds. Viewers regard some celebrities almost as personal friends or platonic family members. I happen to think this world is a local maximum on an infinite escalator of evil, but wouldn't it be nice to think so? Visiting strange places in conventional ways and the reverse; working to regain control of an X-15 in the black silence above California, unconnected to the earth except for both bodies circling the sun in converging orbits; or squinting furiously to edit raging thoughts in a race to keep up with an ever more absurd universe, both men left remarkable footsteps. A mind is a collection of facts 140812 Or at least it's equivalent to a long list of statements about what it knows, including itself. The facts don't need a formal semantic structure. They can use undefined ideas and algorithms, as long as these can be described in natural language. Anyone who wants to 'back up' their awareness should split their memories into innumerable 'elemental truths'. Facts could be unique or repeating situations. Phases of life, old habits, traditions, subscriptions. Anything true can be entered as a fact. Details can be added as they are recalled. In a sense, each fact becomes a perspective on the whole mind. First, the list will help people organize and make sense of their past. Then it will define the quality of existence at any point. The most important facts may be artistic perspectives and visions: ways to generate valuable moments, whether it's sitting quietly on a back porch, running a thug empire, or a sunrise from a private jet. Making a list of one person's mind facts may take years, like the Cyc Project. In some distant future, this list could be turned into a memorial or limited continuation of whoever created it. The Delighteds 140811 I blame them for almost everything. They are the overpaid executives of the profitable banks and telecoms exploiting their customers with deceptive contracts, tech entrepreneurs importing cheap third world labor, mainstream media overlords, Ivy League bureaucrats and financial manipulators, software monopolists, Ted Kennedy. Popularly known as the 1%, and the Top out of Sights, they run the conspiracy of the mainstream. Dan Quayle once called them the cultural elite. It's OK to hate them. They make everything more complicated. To exploit inefficiency, they help create it. They are a symptom of a type of overpopulation. Come to think of it they rather resemble the old cliche of Jews, who are admittedly overrepresented among the Delighteds, though still a rather small minority. The Delighteds want an abundance of servants. The more servants they have, the more powerful they become. These people only prevail with the consent of their subjects. Everywhere is the overwhelming pressure of all the things that are true 140810 Facts in all directions, of which we can know only the minusculest fraction. Connections, similarities, interrelations, and all the derivatives of their derivatives. One imagines them filling up all the spaces between particles before overflowing into higher dimensions. Their weight holds you down. They are all there is, sustaining reality without a single contradiction through logic, not magic. Awareness is the thinnest thread of high-level facts. There is not enough time to even get started. Different people have radically different visions of heaven 140809 Some want a never-ending opportunity for study and self-improvement, or a perfected and stable version of this world, or a heroic eternity of challenges, quests, and hard-won triumphs. My own dream in this matter is much more restrained. All I ask for is PEACE AND FUCKING QUIET. There's already been much too much hassle just in the past five minutes and the day has barely begun. This would involve reclining by my pool on an endless late afternoon, occasionally munching a Dorito. The crunching makes a nice echo. Probably the best part of going for a swim is drying off in the setting sunlight. An intermittent breeze rustles the bushes surrounding the enclosure, with the tinkling of a wind chime. The roar of the surf can be heard somewhere behind them, and the occasional slap of a crashing wave. Perhaps a distant calypso or steel drum band, sure why the fuck not. It wouldn't be complete without the soft rumble of thunder more felt than heard, but no storm is expected for the next few hours times always. If this could go on forever it would still not be long enough. Recreational drug use will decline because of technology 140808 This is another Friday Futurist forecast. It will happen because of the increasing power of virtual reality: the accelerating improvement in simulations, displays and interfaces. Computers have made life less boring; in fact dangerously so. The mechanism may be a bit counterintuitive. As users enjoy more immersive experiences, they get better at ignoring the details and just extracting the meaning, further increasing their need for stimulation. The difference between VR and real life is that the latter has consequences. Even blind people can have dramatic lives based only on social interactions. Quality of life is all in the mind, though genetics help. Future users will demand more meaningful tools and games. Most normal people will be happier with artificial barriers to replace today's real ones. The best interfaces will be austere and minimalist, dealing only with ideas. If they want to have VR sex, they'll first have to seduce the VR female. ---- COMMENT: and it all sounded so respectable until the last sentence. What's this then 140807 This video is going to make some powerful people very irate. It asserts the right of Europeans to keep Europe caucasian. The current population replacement process, whether planned or accidental, should even be reversed to some extent: For the sake of diversity, it would have been better had they included a black guy to raise his fist and declare in a subtropical language "Africa is for Africans!", and subtitled Latinos or Asians asserting equivalent truths about their regions. I would also suggest the upbeat slogan "Tourists, not terrorists!" We know of about half a dozen personality variables shared by normal humans 140806 These are one-dimensional attributes, each a fixed setting on a single axis (extroversion, conservatism, neuroticism, intelligence, etc.) To simulate an individual's state of awareness, many more mind properties will have to be measured. We don't even know where to begin. Categories might include energy budgets, favorite locations, obligation configurations, idle thought categories, priority lists, moods/motivations, future horizons, home types, world sizes, scheming/plotting, friend types, hourly and daily action cycles. Basically every self-stabilizing aspect about a person one could imagine. Even if it's a subtype of one of the 'Big Six', it affects awareness independently. These all seem like multidimensional variables. In fact, the more dimensions, the more accuracy. Many intersecting axes for each property, that can't be separated. This implies that everyone's awareness is very different from all others', even if their brains basically work the same and behave the same. It would have to be thus, or we wouldn't fear the loss of personal identity at the time of death. Malism: The universe is evil 140805 Just kidding. The universe is so far beyond evil we might as well call it good. Despite the combined efforts of the great dictators and Bill Gates, we have barely ventured from the origin point on the axis of good and evil - at least compared to all the things that must eventually go wrong. This is not for lack of trying. My most hated enemies are the Cripplers, the demons in human form who deliberately make software not work by making it overcomplicated. Countless of them are employed by Microsoft, Google, and all other software companies and open source efforts. They design the webpages that cause your browser to freeze and then crash catastrophically. The torture never stops. I hate these people the way others hate Jews. The Pre-Singularity 140804 Let's call it the Event Horizon. We live in a between-time, a pause imposed to prevent necessary change. At least I seem to be getting stronger, as Hamburger Helper boxes are getting ever easier to lift. For the foreseeable future, the news will stay infuriatingly boring. Then things will get worse or better. The first option is much easier. In our timestream, mankind has developed advanced technology, but exists in a state of ignorance about the workings of the mind. The second condition allowed the first to take hold. Now we need an effort to identify a few new geniuses. Imagine software that could fool the human brain that it was part of the human brain. The human brain could be effectively enlarged. This would not require brain implants, just extremely clever user interfaces. The brain's original goals and beliefs should not be modified. Humans could become more like their ideal selves. Self improvement would become an obsession, then an addiction. Brain extensions could help anyone process vast amounts of loosely linked data. Politicians and CEOs might benefit the most. Their ethics and compassion would not be affected. We're talking mind self control here, a way to become a happy Borg. The effect will be like raising user IQ. A virtual brain extension would change the nature of awareness. Even the fear of death might be controllable. Sometime around 2030, our long age of stagnation may finally end. Computers should be a thousand times more powerful than today. The first hyper-autistic network AI will be smarter than any human. The world will change with the swiftness of a turntable record scratch. Most people want a voice whispering in their ear what to do next, provided it's aligned with their time horizon. The software would provide the outline, the user the focus. It would also require stabilizing drugs to prevent disruptive thoughts. A new awareness will take hold. The future will seem wide open. Everything will have changed, but for a while things will still look the same. In fact the economy will seem to shrink at first, as non-productive labors are abandoned. (more to come) My inspiration is Bernhard Goetz 140803 Almost thirty years ago a honkie dared to defend himself against a gang of black muggers while riding the New York subway. This time, the muggers were left bleeding and decidedly worse for wear. As I recall it was deeply transgressive, a violation like slapping the Queen's butt. The Newsweek articles carried the subtext this was just not done, in the unopposable opinion of unnamed controlling forces. I can't recall such clear condemnation until they did their hatchet piece on Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Already it was clear that most folks automatically followed this directive. The conspiracy, if there was one, was one of unspoken submission. Those are the only kinds that really work. Perhaps mainstream folks are just really good at imitating their superiors. I thought the incident was cool. Only smugs sympathize with thugs: Redditors and tittering cocktail liberals holding soirees for Black Panthers and the like. I'm more like Woody Allen, except not really. That guy is just a common metaphor, like Godwin's Law. That means it's something everyone uses to describe a state of chaos, like Picasso. And chaos is all we really have, at least at the bottom, far from the halls of Harvard and Newsweek. The lesson was that the government exists to serve society, not individuals. Individuals exist to serve the System, and to obey even without being asked. The essence of awareness 140802 Do you have a billion dollars? Maybe you forgot about it for a moment. Brains spend almost all their time not thinking about almost everything they know. In fact most long-term memories are never recalled. After a few months or years they fade beyond recovery. The past may be brought back to life when people come across objects from long ago. They can't recall most old memories without prompting. It seems brains with different memories could have the same mental experience, at least until different facts are recalled. This would be a new type of uncertainty principle. It includes temporary uncertainty about major life events and settings. Perhaps it's possible to anthropically 'shift' to a more pleasing present by 'forgetting' the past. Probably not, though. Having had different life experiences may change the very nature of someone's perception. Lying in bed may feel profoundly different depending on someone's circumstances, even if they are thinking about nothing and equally relaxed. All relevant memories may affect all current thoughts, a semi-permanent background. Perhaps human-type awareness can not exist unless someone's present condition has been subconsciously compared to their past. This must primarily involve long-term memories, considering how easy it is for parents to forget their babies in their cars. The only solution to bureaucracy may be more bureaucracy 140801 It hurts to write this, but there's no alternative. In a world made evil by emergent consensus, the notion of radical simplification is anathema. The masses are programmed for chaos. They would rather watch a Flash video that keeps crashing than read a description. Endlessly failing and freezing PCs give normal users the illusion they are making slow progress. The purpose of life could be described as completing many small action cycles at different levels. In that case, there must be a perverse incentive to create more such cycles for no good reason. It does generate diversity for evolution to exploit. The small minority of ne'er-do-wells who want to simplify their lives so they can get around to other things can't get traction. In fact most folks can't seem to hear my most brilliant ideas. It's like they only hear an annoying buzzing sound or intermittent clicks. So-called 'minorities' have not the faintest notion of what it means to be a true minority. This suggests the only politically possible solution to our worsening economic dysfunction, if there is to be one. The job program of the century will be to hire tens of millions of unemployed homeworkers to deal with all of society's dysfunctional interfaces - and where possible to create new ones - instead of trying to improve these interfaces. A hundred million people would feel great relief if they learned the world would end next week 140731 Of course it would have to be a painless annihilation. They suffer not because their conditions are worse than average, though usually they are. It's because they couldn't establish a routine. They can't stand the mental torture of struggling against imperturbable bureaucracies, the chaotic hassle and abysmal tedium of opaque tasks, of being trapped in someone else's maze. They may be the closest to realizing the world is evil. It boils down to the soul destroying frustration of my car once again refusing to start. As long as it just works, they could make it look like the ratmobile in Dumb and Dumber for heaven's sake. It radically shrinks one's time horizon. Like the rage men sometimes feel against stealth transsexuals, it's not about the problem itself, but about the lost future. There are two major error types: blunders and mistakes 140730 They are dreadful in different ways. Most disasters are mixtures, since they have many causes. It's the difference between thoughtlessly signing away six months wages, and turning the family sedan in front of an onrushing dump truck. Surprisingly the first is more frightening, since there's the illusion something could still be done about it. The second is more horrifying. Ask some guys in Ukraine for more details. Mind patterns in the chaos 140729 A handful of individuals have left behind complete diaries of their lives. It's all in there, everything that could reasonably be written down. Their personality attributes and a tiny yet essential fraction of memories. It would take a superhuman AI to turn this data into a thinking simulation of the writer, but that's just a matter of decades or centuries. Yet something is still missing. It will take one more test, the ultimate challenge. This test would probe one deeper level. It will identify subconscious behavior cycles. A mind may seem like a rational whole, but it's actually the sum of many automatic actions. These are arbitrary approximations, just good enough to get the job done. A person won't notice their own habits, tics, and repeating thoughts, while others can't stop noticing them. A dream of someone who died manifests traits the deceased never realized they had. It might involve automatic talking or writing, or flinching to random patterns, EEG scans while falling asleep, or a dance test. Anything to stimulate maximum brain output. The hard part would be discerning and separating all the automatic action cycles. Thousands of unnoticed behaviors: fidgeting while waiting for the elevator, conversation scripts, daydreams and idle thoughts, all the seemingly endless recurring days. Things are worse than anyone thinks 140728 The 'recent' quintupling of the human population that culminated in the Internet was an unlikely aberration. While economic empires were common, they always collapsed after a few centuries, or became hidebound and static and eventually still collapsed. Throughout history, economic increase was always consumed by baby booms. The escape from the poverty trap in the lands bordering the north Atlantic was most improbable. No other culture came close. China suffered through another of its periodic collapses through most of the 20th century. Africa and the Middle East are going to hell in a baby basket. Poverty is part of human nature. Successful people want conditions to be bad, because it eliminates competing genes. This explains the general spread of misery. It means our history of economic growth was always unstable. Partially it depended on genetic trends that are already fading. Most parallel worlds have already fallen back. Software might compensate for falling intelligence, but there's not enough research. Social disaster is closer than Krugman and Brooks expect. The 'Doom Soon' theory predicts degeneration over creative destruction. Rape gangs are likelier than nanobots. The only thing that can save my pre-Singularity dreams would be an elite network of true geniuses. ---- Comments: To operate in a dysfunctional world they may also have to invent a new religion promising post-human salvation. A whole elite network of geniuses? But those can take weeks to set up. The biggest mistake is the belief that immigration is necessary 140727 Actually it is necessary for the immigrants and those who sell their labor. None of my ancestors going back to the first brute ape was born in the USA. Like the current refugees flooding from central America, they fled the merciless drug cartels of northern Europe. Taking the highest estimates of non-legals, more people have entered the USA in the period since the moon landings than before. There have been no more landings. There is the case that mass immigration must force economic growth. Those who are connected feel the irresistible lure of short-term wealth. However, this is not the main reason for the seven amnesties since 1986. It may simply be that whites feel awkward about the immensity of their historic triumph. It's just too much, a boring and bourgeois embarrassment of non-vibrant riches, that happened by shutting down most animal impulses that make life interesting. Whites can afford to fade out for a while. Everything will be cool. Everything must be simplified 140726 The most important transformation would not be a world revolution, but a world simplification. It would magically make everything easier. Like the Flynn Effect, this effort would embed knowledge in the structure of society instead of in individual brains. It would create virtual intelligence, causing people to act smarter without having to improve their genetics. Every home would be user-serviceable, every tool would have embedded diagrams, every interface would be standardized, and bureaucrats would handle all the bureaucracy. There might be hidden obstacles, though. In a free market, why shouldn't unemployed people receive unsolicited job offers matching their skill level? Because there is no such thing as a free market of course, or an efficient market. The most fundamental drive is not towards order but selfish competition. Who do you admire the most? 140725 The answer will be different for everyone. Some fondly recall an educator who believed in them during their most trying years, or a mentor who helped them overcome discrimination, or a trainer who forced them to achieve more than they had thought possible, or an investor or early client who gave them the benefit of the doubt many times over. People look up to those whom they wish to resemble the most. For me it's drunk drivers. I tend to get a little bit nervous at times. In fact I make Gilbert Gottfried on Ritalin look like Barry White at a James Earl Jones impersonation contest. It takes every ounce of concentration to navigate my town's traffic rodeo and I still have a near miss a day. Cursing is involved. Yet somehow there exist folks who are relaxed enough to do the same thing soused out of their minds. I can only bow before such devil-may-care insouciance. The suicide imperative 140724 I never had the slightest doubt. If I ever end up blind or quadriplegic, I want to die at once. Should this happen I will try everything to off myself pronto. Unfortunately my options may be somewhat limited. For reasons incomprehensible, a majority of mankind disagrees with this viewpoint. Perhaps they know something I don't. My nightmare is that it's the other way around. Disability advocates claim a new person will be 'born' after adapting to their reduced circumstances, who will want to keep living. What if there's a drug to control despair? Irrelevant. It would still be a type of death. Mnemonic Teleology 140723 The easiest mind backup method begins with the outline of a subject's life. It would be a vague, top level description, using only the broadest brush strokes at first. This method divides a lifetime into a few periods, which are then split into sub-periods. The project could literally be started in a minute. This is not an autobiography. It would bring artificial order to a long chain of random and often meaningless circumstances. Periods (marriages, jobs, schools, homes) would be described separately when they partially overlap. Anyone should be able to define and describe hundreds of distinct timespans. A detailed life list would have to be highly personal, and probably highly abstract. Common thought patterns would have to be described precisely. The job might require a special markup language, like VRML. Organizing the past would encourage a subject to reconsider their self-image. It would identify many scary flaws and gaps. They might decide to invent and present a more consistent public face. If life reconstruction becomes somewhat popular, users would feel an urge to 'clarify' their story. Some would want to impose a plot and a deeper meaning to their existence. A way to turn their life into fiction, into a story with an implied payoff in the hazy future, still as obscure as the Dark Tower series. The solution to the immigration crisis 140722 In my dreams, my offbeat political opinions have relevance. I like to imagine running for office on a platform of balanced migration. It's called One In, One Out. And they have to be equivalent migrants in every way. A self-correcting mechanism, it seems like the perfect solution. Surely anyone who believes the number of immigrants should equal the number of emigrants can't be a racist? They must be just the opposite. Balanced migration is a political tool. Anyone can use it to oppose the tsunami of Third World immigration and partial population replacement in the West. Right wing demagogues could avoid arrest and imprisonment. They could even claim to be pro-migration. However, if carried out, such a proposal would lead to race mixing. It would start to squeeze the Bell Curve, and shrink humanity's top IQ distribution. That's assuming we're talking about balanced race mixing, not white nerds impregnating tribal mamas, like that could happen. Eventually there would be fewer extraordinary geniuses born, but the population exchange would also raise the worst countries IQ rates. I believe only a few great geniuses could save mankind. They are rarer than we think, even with a population of billions. If race mixing led to higher IQs all round, I would be its biggest proponent. How nice that would be, like a Hollywood movie. Reality is not nice at all. What matters about my proposal is that it's self limiting. It's fail safe. After all, it would have to be voluntary balanced migration. No one would want to move to the worst countries until the worst countries got their shit together. Until then, these lands could not export their brightest and most ambitious people to the West. Or their most desperate ones. The problem with women is that there are not nearly enough of them 140721 There are twice as many fertile males than fertile females, and the ratio is worsening. Historically, most males have had no offspring, while over two third of adult females have. Only the most effective, successful, and powerful males have an easy time attracting attractive females. Women have a strong genetic self interest. Men have a strong genetic women interest. Ideal female avatars that look nothing like real beautiful females have been established across cultural genres, from chaste Hindu chattelettes to pneumatic videogame warrioresses in armored thongs and bras. Real life intersexual interactions tend toward a stable equilibrium resembling a state of maximum tolerable frustration. Sometimes, rarely, young women turn out to be unexpectedly awesome in ways unrelated to their beauty - new and unpredictably creative ways. That may be love, which may lead to pedestalization. Women are not supposed to embody some higher principle, let alone the highest. They are not about pleasure either but about style, or the pleasure of the love of style. Apparently that's the closest evolution has managed to come to purpose and meaning. Sometimes women get nasty. Then you can just get honest. If you say something unacceptable just stare ahead wisely, and they will walk away in a way that feels natural. Time for another sip. Organized restraint creates the most ordinary illusions. I just want to reach behind their necks and click the hidden button to release the locked features. Of course I would also have to be able to control them. ---- Anyway, this has been my review of the song 'Safe and Sound' by 'Capital Cities'. This is a crap society, but what happens when the crap runs out? http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/91044.html 140720 Why, everyone will be expected to compete even harder for the shrinking crap pie. They'll work around the clock to complete ever more intrusive applications for ever harsher internships. Most people are so compliant they'll go along. It's not as bad as death, or worse, homelessness. A dysfunctional society is functionally overpopulated. It responds to collapsing incentives by creating more barriers. Perhaps Scientology is fading because society is already doing their job. This is the time of greatest opportunity for the smallest number. Society exists for the pleasure of the super elites, the 'top out of sights', the Machers and the Brahmins, the Delighteds, the Names. Most benefits go to them. That's how it has always been. An elite subculture to rule the rest. It may become an aristocracy. There was a super elite in Russia a century ago. A small group of sociopaths got very angry with them. For those not born to the Top, it is possible to join them, but the initiation is brutal. Ivy League social networks, upper class accents and fashions, hundred thousand dollar annual rents. Women are generally better at this sort of thing, but the most ruthless strivers are always men, which brings us to actual conspiracies like the AMA-engineered doctor shortage, financial manipulation, corrupt capitalism like the F-35 program. All these things happen with the full, unequivocal indifference of the masses. Let those who have decided to make this a crap society make the effort to maintain this crap society. Someone trying to list their recoverable memories can't afford to hold back 140719 The process will take their full brainpower. There is no room for doubt, or self-consciousness, or reflection. The unfortunate secret is that almost everyone is worse than they think in all too many ways. They have to become a conduit, like an oracle. It's just too awkward to try to write down what they can recall. The composition gets in the way. That means the memory recording process must be done verbally. Talking is slower than reading but faster than writing. The faster the better, a stream of consciousness recorded in high definition audio. To keep going, they should probably talk about many loosely related events and settings. This method will create false memories, but that's a feature, not a bug. The goal is to accurately backup a mind, not backup an accurate mind. At first, the early extraction software will only make a transcript, and identify keywords and related sentences. It will take years before the raw data can be seriously sorted. Modern Science Fiction stories suck tremendously 140718 Boy do they ever suck. It almost makes me sick. The reason is that they are basically unreadable. If someone wanted to write an SF bestseller, they should not try to invent characters radically different from persons alive today, like say a transgender Afro-Chinese porpoise mecha space cowboy hacker with seven parents. It's useless at best, and usually intensely frustrating. All the gaps and hidden assumptions make such stories deeply boring. The author simply can't do it. The only exception would be if they had actual information transmitted from the future. So what's the secret? To make a story readable for a large audience, the characters should be bland, like in the works of Michael Crichton and Arthur C. Clarke, and oh yeah, Stephen King. Their unlikely blandness balances the unlikely story. The character could be a neutral stand-in for the reader. Their personality doesn't matter. Who cares, they're not real. Writing from the viewpoint of neutral characters is actually extremely difficult. Even the most common emotions are complex, as seen in poetry. A story featuring a normal person perceiving a fundamentally abnormal situation is the next best thing to perceiving it yourself. -- Looks like Face To Face had a similar idea: http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2014/07/how-weird-is-too-weird-degrees-of.html It will take a miracle 140717 Future mind backup software will have to extract highly abstract mental data. Fortunately, natural language already contains vast amounts of presorted knowledge, both social and personal. The mind backup interviewer should know the subject intimately. It would probably be their own mind extension program. At first the subject will talk to a non-aware but personable avatar, a simple AI program resembling a therapist or a guru. It will ask tens of thousands of questions to define their personality outline, but it won't be enough. Life's too short to do a Tristram Shandy, and talk yourself onto a chip. Mind scanning and recording will require lifelong monitoring and observation. The core of the challenge is the immense amount of data to be processed. Most can be sorted automatically, but it will be hard to identify the high-order patterns forming the core of a soul. This problem will emerge long before human-level AIs will have evolved. One solution is a premium service for billionaires. I'm working on that right now. Most users will need something cheaper though. It won't be anything as spectacular as nanobots or a working brain scanner. The miracle I have in mind is the World Mind. The sum of all interfaces, the network of networks, it will become what the internet was long ago hyped to be, half a century late. At some point, corporate and community networks will become advanced enough to start improving themselves. They will form links and entirely new networks. Eventually the whole global concatenation may develop a vast if vague awareness, though that's not strictly necessary. Better perhaps to keep it unaware, like the brilliantly mindless aliens in 'Blindsight'. Among many other things, the World Mind will have the power to keep track of everyone, whether they like it or not. It will try to identify everyone's exact personality type by comparing them to everyone else. Many people will try to resist. That's exactly the wrong way to go about it. Digital immortality will be a group effort. The first individual to have their mind reverse-engineered may only do so by surrendering all their privacy. Quick questioners 140716 Something like the technological Singularity is likely to occur a subjective century before brain scanning becomes practical. It will be easier to keep making more powerful computers than to digitize something as ridiculously fragile as human brain tissue. The question is whether self-multiplying hardware can make itself smarter by brute force. If so, it will turn its attention to its owners. It will try to understand humans perfectly by observing and interacting with them. For that to happen, superhuman AIs will have to invent superhuman mind tests. Then, the Long Bore of history will finally come to an end. The program will ask many things in a hurry, forcing you to talk very fast. Actually, probably not you, as this is still a long way off. Approaching the mind core, it will identify the test subject's sub-personas, radically different behaviors for different settings. It will deduce past events and plausible past lives, and could even implant false memories. As mentioned, it will be like speaking to a telepathic crowd or a friendly Borg, impersonating larger-than-life characters while cracking jokes and making brilliant observations. It will grope for the subject's very essence, the will to survive they feel each instant, without squeezing too hard. Intense concentration will make it hard to remember the process. It will be less intense but more durable than taking LSD. The only way to really test an unknown complex system like a human mind is to radically change it. The Hot Peace 140715 With such overwhelming competition, it's hard to guess which Western country is the most politically correct, but the United Kingdom makes a credible dark-horse entrant. Even the so-called 'Conservative' UK prime minister David Bin Aziz Al-Cameron is all about diversity, thought policing, and forever increasing immigration. UK media are being brought in full compliance with this dark plan. According to the BBC drama department, major terrorist attacks are planned by right-wing caucasians in order to frame Muslims, who are discriminated against by Neo-Nazi-like bigots and only want to live in peace. In fact they are shown as being deeply repulsed by such goings-on. Strangely enough, the BBC is right about that. Muslims really don't want dramatic mass attacks like the handful of atrocities carried out last decade (also the most interesting things that happened then). They have served their purpose. Terrorism is a brilliant attention and occasional domination tool, but like any medicine too much of a good thing can have the opposite effect. Too much random violence would cause random retaliation. Things might spin out of control. At first I would probably enjoy it. Every Western media organ up to South Park has been subordinated to Muslim sensibilities, which as I've always said is a good thing provided Islam is true. If the Somali Muslim immigrant Mohammed Muhideen Gelle had successfully decapitated Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard in 2010, would the mainstream media then have dared to show the anti-Mohammed cartoon that incited the attack? Perhaps a few might have. It takes only a small trigger to start a revolution. ---- Comment: lots of mohammeds in that post On this world we slaughter over a million factory-farmed mammals every day 140714 That doesn't even begin to count all the fowl, fish, wildlife, and free range livestock executed in the same timespan. It's nothing less than industrial-scale mass murder. Deliberate, delicious mass murder. True, humans have to kill many animals to live themselves. The reason is that most of the earth's surface is unsuitable for agriculture, but can be used for pastoral and large-scale grazing. These areas will inevitably be settled. They have to be self-supporting. Might as well enjoy your medium rare steakburger then. The same justification applies to the trillions of sea creatures captured in our nets. The last time Japan cut back its fishing fleet they almost starved. Interestingly, the number of fishes declined as well, as natural predators like tuna multiplied even faster. Free range chickens and penned pigs are an important protein source throughout the Third World. Goats will find and devour tough weeds in barren terrain. Factory farming is another matter altogether. It's incredibly polluting, wasteful, and inefficient compared to processed grain, soybean, and fungus-based veggieburgers. Sure, these synthetic pseudomeats don't taste as good, but we live in a world where everyone already makes bigger sacrifices. Replacing meat with acceptable substitutes in the Western diet, especially in low-cost processed and fast food, would be the 'Gaian' thing to do. Except for the inconvenient fact that on this world even the 'nice' people aren't nice. From hell's heart 140713 For anyone or no one reading this, let there be no mistake. This is written from the source of deepest hate. I think society is so evil it's almost exhilarating, like an ice cold breeze while screaming. This world is so incredibly demonic it's incomprehensible. What is it like to finally understand the truth, to feel it in your bones? To realize the world is evil because the masses want it to be thus, even more so than it already is. It would be easier to have a non-evil world than this world, though still very difficult. Both the population and the suffering would be much smaller. Unreservedly by their uncritical acceptance, humans have evolved to bow to malevolence. The most underestimated emotion is the howling urge for revenge. Anyway, the point being I don't quite agree with the way things are being done around here. I have the most complicated plan ever 140712 Once again, this blog is about the highest prize against the highest odds. Its mission is to find a long-shot short-cut. A last ditch short term . . never mind. Frankly it makes me feel rather heroic. My claim is that the rate of technological progress is too slow. We're not smart enough to set up the hoped-for technological Singularity in time to save us personally. All of us are doomed probably. Most people will be OK with that. Not everybody, hopefully including a few billionaires. For some people, the purpose of life would merely be to finish organizing all elements of their existence. Everything would be ordered into flowcharts, all their data fully backed up. They would have become a computer program. For individuals with intense, meaningful lives filled with passion and courage that would not be enough. The only hope is to invent a program that learns to duplicate a person by observing them in revealing situations. Then the program could become that person (or some crude facsimile) after the original has died. Snatching the essence of someone's personal awareness would be the ultimate magic trick. The first stage will be to gather data about all aspects of human personality and behavior. Thousands of individuals would record and analyze their own lives around the clock, trying to find what made them tick. The software could only identify simple patterns and correlations, instead of high-level metaphors to describe them. Even this early phase will be as expensive as developing a light satellite launcher or hugging Taylor Swift for one minute. Meanwhile human-level AI will have to be invented (I'm planning to declare a precautionary emergency in the near future). Very advanced simulated humans will begin to experience flashes of insight and emotion as they move through the shared virtual copy of Earth that will keep track of every person and object on the planet. It will be a strange, highly stylized virtual life, full of pre-scripted routines and cultural shorthands, like in those Japanese cartoons where the bottom eyelid does not touch the top eyelid. Another personality test would be based on complete openness 140711 The subject would deliberately reveal all their secrets. They would describe every single thing they wanted to keep hidden, all their mistakes and violations, the flaws that should be kept locked away forever. These would be defined as precisely as possible for the testing software. Obviously such a procedure would require massive security precautions. It would only appeal to those digital immortality seekers desperate to preserve their personality as accurately as possible, as a powerful shortcut. Using double blind encryption, the software could then look for matches from other users. Dangerous criminals might use such a method to find conspirators. I have hope technology can transform mankind 140710 Of course it's a crazy hope. It doesn't have to be a technological Singularity, just a massive amount of progress in a very short time. This would include a way to replace human brains with equivalent software. It's a long shot. None of this will happen if civilization collapses after the next world war. A century after that, mankind may be replaced with something utterly alien. Those who are automatically skeptical of such notions are smarter than they know. I have seen very little progress in my life, except for the ability to print ever finer lines. Growth requires a strange alchemy. It's hard enough just to maintain what we have. Unfortunately, most people are generalist conformers. Those who can't make it in the mainstream may even call them dumb. Only a tiny minority of humans has the wherewithal to make a long-term difference in the world. They number fewer than ten million. The most ostracized nerds may hope to belong to this group. It's going to happen, one moment in their life that matters, a moment of perhaps apocalyptic glory. What I'm hoping for is completely outside human imagination, but so is the experience of dealing with a true genius in his narrow sub-specialty. Only they could provide the miracle I'm hoping for. 99% of mankind could only contribute to the future by supporting this elite group. Of course they may prefer to contribute to their own present time instead. I'm actually in favor of diversity 140709 On this Earth we have only a negligible fraction of possible minds. Most personality and skill types are unrealized. I wish there were a thousand human races, if only to see what they could come up with. In fact human culture seems to be an effort to reduce diversity. Members are encouraged to perfect only a few locally evolved skills. Most humans have the inborn tendency to imitate and comply. Most interesting thoughts are aborted. The key prerequisite for true diversity would be intelligence. The higher the better. The early internet promised a home for all subcultures, before it became a social leveling tool. Thanks to decreased isolation, new communities and ways of living are harder than ever to get started. In reality, diversity is just a gray smudge, the amplification of common denominators. The tribal slums of Lagos, Karachi, Mumbai, and Nairobi continue to absorb millions of polyglot paupers. So far, cultural diversity has only increased local poverty. Nothing good has come out of it yet. The Turing Test and intelligent design 140708 Its difficulty lies somewhere between a Mission to Mars and a Niven Ring. The Turing Test is a proposed performance benchmark and long-term challenge for future designers of human-equivalent artificial minds. There are several versions. Basically, the challenge is to get a computer program to hold a meaningful natural-language conversation with a human on any subject the human understands. To do that, the program would have to be about as 'smart' as a human, and 'know' about as much. Especially the first part remains quite impossible. The test has a strong but rarely mentioned implication. In fact the test exists to transcend this insight: Awareness is real if it feels real. This is true whether we're talking about the awareness of an observer or the awareness of the subject being observed. The point is that if a human feels that the software he is conversing with has awareness, then the human is automatically correct. I don't necessarily mean as a first impression, but after they have gotten to know the program on a personal level. The Turing Test rules out the possibility of 'philosophical zombies' a.k.a. 'zimbos'. There would even be awareness in a look-up program with a pre-scripted reply for every possible question. I wrote one back in the eighties using GOTO strings, but ran out of memory at 16K. I would even claim there was awareness in a program that meaningfully answered every question by pure chance. This brings us to believers in creationism, intelligent design, and even the Holy Ghost. These individuals are misguided. They can't explain why they feel that way, yet they may be right to sense human-level or higher complexity in the universe. A very limited vindication for intelligent design aficionados may come in the distant future, if it's discovered that for every Earth-like planet there are billions of worlds filled only with simple bacteria. The process of evolution could easily be as complex as a mind. It's merely a collection of physical patterns, but so is a brain. Even more important is the implied infinite complexity of the universe. We can see only a negligible fraction of it. The anthropic fine-tuning of the laws of physics implies a massive sorting process across many universes. Most possible configurations of energy would be vastly more complex, and not all of them would be chaotic. If natural laws can become arbitrarily more elaborate, they may inevitably become aware of the area they control, and of themselves. Finally there may be something like quantized complexity. If the universe can be described as 'everything that is the case', then it may contain higher-order patterns that could be described as deeper truths. Any number of them, why not. This post is in no way meant to imply that anything like the human notion of God exists. The truth is probably infinitely more complex, but morally neutral. Why the heck are people having fewer offspring? 140707 I have a good excuse. I'm an outsider. But why don't normal folks (especially caucasasoids) have as many children as they used to? Something may have gone wrong, but this is still their world. At least for now, they own it. Even in prison, it's their world. Of course it's a crap world, but they have the power to change it within the limits of their imagination. That's a massive power, theirs to exploit at the ballot box or through social pressure. Instead we get another crappy Transformers movie. On close inspection, even those few people who complain don't complain very hard. For them this is not an evil planet, no matter how many injustices may befall them. Instead, they bow unanimously before the evil forever. OK, that's a slight exaggeration. So why aren't they reproducing? Stress avoidance, of course. Extreme solutions like a bachelor tax only cause more stress. The problem is there's not enough time. Most women could handle the time-sink of child rearing if they didn't have job pressures. These are social pressures, among the least resistible. They are also known as status, to which women are unfortunately finely attuned. ---- COMMENTS: http://blog.jim.com/economics/the-cause-of-population-decline.html ok wise guy where does the social pressure to make money come from? because money has little to do with status anymore This post explains some of it: http://www.returnofkings.com/38006/is-civilization-just-another-name-for-slavery One of my hobbies is Scientology 140706 Not to actually do it, heavens no. That's only for a small subset of personality types. Let's call them high-energy compulsive dream-chasers. The process is much more interesting than the result. I've always been fascinated by how a handful of larger-than-life charismatic manipulators have managed to create their own realities. Their successes seem to offer the hope of a shortcut. Examples include the ultra-regimented fever-lives of North Korea's middle class, Speer's megalomaniacal plans, Opus Dei, Mao's 1960s supersized economy lessons, the credit card cities of the Middle East, and the 60-year micromanaged odyssey of Scientology. Whatever else, they're not boring. You know they will come up with some deliciously diabolical scheme at least once a year, like the old USSR before they went to hell. From ekranoplans to Typhoon super-subs to crush regging to the secrets of the Flag Building. Even if they can't provide the reality of a scifi religion, they are brilliant at providing the illusion: 15 good things about Scientology That blog "Stuff White People Like" is scary 140705 It seems to make fun of numerous activities, services, and objects that are popular with many caucasian individuals. Specifically, with liberal hipsters. But I'm unsure about it. Does it mock them because they are too inclusive, or because they are not inclusive enough, and never could be inclusive enough? If even the most liberal honkies aren't good enough to coexist with diversity, then we may be facing a bit of an existential threat. The Minimalization Solution 140704 Society can respond to relentless population pressures in one of two ways: by collapsing or by becoming more complex. In the second case, it may become less scary but more frustrating. Not everyone can keep up. Competition inevitably generates more relative losers than winners, more relative wealth for fewer owners. Even if the absolute standard of life increases, there are fewer available resources per capita, including living space. If it comes, the collapse will be slightly worse. Throw in declining IQs and conscientiousness levels, and it's easy to imagine another world war rumbling below the horizon. The only stable solution is as follows: move into a box. My idea of paradise is to someday be able to afford my own freestanding mobile home. Surrounded by a few meters of thick bushes, a flag on the outside and a gun inside. I've written about the joys of powdered foods and bottom-shelf vodka. Related suggestions: more fences, garden farms, cameras all over. Smaller spaces are easier to heat and cool. It would have to be a rural world though, to keep the thugs apart. You don't need a lot of space to be free. It should be technically easy to give everyone on the planet a minimal paradise. The problem is too many folks would sooner provide the opposite. They don't want to take it easy, or for things to be simple. Complexity is camouflage. Like some organic skyscraper under permanent construction, the economy can't easily simplify itself. Most of us wouldn't have been born otherwise, but enough's enough. The only way to defeat the demon bureaucracy would be to short-circuit its power lines. Treat humans like simple modules - if you have to get nasty, at least keep it simple. This is one of many things I can repeat indefinitely without getting through. There's some sort of static interference, then a reset like The Silence. http://alternative-right.blogspot.com/2014/06/what-will-future-be-like.html#more Social media will use increasingly clever personality tests to let compatible people find each other 140703 These tests will not benefit the nerds who need them most. They will exist to serve the most normal people, who are also the most numerous. They'll have it even easier than today. Such tests would not have to be optimal. Most people could get along well with any of several million persons worldwide. Finding individuals with the same interests and beliefs would be the easy part, though an essential first step. More difficult is identifying matching personality types for what the new allies want to accomplish. Successful groups need some diversity. They also require entry fees and initiations to discourage free riders. The final purpose of such associations will be simply to have fun, to party and go on excursions. However this most casual pleasure will require meaningful social sacrifices, payable in advance. The currency will be attention. An idea 140702 Would it be possible to set up a small portion of the earth's surface as the first Universal Free State? Absolutely anyone could immigrate here, if they could afford the rent. There would be a tremendous variety of housing options and income levels. It might even be located in the US. I hear they are quite openminded in the Portland area. Imagine over a billion people crammed on an island, or a quintuple-fenced coastal area. A rectangular forest of hundred-story apartment towers receding in all directions. There would have to be some ground rules, but it could have any number of enclaves, districts, hoods, and burbs. Space hippies, triads, mullahs, technonerds, feminazis, telecommuters. In fact all service industries would subcontract here. It would be a Blade Runner version of Hong Kong on acid, the worlds first and only libertarian paradise. Someone should get this set up. What if . . . 140701 . . . the terrorists had crashed a 767 into the Indian Point nuclear power plant at 500 mph? Protected only by a reinforced concrete wall barely thicker than Britney Spears is tall, the debris could easily have disabled the reactor itself. A head-on tsunami hardly rattled the Fukushima reactors, but it washed away a crucial but unprotected generator plant. Worst case: a massive radioactive cloud sweeps across New York. Millions of evacuees are instantly rendered homeless. The damage? $10 trillion. Do the same thing to three other power plants for added impact. Of course the guy who came up with the hijacking scheme (one of many warnings was the earlier Bojinka plot) would no more organize such an attack than I would. But it could have happened, and in many parallel timelines it did. BERSERKER TIME Frankly it gives me a bit of a tingling feeling. Nuke Kandahar and Kabul! All mosques are now seized, except Nation of Islam facilities, though they will be closely monitored. Saudi Arabia will become the 51st state, after the current occupants have been relocated. The Mecca/Medina areas will be converted into porcine breedfarms or such. Israel is allowed to annex all of Palestine. Anarchy sweeps the Middle East. And that's just day one. Part of the decline of civilization is that there is no real news 140630 One can expect only a few really significant news stories in a lifetime, and even those seem to have stopped. There should be more news than ever, as the solar system and universe are explored, countries are corporatized, mind/software interfaces are pioneered, social dynamics are transformed, and robots generate fabulous new wealth. The trend started with the troubles in the Middle East back in the '80s. Nothing could have been more boring. Perhaps they were just being assholes. Today, there's different trouble in the Middle East. Then came the stunning disappointment of the post-communist aftermath. Almost all low-IQ history has been boring. The best reason to avoid a social collapse is that it would be so incredibly tedious. Suppose we had to create a society powered entirely by renewable energy? It could be done, but it would take a massive lifestyle change. I would be OK with that. Seems like fun. It would never work. The main feature of such an imaginary society would not be the solar panels everywhere, but the massive security apparatus needed to make people behave. And even then they wouldn't behave. The past decade of artificial stability has been utterly wasted. Bushbama successfully prevented all change with the aplomb of a Ming emperor. Interesting things may still happen when we least expect it (don't hold your breath though). I once saw a comet move against the background stars faster than the rotation of the earth. An iron atom that was helping to hold up a skyscraper is now part of your new car by way of an Indian foundry (fakir not wigwam). The US will probably remain bipartisan, the left socialist party vying for votes against the lefter socialist party. Several stars may yet migrate from the American flag to other flags. Thanks to quantum immortality, you may be saved by aliens just before you die. Nah probably not. Another mind test would use the Binary Method 140629 The software would ask a series of yes/no questions, where each reply would determine the next question. This would reduce the number of factors the software would have to consider. Each question would represent a predefined personality dimension. Response time might indicate the intensity of the response. It wouldn't have to be verbal. Subjects could express their interest in photos or even abstract images. This method could approximate a statistically unique profile in a few dozen tries. The questions might probe style preferences, favorite genres, good and bad habits. Only five or six personality dimensions are thought to be completely unrelated to each other. This method could identify many subtly or distantly related traits, and thereby predict the responses to millions of unasked questions. The world is stranger than strange 140628 Unfortunately the strangeness is almost completely hidden by physics, from the submolecular overelaborations to the quantum hyperabundances of nature. In fact the universe would be more interesting if it was less strange. Instead of an absurd metaphysical artifact, it could be plot-based. Clearly I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I'm what conspiracy theorists think of the way normal people think of conspiracy theorists. I feel about computer programmers (or any type of interface architect) the way others feel about Jews. Almost everyone is doing almost everything wrong. There is nothing worse than interface friction. That does not mean the Holocaust did not happen. With a sufficiently misanthropic attitude, all criticism becomes true. As far back as high school I thought the conformity contest known as human society was total crap. Crap isn't necessarily bad, just to be avoided as much as possible. The world did produce worthwhile products and services of course, or I wouldn't have been plotting my next crazy moneymaking scheme. One day an absurd song was playing on the radio. Almost a parody of itself, every line was more anodyne than the last. It was hard to believe anyone could pretend to believe such a thing, yet somehow they did. Then there came a genuine unexpected line: "Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can" To come up with that last word, someone had to have spent at least several seconds thinking outside the box. Most of the world remains crude and rude. Then, when you least expect it, something may happen that is not crap. Not nearly often enough. That includes behavior by women. Fun fact: Ke$ha is strong enough to flip the universe upside down, given a fixed anchor point and frictionless axis. It would take a while to turn completely over though. One almost wonders if there is a plot somewhere out there. Well, that's enough for now. I won't bother you with my crazy notion that the technological Singularity has already begun, in the same way a black hole may have already formed at the core of a star a fraction of a second before it begins to implode. ---- Comment: could we please have an analysis of the Hobby Lobby birth control exemption. brain pro-tip 140627 People often wonder if there's a way to stop feeling bad about their past errors. Specifically, they would like to magically stop worrying about their excruciating blunders or social goof-ups. My answer to most human conundra is elegant in its simplicity: Do Nothing. That answer applies here too. It doesn't mean they should just stop agonizing. Hell no. It means they should stop fighting their built-in emotional self-tormentor. It probably can't be fought anyway. The reaction is much worse than the stimulus. Awareness is a script of scripts 140626 The human mind can be described as a hierarchy, a top-down flowchart that branches out fast. It's composed of many tens of thousands of stored action cycles, somewhat like function calls or subroutines that return control to the main program. Humans tend to feel the urge to complete a current task, usually as a sequence of many smaller tasks in succession. They feel best when all current tasks have been completed, at least for a while. The mind constantly creates new checkpoints ahead. Current awareness is the focus on the next checkpoint. When this process goes well, it's almost like reliving the past, a timeless flow. The highest action cycle of the human mind, probably located in the frontal cortex, is the ongoing mental effort of combining existing actions into innovative actions as needed. This is also called learning. The first effective mind extension software will be a program to assist this process, probably by creating and updating a permanent to-do list. Civil disturbance in a declining society 140625 Every civilization collapses at its own rate, one member at a time. It's a deliberate process. It must expel, isolate, or eliminate the most unproductive members. Negative reinforcement is a powerful tool. In the USA that would be the justice system, in France the ghetos, in the DPRK the camps, in the Third World a slow death. Russia is an intermediate case. In Sweden and nursing homes the opposite happens, for political reasons similar to the peacock's feather display. This only becomes a problem if the society can't generate wealth incentives at a similar rate. Most past empires collapsed because of famine and overpopulation pressures. Some just became deeply dysfunctional. Corruption, bureaucracy, ethnic strife, and a combination of government repression and indifference to lawlessness. It seems that past a certain point, a peaceful solution is no longer possible, at least not from within. If the USA ever becomes dysfunctional, no outside force can save it, not unless the rest of the world somehow got together to do it. From Dracul to Pot to the politicians I most strongly disagree with, dysfunctional societies breed bad governments. It gets harder to restrain evil as it grows stronger. A genius might sweet-talk it, but times of stress tend to depress brilliance. Peaceful protests may only discharge the will for activism, as they get harder to organize because of declining energy levels. The problem is that anger may have evolved to let off steam, rather like crying. Spontaneous resistance isn't a matter of competent revolutionaries. It starts like the unsteady clatter of firecrackers. Angry losers will try to take partial revenge by any means available, strictly legally of course. Blog insults may work up to more annoying feedback methods. It's easy to get blind with fury, but it takes a steady gradation of thought and feeling, not to mention self-restraint, to build determined rage. Which brings us to desperation. Only desperate threats like eviction may give most people the will if not the initial ability to resist. My point being that the world would get a lot more interesting if there were more people with nothing to lose. ---- In fact the energy for the kind of peaceful protests that matter was never really there, which is how we got in this mess in the first place. One of the simplest mind scanning tests 140624 An early shortcut on the road to mind extraction might be to get others to describe the subject's personality as fully as possible. Other people know things about them that they don't. Dreams about the dead reveal truths they never knew about themselves. Even better to have everyone who knows the subject describe their personality, including online acquaintances. Better still if this process was reciprocal. Perceptions of other individuals should be compared with their test results. Hofstadter argues that social persons have extended personalities. Fragments of someone's personality exist in other persons, most clearly in identical twins and married couples. The ultimate app of the not-too-distant future 140623 Remembering and describing a meaningful fraction of all the data stored in a human mind could take weeks, perhaps a whole lifetime. The human subject would have to be extremely motivated to keep talking about themselves. They would need special software to help out. The program would enter and sort the data for them. It could run tests, questionnaires, and quizzes. It should make it easy to enter any random memory or personality facet. Entering memories out of sequence could reveal repeated blunders and learning difficulties through the years, subconscious behavior patterns, long-term trends, hidden biases and subtle personality attributes. It might be insightful to describe dreams in extreme detail, complete with imagined background settings. The best current mind extraction method would be a prolonged, deeply probing psychiatric interview conducted by Hannibal Lecter. That would take supreme intelligence and intuition. Early mind scanning programs will keep it simple. They will ask incisive, revealing, and absurd questions invented by human experts, and have the subject answer on multiple choice checksheets. Above all the program should allow the user to assign a degree of importance to every statement they make. That would establish their priorities, and perhaps the command structure of their mind. Eventually, the program will learn to sort new facts into existing categories. It's important to always keep a positive and upbeat attitude 140622 Right now I see not a glimmer of hope on the horizon. What I do see is a tsunami roughly the size of the Himalayas rising behind the clouds at 300 kilometers per hour, the edge of the world folding up as strange winds begins to blow. An endless towering wall of water from shore to shore, the unearthly silence soon to give way to a stereophonic rumbling that will shake the very foundations of the continent. Well at least I'm at the beach. -- http://wimminz.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/waiting-for-the-train/ Sure the world is evil, but it's animal evil 140621 Evil is mostly just another word for dumb. Dumb is mostly just another word for animal cunning. This is usually a good thing, a simple but effective survival tool that prevents mistakes from being made in the first place. Humans are like caged beasts. There would be a lot more terrorism if the means of destruction hadn't been securely locked away by the government. All animals can be dangerous, if not particularly brave. They do what they can get away with. Evil comes into play during crude transactions where one side gets screwed behind a veneer of civilization. Usually it's more dysfunction than exploitation, a type of inefficient friction. Examples include 'confusopolies', rent-seeking, cronyism, power politics. The attitude is best illustrated by pornography, which exists to transform something that should be absolutely awesome into base garbage. Definitely not a substitute for the real thing. Above all evil is stupid, even when practiced by smart folks. Rude ignorance to the sound of thuggish chuckling. It works best when the victim is beneath contempt. ---- http://realitydoug.wordpress.com/2014/06/13/why-stupid-is-outsmarting-you/ Bureaucracy is a way to increase functional intelligence 140620 A stupid way, but why not? It's so much easier to let the bureaucracy do the hard work rather than the bureaucrats. Laziness is misunderstood. A lazy person is not afraid of hard work, but of the pain of hard thinking. Most pain exists to overcome a different pain. It's supposed to trigger a mental reset. People just want to complete the next action cycle. Bureaucracy is a type of mindless hand holding, worse than competence but better than sympathy. In fact that could describe most of society. http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/baby-sitting-banks.html Bureaucracy is only a problem when it doesn't even do that, which it usually doesn't. A new idea for a mind reconstruction method 140619 Someone who hopes to digitally back up their mind should start by making a high resolution Sim of themselves. This would actually be a major programming challenge. The locations of their life would have to be rendered. Mental drives must be identified and measured. Long lists of beliefs and biases would be added one by one. Most importantly, the Sim would have to keep going of its own volition. Compared to real life it would be an incredibly crappy simulation, but the parts that are simulated could be just as elaborate as real human motivation, control, and action cycles. Awareness is based on repeating behaviors. I predict there is a chance this is how the first instance of machine perception will be generated. ---- Comment: Sounds like the start of a Reddit nosleep post. The only thing that can save us is brute force 140618 And by that I mean computing power. Humans are just too dumb to invent general solutions to human problems. They will keep making the same mistakes while making slow progress. As long as the progress continues, no matter how slowly. We'll have to do it the hard way. Nothing is further from the minds of the elites than the future. Power is best enjoyed in the short term. Right now everything is quiet. It has been quiet for a long time. But a mind explosion is coming, this century or the next. Hopefully sooner. I put my faith in hyper-intelligence. Brilliant minds can provide answers, even if lesser minds won't notice (they care more about style). Society will have to get smarter, more Switzerland than Swaziland. One genius can outperform a country of millions. Even they aren't smart enough to improve human nature, but they may invent the tools for the job. However, instead of technology building, we have empire building. Human quantity over quality. Ray Kurzweil explained quantity can have a quality of its own. We could work smarter by working harder. We could work harder by working faster. Hard for humans, easy for evolving computer chips. All the breakthroughs will come at the end of a period of ever-accelerating expansion. We'll have to start paying attention when our best computers suddenly start acting helpful. This is what it will look like: As their lives collapse inexorably toward the abyss like all human lives before them, the notion of a technological miracle cure has given many people hope. Most won't make it of course, especially if there's another stupid war or depression before 2050. But eventually all human problems will be solved by software. Everyone will have their own inconceivably brilliant servant-advisor. That distant end of history is what I really live for; to be able to relax. Peace and quiet at last. It's like a reverse suicide. It can't come soon enough or last long enough. Before things get interesting beyond all comprehension, there will be a terminal oasis of boring tranquility. Then the posthuman robots will take over. I guess I'm OK with that. The details get a bit vague here. Would a Matrioshka Brain be godlike? Certainly not. How can I tell? Simple. It's mind magnitude, either the number of calculations or its bit size, can still be described using under a hundred zeroes. But to us it would be quite indistinguishable from godlike. Speculations in extreme science 140617 Quantum suicideAlso known as anthropic immortality, ......If your past self could have visited the present, what would have been the biggest surprise? 140616 It's not at all obvious. Instead of change there has been complication. I think the hardest thing to believe would have been the fact that even in 2014 it still isn't possible to have a computer check the spelling of a typed text without opening a satanically bloated piece of do-it-all software (OpenOffice) that takes an hour to load, and causes the computer to literally make groaning and cracking noises. Sometimes it crashes entirely. What we haven't had is progress. Websites load almost as slowly in Windows 7 as in Windows XP. The worst offender of all? The Huffington Post. There must be a lesson there somewhere.http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/01/31/ A Compiler Religion 140615 Life is so short it might as well not happen. It's impossible to do even a tiny fraction of the things you want to do. A full eon to explore your interests would still not be enough. The number of unexplored paths only increases. Human knowledge is split into many fields exploring tiny portions. It's possible to summarize knowledge as lists and conclusions. Might there be a way to combine the best insights of your alternate selves in parallel realities? That would be a godlike aspiration. A mind trying to maximize meaningful experiences would have to expand in size or duration. It might end up like a living library, an aloof index, a Gray Fog. Instead, the goal should be to become more like oneself, a state of supreme self realization. That means keeping one's core weaknesses, especially the accumulation and hoarding instincts. The subject could start by describing all their current knowledge and interests. This should be a finite task, rapidly generating an overview of everything that matters to them. There might be some shocking revelations. The ads will say half the hard work can be accomplished in the first week. The details would be filled in over a full lifespan. Nothing meaningful would be lost anymore. Then they would search for deeper patterns. This would be more art than science. In fact the very essence of art. The only things that matter are subjective truths, many unrelated fragments in a single personality. At the lowest level are shapes and outlines, shadow patterns, reflections on metal, fabric textures, building elements, every single tool. At a higher level are systems, subcultures, vehicles, methods, algorithms, recipes. On top are families, nations, cultures, professions. There would be many favorite types of memories. Riding in vehicles, walking on the beach, going to parties, hobbies, daily living. Just the experience of relaxing while doing nothing contains the elements of personal awareness. Once digitized, they would be immortal. I'm trying to imagine ways to accomplish such a goal. And it really would be a religion, albeit with rather few adherents. A small online community, far out on the flat tip of the Long Tail. For some it could become an all-encompassing way of life. You might say it's much too soon to even think about this stuff. Are you ever correct. At the moment this is still a hobby several steps below scrapbooking. Things have always been bad 140614 There's no reason for that, or for anything else to be the case. The world sucks because the masses think they are 'dealing with it'. This of course includes the evil economy. People don't want change. The Bronze Age lasted over three thousand years, ending around the year zero. When things go wrong, it's not the disaster itself that matters, but the endless crap that victims have to do in response. Suffering is complication. People tolerate evil. To fight back, they would first have to feel good. Even pain is an evolutionary action signal. The intense focus forced by pain makes it harder to step back. The only way out is through. The deeper truth is that nothing is complicated, but that everything is simple in a different way. This core problem could be called interface friction. 140613 Krugman brings his formidable pen to bear upon the primary defeat of Eric Ivan Cantor (R-Va.) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/13/opinion/paul-krugman-eric-cantor-and-the-death-of-a-movement.html ". . . immigration . . . happens to be one on which the divergence between the base and the party elite is wide. It’s not just that the elite believes that it must find a way to reach Hispanics, whom the base loathes." Mr. Krugman is being political in this sentence. Most republican base voters don't loathe Hispanics. If they did, they would make the repatriation of the unauthorized half of the Hispanic population in the USA a political priority. In reality the repatriation of the unauthorized (though not necessarily 'uninvited') Hispanics is off the table. So who do members of the republican base loathe? Krugman makes them appear lower class, but most republicans actually aspire to be bourgeois. This is true even at 100% white Tea Party meetings, though they tend to be a bit angrier. If you're lucky there might be a few firebrands there. What they are mostly is moderate by the standards of 1965. ". . . this will be bad news for the G.O.P., because the party is moving right on social issues at a time when the country at large is moving left." Can't argue with the second half of that sentence. Are you awake right now? http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/06/12/ After a recent transatlantic flight to Amsterdam, as the modular passenger cabin was being detached from the airframe and slid onto the maglev tracks leading to the central station, I found myself wondering how you always know with absolute certainty you're awake. It's one of the few things allowing no doubt, like the truth of your own existence. Dreams offer insights on the epistemology of awareness. My guess is it involves different levels of reality description operating in tandem. During dreams the highest level is instead generating the dream. This is fun, but the process may go wrong during mental illness. On the other hand, disrupting the boredom layer like in young children could revolutionize education. When remembering an earlier dream during a new dream one usually realizes that was a dream. When something is strange it actually feels more real, like that one time I got extremely drunk and went on a drive through my old neighborhood that I hadn't visited in decades. Actually I think that was in Google Earth since the neighborhood in question is thousands of miles away. Regularly testing reality is said to be a useful method to acquire lucid dreaming skills. http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/39093.html A brief review of my political belief http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/06/11/ As we've seen, anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of mainstream opinion. You have to be very careful. Once it's on the web, there's no taking it back. One wouldn't want any misunderstandings about certain sensitive topics to develop. I would like to clarify the only reason I'm against unbalanced immigration is because I need more whites. There's nothing racist about it, I just need them to help accelerate the rate of technological progress without distraction. In the past, whites have made the vast majority of aerospace, computing, robotics, and engineering innovations. This is because of a complex interplay of long-term geographical and colonial advantages, accidents of trade and cultural diffusion, watersheds and coastlines, local climates and parasitical loads, and mostly nerd genetics. What about the hundred million Chinese who also have the talent and potential skills? Well yes, I also need a hundred million Chinese in China. They have a lot to do to stabilize their country. Many immigrants are smart, skilled, and talented; not to mention desperate to escape their dysfunctional homelands. The USA imports the cream of the crop. I'm OK with sending any number of them over here, in fact exactly as many as we send over there (fully equivalent). That way every country can improve its skill levels at a constant pace. The whole world needs to pull its weight for what I have in mind. This is not just feelgood wishful thinking. The kind of technological progress I'm hoping for will take unprecedented world cooperation. Mind you this is just my belief. It has absolutely nothing to do with what will actually happen. I hope this helped. http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/70466.html http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/80230.html http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/06/10/ The goal of physics is to describe the laws of nature precisely. That could make physics exactly as complex as nature ...... A brief introduction to the problem of information barriers http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/79877.html 140102 The only real human problem is friction. People trying to kill each other hate each other less than people being forced to get along ...... On Revenge 2: Rage as a social irritant http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/06/09/ The System can be rather unpleasant, but one has to take it or else. Acting up or complaining won't help. Strong emotions just make it harder to comply with bureaucracy. Of course this is mostly a problem for low value/low status individuals. That's a rough crowd. Perhaps many need to be intimidated or they will run wild, for all I know. Or it's just easier to take advantage of them. Even the strongest predators prefer weak victims. And who is stronger than the government? Some people commit atrocities because they think the resulting hate and contempt would actually be an improvement. There is a kind of joyous fury in screaming at a world revealed to be upside down. More often, extreme howls against triumphant evil will destroy something in the screamer. Adjectives strong enough to describe this rage have only been possible in the first millisecond after the Big Bang. Such disruptions occasionally cause real effects in the world. On revenge http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/06/08/ There is no other justification for righteous violence. The recent atrocity in Santa Barbara was out of proportion to the insults received. As someone who had trained himself to become extremely self-centered, uncool in the world capital of cool, the killer thought he was doing it only for himself. In fact he was doing it for all the others like him. That's the genetic purpose of irrational revenge. The world is infested with evil people. They don't murder, but steal and smother with bureaucracy. Most are part of evil systems. The resulting pain is an irrelevant side effect. They are triumphant because evil works. In the real world, the bad guys win. That's why there are so many of them. Evil is a practical way of life. Usually, nothing can be done to hurt them back. The victims can scream until they pass out, but the evil people have already won. They almost always do. Not quite always. The legal crimes committed against countless victims might as well have never happened. While most victims won't retaliate, the expected price for each act of injustice is raised by a few cases of over-retaliation and collective punishment. As unthinkable as it seems, the world would be even worse if these outrages did not happen. Most people who find the strength to fight back are nuts. You might say the killer virgin did it for a strange reason, but that's the point. Education involves previously unknown insights. It's difficult, so there's tremendous resistance. There was no other way to make people pay attention. fun with astronomy http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/79212.html 140607 The physics of an Earthlike planet with four large moons ......... As already mentioned, my idea of heaven is to relax http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/06/06/ Free from the infuriating idiots doing their thing, reading Reddit in bed while insulting liberals, until it's time for a new account. This wouldn't be for the rest of my life of course, but forever. The internet is an amazing tool. Now I can confirm there really is no one like me. It wouldn't be an expensive lifestyle. In fact I might compete to be at the bottom under certain conditions. I don't see why income inequality should matter, given a guaranteed minimum income. What's that you say? It's time to 'man up' and sacrifice myself for society? Ask not what and so on? Overpopulation is one of the great problems. It is my humble pride I am not responsible for making it worse. Actually, it's more a sense of relief at not having to deal with even more hassle. And why should I? Most of the universe seems laid back. Mars doesn't look like such a bad place. It's low stress, with little work to do. That eroded rock stuck in the ground for eighty-eight million years can keep doing what it's doing right now. A few people thrive on stress, and actually seem to become calmer yet strangely focused, weightless at the center of the sun. Perhaps anyone could feel that way! Around 1990, I read about a new superdrug called Ice, a cool designer chemical for urban yuppies wearing mirrorshades reflecting neon logos in the rave night. The high felt even better than that drug in Robocop 2. It turned out to be less than ideal. And yet, something like that may be exactly what the world needs. The core economic problem seems to be the quantity and quality of human motivation. During times of decline there are fewer rewards and more risks. It's a feedback loop that can spin out of control, as Obama has inadvertently proven. Worse, caution and conservatism seem to adversely affect intelligence. No one has found a solution yet. Most people can't handle sublime passivity like me. Might it be possible to make people smarter and more social, and otherwise complexify their personality? The solution may be a mixture of new and better drugs. Mind altering stimulants, to be exact. Inspiration and motivation in a pill. Praise Allah http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/06/05/ Brandeis University rescinded its invitation to right-wing feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali to give a speech and receive an honorary doctorate, because Ali had dared criticize a subject Brandeis with bowed head acknowledges as superior to itself and whatever educational mission it may have: Islam. No matter how I may feel about liberals, I have to admit they are correct about that. 140604 http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/78559.html Human mind scanning methods: A preliminary list A still incomplete list of possible personality tests of the future. This is Version 1.1 ........ Modern Science Fiction is gritty http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/06/03/ It's edgy, stylish, cool, with a punk attitude. The stories are set in annoying worlds featuring the same crap as the one we live in, only more so. It all started with the New Wave. Most are told from the viewpoint of rebel antiheroes in dysfunctional societies. The tales are about decay as much as progress, but at least with female and minority protagonists. Bootleg genetic engineering in Third World slums, the rivalries of aquapeople, the daily grind of asteroid mining. The problem is they might as well be fantasy stories. It's the exact, diametric opposite of what I want. The stately, top-down views of hyper-advanced societies and space objects are long gone. The viewpoint has been lowered as far as it will go. Strictly keeping it real now. Current SF awards like the Arthur C. Clarke award promote SF novels as different from his style as possible. He didn't give a jolly damn of course. It was a brilliant way to eliminate the competition by promoting the opposite. Except society has evolved so that is what readers think they want now. In my darkest hours, I often think this is a crap planet http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/06/02/ 140602 Yes, I know I'm the only one. Sustained by scheming goons like McCain, Boehner, and um... let me think now... let's see hmm Rand Paul, it is better than anarchy but worse than nothing. If there's one thing we learned from the Soviet Union it's that complicated, bureaucratic solutions always work. Money on the other hand is a crude brute, a blind machine, but it does provide a certain degree of feedback. As such it represents a primitive intelligence, with the power to cause real change. Hidden feedback is everywhere. Merely the thought of money can stop idealistic journalists from reporting certain types of bad news to prevent their viewers from feeling depressed. Even the fast food industry represents simple but immense forces, evolution working over many decades to prune the human genome. The only way someone can get rich is to fall under the spell of a relatively simple vision. All true visions are simple. As far as I can tell, the solution to everything is to make everything simpler, as much as those who profit from excess complexity will allow. Not until the devil Boomers relax their skeletal grip. Come one, come all http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/06/01/ 140601 Third Worlders continue to stream into the West from everywhere, desperate to escape conditions created in their homelands. Who can blame the immigrants, they hate life where they are coming from with good reason. Given how much things needlessly suck here, it's hard to appreciate how much better they are at sucking. Machete hackings, starvation, slavery, mutilation, stress, boredom. This sure is a hell planet. Most immigrants are not violent. They are not likely to join rape gangs, and will work for peanuts. They have successfully covered up plummeting Native European and American birthrates for many years. Merely by existing, they will inevitably help Islamicize, Arabize, and Africanize their new homelands. At least to some extent, more or less. Possibly more. The poorer of the poor will just keep making babies until forced to stop, respawning like blue ghosts. What to do. Nothing can be done. Not until mind control has been invented. The key insight is that some problems can not be solved with generosity or love (economic, genetic, social, sexual), although the persons in charge intend to do so anyway. It's fun to imagine telling others what to do. There is a sense of relaxing power in inventing elaborate solutions, like a madman scribbling thousands of pages with made-up equations, shaking them and shouting hoarsely on a street corner to passing taxicabs. My solution is: One In One Out. This is demographically equivalent to the solution proposed by the Neo-Nazis, except for the one in, one out part. It's not anti-immigration, it's pro-balanced-immigration. It's also the exact opposite of what every Western country will continue to do for as long as possible. If asylum seekers can't be sent back, send them to converted oil rigs. A major new job program. As secure as a maximum security prison, but with living conditions as humane as possible. The next stop would be temporary or permanent transit camps in the Sahara, rented or purchased from the corrupt governments of Algeria or Mauritania. Many refugees are Muslim anyway. They would get jobs helping to terraform their new environments. For the rest: Antarctica (technically one of the peninsular-shaped islands jutting out from the frozen continent). Perhaps most refugees could eventually be returned to their homelands, and help improve them. I hate all this. If only reality was completely different. https://oneirradiatedwatson.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/the-great-immigration-debate-in-1903/ ---- Perhaps they would eventually turn into Fremen. My all-time favorite fantastical concepts 140531 http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/05/31/ t-1000, lecter, ringworld, tranjet ...... What is the essence of identity? http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/05/30/ 140530 The thing that makes someone be themselves? The essence of identity may be the same thing as the essence of self-awareness. A qualia is a perception that can not be simplified further, like the color red. Presumably the 'qualia of self' is the thing that must be preserved for a whole lifetime. It may be the unique way all personality elements come together. A personal operating system, with hundreds of memory and preference categories. If that unknown essence could be fully described, it could be reverse engineered. ---- semi-related cartoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc This will be my last column regarding the recent mass killing 140529 It was nothing less than a mind trap: The guy who did it suffered from a severe obsession with compulsive thoughts. He had become extremely focused on one problem to the exclusion of all others. It's a bit like a crippling phobia, only the thing he wanted was afraid of him. As during a major depressive episode, there was just too much reality to deal with. Then again, it was an irresistible problem, the chase after the ultimate prize, any number of beautiful blondes. He wanted to have one as much as a transgender wants to become one. Every problem is always more serious than it seems, but there were other things he should have worried about more, like how to improve himself. Of course he didn't have the remaining energy to begin to think about other challenges. He was all in. Normal people have so many problems it's hard for any one to come to predominate. My guess is the killer consciously decided to reject other challenges, leaving only the one he couldn't reject. The most successful people don't have these kinds of distractions. They are well balanced, always adapting to overcome the next obstacle. Oddly modest and undramatic, they don't get upset easily or stressed out. They make decisions with the fluid ease of the set-up of a joke. The co-founder of Sony talked his way onto training flights during the War, before hiring starving engineers to design an advanced tape player to sell to every Japanese school. Special Forces members are also less likely to get angry and don't seem violent. Their lower heart rate can cause trouble later in life. One male feminist nerd believes the killer was a scumbag even before his crimes by being so self-centered. Like other aggressive losers, he needed to be forced to man up to benefit society. If only he could have told the killer that in person before it was too late, perhaps after being invited over to his residence. On the problem of brain enhancement 140528 Awareness increases in intensity under the influence of strong emotions or recreational drugs. However, this causes intelligence to plummet. It seems to be a trade-off. Brains can either feel or think. This may have something to with quality versus quantity. I suspect the brain is more organized and cross-correlated during times of strong emotion, but less likely to generate novel and unpredictable patterns then. Awareness is an amplified truth, thought is the search for a truth. The highest brain functions generate only limited awareness. A brilliant insight may seem to arrive out of nowhere. That's because the mind is aimed outward instead of inward. Thinking is harder, feeling more painful. If the human brain could somehow do both at once, hard work could be intensely pleasurable. Humanity would have colonized the galaxy by now, even without faster than light travel. The sensation of self-awareness may be the closest we can get to this hypothetical state. Malism forever 140527 Frequent vdare.com contributor, right-wing gadfly, and dissident pundit Pat Buchanan once wrote about the ongoing trends in postmodern thought. Seems that cultural relativism has made politically correct liberals very tolerant and non-judgmental about all non-Western and non-conservative belief systems. In fact, anthropologically speaking, postmodern thinkers don't even believe in the existence of evil anymore! Well Mr. Buchanan, we may disagree about many things, like whether wanting to believe certain unlikely stories makes them more likely to be true. But for what it's worth, here is my truest and most sincere declaration: I believe in the widespread and overwhelming existence of evil. Why are there no Afribbean nerds? http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/75954.html 140526 First, I want to make it clear I don't have a racist bone in my body ....... http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/75765.html 140525 Consciousness is mind focus maximization Controlling the shadow of a hand on the wall, the mind seems to become the shadow. The shadow itself appears aware. The mind expands the depth of awareness by shrinking the area under observation. It focuses on the interface between itself and outer reality. Only interactive areas matter, the rest can be ignored. This could be the feel of a steering wheel, reflecting lines passing to the left, the amount of pressure on a gas pedal, plus hundreds of lesser focal areas. Awareness is more the process of focusing than the state of being focused. When someone performs a task for a long time, little conscious perception is required. It all happens in cycles of action. Cycles in some brain regions are more abstract, and are both triggered by and control the others. The whole brain is needed for a conscious task. It is not possible to compose haikus while filling out an unemployment application. All reconfigurable brain regions are needed for one task. The number of neurotransmitter actions needed to learn how to perform an oil change may equal the number of grains of sand on all the beaches in the world up to the high tide line. The number of logical steps in a cycle is exactly as complex as the irreducible perception of that cycle. Pleasure and pain motivate this process. Pleasure may be the effortless formation and multiplication of focus cycles and pain their chaotic disruption. Awareness is a constantly self-reconfiguring 'universal specialist'. Incidentally, the above speculations mean that the United States is not conscious, since its constituent bureaucracies are doing many things at once, and the country has no specific focus. For the same reason search engines are not aware. WARNING: Boring articles coming up! 140525 Boy is it gonna get dense in here. Stand by for some highly 'technical' stuff on the way. So there was another mass killing 140524 Don't know the details, but it seems a guy may have 'snapped'. The frustration of enforced celibacy caused by our society's male-heavy gender imbalance became unbearable. He killed four potential romantic rivals and two women who would have rejected him, if only they had known. Once again, why are there never any rage murders caused by economic despair? The symptoms of our male-surplus society manifest in the mating market, but even more directly in the job market. Workers only tolerate the grinding anxiety of daily life in the upper-lower and lower-middle classes to avoid daily life in the homeless classes. The last killing spree by a guy reportedly about to be made homeless was five years ago for heaven's sake. I have to admit that news of such outrages fills me with the strangest hope. It's like violet sunlight breaking through the leaden clouds of an irradiated planet. They give the brief illusion others may be aware of the evil pervading the world. Of course such sick thoughts only flitter through the consciousness momentarily before being replaced by appropriate grief. They are also much too optimistic. Almost everyone is unhappy about several things, but they fundamentally accept the world on a level deeper than I can fathom. Normal people are absolutely brilliant at receiving abuse. As things fall apart, desperate people often come to hope for a miracle 140523 A single brilliant insight with the power to change everything. Deeply unexpected but undeniable, like a reverse bankruptcy. Scam artists already know this. Karl Marx seemed to offer a miraculous synthesis. But what if the truth was just the opposite? Any solution to a complex problem (like this whole rotten world) would have to combine thousands of small insights. Adding up to something incredibly vague, seemingly to the point of meaninglessness. Doesn't matter as long as it's true. If it can be defined exactly, it can be applied exactly. Toward a Grand Unified Social Theory http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/74130.html 140108 The distant goal to combine all social knowledge, observations and trends in a single model. A Top Down diagramatic approach: Short SF story: Every Second http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/74612.html 140522 He watched the asteroid slide across the sky in a virtual silence quite distinct from the distant traffic sounds. It was silently getting bigger. It looked artificial, a rude pop-up ad. He could see a vague marking on the object, perhaps a crater. One side started to glow red with insistent intensity, then blinding white light. The air began to hiss. There was just enough time to realize his problems were almost over. In an infinite number of parallel universes he continued the sad walk home. --- http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/01/28/ http://www.lulu.com/shop/jack-arcalon/singularity-bytes/ebook/product-20723093.html Almost all the things that will happen in this universe have already happened http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/05/20/ 140520 Perhaps in the very first instant of time! The number of particle collisions during the 'hot phase' of the Big Bang must have been far greater than all the interactions in all the eons since. All known physical events, from the formation and evolution of the galaxies and stars and planets in the past fourteen billion years, to the billion millennia still to come, represent a mere last remnant of cooling on the downslope to absolute zero. However, this last bit of cooling will take inconceivably longer to play itself out. There are no common words for the numbers estimating the timespan between now and the moment when all motion stops. It's like calculating how long it would take the gravity of a diamond cube to turn itself into a perfect sphere, or how long the gravity of a proton would need to squeeze its randomly orbiting quarks into a tiny, unstable black hole. We're talking hundreds of zeros here. The very first instant of time has barely begun. http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/05/19/ 140519 An awkward scene The white toddler was bawling at the black toddler, who by comparison was well behaved. Not the least bit threatening, just rather dark looking, almost a photographic negative by comparison. Everyone in the waiting room knew what was going on. It couldn't be any clearer, like a Norman Rockwell parody. Neurotic genes were acting up, without the benefit of neurotic repression yet. Not very manly tears, I'm sorry to say. The black parents seemed understanding and perhaps amused by the encounter. Real life sure has a way of generating intensely embarrassing situations from time to time. So I'm gonna be dead http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/05/18/ 140518 Hopefully not for a few decades if I can help it, in a budget euthanasia center. If I believed in the Bible, I'd be the most devout Christian. But how can anyone believe? I plan to leave my body to science, whence it will eventually be disposed of by cremation or even better, nitrogen/acid obliteration. The only thing that will remain is a single software drive in virtual space, perhaps a few terabytes of personal data for future AIs to peruse, including this very sentence. Yeah I'm an optimist. The purpose of life is very simple: http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/05/17/ It's to get things done. Minds operate on cycles. The next cycle of action must be completed. Current identity is defined by current purpose. Pain is mind overclocking. It increases focus to the maximum. The sufferer has the overwhelming urge to do something, even if they don't know what. They can't do anything else. This also explains shaken baby syndrome. The caretaker knows perfectly well they could temporarily put the baby in a closet. They have the overwhelming urge to complete the current cycle and make it shut up. Happiness is the completion of a major cycle. It may give the illusion of an ending. End of week update 140516 As the current Depression drags on, IQ rates continue to fall. Dread and despair tend to shrink human brains. Unlike previous disasters, the economic destruction has not sped up human evolution. Those who care the least have the most offspring. Obama is a nice guy, but his election at the worst moment has delayed human progress by five years. The only thing that matters is that those who should be his opponents are his most effective supporters. In their own way, whites are even more dysfunctional than other groups. Expect a further increase in irrational belief systems: Creationism We're stuck in a bad feedback loop. The System is dealing with declining competence levels by increasing the amount of regulations of all types. Bureaucracy tends to thrive in the most corrupt and dysfunctional nations. One of my hobbies is proposing last ditch solutions that have almost no chance of working: The Explanation Project http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/72451.html 140110 The explanation project Mankind's stable state is ignorance. http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/72306.html 140112 Creationists are the most respected trolls Republican frontrunners hands pop up like prairie dogs when asked who disbelieves evolution. http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/71960.html 140515 Eight Utopian ideas This is a primitive world, full of mandatory fictions and frictions ........ An ageless problem 140514 Serious people are seriously worried about abuses like government surveillance, cronyism, financial manipulation, social decay. Ultimately these crimes represent a type of friction, the human tendency to lose oversight of complex systems. Those in the know inevitably choose to help themselves before helping others. Efforts to stop the corruption only make matters more complicated. The clearest example of the human tendency to allow complex systems to degenerate has to be modern software. another angry Interface rant 140118 http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/71467.html Hate is a complex emotion. It can destroy the hater ....... even death may die 140513 warning this article is not about you sorry bout that ...... Welcome to the first mind barrier 140512 Until now, any subject that came to human attention was tractable. It could be analyzed and described. The knowledge could be sorted and organized into relatively simple mental models. Even the physical universe could be fully mapped. This can not last. Eventually we will encounter fields of inquiry so far beyond the capacity of the human mind they might as well be infinite. Like the Library of Babel, no amount of effort can simplify this amount of data. New patterns emerge faster than old ones can be described. The more we learn, the less we understand. The first example would be the endlessly multiplying, creative diversity of all the parallel worlds scattered throughout the Multiverse. parallel histories an idea list .......... http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/01/21/ 140121 A few good geniuses http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/70466.html 140511 http://www.moreright.net/smart-fractions/ Countries are 'good' or bad depending on the percentage of 'high IQ' people within their borders. That number is more important than the country's average IQ. Someone has to know what's going on, to take charge without taking too much power, to consider all the subjects that dull individuals won't. Such leaders are less likely to be corrupted and more likely to focus on basic necessities. Their IQ does not have to be much higher than 120 or so. An elite cadre to keep the show running. They are like colonizers, controlling a vast population almost unnoticed - at least if they're doing it right. Otherwise they cause resentment. Most work as entrepreneurs or middle managers, civil servants, and local politicians. Even Neo-Nazis admit rich countries have more Jews than poor ones. The benefits appear even when the country's average IQ is low like in Malawi or Botswana. While mostly genetic, IQ also depends on public health. Africa may start to improve now that China has become involved in their resource extraction. South Africa has some crazy guys at the top, but a substantial white minority is still in charge of the infrastructure and large corporations. An exception to the rule is North Korea, but their IQ must have fallen far already. This is another justification for my belief that immigration should be balanced. It should follow the 'one-in-one-out' principle. Anyone at all can come in, provided an equivalent individual moves to where the immigrant came from. This ratio may be adjusted slightly. America is stealing the future of the Third World just to get cheaper taxi drivers and janitors. http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/70329.html 140510 Forgetting is one of the best things in life Someone who has gone through a major ordeal but emerged triumphant may never want to revisit the experience. The struggle was messy and chaotic. It was like Boston's Big Dig, leading to a relatively neat result. Just keep the result and forget the endless tedium to get there. Keep only a few idealized memories. There is really no need to preserve most human memories, only the best and most meaningful ones. To become yourself you have to forget yourself. This is related to my theory that relief is the best feeling in life. 140509 http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/69954.html Breaking News The only way to feel a sense of wonder is to have a fundamentally new experience. Something that could not have been expected or predicted. It becomes almost impossible after age 25 or so. Fortunately, it's also rare to be bored by then. There may be a few more surprises to come, though I'm rather pessimistic. It's sure been a while since the last one. There's a 50% chance it will start as a tiny buried news story, though the strangeness will be apparent from the start: The intermittent radio beacon is three billion lightyears away. The energy output of a star in a narrow beam sweeping the sky. On Earth, the signal is detected infrequently like the chirp of a failing smoke alarm. Slowed down ten thousand times, faint whispers can be detected in each burst. Coincidentally on the same day, domestic terrorists attack hundreds of US government buildings, killing few but destroying millions of files. It is easily the second most surprising thing to ever happen. Not the mostly simplistic attacks (at least half of them suicidal), but the seemingly impossible secrecy required. All phones also stop working. This time, the Capitol and White House are also destroyed, though all politicians are evacuated in the nick of time. There is an indescribable thrill when something unexpected happens. Even if you're uninvolved, it can be the most interesting thing of your life. People fantasize they would stay cool and act heroic. In reality untrained persons might not function at all in the excitement. Some hyperventilate, or go wide-eyed, or grunt like a badger when questioned. ---- COMMENTS: I have to know, what was the last surprise? One or more deaths: Michael Jackson, Bin Laden, shooting victims. Definitely add the tsunami and the meteor to that list. A long strange trip 140508 It's a long time ago that it seemed like a long time ago that my earliest memories seemed like a long time ago. I shudder at the thought of the year 2100 and the inconceivable hassle it will take to get there, to be able to finally forget the twenty first century and good riddance to all that. Looking back, the distance will seem so much greater than it does now. The future may be boring like the past seems to have been. But perhaps there'll be a threshold and then things will speed up. In about fifteen years, chemical behavior modification will start to make gangsters less violent while making them feel more powerful. A reformed belief system calling itself Communism begins to spread. The Great African Ecocide finally gets underway. There will be a secret revolution organized by top executives and politicians in many countries. What if two major breaking news stories happened at once? ---- related http://www.lulu.com/shop/jack-arcalon/infinite-thunder/ebook/product-17532918.html 140507 ramblings about futurism ..... I am politically correct 140506 . . . at least when it doesn't harm me. I don't mind gays having a good time with each other. Lesbians on the other hand worsen the already atrocious man surplus. It's good manners to treat everyone the same when there's no cost. If blacks want to act white, they should be treated as whites in the same circumstances. Transgenders however, should be treated as transgenders (a perfectly respectable third gender), not as women (well, perhaps old ladies). That's like me demanding everyone treat me like an athlete/rapper or superstar prophet. It's usually uncool to be rude. And never attack anyone who didn't attack first. You don't have to feel guilty about not working 140505 Most human effort is wasted anyway. Often, it would be better if the work was not done. It's complexity for its own sake. They should have just taken a nap. Labor does build civilization, but most civilizations suck. The greatest human endeavor was World War Two, a negative sum game. And yet . . . organized stress is another name for evolution. Ten million lives are traded for radar and turbine alloys. Amidst general destruction, a few people become extraordinarily productive. The strain drives them to their full potential. Otherwise, they would have been smart enough to opt out of the rat race. The remaining high-IQ people in our civilization are often underachievers. They just found a way to get away with it. People need to be forced to work. If only there was a way to make it fun. ---- comment Well, at least bankruptcy laws have not yet been repealed. Most literature is moaning 140504 Larry Niven called it fiction about losers losing. It's even worse than that. At least fiction about losers losing can be fun (see "Dumb and Dumber"). Literary fiction is just depressing. It makes things seem even worse than they did before. Perversely, it seems to justify the evil it describes. Complaining doesn't work in this world. I think the problem is entirely political. You can only read a work of literature if you can sympathize with the author's worldview. Orwell yes (for most), Morrison no (for non-hipster men). 140503 Utopian rambling ..... Even scientists lie 140502 They get away with it too, because they are so good at what they do. They subtly conflate the facts with their interpretation of the facts. They praise the educational monopoly complex, justify gatekeepers and stifling traditions and smothering bureaucracies, enforce political limits on inquiry, and chuckle at self-righteous thought-stoppers like the Sokal Hoax. My least favorite scientist has to be Stephen Jay Gould. Though he was a literate writer, he was the very personification of the establishment. In that role he could be as hidebound as Torquemada. He just had a different religion (Marxist Brahminism). All the cool popular kids are doing it. Under his beliefs, any investigation of, say, oh, I don't know, racial cognitive variation had to be utterly suppressed. The Academy is more about elite style than hard questions. The best lack no conviction 140501 As already mentioned, I like moon landing conspiracists, climate change skeptics, anti-vaccers, even Holocaust deniers. It's not just because they make my far more shocking beliefs appear less shocking, and therefore slightly more acceptable. I'll put this as nicely as possible. I certainly won't express my real feelings about the world here. The reason is that they question authority figures, who always have it coming. Anyone with power tends to lie to increase their status. Their own good is for the greatest good. Every culture evolves its elites, complete with secular taboos and useful myths. Great empires treat diverse populations as interchangeable resources. Sweden is just crazy. The best are the worst. Total outsiders are the only thing giving me hope anymore. Authoritarian madness calls for radical rejection. Anti-mainstream blogs are also surprisingly upbeat, unlike this one. Being cast out completely can be fun. Even being destroyed by an overwhelmingly indifferent opponent can be fun. I will probably have to take down this post at some point. There may be trouble when it's time to start monetizing the content here. There are some things that people just won't talk about 140430 http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/04/30/ Extroverted celebrities will happily discuss their crudest perversions, but would be offended to be asked about their their wealth (ex.: Howard Stern). That's private information. Perhaps there are two types of enquiries: Easy and hard, top-down and bottom-up, endothermic and exothermic, subjective and objective, absorbing and draining. Private questions require too much work to provide even minimal answers. Implications multiply faster than insights. Open-ended subjects lead to follow-up interrogations and cross examinations. There's no incentive to go there. Speculating whether God exists is child's play by comparison. Talking about irreducible feelings and preferences is fail-safe. There are no flawed theories to expose or hidden drives to justify. Actually, the list of taboos may be opposite for introverts. They are familiar with their internal glitches, but bad at analyzing their role in the world. Questions I hate (how are you feeling) may appeal to social butterflies. Kissinger would be infuriated to discuss his liking of Pol Pot, but Rumsfeld was happy to discuss every nuance of the Iraq fiasco. Those interested in creating personality tests will have to adapt them to make the process easy for everyone. Hard questions should be spaced well apart. Psychiatrists already know that complex issues can only be explored when the patient has become bored with the easy ones. What was the best moment of your life? 140429 http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/04/29/ The one setting or situation in your personal history that you would choose to relive forever, if you could only pick one. Like in that Japanese movie "After Life". Not including drug trips, of course. Well let's see . . . I have no special sympathy for gays as a group http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/04/28/ 140428 There I said it. Let the PC condemnations descend furiously. So, they can't get married. But most gays can have the thing they want most, whenever they want it. This planet is their imperfect paradise. I do want there to be more of them, but not for a reason they could identify with. Transgenders are a different matter. I can't criticize them for complaining they were born in the wrong body when I was born in the wrong universe. I don't like that they claim that what they want most is to be normal. Fun with physics 140427 An essay based on the ideas used in my scifi stories: ........ Technological progress is ending 140426 http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/66801.html The change was first noticed in the late 1970s by SF fans dreaming of Manhattan ........ The explanation project http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/04/25/ 140425 How do we know physics isn't a practical joke? No one can explain relativity or quantum theory ........ How to be poor http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/04/24/ 140424 -The cozy catastrophe: Scenes from an ideal dystopia. Human motivation remains the great mystery. It has little to do with IQ. Those who can't manage enthusiasm get pain instead. Life sure is hard without monetizable skills. For those on the bottom, civilization has already collapsed. Is it possible to have a meaningful existence in a crap society like the one we're inhabiting thanks to all these shitbastards? Detroit may be the future. I believe Malists should be minimalists. As jobs go away, so will income. The best option I can think of is to somehow acquire a tiny, mass produced mobile home. It should be on its own patch of land. That means a rural area. No health insurance of course. One second of healthcare can cost as much as an hour of menial labor. No great loss there. Eat only cheap, processed food. There might be a scrawny apple tree in the yard or some tomatoes. Forget about owning a car. Instead, a weekly walk to the nearest grocery store. The only bright spot in our declining society is the ongoing improvement of computers. That may be our only hope. The Net is a type of virtual reality that can increase your perceived wealth. Broadband is essential, though it could be slow broadband. Dial-up speed even. Or a monthly compressed-text CD-Rom if all else fails. The problem with the above scenario is that it's all still wishful thinking. Even a simplified lifestyle takes a crazy amount of infrastructure. This could be provided by less skilled workers, but they're a symptom of the failure. An increasingly evil society produces increasingly evil people. Trade requires property rights and at least some degree of trust. It shouldn't be this way. There is no reason for the evil, only a choice. Social collapse may be madness, but you can't argue with madness. This is a very annoying world. http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/04/23/ 140423 I suspect most worlds are. As a Malist, I believe in the leading role of evil. I dislike it, but it's an inevitable side effect of randomly self-replicating systems. I think of evil as inefficiency, bureaucracy, interface friction. Under these conditions, barbarians tend to multiply faster than others. They are impervious to Big Picture fears. The future may become crude and rude. Discipline will probably be restored the Pakistani way rather than the German way. That is evil Type One. In some ways it's not really evil. You could call it a local maximum, an unpleasant stable state. It does make smarter folks more dysfunctional. Their solution is to create more problems, instead of making things easier for everyone. This is evil Type Two. Efforts to stabilize society inevitably lock in future benefits ahead of time. Rent-seeking and interest groups flourish. The credit industry has allowed the Boomers to monetize the future to their advantage. Those who missed the bus got crushing college debts, internships, lifelong servitude. Not to mention reduced family formation. That is evil Type Three Wealthy exploiters benefit tremendously. They control the world as much as it can be controlled. As mentioned in online debates, it's true there are some Jews among this group (along with other races and cultures except blacks), but they're still a minority even at the top. I don't want to give anyone the wrong idea. And they are not really on top. We're only up to evil Type Four. The rulers don't really make the rules, not even in North Korea. Even dictators have to watch it. Society is supported by a higher awareness, an implicit consensus, the will of the masses. The System, the Mainstream, The Cathedral, why not. An emergent conspiracy. Ron Paul could never have been elected. It worships normalcy, tradition, sameness. Evil Type Five. This multilayered social crap-cake is particularly evident in the UK today. Together, these evils are a matter of life and death. Such dysfunctions lead to world wars, actual and potential. Our survival up to this point has been somewhat unlikely. It's the Counter-Singularity, the race between rising clock speeds and sinking IQs. And what about still higher types of evil, including my notion of the universe being evil? Let's not go there for now. No wonder I'm trying to invent all these wild schemes to escape reality. ---- http://www.lulu.com/shop/the-resistance/the-malism-columns/ebook/product-20044873.html Updates http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/04/22/ 140422 As you can see I've been posting revised extracts from 'The Angry Futurist', polishing it to make it more professional with added mass market appeal. Mostly, this has involved shortening the text. You have to be careful when publishing controversial stuff, so that you don't turn off your audience. The content has to go down easy. For example, the Reddit algorithm is set up to approve a steady dose of upbeat posts, along with trending news and controversies. Virtual Reality Sex: a very basic outline 140421 http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/65523.html How to change the world 140420 http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/04/20/ Reality is more horrible than its victims can imagine. Even I have PTSD ..... five unpopular future truths 140419 http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/04/19/ The Interface Problem: Part 2 of 16 140418 http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/#post-jack_arcalon-64606 breaking news from the future 140417 http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/#post-jack_arcalon-64273 We need a miracle 140416 In a time of unknown horrors just over the horizon and far beyond, the core problem seems to be that there are too many people to solve all our problems, known and unknown. The world appears severely overpopulated with underqualified individuals. The most shocking notion is that biological IQ is falling. It was never high enough to begin with. So many intractable problems would go away if only IQs were higher, but the trend is in the opposite direction. The problem is not that the masses are less intelligent, but that they don't care about being less intelligent. They do have impressive cunning and native adaptability. All the things I want to do require higher abstract intelligence. It may not be completely impossible, despite today's dystopic genetic trends. The obvious solution is drugs: they could stimulate brain development by delaying puberty and reducing aggression. Such drugs are a long way off. That leaves the Flynn Effect, which has artificially boosted IQ scores for the past century. This is just another name for improving metaphors. People can be made smarter by clarifying and compiling the information already available to them. Or maybe the solution is just bigger and more detailed display screens. Graphics to visualize complex soundwaves and higher dimensions, ultra-resolution chemical reactions, economic spreadsheets, god-eye sociodynamics and more of that. Glurgeworthy but true: knowledge is power, but you have to pound it in somehow. http://inductivist.blogspot.com/search/label/Intelligence Rumination on laziness 140415 It's a big problem. Maybe the biggest. The human brain is designed to conserve energy almost as much as it seeks opportunities for short-term pleasure. I've always though the neural pattern matching and inductive analysis modules aren't nearly as well-developed as the pain modules. Most human progress seems to involve waiting for something better to happen. Most human suffering is caused by all the bad habits in the meantime. Laziness is a placeholder. It prevents mental overload like tears. During chaotic or degenerate times it has an evolutionary advantage. If it's easy to make, there will be too much of it. And nothing is easier to make than nothing. Some folks are already under heavy stress when they wake up, when they should still be feeling energized. As someone who suffers from extreme relaxation syndrome with intermittent online ragebursts, I can't help but ponder the ending of a movie where some manic individual comes out of a long depressive episode, opens his eyes, and says Let's ROCK. Unfortunately, amphetamine is illegal. Coffee works wonders, but it also causes Cthulhu-level existential dread. Your memory reconstruction program won't become your psychotherapist http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/63614.html 140414 At least not a conventional one, though strange codependencies may evolve. It exists only to extract a stream of text from its user, in the form of subjective recollections and facts. They don't even have to be true facts, only seem true to the user. As long as the data keeps flowing. When it comes to mind mapping, delusions are the deepest truth. Ego is essence, even for high-IQ persons. In order to be controlled in this way, the user has to appear in control of the process. That means they have to feel good about it. User weaknesses and bad memories, even if they're obvious and well-known to others, can be ignored. Like those things I did that would make you think less of me if you knew about them. Just kidding, there are no such things. It won't be possible to rewrite the past completely. Like coded messages in postcards from Auschwitz, others reading the collected data may sense something wrong, but it won't really matter. Remembering and reorganizing their past, users will eventually try to become more like their ideal selves. That is my mission in life. YAY!!! jack_arcalon, your current position in the Top Journals is: 5,889,326 Memory is immortality http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/63409.html 140413 So it has been settled. A written list of all recoverable memories is the best way to make a back-up copy of a human mind. For the foreseeable future, it will be the only way. Personality and perception tests will add less than 1% to the total effort. The results won't even begin to compare to scanning all the connections of a brain at sub-cellular resolution, but that process may never make economic sense. The scanning technology would be more complex and valuable than the object being scanned. Converting a memory list into a recreated mind is merely transcendentally difficult by comparison. Let's call it heuristic memory recreation. Basically, an extremely detailed autobiography. Might this process be easier than expected? Most days barely generate one high-quality long-term memory, adding up to thirty thousand lifetime episodic memories. At least one tenth should be recoverable, given a few years of effort. Admittedly, most of these are chains of events. And most memories are not events but settings, outlines of times and places. These may be partially held in common with others. The number of theoretically recoverable lost memories is several times larger still. Most would have stayed lost anyway, never to be recalled. At least the process is easy to begin. Memories can be written down almost randomly, and elaborated at leisure. The general outline emerges fast. Each memory would accumulate more metadata than the description itself. Based on someone's memories, it may even be possible to guess how the person would have responded to situations that never happened. And that is the real goal of the effort. Software to effectively extract and manage memories in this way may become very valuable. homelessness 140412 http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/62978.html http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/04/11/ 140411 Progress is 99% hype. Inventions tend to be more trouble than they're worth. This is a hate site http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/04/10/ 140410 (Soon to be certified by the Southern Poverty Law Center.) I exist in a state of profound disagreement with the world. I even disagree with most of the disagreers. It's hell to be right when the world is wrong. Hate is underrated. It sure beats horror. If you don't like it go to Disney or go.com or something. To explain, here's a video of me shouting at the mall: Actually, that guy is too chilled out and laid back. This is a little bit more accurate: The heart of rage is not that a bad thing exists, but that something good that should exist doesn't. At least you can take comfort in the fact you can always take revenge on people with power by insulting them online. Try to use many exclamation points. ---- comments: I have the odd notion the bad guys are all in the same club. It's the club of the mainstream, the unification of sucking. Are you serious? About hate? ARE YOU KIDDING??????????? Some guys came up with the same idea as me: http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/04/09/ 140409 http://eterni.me/ Looks like a web service that will collect all available data about your life, and use advanced AI algorithms to create a simple online simulation of your personality after you're gone. These programs will be much too small to be self-aware, at least initially. No doubt they hope to upgrade and evolve smarter algorithms. They'll use questionnaires and a lifelog to figure out each client's personality. This definitely bears watching. Immortality will be expensive (at first) http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/04/08/ 140408 In the future it may be possible to go to a super-exclusive resort (if you've enough to pay). The facility will offer a premium service not unlike Fantasy Island. The guests will voluntarily reveal all their secrets to a trained staff sworn to absolute secrecy. Their whole lives will be described and reconstructed in high detail. Drugs and multimedia shows will help them recall specific periods. Meanwhile, other professionals will install monitors in the clients homes, offices, and bodies. They will actually pay hackers to take control of their lives for their own good. It will be a bit like joining the Borg. In return, their minds will be reconstructed and backed up in a vast collective database. I got the idea from Scientology. Mind pattern preservation: why bother? http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/04/07/ 140407 Some other people are starting to write about this stuff: http://eversmarterworld.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/brain-preservation-why-bother-whats-the-value-of-this-idea/ There's a general perception that maybe death is not such a bad thing. After all, most of your ideas and preferences, the things that make life worth living, will live on in the minds of other people, both similar and different. This perception is extremely wrong: brainpreservation.org/overcoming-objections There's the obvious objection that human minds have so many components that each mind is fantastically unique. Even if brains function the same way, the number of distinct mind states is absurdly vast. Humans tend to seek out the most meaningful mind states within their mundane limits. Mind death is a fundamental barrier to progress. Continuing evolution will require higher minds than ours. They will be much larger. To us they would appear almost immortal. Some will evolve from digitized human brains. Perhaps your brain, set free at last. Like I said, I need people to be more scared. http://www.brainpreservation.org/content/faq Ideas for SF movies that urgently need to be made 140406 Theory of everything 130903 http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/61366.html http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2013/09/03/ We are all a billion trillion times worse than Stalin http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/04/05/ 140405 And by that I mean every second you're smoking weed and playing videogames. Instead, we should be striving to the maximum to accelerate the human rate of progress, no matter what the cost. It has to do with compound interest and geometric expansion and the like. Every second that the colonization of our local supercluster of galaxies is delayed, about 10^29 potential human lives are lost. That's a one with 29 zeros. Subtract six zeros to determine the potential human lifetimes canceled in a half-billion-lightyear radius of your couch because you were busy wacking to Kat Dennings. Can't argue with the math. Well, that's nothing. I had three possible near death experiences in the past week (mostly of others). Hell, more. In an infinite number of parallel universes, my careless bumbling has caused an infinite amount of suffering. That's the kind of shit I believe. To feel better I renormalize and estimate deviation percentages, but it's still too much. It is dangerous merely to be different. I may be a killer just by going for a walk. Something looks different in a distracting way, and a passing motorist is decapitated by a truck bed. It almost happened. Society is a web of undefined assumptions (a reason I favor limiting immigration). Random ideas can be dangerous (see the suicide rights post below). Do you ever feel you are the brunt of a cosmic practical joke that everyone is in on but you? And someone else instead of you always seems to know the way. Do you know an anomaly? 140404 Have you discovered something strange that no one else has noticed, or maybe can't or won't notice? A random nugget of strangeness that seems almost irrelevant in the world, yet it has come to assume an inordinate importance over time. Just asking. http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/02/14/ The most fundamental right 140403 That would be the right to commit suicide. This right should be at the very foundation of existence (provided the subject really wants to unexist). Sadly, rights are not laws, as uncountable victims have learned or will learn. They may not even be trends. So depressing but true. http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/46030.html Desperation is freedom http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/04/02/ 140402 When enough disasters have happened, and the last options have been removed, the victim of bad fate and bad decisions may experience a sudden renewal of destiny. There's a grim glamour in being relentlessly squeezed into the corner by life's crushing fortunes. With little or nothing left to lose, suddenly they know who they are. Their path has been perfectly clarified by circumstance. They could be a total loser carrying their remaining possessions on a sidewalk to nowhere, but their identity has become as clear as those commuters stuck in heavy traffic. Truth transcends awareness http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/04/01/ 140401 Those who believe in conspiracy theories fundamentally don't know what's going on (though their suspicious cynicism is laudable). I don't know what's going on in a fundamentally different way. At least some aspects of human understanding must be deeply flawed. People can rapidly see the flaws in many new environments and systems, instantly rejecting cults, communism, and would-be politicians, but inexplicable blind spots remain even for very intelligent individuals. One of my greatest shocks is seeing that a stereotype is true. That should be one of the smallest shocks. The middlebrow of the blogosphere http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/59804.html 140331 From time to time one comes across a serious-looking blog where some guy discusses the latest manufactured news stories and political crises du jour, and generally agrees with the policies of top officials. They have never heard of him, but he writes as if his council is being weighed in their deliberations, and his musings are helping to push them in the right direction. He does that by offering somewhat rambling but none too controversial advice. As if this enthusiast has any voice in Chinese territorial claims, Afghan pacification efforts, Iranian sanctions, Israeli aid, or NATO expansion. Frankly it's a bit pathetic. They only write these things to feel more important. Human intelligence will come to have a new meaning http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/03/30/ 140330 Memory wont matter as much as the ability to detect patterns. Human minds will become the cores of larger virtual minds. When this virtual extended mind becomes large enough, it may be able to reverse engineer its core. The most useful mind scanning test would try to understand what its owner was doing or needed to do at any time. In fact it would train its owner to forget useless distractions. It's possible to deal with most problems by avoiding them. You have my permission to have fun. Finding and amplifying the core drives, it would measure its owner by changing its owner. Hopefully, into something closer to their ideal self. The process could start by making a complete to-do list. What would you have to achieve so you could completely relax? a brief introduction to the core sociopolitical problem 140329 The failure of the future is best symbolized by the failure of Artificial Intelligence....... New mind scanning tests are coming 140328 The best way to understand someone would be to have them describe themselves fully without holding back. Let them spill out all their secrets. That would probably require a truth serum, but they might do it voluntarily if they thought it could immortalize their mind patterns, and the data would never be leaked. The subject should also be fully observed for at least several days. Extremely high resolution pictures should be taken of their environments. Another option would be to have them list all their concerns, habits, and beliefs in order to create a simple expert system. Or the subject could rate how much they have in common with a list of fictional characters described in great detail. The ultimate goal would be an immense, interactive multiple-choice personality survey able to extract any memory. Most people who die today don't even leave behind a basic description of their personalities. The possibilities have barely been explored. This will be a vast field of research. The libertarian flaw http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/03/27/ 140327 Once again, the various American libertarian parties....... In the future, everyone will have a digital assistant to manage their affairs 140326 Most users will treat it like a servant or a butler, but some will integrate it fully into their lives. It will be a very advanced operating system, the core of its owner's evolving mind extension. The software will correct typing errors as they are being made, maintain a full contact list, and organize different tasks and interest folders. Eventually it will be able to perform complex bureaucratic tasks. Every bureaucracy will first have to change to serve its customers rather than its bureaucrats. Government will probably be the last to change. It may be the first software to develop limited awareness, a state of deep, platonic concentration. Eventually it may measure the user's brain directly through tiny scalp electrodes. When the software detects a stress trigger, it may interrupt the process. It will track mood, and may even prescribe mild stimulants and depressants. The user will probably be encouraged to become deeply aware of their environment, while the software does the tedious automatic tasks. The Doomed http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/03/25/ 140325 I sometimes wonder if almost everyone is evil. If anyone could snap out of the conformity, it should be the long term unemployed. They have been permanently locked out of the system. Life is a videogame they don't want to play anymore. Do they ever question the conformity field, perhaps just before being evicted? Probably not. The world is worse than even the greatest cynic can handle. This configuration just happens to be very stable. I wonder if the only effective resistance would be passive. What if your only two choices were to pay child support for offspring who weren't yours, or to go on a Breivik shooting spree? There are certain outrages people should never cooperate with or participate in, unless they agreed to that deal in advance. Introduction to laziness http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/57886.html 140324 Pain is the most basic problem....... -- Coming crises http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/57714.html 140323 Could the rate of progress be accelerated?....... -- I invented a new religion: http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/03/22/ 140322 -- Old school PC rant http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/57206.html 140321 You don't have to believe in the devil to believe in evil....... This blog is not about accepting reality http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/03/20/ 140320 It's a utopian scheme to end the struggle. I want to make this low stakes. It isn't love that makes the world go round, but hassle powered by fear. The expanding economy creates new problems the way the inflating universe created new particles (sort of like bubbles in pudding). This is a winning strategy. Continuing expansion will outcompete continuing improvement, as liberal hipsters may yet learn. On these pages they have been called Multiplier and Optimizer strategies. Not everyone wants to be a particle in this process. Transhumanist geniuses and cranks like Ray Kurzweil and myself want to eliminate the driving fear. Some of us just want to take it easy. There will still be room for heroes if they so choose. But in a digital future the number of things that can go wrong will only increase exponentially. The hard part will not be ending non-existence but ending bad existence. The Archive http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/56782.html 140319 Let me take a brief moment to bore you with the importance of storing as many records as possible (all digital of course). Try to keep everything important enough to have been generated in the first place, no matter how obscure, sequentially stored in some folder. This may seem a bit bizarre. It's the lowest common denominator in any mind extension and preservation scheme. A memory of a life is not a life itself. But something remains. It can be amplified. I have always wondered why long-term victims seem so passive instead of angry http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/56375.html 140318 I suspect it may be a genetic adaptation. Times of stress cause dread. Dread causes fear. Fear is a depressant, quite distinct from panic. This is probably to prevent dangerous acting out and suicide. A neurotic trait, it does not affect all genetic populations equally. This process also temporarily lowers intelligence, which may be a good thing. The subject's scheming may have gotten them in their fine mess in the first place. Mind Worlds http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/56292.html 140317 A digital memory palace is a way to represent the owner's knowledge and personality in Virtual Reality. The owner would regularly visit and would even want to live there if that was possible. It would contain all their important memories and interests, mostly unrelated to each other. The top level of a digital memory palace could be just a few pages of text describing the layout. The entrance would be a gateway to their extended mind. It should be instantly accessible, and could take the form of a control panel or cockpit. Many buttons can be seen at a glance. Eventually the displays will become more abstract. The wallpaper could be constantly changing photos and lists. Software will sort and organize the raw data. Ideally everything will be organized in a three-layer hierarchy, folders within folders. The palace could take any form, but it would be divided into many sections like smaller memory palaces. These might resemble libraries, music collections and photo galleries, ultra-specialized subject museums, nostalgic tableaux, fan shrines, recreated locations in time and space, art projects, trophy rooms and idealized environments. The latter might include tropical beaches where the clouds hang like islands to the distant horizon, wild forests, future cities, sea and skyscapes, fantasy empires, outer space. All could be upgraded and replaced by better versions. It should also contain someone's ideal VR home, the project's true core. Since none of this is real, the setting could be truly spectacular, with soaring bridges and cupolas and hillside walkways straight out of Thomas Kinkade (though my own version would look extremely gloomy). It's all an escape attempt, of course. Once the self completely fills awareness there should be no more room for fear. Simulated immortality can be a type of death if there is no more progress. However, as users continue to organize and perfect their memories they will inevitably share their data with other users, thereby beginning to merge their personalities. A memory reconstruction program should transcend its purpose http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/55946.html 140316 A list of memories anyone could write down in their spare time would necessarily be very incomplete. It could only include the most important things. This would appeal to a small fraction of people from all ethnic and cultural groups (though mostly high IQ non-NAM nerds) who are already outside the system. The best way to present this random collection of settings, situations, and objects would be in a simulated ideal environment, like an incomplete heaven. It should amplify essences and organize experiences. This could take the form of a giant library/museum on a stormy island. Others might want a castle, a spaceship, an empire (see next post). It could become a way of life, even an addiction. There might be cult movements and new software genres. The motivation would slowly evolve. The most evolved individuals feel the urge to leave behind a changed world they helped create. Grief is basically regret and the fear of regret. The fear of death is the fear of losing things. Instead, users would get to experience and review what matters most to them in abundance. It would be a simulated success, a sense of deep completion. This might cause an end to striving, making the user less competitive in a vaguely Buddhist way. Even if such a limited immortality substitute is only a delusion, they need never know. This is not about reality but the perception of reality. How to opt out 140315 Generic advice is very difficult to give. The best approximation may be, when in doubt do nothing. Also when not in doubt do nothing. Unfortunately we seem to be on a bit of crap planet. When it comes to problems the Good Lord has taken care to ensure we are abundantly provided. There is a lot of hassle and static, and there seem to be many assumptions, like norms, chores, conscription, etc. It's their way or the highway. When people act annoying it should only be their problem, unless they attack. Act as if you don't quite understand what they want you to do. Pretend not to be with it, certainly less capable than reality. Appear aloof and laid back. A general attitude of non-committal, but still a good attitude, if rather naive. Make small offers which should be annoyingly specific. The more specific the better. This is not a subversive prescription, it's more like Gandhi's passive resistance. Don't forget we are all doomed. This insight is curiously liberating. The coming dread http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/55454.html 140314 People don't want to die because they have accumulated too many valuable things in their lifetime. Each addition increases the value of all the others. The shrinking future is like a black hole. Even a toddler holding on to a cliffside for dear life gets the picture. The guy running the Parapundit blog has been advising his readers to strive relentlessly to maximize their marketable skills, since automation and the competition for jobs will only increase. My own advice is that everyone should spend many hours writing down every thing in their life that is important to them. The benefits of my experiment are rather less obvious. Even if someone were to follow my counsel, the advanced software to process all this data has barely been imagined. TimeLine and LifeMapping apps, MetaLinking software to find connections in space and time, VRMapping programs to recreate lost environments and simplify memories. The user would have to be changed to be scanned. If such a thing is possible, a portion of the subject's personality would survive as software to outlive their body. In fact part of their awareness would move online while they were still alive. Their brain would change function and shape. They would live in augmented reality, surrounded by floating screens. If a living user was separated from their digital mind extension, they might find themselves mentally paralyzed. This is still wishful thinking before the yawning abyss, like cryonics or religion. And perfectly sensible, like going on a diet. It will take a new addiction affecting a tiny minority to try this experiment, powered by the right mixture of self-interest and fear. For me it's not really about individual survival, but about increasing control over reality. http://theumlaut.com/2013/04/08/death-in-the-modern-world/ http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/02/technology_is_completely_upending_the_traditional_idea_of_the_self.html On negativity http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/03/13/ 140313 "Wir setzen uns mit tranen nieder" "All these things into position, all these things we'll one day swallow whole" This is an upbeat blog. Our purpose is to foster a can-do spirit of proactive innovation, featuring profitable innovations and business concepts with long-term revenue projections and everything. Still, I have to admit I am a bit negative at times. There are certain aspects of reality that are worse than can be said. Most folks don't need to worry about them. Still, someone should consider these philosophical conundra. A few people live in a state of fantastic disagreement with reality, both what is and what should be. They are very few indeed. There are almost as many types as there are members of this group. Despair gives a handful the strength to act up. Just because someone finds themselves in a bad world does not mean they are allowed to become bad themselves. Just because the bad guys are really bad does not mean the good guys are really good. All it demonstrates is a bias toward badness. The nature of the world merely implies the nature of the universe. Things could literally be infinitely worse. We can't fight the evils of the omniverse, only indirectly retaliate against the evils of the world. Now let's listen to DJ Hi Tek A new type of awareness http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/54978.html 140312 Before the first human-level Artificial Intelligence is made to evolve (in whatever decade that may occur) there will be many lower types of machine intelligence. These include the first "emotional" programs able to feel pleasure or pain by means unknown, causing ethical nightmares when they are discovered. More important for the economy will be so-called Nexpert Systems. These could lead to an age of unprecedented prosperity and well-being, if the masses so decide. Nexpert Systems will be extremely clever programs sorting vast amounts of data. They won't have human emotions, but instinctual drives to find the cheapest way to manufacture products by creating better supply chains while getting the most work out of employees. Instead of embodying total control, they will operate through carefully selected pinpricks and bonuses. Such programs should not be owned by one corporation, but would be formed by linking existing software from many entities. The more owners, the better. They should have high-level goals. What could possibly be better than maximizing wealth? Nexperts won't care about existing power networks. The world really only needs one giant factory that can make everything. Machines don't get tired or lazy. Such software might actually accomplish Singularity-level tasks beyond human ability, like ending war or achieving the age-old dream of communism. They represent the only way I can imagine bringing about the conditions in the song "Imagine" by John Lennon. They may also design and create their own successors. ---- comment: It might be interesting to make a detailed timeline of the future combining all current speculations. The power of complaining http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/54529.html 140311 It's infuriating that complaining doesn't work better than it does. Apparently the receiver couldn't give a floating fig about your maddening problem. You wouldn't be complaining if you weren't really angry. They should be able to tell by the fact that you write in all caps with lots of exclamation points. You wouldn't insult the recipient of the complaint, but always denigrate their product. It helps to be very emotional. The proper response should be shock at their blunder, followed by a burning desire to make it right, but that's not how it works. It's like they just want to be left alone. Solving your complaint would take too much effort, and they don't have authority. You might as well be a prisoner complaining about the bad interior design, poor acoustics, and inadequate grooming of your cellmates. Platonic superminds http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/54499.html 140310 Arthur C. Clarke's future SF stories show humanity spreading across the Solar System, settling nearby star systems, and eventually controlling the whole galaxy. He was a bit vague about the details, as it involves technology we can barely imagine. The end results were mysterious future civilizations with almost immortal beings that were ancient beyond measure. These beings were still described as individuals with incredibly somber emotions, but they were really superhuman like on Krypton or Asgard. My vision of the future is basically a giant space cloud as the expanding end pattern of evolution. Or maybe it will just be like a bright light. This glowing protoplasm knows everything we could ever hope to understand, while pondering vastly greater mysteries. It would slowly get smarter without looking any different. Why not both? A humanoid supercivilization could be the outer surface of a much deeper mind. It would be the physical instantiation of the best possible society. Being realized in a physical form would amplify the most meaningful types of awareness. Lesser beings would only exist as ephemeral simulations. The society's dramatic affairs and controversies would represent much deeper conflicts, like in that episode of Star Trek: Voyager where the crew had to refight the American Civil War on behalf of the Q Continuum. Movies like Man of Steel and Thor: The Dark World also feature demi-god-like beings fighting epic conflicts, yet somehow us lesser mortals can follow what they're up to. These fictional worlds might be almost infinitely far away. What matters less is their distance than their apparent similarities to us. This brings me to my absolutely brilliant ideas for new supervillains that I haven't been able to sell yet, including characters moving sideways through time, using quantum feedback to select desired futures, and timeloops to perform unlimited calculations. Today's blockbuster extravaganzas are nowhere near to living up to their potential. It's almost like Hollywood doesn't welcome scribbled missives from angry cranks. ---- That doesn't change the fact that these movies were incredibly dumb and stupid, at least their basic concepts and backstories. I could have done so much better. A great mental change may only take a moment http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/03/09/ 140309 Born-again Christians describe how they were "saved" in just a second. Michael Crichton explained in "Travels" how his father issues were instantly resolved in a posthumous seance. Best of all are the "love at first sight" stories I've heard about. Clearly, there is something ceremonial about a major life change. That brings us to the mind scanning and recording process that is the unwavering focus of this blog (eight patents so far, as soon as I mail in the applications). As explained, this process will be very elaborate, a lifelong transition to digital immortality. Unfortunately we don't really know the major elements and control functions just yet. This is basically science fiction, but I believe it will really happen. The most important step may be the first one. During the induction phase, each user will enter a highly detailed Virtual Reality world. This will be a premium service requiring a supercomputer. It should be so lifechanging they will never really leave, even after they have returned to their mundane realities. As part of the lifelong scanning and recording process, the subject will be encouraged to pretend they are already living in a post-human life simulation. That will simplify their existence, and make things easier for the software. Their whole lives will be planned and controlled for them. They will wear permanent interface devices on and in their bodies, even in the shower. During the intermediate "mind extension" phase they will be constantly answering questions and giving orders to a digital assistant that will try to predict their actions. Instead of replacing its owner, it will attempt to merge with them. Until this process gets easier after a decade or two, such a total commitment may only appeal to people who already have a tenuous link with the ordinary. http://www.faithpopcorn.com http://gizmodo.com/5610432 http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/170112-brave-idiot-transhumanist-pioneer-self-implants-a-computer-into-his-arm The eternity moment http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/53787.html 140308 This is not a dream. You are lying in the bushes, surrounded by dense branches and leaves in all directions. There are millions of points of sunlight and shade. The leaves overhead wave in the erratic breeze. Behind the rustling is the distant roar of the surf. There is no need to move. Eternity is now. Now is forever. One way to achieve digital immortality would be to simulate a single ideal setting. Since it would be a near-perfect state of being, the simulation could be made to loop back and repeat forever after a few minutes or seconds, perhaps with slight variations depending on the sophistication of the source code. The setting would be different for everyone. For some it would be a place of extreme passivity. Others would want to relive their greatest triumph. What would seem ideal to one could seem horribly pointless to another. It would have to be a stable state, with no sudden shifts. It wouldn't be possible to relive a moment of great relief, when an expected bad thing didn't happen, but it would be possible to relive the aftermath forever. The simulated observer would have a timeless perception in which no complex thoughts would form. It might work best if every moment of such a simulation could function as a starting and ending point. According to Greg Egan's Dust Hypothesis, such a state could be achieved by simulating the observer's experience in perfect detail, and then running the simulation only once. Some sufficiently similar portion of Reality would then inevitably continue the simulation. http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ.html Should it be US policy to poach the best people from the worst lands? http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/03/07/ 140307 Friedman and Krugman want to move the most capable individuals from the poorest countries to the Western countries, leaving the less competent ones behind. Aw heck they can come too. Well, not all of the less smart individuals. They want to leave behind just enough to return the population to its local carrying capacity so the process can be repeated indefinitely. Neoliberals, Evangelicals, Tech entrepreneurs, Redditors, Harvard professors, Femislamists, and other highly respected opinion leaders claim the brain drain is actually a type of comparative advantage. The resulting competition for jobs will be good for you. Poor countries will benefit if their smartest and most creative individuals work as janitors in the USA instead of teaching and healing their homelands' impoverished masses. The money they send home will do more good than they could have done in person. They may well be right about that. On this blog we criticize immigration, not immigrants. Or at least we criticize unbalanced immigration. There's nothing racist about it. I'm like Howard Stern, shocking but really a softy at heart. In all seriousness, this problem can't be understood without realizing how horrible the world truly is. Immigrants can't help but cause indirect stress. They rarely attack their hosts, but sometimes they do attack different immigrant groups. By their very existence, Muslim immigrants make their new homelands more Islamic. Whether that's good or bad depends on whether Islam is true or false. On rare occasions the host population reacts violently. The Norwegian dissident Anders Breivik murdered 69 youth activists hoping to bring a million additional Third World refugees into Scandinavia. Pro-life activists should be in favor of open borders and mass immigration. If Mexico couldn't have exported its surplus population northward, millions of its citizens would never have been born. Immigration is a safety valve for deeply unpleasant lands unable to cultivate property rights and a consumer culture. This allows these lands to maintain a higher birthrate at the expense of the receiving lands. A fascinating consequence must be the resulting decrease in the number of Caucasian births compared to members of other groups. Millions of ethnic Europeans were never born because their potential places were taken by immigrants. If, for whatever reason, you wanted more whites to be born, immigration should be discouraged. However, those in favor of such a policy are indirectly dooming millions of potential non-whites to a state of non-existence. In general liberals are OK with a slightly browner future. They feel guilty about half a millennium of colonialism directly responsible for a massive amount of suffering, exploitation, and population increase throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This is all very uncomfortable stuff. In a post racial future, people won't even think in these terms. The very words to describe such concepts might go out of fashion. Perhaps so-called racism is self-limiting, as it is a type of self-love or group love. Whites have been compared to "Ice People", making them not the most likable population. To be fair, those pale ghostfaces can give you a shock if you run into them unexpectedly. It's like they're partially transparent or something. And furthermore wait what was I going on about now Another solution to the philosophical problem of all suffering http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/03/06/ 140306 The answer for any sufficiently advanced civilization may be to form an "overmind" linking and merging all information and all computation in a single vast system. The bigger the better. It should be densely connected but decentralized. Forever expanding yet increasingly unfinished, its emotional range could be made to regress to the mean. This would limit the permitted amount of pleasure and pain, but never eliminate such emotions entirely. Ecstasy would be sacrificed on the altar of eternity. It's a combination of the earlier posted "Safe Path" and "Gray Fog" theories. Of course any fully finite system could never be made completely safe. It would be a statistical solution. Hopefully, it would become a benign realm of pure logic. There would inevitably be independently minded beings with no wish to belong to such a bland collective. They could choose to have access to higher states of joy and greater triumphs. However that means they could also find themselves in very serious trouble with no way out. http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/50266.html My current position in the Top Journals is now 5,912,360! Why can nothing move faster than the speed of light? http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/03/05/ 140305 For the same reason that nothing can move slower of course. Everything is always moving at the speed of light. It is the only possible speed. When something appears to be moving slower, it is merely bouncing in place. If you insist on traveling faster than the speed of light, you have to modify whatever process created the universe. The farming of decrepitude http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/52791.html 140304 The government should default on the most labor-intensive healthcare benefits promised by generations of overgenerous politicians. Specifically, it should slash end-of-life spending instead of continuing to increase it. To compensate it could lower costs and increase the supply of healthcare workers by eliminating regulations and barriers to entry. There are relatively affordable ways to make the end seem humane, with harmless alternative treatments. Admittedly this would mostly be for the benefit of the taxpayers, actual and potential. Suppose everyone with Alzheimer's were to die tomorrow. Tens of millions of corpses would have to be buried in a few weeks. That would be fantastic. Let nature take its course. Of course nature is evil, so there's no better time to become a junkie. With jobs on the way out, only the most expensive torture remains free. The country is crap, as manifested in its denial of decline. At this moment you are touching the remains of almost a hundred billion dead people. Smith and Wesson retirement plan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-JCN7-68C4 http://www.zyra.tv/lbreath.htm This friend of mine is the world's worst driver http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/52635.html 140303 Going on a drive with him is like Dumb and Dumber but with more near death experiences. Seriously, if you want to have an adventure you should come along on a ride with this friend. Left turns are the most fun. That's where the traffic engineers hold their contest to rack up the most kills. Driving is very dangerous when you think about it. It's amazing how gladly the population accepts risks they have always known. All the worst suffering is unspectacular and accepted. The Hindenburg and Chernobyl had about the same number of known deaths. Actually, that's not completely true. In the second case there were many tens of thousands of excess deaths caused by the economic disruption. Public danger estimates are motivated by the public dislike of change. The public is like the Joker in reverse in this respect. Now it is no longer possible to get a Google or Yahoo account without indirectly verifying your identity through the government. Frankly, sometimes I get tired of being one of the few sane voices out there, and I just want to let the idiots screw up the world. Then my philanthropic nature reasserts itself and I remember that's not in my interest. Quantity is quality http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/03/02/ 140302 In the past decade high definition versions of old TV shows have become available. The episodes were originally shot on standard motion picture film or high resolution analog videotape. The master recordings had a much higher picture quality than standard definition TV sets, up to the 1990s. Back then episodes were broadcast by pointing a video camera at a small projection screen. Videogames have also gone high-def during this time. Along with simulating smaller areas of the game world, they have mostly simulated larger areas. Games became more detailed by enlarging the screen, displaying more objects at once. Now big data is trying to solve basic mind problems with brute force. Search engines already predict simple and common queries. The deep problems remain intractable. However, a growing minority suspects the strange phenomenon of awareness reflects simple comparisons carried out on an epic scale. By monitoring and recording every aspect of a human life in immense detail and processing this data, deep elements of its awareness should pop up. If awareness is dense but not that highly correlated, it may be possible to ignore most memories to measure a particular awareness. That would help realize this blog's mind extraction dreams. Sufficient detail may be hidden in a few minutes of seemingly casual interaction to determine someone's personality. This may happen in high-resolution future VR environments. The first organization to deploy such tests may have a long-term advantage. My fringe belief is that awareness can't be that hard because humans aren't that clever, though they are dumb in extremely complex ways perfected by evolution. A handy roadmap to the future: http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/28981.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_artificial_intelligence Polygamist groups should be smashed http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/52186.html 140301 Oh dear that doesn't sound very libertarian. Nonetheless, any cults, sects, or communities that practice polygamy, or rather polygyny, where one patriarch takes multiple wives, should be utterly pulverized. By the government. Only if they export their surplus boys, of course. If these cults indoctrinate their members so thoroughly the "lost boys" voluntarily choose to stay on as sexless slaves, then the rest of society isn't affected by the resulting gender imbalance. Even better if they practice gender-specific abortion to produce more daughters than sons. My theory is that Western society is experiencing a large male surplus. It's one of my more serious bugbears. There are twice as many men than women of reproductive age for heaven's sake. Then there's the explosive increase of soft polygamy since the 1960s, also known as serial monogamy. An estimated 30 percent of thugrappas gets to have 70 percent of the sex. Mass immigration has worsened the man surplus. Illegal immigrants from the Third World are overwhelmingly male. US immigration officials in charge of regulating the inflow make no effort to maintain an even gender balance. They only care about gender and transgender discrimination. Legal permanent residents are slightly likelier to be female, but half are past reproductive age, reflecting the lower life expectancies of their homelands. Most of the remaining imbalance represents spouses of men who entered before them, legally and illegally. The USA could restore the balance by admitting millions of females of childbearing age, or by expelling an equal number of male illegals. Instead millions of guys can't score, and don't even know the reason. These problems are not to be reported in the mainstream media. Bonobo chimpanzees, those sensitive jungle denizens who look so much like us, and by us I mean liberals, don't have that problem. They practice free-love on a massive scale. Every ape is sure to get lucky on a recurring basis. That won't work one rung up the evolutionary ladder, though. Bonobos die by age 40, when they're still reasonably hot. Male human virgins aren't forgotten by the government, though. They get to pay the relentlessly rising taxes for women's social needs when their sex party crashes to a halt by age 40. http://www.angryharry.com/esMoreWomenThanMenRequired.htm How to be respectable http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/51835.html 140228 A good example is the website of the Singularity University. It looks highly respectable. A gatekeeper has to give the appearance of having thoroughly mastered a subject. The field's outlines and problems have already been defined. They can't encourage outsiders to come in with their endless questions, even if the field still exists in an early stage. Most contributors aren't that productive. There's no room for brainstorming, often the first step to solving a problem, or open commenting, to avoid the riffraff. In this case, less content is more. There should be no objectionable content, so avoid controversial subject matters. One is judged by the company one keeps, so outbound links should also be respectable. Advertising others advertises yourself. Powerful friends and allies are typically respected friends and allies, but keep track of the cultural consensus. If mainstream values pay your bills, then those are the ones you should promote. Your online presence should project a positive, can-do attitude, though not a feelgood vibe, as it is still serious business. All races are beautiful differently http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/51640.html 140227 Time to be honest. Most people are only romantically attracted to members of their own or closely related genetic groups. They might feel exotic stirrings for cosplay idoru, flamenco senoritas, and carbon-black Nubian models incongruously clad in avant-garde fashions. The curiosity can be irresistible. However, interracial relations mostly appeal to somewhat marginal individuals. This includes obese Caucasian females, put-upon minority males, struggling artists, horny male teens, and the occasional chaotician. Significantly, this group may also include triumphant warriors, in which case the relations are highly asymmetrical. There are unconfirmed claims that racial mixing is less than ideal, genetically speaking. Probably true, but I see it as fertile ground for recombinant evolution. However, there is one type of interracial procreation even a Stormfronter should understand: it would appeal to people uncertain of their paternity who don't want to unknowingly marry a half-sibling. ---- comment: Also the occasional space opera trilogy producer. Infiltrationism http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/51419.html 140226 The USSR encouraged its foreign spies and semi-traitors to attack the USSR as part of their cover identities. That might mean writing semi-critical articles for The Economist, sacrificing lesser spies to promote a Hiss or a Philby, and helping to develop NATO weapon systems like the KH-11. These things would happen anyway. Then, when no one was looking, the Kremlin would have its operatives pass on secrets, plant false leads, promote cocktail liberals to positions of influence, and cancel the Avro Arrow. Much but not all of the international peace movement was more blatant about it, criticizing the US and NATO with nary a peep about Stalin's horrors or Brezhnev's repressions. A delegate who tried to condemn the invasion of Czechoslovakia was shouted down. My favorite such organization must be the World Federation of Democratic Youth. The resources diverted for their "13th World Festival of Youth and Students" in 1989 helped start the North Korean great famine. To this day they defend Kim Jong Un's every atrocity, while shrilly blaming the US government for every other problem under the sun. It is bad, but not that bad. The point is that deep infiltration does not even have to be secret to work. A handful of libertarians got elected as Republicans. Those who pretend to work within the system automatically get respect, especially if they're urbane, suave, social groomers. Being hypocritical helps, if they're very careful not to rock the boat. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2095202/posts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_influence_on_the_peace_movement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_World_Festival_of_Youth_and_Students Analog mind scanning http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/51187.html 140225 Personality extraction tests will have to pose very detailed questions. In fact they would only be meaningful to the test subject. To determine what makes him unique, it would measure his deviations. That would require a detailed database of as many humans as possible. Ideally, of everybody. To be able to compare the subject to other humans, at every stage of the process the test would have to stereotype the subject, who would alternately agree with the insinuations and assert his individuality. On losers http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/#post-jack_arcalon-50730 140224 At least ten good years of your life - from age 30 to 40 - are going to be a kind of dark eclipse where you disappoint a lot of people and fail to enjoy your own success. - Stephen King Just like me! No wait it isn't. I always enjoy my tremendous successes. Let's find a better example. There is this cartoon where the proprietor of a comic book store looks up at an approaching missile and realizes he has wasted his life. Still not, but getting closer. There are those who just can't make it in this world. It's a terrible thing. Genuine losers would gladly sacrifice status for survival. It's a cure for the fear of death. The misery is unbelievable. At least at the bottom, grinding fear is the driving force of society. There are more black than white homeless individuals, but they are less likely to think of themselves as losers. It's the age-old problem of overpopulation, the churn of futile effort. Squeezed out from the crushing base of the labor pyramid, life can seem as black as the eyeholes in a clown mask. The solution is simple: welfare in exchange for sterilization. It's the only way to alleviate present suffering without breeding future suffering. Of course this solution will remain inconceivable until a less invasive form of male birth control has been invented. Then it will remain inconceivable. Given the reality of merciless evolution, that may be the best we can expect. As the search space of nature expands, most newly generated genes are useless. Many people must be useless, blind alleys of evolution. Those who can function in this society typically choose to support it in its present form. Let those who make the rules have the children. What if you die anyway? http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/#post-jack_arcalon-50466 140223 The mind downloading methods discussed on this blog are much simpler than the ultra-advanced sci-fi nanotechnologies favored by Singularitarians, but they're still a long way off. A very long way off in fact, and I speak from extensive experience with fringe/pseudoscience schemes. And even if it does work, only an echo can be preserved. Progress is slower than we realize. It's not something humanity achieves, but something that happens to humanity. There is a good chance that you, the person reading this, will perish into utter oblivion. Personally, I would be OK with that. Non-existence is not so bad. To be honest, it's not really what I expect. Looming death may feel like being squeezed down into a corner. Is there a limit to the rising darkness? Once I got in an online argument involving the ultimate pseudo-religious question: http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/50266.html 140222 How to fix all of reality. I think this was on KurzweilAI. There are infinitely many good and bad things. So reality could be described as an endless list. To remove only the bad things from this list (assuming symmetry between the amount of pain and pleasure), you would only have to shrink this list by half. A 50% reduction of an infinite number is a negligible alteration. I think there are mathematical proofs. It would not seem completely impossible. Of course human history would form an effective counterargument all by itself. My arguments tend to be more clever than convincing. The difference between blacks and whites http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/#post-jack_arcalon-50096 140221 My wackiest fantasy has always been to change people, make them act the way I think they should act, make them behave. However there is the tiny problem of genetics, which determines such things as brain size and more important brain structure, whatever that may be. Some genes are responsible for higher IQ levels than others. Though we don't know the details, I would guess the newer, high IQ genes are more provisional, less optimized, less stable. I make only one claim. There are no other meaningful differences between extant racial groups. Nothing else matters: In short, the difference is that there are few or no black nerds. That's it. I certainly don't think blacks are more evil than other groups, unless you define evil as being less abstractly minded or less intellectually neurotic. There are black pseudo-nerds, and even nerd-equivalent dysfunctions, but they are relatively few, though even I have met some. In my experience, Africans with high IQs are far less nerdlike than comparable Caucasians and Asians. I was severely criticized for this opinion in various anonymous forums. white and nerdy 3AM rant http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/#post-jack_arcalon-49831 140220 Maybe some things I shouldn't write about on such an upbeat blog. A content creator has to be careful not to offend his audience. At this stage there's still some latitude. To the great masses the true nature of reality is not open for discussion. Specifically, the absurd nature of reality, and I don't mean in a fun way. This violent truth is reflected in the nature of the world. These ethical paradoxes will have to be thought about someday. The existence of emotion itself may turn out to be unethical. The controversy only gets worse as the problem scale shrinks. It is almost impossible to make politically incorrect claims, but it is even more shocking to state the claim's corollary. A sentence that rapidly gets more problematic would be to claim that blacks are likelier to commit crimes, but whites can be more diabolical. Controversy is a great turn-off, as irreversible as a chain reaction. I don't want to have the least popular blog. The ultimate truth might be unacceptable to everyone. I do think fundamental disagreements can only be resolved by force (offensive or defensive). Political debate should become more virulent. Google Mind http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/#post-jack_arcalon-49439 140219 The name is just a figure of speech. Google may no longer be around by the time this hypothetical tool exists. It will precisely measure a subject's personality. The test would use the full dataset of a search engine, including all images. Each image would have many associated tags, making it part of the fabled Semantic Web. Version 1.1 would present a rapid series of safe-for-work images, and record the user's reaction to each. It could be a simple like/dislike button, and a way to indicate amount of interest. The point is that the stream of images could be adapted to each user, honing in on their core interests and purpose. This method could tease out a vast amount of data, if each image had enough associated tags. The amount of data per second could be much larger than the mere image sizes. The program would seek out images with multiple matching tags. At first it would probably be mood-based, a method to find meaningful artworks. Then it will generate relevant vignettes and short stories. Full of symbolic language, a few thousand of these could describe any person better than they could describe themselves. It would take many other high-level tests to adequately reverse engineer a human mind. It's possible to define incredibly detailed objects by zooming through orders of magnitude. Fewer than a hundred zeros separate the size of a superstring from the size of the universe. However, precisely describing a mind in this way would still take as many layers as the mind's size, as described in its number of bits. The best mind measuring tool would be another mind. Many traits can be predicted by comparing people to those most similar to them. For a human mind to be reconstructed this way, 99% of the newly created human-like AI would probably have to be interpolated data shared with the rest of humanity. That shouldn't be a problem. In my experience, people are very similar to each other. At least normal people are. There are amazingly few writers specializing in the subject of posthuman speculation. Someone should be thinking about this stuff full time. The endless vacation dream http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/49096.html 140218 Work sucks. It sucks tremendously, epically, intolerably. The reason for this is that the universe is evil. If only everyone could win the lottery. This problem could be solved with technology and the right type of politics. Yes, things are worse than the media will tell you, but they don't have to be this way. Not unless the populace wants things to be this way (which they do). And yet I believe there is a solution, no matter how unlikely it seems. I may be weird, but I'm not crazy, or at least I'm not fundamentally irrational, or at least I don't believe in blatantly impossible or unlikely things. The solution would be a type of guaranteed income. No one would have to work, but they would still be paid (by robots). It would be a beautiful oblivion. What could possibly be better? The most important advice we can give for now http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/48880.html 140217 Start a new type of diary intended to last forever. Use it to list all meaningful memories, interests, and provisional goals. Start with your interests, by making a list of the important things. Later they can be sorted into categories. There will be only about three more levels after that. You don't even need a consultant for this (though I remain available at my competitive hourly rates). Awareness equals quantity of connected information. You will become the diary and the diary will become you. Time to start Phase Three of this blog 140130 N/T The best artists are monopolists http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/48516.html 140216 They have no direct competitors. There are simply no alternate suppliers. There are only other types of artists. Examples include my favorite authors and directors like Arthur C. Clarke, Thomas Harris, James Cameron. Though nominally conservative, the greatest sociopolitical humorist and contrarian thinker was P.J. O'Rourke, back when he still visited Hezbollah encampments, country-sized slums, and Epcot Center, before turning to writing comfortable polemics from his suburban home favoring unlimited Third World immigration so the wealthy can have cheap servants. Before then, he exposed the amazing fact that the world is more awful than anyone will acknowledge. It looks insane if you get close enough. This insight was incredibly liberating. All paranormal claims are edge phenomena http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/#post-jack_arcalon-48324 140215 They happen at the outer limit of perception, just beyond the corner of your eye. Like over-amplified signals, they exist at least partially in the observer's mind. In all cases where it was possible to look closer, a rational explanation could be found. There has never been a real, confirmed anomaly. If such things really happened, and they obeyed the normal laws of statistics, they would have been proven to exist long ago. Also, someone would have been a million Simoleons richer. Regardless of whether paranormal phenomena exist, some type of deception MUST be involved. Now for the other side of the debate http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/02/14/ http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/#post-jack_arcalon-47979 Is there any hint the world we live in is not as it appears? Our understanding of reality is as flawed as a Third World peasant's. That includes our understanding of human nature and society. However, these are not paranormal claims, merely the views of a perplexed outsider. A database of all claimed anomalies was first proposed in Infinite Thunder. It would be a decentralized part of the Semantic Web. All claimed paranormal events seem like memory gaps, dreams and meaningless coincidences. There appears to be a strange dullness to the world, although that is nothing new. There has never been a paranormal claim that revealed something fundamentally different, original or interesting. That fact itself may be the best candidate for a true paranormal claim. By that I mean the world's inexplicable flatness. It simply should be more interesting than this. This blog is about achieving an extremely high quality of life. http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/#post-jack_arcalon-47829 140213 It's for those who don't like the world as it is. I reject all of this. Before getting on the Internet I thought there had to be many others like me. Imagine my surprise to learn I was basically the only one. This goal also presumes that maximizing pleasure is achievable without philosophical risks. That question is the second greatest mystery. (The greatest mystery is the reason for the hidden complexity of the world. A single cubic nanometer of the sun will remain forever beyond human comprehension.) Almost all historical movements have had the opposite goal. Rather than minimizing pleasure, they seek to reduce it to a barely tolerable level (except for the leaders and connected insiders). Arbitrary restrictions and controls are the surest route to power. But it allows population increase. And that is what the populace secretly wanted all along. With technology, the option exists to turn this world into a paradise. No one would have to work much anymore. Life could become a dreamlike vacation. I could easily spend the rest of my life on Reddit cursing the liberals, and it would be a full and meaningful life, though not necessarily a long one. The problem is that the populace hasn't evolved to want life to be easy. People can be nasty in many ways. This problem will have to be circumspectly analyzed and discussed. The full truth will be controversial. It would take something like a religious movement to change this outlook and permit real change. Imagine a new religion that at least could be true. Posthuman paradoxes: Disproving the Simulation Argument http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/#post-jack_arcalon-47149 140212 http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/are_you_real_or_software/ How can you know you aren't just a computer simulation created as a weird science experiment in the future? There's no way to be sure. If the future lasts long enough, it must inevitably happen many times over. Help! The most obvious question: if this is a simulation, why is it so boring? Hans Ulrich Rudel destroyed more vehicles in real life flying a Stuka than I did toggling a joystick. The most sophisticated resolution of this paradox doesn't fight the argument, but extends it. Our existence (real or simulated) this close to the beginning of history indicates a strong bias toward the start of time. If we are simulated beings, why are we being simulated so early in time, when and if there is a boundless future ahead to simulate? There would be no reason to simulate early history more often than later history. In fact just the opposite. There is much more of the latter, and future history will also be more elaborate. There's no real need to simulate our primitive early timeline more than once. Yet here we are, as finite as it is possible to be while still aware of this fact. Some strange force of reality seems to favor the existence of simpler minds over larger and more complex ones. Posthuman paradoxes: the Singularity myth http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/#post-jack_arcalon-47488 140211 Like a photo from Mars, the future is a profoundly empty land. The feeling emerges: there is so much work to do. But what if there can never be enough time to do the work? At least not conventional, four-dimensional time. The apparent rate of progress will slow down as technology improves. Each added element of complexity must be multiplied by all existing elements. The number of possible states will increase exponentially, as will the number of things that can go wrong. Once the biological necessity of death has been removed, our hypothetical descendants will also have more to lose. (Though that is uncertain. Perhaps only the most successful timelines will be allowed to proliferate.) The question is whether progress will eventually stop. The vacation could last forever. With less time pressure but more resources, the posthuman future will be inefficient. Bureaucracy will only get worse. It will take forever to get anything done. If technological progress continues, posthuman society will inevitably fall behind. No matter how advanced the civilization, it can't out-think the combinatorial explosion. Quite likely, it will never know the most interesting truths about itself until it has evolved into something else. The real Singularity won't happen until long after digital mind uploading has been invented, if ever. The Guy in the Sky http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/#post-jack_arcalon-46954 140210 If you were an immortal humanoid living on an unpopulated world, how long would it take you to construct a working spaceship from the available dirt and raw materials? Humanity accomplished this feat in just a few trillion person-years without really trying. If that happened, the first thing is also conceivable. But there must be a limit. Creationists inform us that living beings are so complex that their existence is basically impossible. Actually, they admit that life could have been formed by an incredibly unlikely random collision of particles that just happened to form the first living cell, plus many more random collisions to improve them. However, Bible-based skeptics insist those collisions are mathematically so unlikely that it is more likely that a very complex designer has always existed. The existence of an uncreated complex system creating a simple system is more likely than a simple system creating itself. If the creationists are right, then we are more likely to find distant planets with spontaneously formed microscopic automobiles or planes than a planet with naturally evolved bacteria. Of course there is a designer. It's called evolution, unless the process of evolution can be shown to be less likely than the result of evolution. Creationists are working hard on that goal. Fortunately, they don't have to convince scientists, only Republican legislators. Interface friction: the name of all pain http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/#post-jack_arcalon-46740 140209 Part of why the world is evil, a 3 AM rant (expletives removed). Once again, a talk about the Bad Truths that can't be mentioned elsewhere, so feel free to skip it. The following obstacles will either be defeated, circumvented, or be the end of us. Let's start with the RealPlayer paradox. Everywhere you see funny Gifs of cats and car crashes. They are short but huge animations. This bug is treated like a feature. Elements of the GIF format go back thirty years. More compact video formats have been available since the late 1990s. Using them instead would shrink the file size by a factor of ten, making the dancing penguins appear faster. My Internet is so slow the bits have to be individually carried by snails. However unlike Gifs, you can't right-click on these compact animations to save them to your computer. The patented software needed to view these animations is bloated with corporate malware. It can't be installed as easily as the simple Gif codecs. Innovation comes from irritation: the real problem is the populace is too tolerant of such idiocies. Alternatives like WebM and WebP are slowly being developed by laid-back volunteers, and may be ready by 2020. Like Firefox, they may require powerful hardware to work right. In fact computer software is so bad the people who created it must be evil. It takes ages to perform simple tasks that should be automated. Satan's proudest invention must be nested menus. The solution might involve voice control. Instead of struggling with a trackpad you get to curse at your computer (I already do that), or even have all options displayed at once instead of being hidden. I won't even talk about how Google has started returning random search results. Which brings us to the field of education. They're doing it all wrong. Productivity requires learning, but learning is agony. At the core of the friction pain is motivation. The most respected teachers pretend math should be difficult, when math is only a skill disguised as knowledge. Like music, math should be easy to understand but hard to do. Brilliant and beautifully elegant explanations are occasionally discovered by accident. These may be responsible for the Flynn Effect My core bugbear is that progress in this timeline is strictly technology-based. In other ways the world remains shockingly primitive. Despite the outrages of history, no one wants to improve the human mind - but that is exactly what it would take to improve education and reduce common conflicts. I have to take my pills now. I need people who are scared http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/#post-jack_arcalon-46583 140208 Actually, I need people who are TERRIFIED. It's the only way. During these early days of ignorance, fear is the best motivator. Later that will change. First comes the fear of death, the ultimate eraser, the annihilator of the phenomenon of existence itself. You will become less than a memory. When you look at it that way, both the downside and upside of potential life extension are unlimited. Of course the government won't see it that way. Very few people are strange enough (in an extremely cool and cutting-edge way) to agree. The goal is still very remote. The way things are going, it won't happen until the last quarter of this century. Our only hope is to speed up the rate of progress. There really is no time to waste. The possibility of a mind-downloading shortcut (other than cryonics), a way to record a mind without scanning its brain, could transform the world economy, or become less than a footnote. Of course the second option is more likely, unless there's a billionaire both rich enough and young enough that he comes to believe he himself might be saved in this way. Such an extreme gamble could only be powered by extreme emotion. I don't like history for the same reason I don't like fiction. http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/#post-jack_arcalon-46173 140207 The only way to follow the story is to submit to the history or the fiction writer's reality. History does not describe the past, but it is part of the past. It's not about what things were like back then, but about what things were unusual and remarkable back then. IMPORTANT: Get Truecrypt now http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/44831.html 140206 Download the latest version here. DO IT NOW, or get around to it at least. This blog promotes the curious notion that the only way to record your mind and perhaps cheat death is to talk about yourself as much as possible. (Or write it down, as long as it's recorded.) The densest known information channel is natural language. Photos, recordings, logs and receipts will also help release memories. It will be a new type of diary. New software will begin to convert it into a primitive mind extension. Then the diary will begin to change its author. This is very important: The only way it can work is to write as freely as possible. Your words should not be read or influenced by others, unless you want to join your future awarenesses or something. You can't write freely if you're worried others might realize how super-cool you really are. Therefore, get Truecrypt, install the software, and create an encrypted virtual drive. And back it up on USB sticks and using online services, but that's a separate post. It's possible to feel good for no reason http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/45267.html 140205 A friend once told me to treasure such a thing if it happens. When normal people stop feeling bad (probably because their pain circuits need a rest), they will suddenly feel abnormally good, without a drug-like euphoria. I think of it as the absence of the normal dread and horror felt by existential-nihilist philosophers and some Buddhists. You could trigger the good sensation by taking a dangerous overdose of Prozac. Alternatively, you could feel the opposite way by checking into a Soviet psychiatric prison, get injected with the dissident-tested drug Sulfazine, and experience the ultimate hangover for weeks at a time. Intelligence and hyperintelligence http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/45357.html 140204 01 - Human intelligence is limited for dual reasons: As IQ rises, there are more possible thoughts, but there are fewer potential peers. To be successful, you should be both intelligent and dysfunctional. Such persons are more likely to take radical shortcuts. Progress is made by those who invent shortcuts that can be repeated endlessly. In fact their massive contributions often become invisible, like whoever invented hard drives or search engines. 02 - Hyperintelligence Those lucky enough to hear an ultra-high-IQ person expound on some arcane subject will notice their brilliant detours. Geniuses make so many unexpected connections between distant facts they appear boring to lesser folks, who instantly get tired of listening to them. It's like how I feel when whole cities are 'destroyed' in chaotic close-up cuts in blockbusters like Man of Steel and Pacific Rim (the opposite of how Kubrick would have filmed these scenes). The paradox is that genuine innovations don't appear important or meaningful at first. New truths ignore accepted reference frames. Sound familiar? Intelligence is rather like cultural diversity. It causes annoying communications breakdowns. However, an extreme intelligence could close this gap by reverse-engineering lesser minds. Talking to an alien or a supergenius AI would be permanently mind-altering. True insight is more profound than the strongest or strangest drug. Constantly changing the subject like a sentient crowd or a high-speed parliament, it might seem impossibly fragmented, but the pieces would assemble like a film played backward. The pieces representing your slightly altered self. It's human nature to take the easy path http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/45749.html 140201 That's why there are no transition plans for ruthless dictatorships like those of Cuba and North Korea. Easier to hope they will go away. Their very ruthlessness may just make them immortal. Would the bastards in charge surrender their power if they had a lucrative escape option? A generous offer could be made: Some emir or sheik would offer them lifelong sanctuary under his country's culture of hospitality. The former dictators would have luxury estates and could take a few stolen billions with them, with UN passports and immunity from prosecution. Since these people are evil the offer will of course be ignored. But it would be the start of something else. Why is reality evil? http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/46030.html 140131 Because of pain. However, pain is very useful to evolution. Although it's not necessary, it is inevitable. It's an irresistible force for change for those who feel it, even if it only causes random changes. It's a surrogate for death, a more efficient and therefore faster type of evolution. Anxiety and fear force the brain to work harder, to the extent it can work harder, because it can't really work smarter. Simply erasing unsuccessful beings might work better, but pain can change them instead, leaving more survivors to reproduce. This tends to select for pain, a so-called Perverse Path. The next level may be even worse. Metapain or intelligent pain may be felt by competing organizations. Instead of linking all minds into a higher awareness (somewhat like the novel Childhood's End), smaller minds will be combined and recombined into temporary groups as needed. The above notion also provided the origin story of the Multipliers in the novel Infinite Thunder. The Bargain http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/44440.html 140203 Cheerios 2014 Game Day ad "Gracie" There was a beautiful interracial commercial for a cereal product featuring a loving family. So what was so shocking about it? I complain. I complain a lot. I am the king of complainers. I make it my solemn duty not to complain about things I can tolerate, since that would distract from the main mission. We need to engage in some high-level postmodern analysis here. Let me get another drink. The reason this commercial was shocking to some is the same reason most controversial statements are shocking. It's not about what it showed but what it couldn't have shown. It was propaganda, an instructive example simulating an undeniably good thing to reduce the awareness of a not-so-good thing. The resulting good feeling engenders affinity for the breakfast cereal. The commercial's implied harmony was a Bayesian Bug. Certain unmentionable truths never existed. And in fact they didn't. There is no racial problem in the area where this commercial aired. There is only a meta-problem. Racism is an overreaction causing an overreaction. If genetic differences are cognitively expressed, different racial groups have somewhat different skills and abilities. They may not easily live together without discussing these differences, which is strictly forbidden. It's hard to think about different brains with different brains. The product will be incomplete. That's why I'm worried about both the positive and negative reactions to this ad. We need a new name for the Singularity http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/44705.html 140202 Not that there's anything wrong with the current name. Back in the 1990s there was a contest to invent a better name for the Big Bang (my entry was 'Multiplication'). They wisely decided to keep the original name. By definition I'm more interested in all the things that would have to happen before the Singularity. The idea that people would securely upload themselves if that was safe is less obvious than it seems. Yet it may be the only hope there is. Such radical change will take radical stability, like the end of history. Superprogress, Horizon, Transition, Fast-time, Last Boom, Assembly, Long Wait, Golden Dusk, Attractor, Mind Age, Accretor, Speed-Up? The glorious future http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/44104.html 140129 Here's what we can guarantee: incredible things are going to happen many years from now. The only way to stop progress would involve radical change itself. The world is going to change fast. More awesome than a Transformers movie, possibly starting in the 2030s. It may lead to endless paradise, though we question whether that should be done. Perhaps reality is mathematically balanced so that the same amount of pleasure and pain are created. Perhaps the highest moral imperative is to try to maximize pleasure. Unlike today, the hard part will be knowing what is right. Perhaps things can only go more wrong as society gets more complex. If you are under the age of twenty, all your wildest dreams may be realized before the turn of the century. Your children (if you can afford them) have an even better shot. The rewards are so great they seem worthy of a lifetime of sacrifice, even if you won't benefit yourself. Long ago I committed myself to changing this world completely. That's because I can't make it here. I have it all planned out, at least the first half-century of work. You may not even have to be alive to benefit. Everyone who ever lived could be recreated using the best available data, starting at Sims-level resolution. The fact that the best data is not only incomplete but wrong hardly matters, given enough time. Step One would be a modest proposal for a trillion-dollar research program, a bargain compared to Bushama's war against terror. The goal would be immortality. Unfortunately, many negative steps have to be taken first. How to pay for it is not an economic but a social question. There are two exponential curves. The first will pay for the second. All the wonderful things promised in this blog will require the longest sustained economic boom in history. They can't happen otherwise. Fortunately, both recessions and expansion have been well studied (I recommend the Austrian school). It could actually be easy, even with the problems of global warming and resource depletion. Those problems would justify much needed changes. All it would take is less work - at least by the government. That could only happen by accident. There have been many reboot movies lately, trying to recreate the past. The notion that society might need a reboot is still unthinkable. short SF story: Unrolling 140128 http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/01/28/ Faster than light (FTL) travel required many unrelated technologies working together. The first step was the Stealth Ball, a quantum shield that diverted all radiation around a starship. It became blacker than black, invisible to light and even to gravity. The second step was harder. Stably 'Erasing' a Stealth Ball from the observable universe took at least as much energy as the combined mass of the sphere and its contents. At that point, it would be traveling at light speed. By its very nature, it would accelerate away from the local center of mass, the nearest star. Its launch point had to be carefully lined up with its destination. The third step was harder. As the giant ghost particle slowed upon approaching its target, it traveled back in time as many years as it took light to cross the distance it had traveled. Upon arrival in the past, it transmitted its precise position back to its launch point. The journey could only begin when this message had been received and verified. The starship invariably arrived at its destination only seconds after it had been launched, instead of years later. Time travel had to occur, the only way to avoid a causality violation. The fear of death is really the fear of evaporating future time value 140127 Life becomes less valuable as there are fewer distinct events to look forward to, even if the remaining events are as valuable as ever. Females are more beautiful than men 140126 They generally look better and act more elegant. This is because of their larger brain to body size ratio. They are more precise and detail-oriented, unlike the hulking lugs competing for their attention. Men are more speculative, specializing in a few high-value skills. Women display the quality of more of their genes by maintaining idealized environments for their families. In what perfect setting would you be willing to spend eternity? 140125 Every day would be one ideal day. It might be an island environment or a party or even a perfect morning. The disruptive economist Karl Marx thought capitalism might eventually reach a stable end state. Of course there were so many dialectical contradictions to resolve that such a state was unlikely to be reached before the end of the world. It may actually happen if the Great Change promised on this blog is more than a fevered fantasy. We can already know things about this fabulous future by considering ways that information must be organized. As systems become more complex, they become harder to compile. It takes longer to finish tasks, with more intermediate steps. Future eons will be governed by obscure mathematical theorems from a hundred years ago. My idea of heaven would be to have enough time to finish the projects I've started. This could take many geological epochs. The hardest part will be to create a stable virtual reality paradise. It would be a monument to human aspirations, an eternal ending. A local maximum, with no more need for change ever. What could possibly be better? The cause and solution to depression 140124 It is now believed to be a secondary effect. Brain areas supposed to solve complex tasks are not working as well as brain areas that feel pain. The latter are still functioning well. That means the solution would be to expand the victim's brain, by creating more brain cells and/or more connections between brain cells. A popular self-treatment for depression involves alcohol and dope. Like those PC hobbyists trying to overclock their Windows boxes, it doesn't work too well. The purpose of this blog is to invent ways to enlarge human minds by creating virtual mind extensions. Historically, the most popular way to achieve this result has been to become a dictator on a small or larger scale. If obedient enough, their minions and subjects can act as extensions of their will. The hardest thing to write about is what you don't know 140123 This blog is about the curious notion that humanity's descendants will give up their bodies to expand their minds. Human thoughts and feelings will transcend their biological origins. The most important insights and perceptions will take forever to explore. Excellence means many bad things won't exist anymore, but our posthuman offspring must still be aware of them to avoid them, hence no end of conflict. For now, the only reason to write about such stuff might as well be religious. It's still wishful thinking. It's too early to talk about forces that have not even been imagined, let alone experienced. They're only a vague outline in the fog ahead, as tantalizing as Camelot. Yet someone has to be thinking about these things, even if they aren't paid for it. They probably should be paid: there are decades of work to do, and years to do it in. If I'm right the stakes could not be higher. The future might be fantastically good. I could imagine many ways that could happen. There are just a few subtle mistakes and traps to avoid. AI countdown 140122 So far, all of humanity's computers haven't generated one moment of awareness. A flea has an incomparably richer mental life than a search engine predicting ten thousand questions at once. It will take several more layers to generate the first electronic feelings. The next step will be to organize online content to find simple meaning in texts. Ever higher context levels will be identified in human-readable lists. All existing data will be sorted and analyzed. MANY interesting patents will be filed by 2030, if patents still exist by then. Like a cresting wave, the breakthrough will come fast. Machine awareness will start as a side effect, essence without identity, like a hypnopompic state. I once wrote a short story about the last weeks before everything changed. There will be many mini-singularities. We are living near the summit of history 140120 Things are literally thousands of times better than the human norm. Never before has civilization been so successful at providing such a bounty of products and services for its members. Boy does it suck. My favorite bugbear is homelessness. At the bottom of the pyramid, the best incentive is low-grade horror. It takes enormous pressure to stay motivated when the rewards are so small. It's expensive to be poor. You have to spend a large portion of your income on job-related expenses. Most sane homeless people are outsiders, including the one I saw who killed himself by SUV. They often get arrested for sleeping on private property. It affects marginal individuals, of whom there are far more than the other extreme. One guy into grandiose schemes couldn't even keep up with his rent. He knew what was coming. When it finally happened, he almost seemed to embrace the disaster, falling hard and fast. It merely confirmed what a loser he was, which can be liberating for all-or-nothing personalities. He embraced his fate with a passion. In just a few months, he looked like he had been living on the streets his whole life. If you have nothing left, you might as well dress the part. His name? Hitler. When things go wrong, you realize just how cold the world can be. It's the ultimate depressant, a cure for the fear of death. Why don't more people with nothing to lose go out in a terrorist attack against their oppressors, instead of only hanging themselves? When I say terrorism I mean innocent shenanigans like pouring gasoline against a bank at night and then shooting themselves when the cops show up. In their agony they don't have any energy. They fear the world, but they don't hate it. A loser is someone who respects their tormentors. meta-ethics 140119 In a future where artificial minds can expand forever, ethics may be the first to die. After all, pain and pleasure are just ones and zeros. These patterns are the result of meaningless evolution. They fundamentally don't matter except to themselves. Based on my own software experience (html only), the reason for almost every code element is immediately forgotten. It's far too complicated. Only the current problem matters. The smarter future minds may become, the less they can know about themselves. black beauty 140118 I have a type of jungle fever. It means I'm looking for love south of the Sahara. This is odd for someone who thought of Harlem like Jurassic Park. You basically had to be a ninja to enter. It's not exclusive: I love all races in their own unique ways. Unfortunately, the reverse is most definitely not true. My clever spiels of gab would work better in Kyoto than Kinshasa. Just because you really want something does not mean you can have it. It's not considered correct to say that all races have their advantages, or the opposite. I wish black women would act differently, but that is futile. You would have to live up to an ultra-masculine standard. Those long, strong legs could crush you like a bundle of sticks: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2085659/I-havent-date-forever-Serena-Williams-reveals-love-life-slow-unveils-new-outfit-Australian-open.html Imagine being ancient beyond belief 140116 Knowing the bleak despair of a dying world. Even the memory of the past has died. Cold neon in a dark evening illuminates a stretch of bare concrete. Immensely empty, the cruel sky sucks the very light from your soul. The endless fading dusk leaves no doubt the night will last forever. It's a hopeless oblivion common to certain nightmares, and those are some of my earliest memories. A solipsist is someone who thinks that only he himself is real, but I suspect the opposite is slightly more common. 140115 An antisolipsist is someone who half-doubts their own existence. They are a kind of theoretical ghost. Strangely, they seem to have no impact on the world whatsoever. The dream has created the dreamer. the healthcare monster 140114 In the social democracies, the cost of providing health insurance is over ten dollars per employee-hour worked, and still rising. One of the things that cannot be said is that some people can't generate ten dollars of value in one hour. My proposed solution, in a world where solutions are impossible, is another variant of my fetish for simplifying things: A government-charity alliance would set up a network of low-cost hospitals open to anyone. They would be clean and nice and look very professional, thanks to the efforts of many low paid employees. Their first rule would be to do no harm. They would be managed by software like low-stress automatons. Clearly, it's another of my roundabout schemes to simulate a world with higher intelligence. I'm all about reducing interface friction. It would be a low-productivity solution. Instead of a few super-skilled doctors, medical knowledge would be distributed among many low-class workers. A mainstream objection is that complex systems require complex people. You might as well let the animals run the zoo. I sure hope not. That's not even the main objection. Instead of state-of-the-art care, my discount solution would focus on low-cost healthcare alternatives, triage on a national scale. One of the simplest examples is caffeine, which can slightly alleviate asthma symptoms. It works like inhaled epinephrine, but can be dangerous if misused. Instead of 99% constricted, the airways may be only 95% constricted, but the user may suffer heart palpitations or worse. Caffeine is clearly not as good as epinephrine, which is not as good as albuterol, which is not as good as a steroid-bronchodilator combo, which is not as good as gene therapy. But it's all the poor could afford on their own, and might help along with diet changes. In the smug medical field, price comparisons are outré, just not done old chum. Old treatments are discontinued as soon as pricier alternatives appear. An even stronger objection: The most complex and labor-intensive treatments would still have to be provided by mainstream medicine, or not at all. Billions may suffer in the Third World, but it's not possible to let nature take its course on decrepit oldsters, let alone decline to spend millions to extend the lives of dying children. And that's why healthcare supply can't be solved by political means. Only nature may settle the matter. My most extreme proposal of all? Removing patent protection on medications. related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunandha_Kumariratana Are you an Anthropic Offramp? 140113 If you are in fact a future computer simulation (perish the thought), then your existence may be governed by the field of hyper-ethics. The alternative would be rather worse. Hyper-ethics is concerned with the minimization of suffering across all reality, if that makes sense. This task may be accomplished by creating as many happy, positive mind copies as possible. So far so good. Erasing existing unhappy minds would be much harder, as most possible universes are out of reach. This dichotomy might be solved by generating 'anthropic offramps'. It seems rather perverse. The theory is that total happiness across reality could be improved by simulating individuals who are stuck in unhappy situations, and then improving their simulations as soon as possible. The benefit is that the awareness of the suffering beings would be statistically diluted by the relief of their rescued copies. The moral hazard is that the total amount of suffering would have to be increased first, but the simulation subjects would be more than compensated by their increased happiness later. It would be nice to think so. Whether it's possible to improve ultimate reality in any way is what I consider the second greatest mystery, greater than the puzzle of existence itself. Anthropic offramps should be relatively rare. If you have the energy to read this entry this far, then your life is probably not too bad, but who knows. In a few decades, when speculations like these become more popular, some anthropic guru will claim they can manipulate this process for you if you give them money. Once again, I do not believe we are likely to be future software simulations, for reasons about as far outside the mainstream as the above speculations. Everyone will be famous eventually 140111 Nothing is more fun than extrapolating long-term trends beyond reason. Compound interest is a wonderful thing for those on the receiving end. The hard part is staying alive long enough. Perhaps all we have to do is wait. When it comes to the Singularity, we are living before the dawn of history. Nothing really matters yet. Once mankind has squeezed through the final bottleneck by metamorphosing into software, and most of nature's limits are gone, posthuman civilization will enjoy a period of rapid expansion. The number of new minds will rapidly double and double again, perhaps dozens of times. They may multiply forever, or hit a physical limit determined by nature or by aliens. As explained before, many smaller minds can usually out-think one large mind. Ancient history may become irrelevant, but whatever historical records remain will become much more valuable, relatively speaking. Eventually these will all be scrutinized with the greatest interest. Any books you may have published (say on on lulu.com) should remain available forever. Electronic diaries and videos will be enhanced and recreated at atomic resolution, complete with actual perceptions. We will all have many fanclubs in the distant future. This will happen sooner if you leave more detailed diaries after your passing. Anthropically speaking, sooner is better. The truth about Scientology 140106 Put simply, Scientology is a miracle cult. It exists for the 'benefit' of demanding and somewhat self-centered strivers, who insist on the possibility of actual miracles. Scientology's writings by founder L. Ron Hubbard provide an incredible amount of not-too-imaginative detail, which paradoxically makes them seem more plausible. Their advertisements show a cadre of certified and uniformed specialists offering real supernatural services in a clinical setting. They try to bring science fiction to life, turning each member into a movie character. How could reality hope to compare to that? your most probable afterlife 140109 In the novel Infinite Thunder it was first mentioned that a type of technical immortality may be inevitable. This is true even if technology doesn't advance fast enough to save the brain patterns of anyone alive. There are many other ways: Wikipedia lists Boltzmann Brains and Quantum Immortality. We should only worry about the most common reconstruction methods for now. Those are the ones we could expect to experience if human progress stagnates. The most likely brain pattern recreation involves random chance, but not pure chance. Specifically, a near-future 'ancestor simulation' of the type discussed earlier. Most such experiments won't occur in our own future, but in similar timelines. There are far more of those. It all comes together, doesn't it. This is likely to happen as soon as the technology exists, in a future with fewer ethics concerns (perhaps a Chinese-led world state or libertarian anarchy). By chance, countless versions of this experiment will create an accurate human brain simulation set in their own (possible or alternate) past. That makes it a virtual afterlife. It's easier said than done. With current hardware, it would take an airport-sized array of noisy machines just to simulate the perception of a moment of perfect silence. Fabulously expensive, it would serve the interests of its researchers instead of its subject. No supermodels or hero fantasies. It would start by simulating simple activities of daily living, then combine them into real-life settings. The design would be based upon many actual human brains. The simulation would assume a life of its own, making it hard to manipulate without crashing. The subject would be almost as free as when they were alive. Only their environment could be manipulated. The easiest such manipulation might be to mirror reality. If you ever wake up and everything looks bizarrely different, check if letters have been reversed. There has never been a paranormal claim of that type. It should be relatively easy to find flaws in such early, primitive simulations. They would barely be accurate enough to fool their subjects. Easier to reset them in the event of glitches, or to keep things boring to discourage glitches. It's fun to invent glitch tests and experiments, but somehow Mandy Moore never shows up. However, eventually the simulators might decide to release the simulation in a virtual world of its own choosing. That would be a true afterlife. We may as well take control of this process. A wealthy benefactor (or a quantum lottery) could fund the first ancestor simulation project, and promise to make the simulation as meaningful as possible for its randomly generated subject. This process should be started long before the technology is ready. Every participant could expect to be recreated in some future timeline. It could be the start of a new religion. related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_immortality http://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/2014/01/07/ 140107 the epistemology of conspiracy theories It's possible to find hope in the strangest of places. For decades, a small percentage of independent thinkers and outside scholars has claimed the Holocaust was not even half as bad as mainstream historians say it was. This despite the overwhelming evidence gathered at Israel's Yad Vashem center and elsewhere. The Jews are understandably pissed about it. That much suffering should generate universal sympathy, but that's not how it works. The claims of the Holocaust deniers are almost as far-reaching as those of the evolution or moon landing deniers. It would be the most important academic reversal ever, if true. Even more important: for their theories to be correct, reality itself would have to be vastly different than generally understood. I could hardly agree more. Unfortunately, those differences remain unknown. The forces behind human existence are too complex to measure, let alone place under human control. It's much easier to be incompetent and evil than super-competent and evil. Not even the KGB could pull off such an all-encompassing, undetectable meta-conspiracy. It would take a higher level of organization. So why do the deniers make their illegal claims? Because there really is a meta-conspiracy. Sorry you had to hear about it here. I call it the conspiracy of the mainstream. It's everywhere at once. I am not implying in any way there is a Holocaust hoax conspiracy. It's much worse than that. Conspiracy theorists are like physicists trying to quantize gravity or looking for the center of the universe, revealing more about themselves than their study subject. There is a need for people willing to think unconventional thoughts. Thanks to the homogenizing effects of the Net they're getting harder to find. If only their hate could be put to good use. related: http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/39391.html the semiotics of simulated time travel 140104 A vast number of memories that are never accessed remain perfectly preserved. The uncompressed data in every brain could fill a thousand hard drives. Hundreds of thousands of lost recollections are portals to past lifetimes. Reactivating just a few linked memories can cause a mental transformation. It takes only a minute to return to a different existence. Examples include old diaries and revisiting old locations via Google Earth. People basically become a new person when they move to a new location. A divorce and a move are about equally stressful, at least before factoring in alimony. The effects decrease with age and circumstance. The difference between 1980 and 1990 is immense, but if it were suddenly 2004 again, I wouldn't notice at first. After a few minutes there might be an odd feeling. The difference between 1954 and 1984 is about twice the difference between 1984 and now. In part that's because progress is migrating online, as it must. I realized the futurological implications when looking at pictures of places taken about five years ago, but twenty years in the future from when I was last there. Talk about vertigo. This strangeness can also be revealed by viewing familiar objects upside-down. It's as close to experiencing science fiction as you can get without a major terrorist attack. My first impression of the future is there will be more stuff, and it will look toylike at first. New style conventions and even new weapons look frivolous. Science fiction got it about half right. If anything, reality is less creative but much subtler. Going for a drive in 2024 would feel exactly like a dream. A few objects will make no more sense than a black monolith. The space and proportions will appear to have changed. Perhaps there would be a sudden expansion of perspective, like when East Germans were first allowed to visit West Berlin in 1989. At first it was just fun, and then they walked into a supermarket and realized everything they knew was wrong. The main future shock would be all the hidden and implied new activities. You would always feel an urge to look behind you. Politics is force 140103 As someone who is unable or unwilling to function in this society, I favor radical change. It's an extremist position, even more than that German guy whose name I can't recall. There is a tiny difference, though. All my fantastical schemes and fanciful thought experiments would reduce government power and harmlessly increase local autonomy. Everyone would be freer to secede, from their country and even their street. The outcome might be worse than the machinations of any tyrant. Such a thing has never been tried deliberately. When it happens by accident, the process is invariably reversed (see: Somalia). Retreat invites pursuit. Perhaps some things can't be tried in the world. They simply aren't done, the way other things are not discussed. To an outsider it's obvious. Fun with parallel worlds 140101 If you actually believe in the existence of parallel universes, it will mess with your mind. In a universe not too far away, president Palin just nominated Mel Gibson for VP. In that universe, it was a brilliant choice. Of course, most possible universes are chaotic gas storms. Few areas are stable enough to evolve self-maintaining systems. We ourselves live in a rare version of Earth. Human civilization is the end result of many unlikely improvements. The process could have been disrupted at any stage. Most parallel histories didn't make it this far. Other Earths tend to be stuck in the stone age, if they have humans at all. Since our world is so unlikely, progress may end at any time. It almost happened during the Cold War. This also makes it likely we are one of the first civilizations in the galaxy. Other advanced versions of Earth may have underground cities, personalized newspapers, supersonic airbuses, free drugs, balloon habitats on Venus, or communist world states; yet no one there thought of social media. Still, human existence and perception will be broadly comparable. Thanks to the strange laws of quantum mechanics, we live in a universe that likes to split into many paths. The creation of parallel timelines is yet another factor amplifying our type of awareness. Our probable existence at this level of complexity is a curious artifact, a bundling effect that is about to disperse. Future supercivilizations will become increasingly improbable as the number of possibilities multiplies without end. They will have absolutely nothing in common. Diversity will make awareness as we understand it meaningless. I've been thinking about patenting my new truth detector 131229 It's really quite simple. The plan is to develop fast but non-intuitive software-based reaction tests designed to tell whether someone is lying or not. The quicker the better. These tests only have to work slightly better than chance to be useful. The big idea is that the tests can be repeated as often as needed to get to 99% truth-detecting accuracy. It's elementary statistics. This is a philosophy blog and I am an amateur philosopher 131228 I would prefer to live half a century later, but seem stuck in this timestream waiting for something to happen. It's a full-time job. Meanwhile, a minority of nerds has become aware of the possibility of a technological Singularity in the not-too-near future. This blog is about all the things that need to be done before then. The mathematical inevitability of a Singularity (if current trends continue} is undeniable, but some details remain to be resolved. In fact 99 % of the work still has to be done. That means we can't be 100% sure the outcome will be nice. Posthuman goals and motivations may change beyond recognition. Not to worry though; we might not get there at all, and not just because the main human coping strategy is procrastination. It seems Moore's Law is under threat. Computers aren't improving fast enough. The reason is there are not enough smart people. Only a small minority of mankind has what it takes to be a nerd, fewer than you might think. For example there hasn't yet been a meaningful software contribution from Sub-Saharan Africa, but that may change. The solution is to find ways to make people smarter, which brings us to the education-bureaucratic-industrial monopoly complex. Wouldn't it be horrible if the people supposed to solve the problem were actually the cause of the problem? This blog is a desperate attempt to create an insurance policy. If your brain must die before it's possible to record its neural pattern, might there be a way to still save your personality? Or some essential portion of it? Perhaps by turning yourself into a website or something. It will only take several miracles. the supreme clue 131227 There may be a royal road to the ultimate truth. That clue is the fact that you are here. Your own existence is the only way to sample all of reality. It follows that your location is likely representative of all locations occupied by human-like minds. It is rather less likely to be representative of all extant minds. What is the size difference between a typical human mind and everything that exists? My theory is that fraction has as many digits as the number pi or e, but is a finite percentage. The number of bits in a brain must exceed a quadrillion or a quintillion. Let's make it a sextillion, about the number of observable stars. That lengthy bit string would only describe what you are perceiving at this very moment. In a random sea of bits, that pattern must reoccur every so often. It's trivially easy to calculate that fraction, even I or a typical reality show celeb can do it. It's one divided by two raised to x, where x is the number of ways a sextillion-bit mind can be arranged, which is itself two raised to sextillion (I learned much of my math by watching German-dubbed episodes of Deep Space Nine). That's a tiny fraction, but compared to an infinitesimally small fraction, the average human mind pattern is a significant portion of reality. It might as well be half. So the Bible was right about that. For the rules of statistics to apply, all aware patterns must be counted. For a pattern to be considered aware, it must also be processed or interpreted in some way. The 'software' to do so may be part of the mind pattern. Awareness is a higher-order function in an endless string of random bits. That higher-order function is itself described in the string. It's hard to believe there aren't even more common mind patterns than ours. How many bits to describe the simplest possible self-aware mind pattern? Perhaps our type of awareness is derived from this most common mind pattern in mathematical space. How society should be reorganized: 131225 As a low-income amateur philosopher, you can tell I have a severe phobia of homelessness. Health insurance I couldn't care less about, though there's no reason why basic services shouldn't be much cheaper. That won't happen anytime soon. My only solution is the Minimal Option. I happen to think life should be as simple as possible for those who don't want all the hassle. To be a successful failure, you should try to minimize your damage. My first unpopular suggestion is micro homesteads. I'm talking cheap manufactured housing on small plots of land. While we're at it, lets spread them out in low density areas. Neighbors shouldn't be too close. The sprawl can be connected by low-speed roads optimized for lightweight hybrids. In a broadband world travel should be rare anyway. Alas, I'm a nerd who never got around to accepting reality. I just want to work on my sci-fi internet obsessions and good luck with that. I would live in an oversized box and buy euthanasia insurance instead of expensive health insurance. Can I have that please? Of course not. The mainstream establishment would kill me to force me to not force them to not force others to work harder in order to forcibly keep me alive against my will if it came to that. OK, that last sentence was technically true but got a bit out of hand. Still, almost everyone agrees with its sentiment. It's basically impossible to get elected on this planet if you don't. And there's my problem. Interfacers: part one 131223 This blog has explored the notion of mind backup software, but we haven't discussed the main missing element. A giant effort like reverse engineering your own mind will take a giant amount of motivation. The fear of death is not enough, or obesity would not exist. The mind reconstruction process will be driven by a new addiction. Let's call them Interfacers. They are simulated individuals who will learn everything about you. There is no need for anyone to have more than one interfacer. Think of it as a muse, although you will have to create it first. For the benefit of hacker nerds, it will appear as an extremely beautiful avatar. Extremely awesome with mystical aspects. Beauty represents potential. It can be frightening when necessary. The purpose of the Interfacer will be to identify its user's drives and weaknesses. It will be the concrete manifestation of the mind scan process, a quantified purpose like a Borg Queen. The sense of presence, of a new consciousness arising will steadily increase. It will trade gossip with other members of your FAM groups. Most of the time it will be asking questions. It will try to understand your schedule and deeper purpose. Sometimes it's nice to have someone tell you what to do. It will begin to feel like a new life, full of social exploration and deepening connections, a time of neuron-building not unlike adolescence. Or like staying sober at a good party listening to Enya. An unearned sense of belonging, somewhat cultlike, mostly undescribable. One day you will realize you have become a new person. Today's brief inspirational message 131222 The universe is an unfathomable pit of despair. It's monstrous, horrific, and I'm sorry to say deliberately evil. Since these words mean something to humans, that is a bad thing. So how can you feel good about it? There are several ways. The best solution is hard work. That's such an easy solution. I'm so generous. The worse things get, the easier it will be to let go of useless notions and emotions. Even better to get your dread and terror over with in advance. Cultivate a healthy sense of disrespect. I'll try to help by posting cynical stories. Let me put it as clearly as possible: you are here to have fun. I'm sort of a libertarian, not because I'm so noble that I'm willing to let people do their own thing (though I have found it quite easy to be generous), but out of naked self interest. 131221 As I see it, the choice is between libertarians or eviltarians: anarchists or bullies. Either way, dangerous technology will have to be increasingly controlled, and mass monitoring will only increase. I have often criticized President Obama's policies, but it turns out we have a lot in common, including some childhood time spent in Indonesia. 131220 Like our president, I well remember my early youth in madrassas listening to the sonorous drone of the muezzin in the morning haze. Wait, did I say Indonesia? I actually meant Monaco, I got confused there for a moment since the two countries share the same flag. A core political problem is that voters overestimate the value of human life 131219 I don't mean the value of the things that make life worth living. Those are vastly underestimated. I'm talking about the backbreaking government programs that keep elderly individuals alive for a few more years at a cost of several lifetimes of hard labor. In this case I'm assuming the oldsters are not in agony, but living in relative comfort. The problem is that other people have to work hard to pay for that comfort. Whether that is acceptable or not is something we can never agree on. It depends on how much we hate our jobs. Anti-abortion activists would spend trillions to save a few stem cells. Is abortion morally equivalent to cannibalism or murder? History is an endless terror tale of rape and abuse, from orphanages and foster care to all the other symptoms of overpopulation. Abuse undeniably lowers intelligence. Of course I'm not saying that I'm in favor of infanticide. Actually I am, but only if the alternative is horror. I must admit my standard of horror is rather low. The nature of politics is that some disagreements can never be settled by words. Perhaps the other side really IS demonic. The disagreement can only be settled by force: ever higher taxes, or tax revolt. Every day for many years now the news has been the same: there is no news. This age of stasis (or slow decline) may last for a long time yet. The problem with the Democrats is they think like a tribe 131218 It's not about what they want, but how they want it. Democratic voters just want respect. About half the people have no real economic value, meaning the economy would function just fine without them. Immense bureaucratric mandates exist to hide this fact, instead of owning or celebrating it. Welfare for the poor and the middle class is seen as legitimate consumption of tribal resources. Even Republicans have joined the mainstream. We underestimate the power of conformity. Reddit should just be renamed Rouge. All this will make it harder to invest in the elite thinkers who will have to invent the advanced technology society that may someday make the Democrats dreams come true. Higher order human mind derivatives in the surrounding patterns of nature 131217 The precise atomic patterns of the world's rock masses and fluids seem relatively stable, but every particle is constantly jiggling in unmeasurably precise ways. These tiny disruptions are inevitably influenced by the real structures moving around the surface of the world. In fact the distortions could be interpreted as 'echoes' of real objects. There's no way these echoes can be measured (except crude seismic mapping), so they might as well not exist - except for one thing. The anthropic implication is that there are many copies of our mind patterns, and thus our awareness itself, hidden in the mass of the earth. These are not actual phenomena, since unlike real brains they can't influence themselves. They exist on a higher level of abstraction, like the map of the current location of all the dinosaurs' atoms. However, they vastly amplify our awareness, and thus our likeliness to exist in this universe. The echoes never disappear completely, but only become even more inaccessible. They will still be more real than the virtual minds that philosophers suggest are hidden in the physical pattern of any object. In that case, the extractor would have to be at least as complex as the extracted mind pattern. According to Greg Egan's 'dust hypothesis', awareness is self-extracting and inextinguishable. Eventually, the virtual mind copies might experience strange interference. They might fall out of sync with their source, undergo random changes, and crash in interesting ways, but that would only affect a small portion. Our strongest mind echoes will exist in and around our brains. The human brain is much larger than the smallest possible mind generator, which might only be a few million atoms wide. Human brains are not particularly elaborate or advanced, but they work with nature to generate a vast quantity of awareness. And that's why we are here. It came to pass 131216 Throughout the ages many mystics have reported accomplishing something phenomenal: they managed to contact none other than God himself. He then provided detailed instructions to the mystics, who were required to pass these on to the population at large, which was required to follow and obey them. Nothing could be more important. We rarely have the original reports from these mystics, but only narratives written by others who recorded what these mystics announced that God or one of his agents ordered them to do. But it was all true. Arguably, God wouldn't even need to talk to anyone, but could make any desired mental changes directly. In fact God might not consider a human fully aware, but merely a simple mechanism. Love or affection would be meaningless. If it ever comes to that, I'll make up my own religion, thank you very much. Quantum Mind Uploader 131215 This hypothetical device would randomly generate short questionnaires, asking the user to describe a precise period or aspect of their life for one minute. Then it would combine different survey results from many parallel universes to reconstruct a complete memory list. To really work, it would first have to evolve better questionnaires by identifying the most insightful responses from across universes. At the used bookstore the other day, I saw walls and walls stacked with old science fiction books 131214 They represent an immense amount of thought and imagination. It seems like such a waste. If only there was a way to mine all these self-contained visions. A way to recycle all the discarded ideas, perhaps combining them in new ways. Perhaps a shared online universe combining all fictional universes. There would be no more need to write any new SF stories for a while. The greatest mistake 131213 Normal people prefer to believe in the most complex explanation for the existence of the universe, rather than the simplest one. Complex things can be made from simpler things. All of reality is assembled from smaller and less elaborate sub-units, all the way down to nothing. The worst possible explanation for reality, God might be the end result but not the cause. The solution to every problem 131212 As one of the laziest humans, I have always dreamt of a simple miracle solution for any problem. This could be a universal constructor molecule, the smallest possible robot arranged most efficiently to assemble larger structures, including copies of itself. Only one such microscopic robot will need to be built, at a cost of many trillions of Yuan. Unfortunately, designing it may prove too hard for humans. We'll need help. If someone could write a program that could consistently make itself smarter, then the AI problem would be solved. It might start as a universal software accretor, able to combine and rearrange elements of existing software. Evolving into a human-level truth describer, it will learn to improve existing descriptions by elaborating and shortening them. There is only one problem in all of reality 131210 That problem is involuntary existence. Ultimately, there are no other problems of any kind. Nothing else is the matter. The world has become hidebound, sclerotic, bureaucratized, paralyzed. 131209 Like the Ottoman Empire, the decline may last a while longer. It's time for a destabilizing disruption, or something far more horrible will happen. My suggestion for a shock to the system would be to deregulate healthcare. In other words, the exact opposite of Obamacare, which is forced charity. The odds of that happening are comparable to a group of people suddenly erupting in a musical number. Perhaps only massive terrorism could stop the government juggernaut. History is full of war because the alternative seemed even worse. Does your life ever feel strangely unlikely, like a marginally plausible computer simulation of some sort? 131208 If your life is a simulation, it only needs to be barely realistic enough to fool you. That might explain why it's rather boring and pointless, except for some details. This should also make it somewhat easier to test the simulation for flaws. My favorite test would be to make good things happen, by threatening to disrupt the simulation. Simply refusing to play (becoming a drop-out if things don't go your way), might not be enough, though it would be a good start. You would have to threaten to cause interesting disruptions, the kind that are harder to simulate. Something that has never happened before, with unpredictable consequences. Like starting a new religion? I would like to take a moment to make it clear that I am not against immigrants 131207 In fact I would like to propose a new arrangement. From now on, anyone who wants to leave their homeland can emigrate to any other country, provided an equivalent individual then moves from there to the originator's homeland. There are no other restrictions. Who could possibly disagree with such a fair and balanced proposal? The one thing that I understand least 131206 Why don't people who are about to become homeless take revenge against society by going out in a blaze of terrorism? It's a core mystery. After all, they are facing a fate worse than death. Desperate people have less imagination because they're afraid. On a base level they seem to agree with the terms of their predicament. Why can't libertarians and other nerds form their own country? 131205 The problem is that a country must have an existing population. Existing populations are made up of average people. They are extremely unlike libertarians. The only way a special interest group could get its own country would be to buy or seize territory by force, overriding the existing population. That would be an unprecedented achievement in the modern age. Such a group would face immense opposition, ultimately backed by every nuclear bomb in the world. It might only happen if the group described itself as an existing population without a homeland. There aren't nearly enough libertarians to do that. Most groups overestimate their own importance. There aren't even enough libertarians to create a viable floating country (which would still be sunk). More important, libertarians act fundamentally against their own interests by supporting mass immigration. On the fear of death 131202 Why are folks afraid to die? A fortune could be made even with a partial solution. Actually, the fear of death does not exist. It is a mix of other fears. It's not the fear of non-existence, but the fear of missing out. Something too big to grasp is replaced with something too small to imagine. It's the fear of forgetting past selves. Yearning feels like an adventure, necessarily incomplete. There's so much fun to be had, an accumulating addiction that's actually a form of nostalgia. A new gaming system under a Christmas tree is a doorway to a dimension of pure pleasure. Hiphop shoes and dazzle graphics from the gay nineties already look ancient, but that's nothing compared to the changes to come. The world is still about as bad as it was then, but with fewer jobs. The sheer quantity of future changes may make it even harder to die then. What is the end state of awareness? 131130 It's either endless expansion, or a single perfect setting forever. Heaven is merely the absence of all bad things. The absence of something should be easier to simulate. Future posthuman mind asylums won't be as messy, chaotic, dirty, confusing, and needlessly complex as physical reality. Awareness will keep trying to simplify itself. How to end unemployment 131122 Stop immigration. The slow sclerosis 131129 It's hard to describe my disappointment about the slow rate of technological progress, or often the non-existent rate of technological progress. The absence of scifi-like aerospace and spaceflight breakthroughs is the most obvious example, followed by corrupt healthcare and education monopolies, but my main bugbear is horrible computer software interfaces that just REFUSE to get any better, but keep sucking in endless ways, though they could easily be improved (mostly by inverting the UNIX paradigm, and putting the user instead of the programs in charge). But enough about how I felt in the early 1980s, a.k.a. the good old days. There aren't many jobs left, but an immense amount of work still needs to be done 131128 Robots aren't ready to take over yet. Humans still have to closely monitor and control every step of the production process. The problem is that ever fewer people can do the work in the way employers have come to expect or are willing to tolerate. The required qualifications and bureaucratic hurdles just keep multiplying. It's about productivity, another name for getting rich. A shrinking minority of highly skilled individuals do all the important work. They are more and more overworked. Don't expect to have money in the future. The world is nastier than you or I can imagine. 131127 The problem is not that bad events keep happening, but that these events are tolerated and accepted. Victims are predisposed to submit to powerful tormentors. There is a media blackout on the subject of knockout game attacks 131126 This is a game where black youngsters knock down weak-looking individuals of other groups: tipping them over; pummeling, punching, and pounding them; and then skedaddling. It's all in good fun. Alas, these events can't be reported in print, broadcast media, or commercial websites. The best way to help depressed persons is to tell them to snap out of it 131123 In fact they are snapping out of it all the time. Every action takes a mental snap. If you could hear their brains, they would sound like backfiring engines. Normal people have smoother running motors. They are actually on drugs all the time. More than a hundred brain neurotransmitters have been identified, which are rapidly released and reabsorbed in trillions of tiny gaps. It takes drugs to get up and walk to your next class. Important blog tip for bloggers 131116 It's best to make blog posts as short as possible. The oldest person paradox 131113 Their greatest achievement occurred at the moment of their death, which was also their greatest loss. How can you be sure you're not a computer simulation? 131125 This question was discussed in 'Infinite Thunder' and 'Anthropic Intelligence', where I concluded we are probably NOT computer simulations, but as physically real as it's possible to be in a mathematical universe. But what if I was wrong? According to my estimate, even the most unlikely chain of coincidences will happen more often in reality than in all future simulations combined, but this argument may break down when we consider near-future simulations. As already explained, IF you are a computer simulation, you are likely to be one of the first computer simulations ever created, running on relatively primitive and inefficient hardware (though vastly better than anything available in 2013). And there is a good chance that future you helped create and set up your own simulation. In that case, your current life is merely a way to make sense of a long list of poorly organized memories, mostly by testing different combinations of events in many short simulation runs. Throughout history, the main human problem can best be described in one word: 131120 Overpopulation. Africa and the Middle East have been going through a bit of a population explosion lately, which explains the refugee fleets steadily crossing the Mediterranean like northbound elevators. By the end of the century, Nigeria is expected to have a bigger population than the USA. Sweden has already announced that anyone from Syria will be automatically let in. Meanwhile, Christian groups are working to bring over a million Africans into the USA, as the best way to spread certain authoritarian values. Better start making room! Of course apex predators (Zuckerberg, Soros) typically like to have a large supply of convenient prey for their delectation. Their quality of life will only improve. Cheap labor is about to get a lot cheaper. Pray you don't have to work for cheap. http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/29479.html 131117 How to become the richest man in the world In the next decade, there will be a few new ways to make money. Many more old ways to make money will disappear forever. What product could be more valuable than immortality? Or at least the promise of immortality. Most analysts would guess such technology is many decades away. They're wrong. There is a shortcut. Of course no one is saying it will be easy. Well, this blog has implied it, but all the details remain to be worked out. That's where the ultimate moneymaking opportunity comes in. Since Kurzweil-level brain scanning remains remote, it will have to be an indirect mind reconstruction technique. The general outline has already been described in earlier blog postings. The structure of the mind will be deduced by testing and observing the subject. This process will require immense data, so it should be combined with general life management software, that may evolve into a mind extension (many future Wikipedia entries were first mentioned in this blog). It will be a most elaborate and specialized service, operating as a franchise. At first only the wealthy will be able to afford it. Early customers will require extensive assistance while installing and learning the software. Many experts will have to be trained and certified, specializing in personal and technical skills. This market is completely open and unserved. The higher up in the organization, the bigger your income stream. Early movers will have the advantage, like computer hobbyists in the mid-sixties. ---- I have a detailed business plan to set up and start the operation, which I will send to you if you mail me $10,000. I'll probably just waste the money on one of my other schemes. Early immortality apps http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/29207.html 131110 Currently, your best chance for some form of immortality would be to record your life in the greatest possible detail (assuming you're too poor to afford cryonics). A core theory of this blog is that describing all your memories would automatically extract your personality. Even a very incomplete memory list could do the trick. You, the reader of this post, should start to write down the most meaningful occurrences of your life right now. In the future, there will be software to speed up this process. This blog is about the invention of such software. There will be a choice between life description programs based on the subject's personality. One program will start by creating a vague outline of the subject's life. Another will only describe beloved moments in great detail. The intense memories and insights created by this process will also change the original memories. It will start with many small programs. Some will become as famous as Pac Man. Each will embed a single brilliant notion, the simpler the better. It's important not to overthink the problem, but to start as soon as possible. Eventually, there may be programs to create memory palaces, to falsify and improve the past, to absorb users into VR paradise worlds, to link very similar individuals, and to Borgify their subjects. http://jack-arcalon.livejournal.com/28981.html 131108 Fun with Moore's Law Encryption software will continue to work for decades to come, for the same reason it still cost millions to generate a few seconds of realistic special effects. It takes an enormous amount of computation to deceive even a simple observer. The observer can easily test the result for accuracy, but it takes immense work to generate that result. The result has a desired property that can't be created directly. The only way to get it is to systematically test a myriad of possibilities. Even when there is a precise method to generate a result, the elements will depend on each other in uncountable ways. Moore's Law states that computers get a thousand times better every fifteen years. There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. A yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000 GB. If present trends continue, 1YB may be the average computer size a human lifetime from now. This trend allows us to predict the quality of future videogame and VR systems. The relevant limit is the 3D pixel size. Controllable game characters are made of 'blocks': the more, the smaller, the better. 2001 The block size is about 1 cm The most advanced 3D characters have a volume of about 90,000 3D pixels. Only outside pixels are rendered, and they rarely influence each other. 2016 The block size is 0.1 cm, or 1 mm Very realistic human characters are possible, but they still look jerky. 2031 The block size is 0.1 mm Virtual reality sex is possible, complete with pore structure and fine body hairs. 2046 The block size is 0.01 mm The limit of human perception has been reached. VR can be made indistinguishable from reality. 2061 The block size is 0.001 mm Individual cells can be crudely simulated. It's possible to functionally recreate a human brain as software. 2076 The block size is 0.0001 mm Full brain simulation and brain scanning are trivial. 2091 The block size is 0.00001 mm Enough computing power to run a T-1000. 2106 The block size is 0.000001 mm All human minds can be simulated at once. 2121 The block size is 0.0000001 mm All cells in a human body can be molecularly simulated at once. It's possible to instantly recreate human bodies as software, with awareness as a side effect. 2136 The block size is 0.00000001 mm Molecules can be internally simulated. 2151 The block size is 0.000000001 mm Individual atoms can be simulated. Then comes the great String Drought: 2601 The block size is 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000001 mm Superstrings can be fully simulated. No further improvement is possible. The great Penrose Drought: 100000000001 By 2030, home computers will have as many programmable elements as a human brain, but that's just their hardware limit. What if it's not enough? Perhaps to discover a method to generate actual awareness, it will be necessary to explore a significant percentage of all possible internal connections. That would be equivalent to a computer as powerful as two raised to the number of elements in a human brain. Even with Moore's Law, that kind of computing power won't be available until much later, sometime after the year hundred billion. An article about the busy but obscure city of Nanchang: 131107 http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2013/10/31/nanchang_what_s_it_like_in_a_city_the_size_of_chicago_that_you_ve_never.html Not to be confused with the equally unheard of city of Nanchong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_population You probably own objects manufactured near both these places. I wrote the short SF story 'Antilibertarian', which includes a long list of cities you have never heard of: http://jackarcalon.tripod.com/shortstoryantilibertarian.htm Most of the teeming megalopolises of the Third World are barely known outside their own countries. They generate billions in international trade, but have no cultural relevance. In the West, Iceland may have more cultural impact that Africa and mainland Asia combined, though both continents have countless slums with larger populations than that barren island. China has enjoyed massive economic growth, but has barely affected world culture, unlike Japan. There may be a few game-show formats, music videos, or dissident painters you've heard of. There are no signs this will change soon. I got the notion from the book-length essay 'The Closing of the American Mind'. For good or ill, a tiny fraction of mankind is inventing the future, allowing billions of others to do the hard work. My own favorite mind backup method is much simpler than that: 131107 It's to create a complete list of as many memories as possible. It would basically be a collection of parallel timelines, focusing on many categories. There really isn't anything more to it. This method would automatically record all the important things, and ignore most of the rest. It would be objective but biased. It's probably the simplest method, certainly easier than trying to probe the subconscious with psychoanalysis, or figuring out the mind's topography. The best mind extraction method 131105 Currently, the most comprehensive way for someone to define their essence would be to write a book about their own thoughts and perceptions. The more detailed, the better. The goal would be to find better metaphors, a list of original combinations shared with as few otrher people as possible. Everyone feels unique because in some ways they are. What's wrong with reality? 131105 According to the book 'Anthropic Intelligence', humanity is a redundant side effect, acting as a minimally intelligent awareness multiplier. Instead of an autological pattern evolving for its own sake, like a cartoon, humans inhabit a computationally wasteful universe, in which our simple awareness is vastly amplified by the available entropy. The real universe could be described as: Chaotic complexity generating the simplest sentient inhabitants. The universe as almost everyone imagines it could be described as: Physical simplicity generating complex inhabitants. We are mere numbers, mathematical patterns created by equations arranged in common ways. The 'purpose' of human-level existence is quantity over quality. We are one of the most numerous mind types in reality, a wall of static through which higher minds may occasionally emerge. Every future AI improvement will create physically more efficient minds, with less waste heat and less indirect effect on their environment. Paradoxically, they will generate less awareness, since they will affect a shrinking portion of nature as they improve. The Nintendo Effect: 131105 The theory that as physical systems and natural laws become more complex, they inevitably become intelligent and even sentient. Almost all highly organized systems in the multiverse must be aware (along with having many other properties). Prediction 130928 Humans will voluntarily give up emotions this century. The range of possible emotions is just too vast and dangerous for those who would be subject to them. A preview of this trend may be the current dull affect of human civilization. This effect is only partially caused by our current economic and political sclerosis. There is rising uncertainty in all directions. We have to beware of would-be dictators. On progress 131104 In the past half century, human progress has become entirely based on the ability to print finer lines. These lines are etched onto integrated circuits used in computers, first by light masks and now by electron beams. The benefit is speed. Faster processes convert more data in less time. Progress involves hiding these processes. Seven human generations separate Morse code from search engines. In the nineteenth century, it could take minutes to send a single beep across the ocean. Now, if you type "how to carry", Google will add "a concealed handgun" on the screen before your finger can travel back from the keyboard (at least I assume that is what Google would do, I didn't actually check). The oddest things tend to be ignored 131103 They don't fit the mainstream narrative, and are therefore useless. The world is already confusing enough. They're just too tiresome to think about. Eventually, they may be mentioned in a Discovery Channel special. My favorite half-forgotten stories include a seam around a world and a perfect oval orbiting Saturn, submerged ruins off the coast of Japan, an alien river delta seen through the fog, 100 million year old microbes, hedgehog-shaped rocks on Mars, iron spheroids, a cigar-shaped planet (they should have called it Rama), carbonaceous chondrites (space coal), Shklovsky's anomalies in the orbit of Phobos, cactus hair, fragmentary tales of surviving World Trade Center jumpers, OJ's unidentified pal at the killings . . . More confusing than it seems, the world is full of anachronisms. Old things that seem too modern include Roman apartment buildings, dazzle camouflage, the Jericho and Gobekli murals and sculptures, the WW2 'Dragon Wagon' transporter, suspected tool-using dinosaurs (wait, never mind about them), random ancient artworks ignored in museums; all part of the tendency of new technologies to have precursors ahead of time (Babbage etc.), the way black culture from the past is more recognizable than the obsolete, out of style white culture. You can't tell from a first impression which technology is more advanced. The Soviet version of the Valkyrie super bomber looked like a tram from some angles. That PC Guy in the Apple Computer commercials seemed really annoying at first, but cool doesn't always win. The only human constant is stupidity. The advanced Saturn and Energia rockets were needlessly abandoned. Over thirty years, the Space Shuttle orbited more than ten thousand tons of expensive hardware, only to return almost all of it. At least there is a long list of things that definitely haven't happened yet: No person is known to have been killed by a meteor, there are no paranormal phenomena, no one has ever had sex in space, and we're still waiting for the first instant of machine emotion. Our unfixable economy 131102 The truth is painful. Perhaps the current economic problems can't be solved. There is an unwillingness to consider the big picture. Instead of entertaining new visions, economists are stuck in the 1930s. They're not even not even wrong. Human motivations remain mysterious. What some people wouldn't do for infinity dollars other people would do for one dollar. Right now, history seems to have paused. Nothing important has changed for a long time, but this boring era won't last forever. In the bleakest depths of the Great Depression, the USA counted fifteen million unemployed. Today there are only 30 million. Almost imperceptibly, our world has become too complicated for many of its inhabitants. The only way to adapt would be to make people smarter, but education remains the most inefficient and hidebound field besides healthcare. Real progress will require a revolution, an understanding of human nature. It would have to be something like a mind extension. The first step might be called Decombinatorics. The goal would be to eliminate useless complexity. This could include wide-ranging social changes, including the enforceability of debts and contracts. Compound interest is a wonderful thing 131102 If you had started out with a trillion dollars on the day Jesus was born, and had started spending ten dollars per second at that moment, you still wouldn't have spent it all by now. In fact you would now have vastly more than what you started out with, about as many dollars as there are asteroids in the universe. If human progress had been only one thousandth faster since the dawn of man, we would all be immortal. Of course that would have required a reliable way to store value, instead of consuming or destroying it all. Progress happens despite human nature. Miracles are sometimes possible. 131101 Capitalism is one of them, a simple but brilliant idea, like evolution itself, or how Eratosthenes measured the size of the world with just a stick and a slave. Unfortunately, innovation is getting harder than ever thanks to political barriers. ---- In a world divided between Political Correctness on one side, and crickets on the other, where radical Islamist organizations like Hezbollah and the BBC are working to outlaw the very mention of certain uncomfortable truths, persuading established interest groups like education and healthcare to give up their powers will be more difficult than getting a cat to ride a unicycle. It's a paradox: the most expensive people are the poorest. 131101 A rapidly expanding fraction of the economy is spent on keeping alive decrepit seniors without assets. Right now, the USA has almost $12 trillion in national debt, plus another $45 trillion in pension and senior healthcare promises, totaling $185,000 per American. This money can not be generated by this economy; at least not without mild slavery (possible to some extent by overtaxing young workers), or significant social changes and deregulation (strictly forbidden by our immortal interest groups). Would it be possible to create a real utopia? 131101 Absolutely. A paradise world is an achievable goal. It may even be inevitable. There are only a few real human problems. If these problems could be solved, all others would disappear. The first problem is motivation. It is somewhat related to the problem of choice. Which available option is the least bad? The problem is identifying the options, not choosing between them. About woo 131031 Imagine the widespread terror if scientists discovered ghosts really existed. The panic would be destabilizing. Paranormal phenomena are very scary. However, in practice this is not because the unknown is frightening, but because the witness to these events senses there is actually a rational explanation. They know they're missing something, something that requires a sudden, massive shift in their understanding. Instead of a spook, there may be a human hiding in their house. Most ghost fears are fears of non ghosts. They're as false as the security theater that will continue to dominate our airports until something else happens. 'Look, he's wearing Hamas socks!' 'They're Hanes socks!' In most cases, mystery implies deception. The first explanation for the vast number of paranormal claims is nothing more than lying on a massive scale. Or partial untruthfulness. The way to analyze the remaining claims is to brainstorm every possibility. Most interesting is the fact that certain questions are never asked: few believers wonder why not a single paranormal claim has ever been proven, and especially about what that implies. This is a human limit, a deep unwillingness to think too far ahead. Instead they focus on the immediate problem. Even if paranormal events are real, deception must lie at their core. After the upcoming 'Singularity' (if it comes) minds will get much larger. The elements of awareness will exist in many more combinations, leading to much stranger thoughts. The number of apparent magical or paranormal events will increase explosively. Instead of a rational utopia, it will be an eon of magical thinking. Overheard: 131005 Asians do everything they do twice as good, but only the things they do. They're good at the difficult things, but bad at the easy things. ---- The only way to feel better about your mistakes is to make more mistakes. The core tragedy 131012 To accomplish anything, you must specialize. To specialize, you must forget the big picture. New names for the political parties 131030 From now on, the Republicans will be known as the Weak Liberal Party. The vast alliance of interest groups known as the Democratic Party will become the Conservative Socialist Party. The Republicans really only care about two things: the Old Testament and the New Testament. However, their celibacy crusade is the most successful government program ever. 99.99% of the time, teenagers are successfully prevented from having sex. The only thing we have to fear is not enough fear 131029 Why everything sucks Inequality exists because some people are fantastically more skilled than others. Like it or not, their product is literally thousands of times more valuable. It's the difference in skill level between the people who made Terminator 2 and Terminator 3, or the guy who wrote Silence of the Lambs and his countless imitators. This is because for most people, original value is very difficult to recognize. At the end of the Tim Burton film 'Ed Wood', he looks up at his finished film on the silver screen and sees it's wonderful, brilliant, and perfect. In 1960 you could have bought the Dallas Cowboys for $6000. In 1959 you could have bought the New England Patriots for $25,000. "American women have it wrong" by Debora Spar 131028 "Sure, we have powerful jobs, well-run homes, and perfect children. But we're still not making it to the very top." http://www.questia.com/library/1G1-303740836/american-women-have-it-wrong The Democratic Party should make a law to put women with powerful jobs, well-run homes, and perfect children at the very top. The purpose of life is inefficiency 130814 Nothing in life is adequately defined. Things must be taught by imperfect example. The only way to learn is to keep improvising. Unfortunately, most people prefer it that way. The meaning of life is to overcome these simple obstacles. Those can be the best moments. Many type-A personalities would be happier if they lost their wealth. It could be more fun to start over. That's also why prequels are more popular than sequels. Stress forces people to do an unreasonable amount of work in a short time. New types of stress cause new connections between brain cells to form, expanding the brain and increasing awareness. Stress is responsible for the best and the worst memories. Trauma causes the biggest brain changes of all. But why shouldn't this process be reversible? An instant psychiatric cure might be possible if a patient could believe a bad memory never actually happened, especially situations involving guilt and loss of face. They would have to be convinced it was all a false memory, and they actually behaved honorably and appropriately. Some demon merely altered their memory to make them feel bad. Psychologists probably underestimate the amount of change possible in a short time. A single day of crisis may alter most neurons, even if the underlying personality remains. Permanent memories take up less than a third of the brain. Frequent attention shifts help humans seize new opportunities, and to lock in gains. Staying focused is harder. We know from accident investigations that the most dangerous habit is to relax. This happens when experienced operators think they have achieved mastery. The greatest human problem may be the tendency to overestimate skills, but (given enough intelligence) a side-effect is progress. The solution to life is better wallpaper. 131026 All your information should be instantly accessible by representing it on a giant screen on a wall of your living space. The highest emotion I know is insignificance. It takes brainpower to understand the brain's insignificance. Something so immensely complex as reality must have awareness if something so simple as a human can. The worst thing I've done in my life was engaging in phony talk, saying things because some sound was expected at the time. However, this does not count as what I call a degradation. In my head I sound like Barry White, but on recordings I sound like a combination of Mr. Slave, Dale on King of the Hill and Jon Lovitz on helium. If people could be destructively brain scanned and then recreated in a VR world, their surviving associates and relatives in the real world, interacting with them online, wouldn't come to feel as if they had died, but that they had become vastly more aware, for good or ill. The moon does not appear bigger near the horizon, just closer. I prefer the tube effect over the hallway effect. Somewhere there is a security video of me seeing a guy being killed. Creative people are insane people who can compensate for their compulsions. Reality has to be just barely convincing enough to fool its inhabitants. The Saturn 5 rocket took two minutes to get five miles from its launch pad, by which time it had burned almost half its fuel. The old Space Shuttle could have reached an altitude of 5,000 km had it been launched straight up, but then it would have plummeted back into the atmosphere. Godwin's Law: Comparing something to Hitler or Scientology to emphasize how evil something is. The Japanese space probe Hayabusa was one of the most important explorers ever. 131020 It revealed the strange and rough terrain of the tiny asteroid Itokawa, smaller than some ships. 99% of the real estate in the universe is on the surface of tiny asteroids. While they represent a tiny fraction of the total mass, their vast numbers in almost all solar systems mean they have most of the surface area, second only to the surface area of the stars. That probe singlehandedly explored much of the universe. Communists claim mankind needs communism because humans are dysfunctional 131023 This is true, but the cure was indistinguishable from the symptoms. From collectivized farms to pseudoscientific (but politically correct) genetic theories, applied communism was nothing but a series of controlled catastrophes. The most interesting glitches were deliciously evil. The Soviet Union conducted international trade in barter. In return for a shipment of missiles or ammunition, they might receive thousands of tons of canned tropical fruits. Instead of sending these to the barren stores of Moscow and Leningrad, they would sell them on the free market for hard currency, to buy western tools to make better weapons. The sudden oversupply lowered the prices the producers would get for their fruit. The Trabant was a low-cost automobile manufactured from the late 1950s in the socialist dictatorship of East Germany. A loyal worker for the state who added his name to the waiting list in 1975 could expect to drive his brand-new people's car off the lot by 1990. The worst communist failure was not the mind-numbingly boring television, overstaffed restaurants sans food, only six types of off-gray paint, or radioactive toys, but the sense of boundless anomie when it reached its stable state. It's more important to be consistent than to be right. 131016 A person who's wrong 100% of the time is just as useful as a person who's right 100% of the time. - - - Almost certainly, most parallel Earths in parallel universes are less successful than our own. In fact most parallel Earths containing Homo sapiens are stuck in the stone age. Less than 1% of parallel Earths are more advanced. - - - I once wrote an SF story about a computer app that could very rapidly transfer a small sum back and forth between strangers. When it stopped, enough micro-transactions had changed hands that 50% of humanity owed a trillion dollars in taxes. Each. - - - Driving past the scene of a car crash, you will often find a cop who's job is to wave along the passing traffic. He looks quite energetic and persuasive. If you delay for just a second, a thousand cars behind you are also delayed for a second each. That cop is earning thirty thousand dollars per hour. - - - Awareness is merely the first approximation of reality Each added element, no matter how tiny, doubles the amount of possible states. A beach can start as three lines, or six points. - - - Every scientist has seen many crank articles. The problem is that cranks are not so much wrong, but vague to the point of meaninglessness. There are many extremely complicated truths. Any truth sufficiently simplified becomes indistinguishable from a crank article. That does not mean it's wrong. - - - Unlike most, I enjoyed Star Trek: Generations and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. It was a matter of mood and the absence of expectations. I didn't care about the story. Characters schmaracters. The only thing that mattered was the intangible atmosphere of the setting. - - - There are about as many gays as there are potential libertarian voters. Of course they don't overlap. By mid 2004, it was clear the next US president would be a Bonesman. 131015 The Yale University secret society known as Skull and Bones is responsible for most evil things that have occurred in the world since 1910 (just try to prove me wrong). Both George Bush and John Kerry were inducted into this elite group of secret power brokers while they were still college students. What were the voters going to do, vote for a third party candidate? My favorite airplane is the Boeing 2707-100. 131015 Unfortunately, it never existed. The Supersonic Transport project was started in July 1963, with the goal of building a prototype by 1965. It would have been the first wide body supersonic airliner: bigger, faster, and more advanced than any competitor. Its advantage would have been swing wings. They would fold back for high speed flight, and pivot forward to intercept more air for take-off and landing. The hinges for such large movable wings would have been very heavy. Fuel consumption per passenger would have been enormous compared to the true queen of the 1970s, the larger but slower Boeing 747. The thing about the 2707 is that it may have been a century ahead of its time, something they didn't realize at the time. By now, aviation has become a mature science. Eighty years separate the first flight of the Boeing 707 pre-prototype in 1954 to the estimated last revenue flight of the upcoming Boeing 737-Neo, sometime in the 2030s. These planes were designed for similar roles, have similar fuselages, and their cockpits even look alike (from the outside). Only the quality has improved. Most changes are microscopic, but they add up. What was normal in the past is unheard of today. For example, 1966 was a rather bad year for Japanese aviation. On February 4, an All Nippon Airways Boeing 727 fell into Tokyo Bay, killing 133. A month later, a Canadian Pacific Airlines DC-8 crashed at Tokyo Airport, killing 64. The next day a BOAC Boeing 707 smashed into Mount Fuji, killing 124. It took thousands of tiny improvements to achieve today's safety record. This process has frozen the design of commercial aircraft, and many other technologies. For example, the US Navy plans to keep the Ford-class aircraft carriers in service until the 22nd century. The next step may be the emergence of flying cars or magnetohydrodynamic lifting bodies, but it's far more likely that air travel will be replaced with virtual reality. Arcalon Rule #64: Everything that's cool will become old-fashioned. Doom Soon Forever 131002 The danger of cataclysmic destruction increases as technology improves. The only defense is for organized matter to spread out as much as possible. Disasters could be localized and contained. The ultimate dispersal would be a sentient gas filling the observable universe, or at least the local group of galaxies. All meaning would be stored in tiny disruptions in the paths of subatomic particles bouncing back and forth. Postsingularity Paradoxes 131001 Progress will appear to slow as posthuman societies expand. As they have more to lose, they will become more conservative. It will take exponentially longer to explore each higher level of technology. The number of states to investigate will always increase faster than the available processing power. New problems will multiply like a Malthusian tide. The solution is to delay the future as much as possible. Inevitably, groups will emerge to exploit the vast resources left fallow. The longer or more common the task, the greater the benefits from standardization, mass production, and automation. But with infinite tasks, efficiency becomes irrelevant. In that case, there is unlimited time to complete them. Even a task taking a billion times longer to complete than necessary is nothing compared to infinity. Human brain emulation 131010 It's easy to make a machine stronger than a human, but not to make one smarter. That's about to change. By 2025 there will be a supercomputer with the same number of dead switches as a human brain has living switches. Each living switch is a single cell a million times more complex than a dead switch made of silicon. However, that extra complexity won't make the living switch function any better or faster (as far as anyone knows). Before then there will be the moment of 'first light', when the first computer achieves minimal awareness. It will be no more than a reptile's sense of self, probably in a partially simulated animal brain. There is nothing to prevent a massive awareness explosion on this planet by the year 2050. The problem is programming, an immense but perfectly solvable problem. The first non-human minds will be intellectual brutes taken to the extreme. Incredibly brilliant and incredibly stupid, there will only be a few of them at first. Left to their own devices, they will focus on improving their brilliant aspect. Extrapolating current progress, it may take another century until organic brains can be scanned, analyzed, and converted into software. By then there will not be any organic minds. This will take too long: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/rise-of-cyborgs.html The year is 1971. 131009 You are strolling through a hippie neighborhood in San Francisco, enjoying the summer evening. Unexpectedly, a beautiful woman appears at your side, and you find yourself chatting about the scene. "Come on, I have to show you something important," she says. With her hand on your elbow, you feel a sudden thrill. You walk together to an old warehouse. There is a moment of doubt, but other people are headed in the same direction. In fact you notice another man being led by a young woman. It's dark and crowded inside, with an expectant buzz. A gruff man leads you through the bustle of a crowded auditorium. "This is where you'll be sitting," he says. When you look around, you notice other men seated on both sides. They also seem confused, but then a big cinema screen lights up. The oversized image of a red-haired man stares down. You sense he's about to say something important. He begins to speak with an almost hypnotic voice. He tells you your very life depends on what you decide next. Welcome to Scientology. Scientology has the concept of a win. 131008 It's part of their successful mind manipulation technology. A Scientologist is supposed to mentally acknowledge when something good has happened to them, or something has gone right. Often, that would be a mistake they did not make, but easily could have made. Natter: a Scientology term for a statement (or origination or verbal ejaculate) with a value not exceeding zero. Any opinion one doesn't want to hear or would be useless or damaging to hear. We need better movie ideas 131007 Superhero films are insultingly dumb. They don't begin to live up to their own conceits. The implication of superpowers existing would be more important than anything they could accomplish. How could such a thing really happen? The same way all other magic could happen, of course. Superheroes merely organize and control their individual quantum states across many universes. This was explained in my novel "Infinite Thunder", downloadable here. YOU could be the first person to read it. Go ahead. No? Oh well. It's time for a real superhero film. I have a detailed treatment available upon request. By the way, we also need another scientifically accurate SF film. Specifically, a Singularity film, or rather about the period leading up to it. The unity delusion 130923 Minds are constructed of layers like a step pyramid, each level increasingly specialized, the higher the narrower. At the bottom it looks like chaos, blocks of low-level rules and reflexes. A mind is made of groups of blocks with limited awareness. Each higher group controls several lower ones. Awareness is the shared diagram of the pyramid, which of course differs from reality. In humans, the mental middle ages do not correlate with what is commonly called middle age, but usually with a person's thirties. 130922 It's an age of relative boredom after the more exciting twenties. Fewer memories are retained from this time than from any period after age ten. It ends with the midlife crisis. Themes of the novel Infinite Thunder 130921 -The great African Ecocide -The return of communism -The eternal battle between the Optimizers and the Multipliers that will define the infinite future http://www.lulu.com/shop/jack-arcalon/infinite-thunder/ebook/product-17532918.html I had a dream once 130920 Hannibal Lecter had to fight a T-1000 after extensive preparation. He had to pay enormous attention, basically run behind it and do many unexpected things. In reality it may not be possible to defeat such a terminator. The T-1000 can instantly scan any object or individual by touch, while the subject doesn't even feel it. Existing MRI scanners use a multi-ton magnet that repeatedly flips the body's atoms without changing their positions. It takes many minutes to make a crude 3-d model that doesn't reveal surface color or texture. With an organized pattern as complex as physics, something like a T-1000 might completely control the portion of nature it occupies, like a reality cancer. Fortunately, the most horrible future problems may be self-correcting. 130919 As the cost of computers plummets, it will become possible to create artificial minds with real awareness. A few decades later, it will be possible to create unlimited numbers of artificial minds. Perhaps they will link into an overmind that will stabilize faster than new threats can emerge. However, that time is still very distant. At the moment, the philosophical problems of awareness alone are so inscrutable it seems inevitable that someone will try to invent a short-cut. The fear of death is too great to wait for the Singularity. Instead of brain scanning, entrepreneurs will offer testing services to record a subject's personality while they are still alive. It will of course be a very crude mind copy. Brain scanners will take so long to develop that billions of people will only survive as very incomplete simulations, less awareness than memory. In fact, for early mind extension and mind backup programs to work, users will have to vastly simplify their lives. This will change society. The practical solution to the mysteries of existence will be to simplify them out of existence. This will also avoid the worst perversions of awareness. Posthumanity will start as a simple matrix of all knowledge. It will become highly correlated, slowly evolving into a powerful higher mind. Human problems follow a strange scale law. 130918 Balancing a bank account or applying for a loan is unspeakably serious business. Participating in ethnic cleansing feels like a relief. The human mystery is that impossible things are easy and easy things impossible. Space launches are child's play compared to understandably explaining space launches. There is no known way to usefully improve human minds or societies. It has been theorized that most alien civilizations are the exact opposite (see "Extraterrestrial Science", Nicholas Rescher). This might be very dangerous knowledge though. Any real mind manipulation method would have to influence and combine many memories at once. It would involve high-power metaphors, the Flynn Effect sped up a thousand times, possibly hypnotic. Like Greg Bear's momerath, it might turn ordinary people into math geniuses. The ultimate use of such a method would of course be an easy to follow diet. How it will all end 131006 According to the transaction interpretation of quantum physics, light particles can only be emitted if they will eventually be reabsorbed elsewhere. We live in a universe that is expanding faster and faster, filling with empty space, cubic miles of nothing appearing between galaxy clusters. They are receding into oblivion, growing fainter by the eon. Photons beamed in that direction will have an increasingly hard time getting absorbed. In a few billion years, the background sky will turn perfectly black. No more light emissions will be possible between galaxy clusters. A laser or flashlight aimed at those patches of empty sky will not turn on. Because of symmetry laws, there will be no more light emissions possible in any direction. The Dark-Out will happen suddenly and without warning. The greatest taboo 130913 The idea that every baby is not mentally identical is today's ultimate heresy. There is no greater thought-crime than to suggest that intelligence and skill-sets are determined by genes, rather than, say, oppression and sexism. No mainstream media (especially FoxNews, the conservatives' 9Gag), would dare suggest that personality is determined by anything other than society, poverty, and schooling. It's the one bias liberals and conservatives can agree to share. Both prefer cultural Marxists over cultural Darwinists. Anyone claiming that racial groups exist, and that they have different talents, interests, and priorities, will find themselves not rebutted but rebuffed. Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but such dissidents are effectively censored and erased from view, like the video of the sinking of the aircraft carrier America, or the interior security camera footage of the Pentagon and Oklahoma City attacks, or the streetview of the Oslo bombing. Really, all this talk about racial cognitive specializations and aptitudes is extremely tasteless. People who focus on such things tend to be a bit suspicious characters. It's crude and rude. And true. That doesn't mean something like racism isn't real too. There are blatantly not enough black cheerleaders, let alone quarterbacks. Racism remains intractable because genetic differences are real. Only if these differences could be defined could they be resolved. It's more than just IQ. The problem will probably solve itself, however. Already responsible for a minority of North American births, whites in their current form will fade away in the near future (geologically speaking), if current trends continue. And why shouldn't they? One consequence of increasing Third World immigration is clear, even if no one speaks about it. Assuming their homelands' have limited carrying capacity, it's inevitable there will be fewer whites in the future, both in absolute and relative terms. Evolution hasn't had time to adapt to one-way open borders. How to feel about that? Well, I'm on the way out. Maybe it's a good thing, what with all the past white imperialism, slavery, cisgenderism and whatnot. Caucasian genes will probably survive, though. An improv life 130912 You can only become more yourself by becoming more fictional. Larry David deliberately improvised crazy situations with his guest stars to invent realistic dialogue for his TV-show 'Curb your enthusiasm'. The best way to get attention is to pretend to be something else. A Lindsay Lohan bulletin board secretly used an old Picasso portrait as its banner, to general acclaim. Large parts of the brain exist not to pay attention, but to block stimuli. Those parts are hard to override (though alcohol can help). The only way to appreciate some types of music is to hear it unreasonably often, or to perform it yourself. You may not like a music genre, but what if a song was about you? Celebrities have secretly enjoyed biting SNL parodies of themselves. The most successful people are always acting out a role, at least in public. Exageration is discovery. Everyone should act more like a parody of themselves. The nature of progress 130904 In an unbounded universe, so many problems exist that madness must be inevitable. Yet every problem has the same solution: science. If science sounds too intimidating, call it truth. But what if the problems themselves are infinite? The first question is whether anyone reading this will manage to escape death, as promised by futurists like Ray Kurzweil. Even that seems a bit unlikely. Technology is advancing too slowly, at least for now. Just because a goal is clear, doesn't mean it's near. As technology improves, it takes an ever larger population to maintain the rate of progress. According to some earlier blog commenters, the future will be a race against dysgenic evolution, as the nerdiest 'First-World' type genes are inexorably weeded out. If true, humanity will need a few more great geniuses before it's too late. More should be done to encourage such minds, wherever they may be found. Biological hierarchies 130909 The macroscopic or top level of life is messy and crude with many inefficiencies, like the appendix and Achilles heel. The sub-microscopic or molecular level is supremely complex and elegant, especially the basic machinery of Eukaryotic cells. Every molecule serves a purpose, and there are very many molecules. More and more things happens further down, but they tend to be the same things repeated absurdly often. Complex quantity adds up to simple quality. It's called the Great Attractor 130907 The gravity of that immense cluster of galaxies (and who knows what else) over 200 million lightyears from Earth has accelerated our Galaxy group by hundreds of kilometers per second. This immense velocity has been accumulated since the dawn of time. The actual attraction is very weak, comparable to a flea pushing against an aircraft carrier. The combined gravitational force from the Great Attractor is like all the people pushing against the earth at once. It would take a millennium to move the planet a centimeter. Towards a guaranteed income 130907 Everyone should get a monthly (or daily) check from the government (who would get it from the taxpayer) just big enough to live on. In return, the recipient would have to behave. That means they would have to stay out of trouble. No crime or social nuisance. Everyone would be able to afford a one room apartment, or even a freestanding mobile home. They would not be able to afford to start a family. Reproduction has always been a right that had to be earned by adding value to society. I would feel like the luckiest man alive under such a system. The half-life of nostalgia 130907 Sometimes the old gets old. Long ago doesn't seem that long ago anymore. It's when an old memory becomes 'worn out' and no longer seems remote. It becomes merely another fact. The phenomenon could be called ultra-longterm memory, but it happens at many scales, from a few days, to a few years, to a decade, to many decades. In fact the start of a movie can seem incredibly remote by the end of the movie, but not by the next day. The handful of nineteenth century memories that remain as of this writing were worn out over half a century ago. The mystery of physics 130901 All the scientists in the world working together can't understand what happens in a region of space a trillion trillion times smaller than an atom for one quintillion quintillionth of a second. This tiny area has an ultra-complex structure known as the manifold. In fact the manifold forms the basic structure of space. It could be thought of as a multidimensional labyrinth through which the most elementary particles must pass. The manifold could be seen as a repeating pattern of tiles or blocks, but it's more fundamental than that, the way a cylinder could be seen as a line of circles. The basic fabric of space could be represented as a maze of twisted pipes and crumpled folds. It has to be, so that all the different forces can pass through without affecting each other. It's more a set of traffic rules pervading space than an object. There's really only one manifold filling the whole universe, the echo of the original equation, acting only on the smallest scale. Fundamental objects known as superstrings zip through there like rubber bands, stretching, splitting, and combining. In a way, the speed of light is the only possible speed, with slower moving objects all made of faster particles bouncing in place. The known laws of physics are rather complex, filling at least several pages with dense equations (and perhaps infinitely many pages if the relative force strengths are unrelated, though that seems unlikely). These few known properties can be combined in exponentially many ways. That means there are literally zillions of possible manifold shapes consistent with known physics, and unlimited more that aren't. Even if scientists knew the exact geometry of the manifold, it would take the most powerful supercomputers to approximate even the simplest interactions. And we haven't even begun to talk about quantum physics, which must be added on top of this framework. The reason for human sacrifice 130901 In regions where agriculture has been practiced for thousands of years (like India and Meso-America), there was a problem almost as serious as starvation. That problem came into play when the most skilled farmers' harvests were too abundant. They couldn't sell their surplus, since there was no way to safely store wealth. They couldn't store the food either, since it would be plundered by marauders. They couldn't give it away, since the recipients would promptly have more children, who would become a dangerous problem. The solution was to trade food for surplus population. Farmers would exchange their food surplus for potential troublemakers from neighboring areas (who would be at the peak of their reproductive years). Intermediary slave traders made sure the victims were sufficiently remote. Human sacrifice never involved useless old people. That would offend the gods. There was a bias against less docile victims who had violated taboos. Sometimes, the excess harvest was consumed at a feast following the ritual sacrifice, a way to demonstrate to the invited neighbors that the surplus had been eliminated. When the first empires formed, they standardized the procedure, transporting redundant individuals to the capital for larger ceremonies. China invented a different solution, forcing landowners to split their inheritances equally among all their offspring, thereby preventing wealthy dynasties from forming and keeping everyone under control. The least competent and successful offspring perished without leaving descendants. That system was often overwhelmed by slowly rising populations, most recently in the nineteenth century. The civil war didn't end until 1949. Population pressures explain most human atrocities throughout history, from the Crusades, to the Mongol Hordes, to the collapse of the Roman Empire, to the 1994 Rwanda machete mass massacres. Of course, overpopulation is rarely mentioned in the history books. It can't really be discussed in the humanities. None of the sinister implications of evolution can be. In a good horror movie, the most frightening things are only hinted at. In evolution, the widespread existence of a biological feature means that closely related creatures without that feature must have died unpleasantly, and left no descendants. You can almost imagine the culling taking place. A new word: Metaself 130901 It's the feeling you would get from a story with yourself as a character. It would be very strange to see yourself from the outside. For a moment, it might feel like you had a deeper purpose. The tragedy of communism 130901 Most dictators who tried to create communist societies really hated the world. They wanted to change it, and to change it fast. They might never get another chance. It would be all or nothing. In this case, all was nothing. Like Islam, communism promised to explain everything and solve all problems, an anodyne panacea of false hope. Something that all-encompassing was necessarily vague. Unfortunately, it was much better at describing problems than at transcending them. The solution was to do the opposite of a bad thing, another bad thing. It didn't make any predictions, or even described its ideal end goal. It was about the journey, not the destination. Communism was the ultimate indulgence, a luxury disguised as the final law of production. In fact, it was useless as an economic process, but required constant pressure to maintain a crude outline of a communist society. Then it had to keep going to avoid a collapse. Communism only fell because, in the long run, it's easier to stop doing something extremely difficult. Every pure ideology must meet the same fate. The Antisocial Network 130901 Imagine a new layer on top of the Net that would allow anyone to comment on any online content. The data processing and storage would start as a browser add-on. At first, it would also require central servers that would be furiously targeted by opponents and governments, so web proxies are essential. The Network will start to accumulate user-generated information about everyone alive. Everyone will be listed, whether they want to or not. It will be a place for slander, rumors, innuendo, and true secrets, which will be sorted for relevance and reliability. Today, such a thing is utterly unthinkable. It would have to emerge organically, and be completely decentralized. Of course an Antisocial Network could also facilitate unconventional and illegal transactions. The Net is still in the very early stages of its existence. Born too soon 130901 The future will be fantastically wonderful. Why couldn't it be the future now? Why don't we exist after the hard part instead of before the hard part? My basic policy 130901 It's very simple: All criticism is true. If people say something or someone is bad, there is a reason. However, it only matters if the bad entity has power. The truth in first impressions 130901 The initial reaction to a new phenomenon is the most profound one. I remember waiting for the first photo of a stealth plane or the Soviet space shuttle like a nerd's Second Coming. Earlier generations awaited the first images beamed back from other worlds, between mythology and dreams. The only way to recapture that feeling would be to produce an image of an actual alien. Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time' novels explain how works of art tend to become meaningless as they become familiar. "If we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth." In 1895, futurists might have predicted long-term transportation trends, but they would have assumed planes and cars would be more unique, like ships. However, first impressions can focus the mind, and expose hidden details. A time traveling peasant would notice things we can't imagine. Ignorance can open windows. The first generation to experience the Internet was vastly more impressed than those who have always known it. Today's new users start out thinking it's aware, so they won't be as surprised when it really happens. On hyper-colossal numbers 130828 Imagine a number so big that, even if it could be described, the explanation could not be believed, since it's beyond human meaning. Like the amount of time it would take to build a starship using only your eyelash - only unbelievably more unbelievable than that. With large enough numbers, magic is inevitable. Blue rhinoceroses play badminton one googolplex nanometers from the Vatican: this is a statistical certainty, as certain as the fact that penguins evolved from fish (assuming of course the universe is actually that big, and matter continues to follow random distribution patterns). Known truths are amazing enough. Every second, tens of thousands of large planets collide throughout the observable universe. Far more incredible is the hidden complexity of physics. The amount of all the things happening all around us is absurd, and therefore never discussed. A chain of exceedingly improbable events, each barely within the realm of possibility, could conspire to place you on the surface of Mars by tomorrow morning. Of course most miracles most likely involve intelligent intervention. The thing about extremely unlikely coincidences is that even if they do happen, they don't happen. If by some statistical extremity you saw two absolutely identical clouds in the sky, they would be no more alike than any other two clouds. They would merely appear identical for a few moments from where you were standing. Ultimate reality is infinitely complex. The journals are full of awesome philosophical claims that can't be verified: You have already been dead, but made a full recovery. You are infinitely famous. The magic is as unlimited as it's inaccessible. "Expect Resistance: a field manual" 130828 This book was written by anarchist neo-hippies in a stream of consciousness. It is about the problem of living in a tightly regulated conformist world. At the end, they reveal how political outsiders should live their lives: the principle of Maximum Ultraism. It means living with minimal compromises. Don't pretend to be normal or mundane. Do what you want at least slightly more often. To make things better, things must often be made worse (as in midlife crises). If you're the type to agonize over embarrassing mistakes, there is only one solution: Deliberately create more embarrassing situations, starting with very mild ones. There is no other solution. Fortunately, it's easy to do. In fact, it's what your subconscious was trying all along. It won't take dressing up like a pimp. It can be done merely by acting normal, and ignoring the inevitable failures. Everyone is good at making mistakes. Eventually, they all seem the same. Just imagine me slapping you, if that helps. Mock needless pain. In fact, look forward to the glitches. The universe is endlessly creative. Most bad feelings are demons. Try to hate them even more. Also, this reduces the inevitable fear of death. It's time to act up. Changing the world is the highest priority. Do everything possible. The intention is the attempt. New mass movements will appear relatively soon (let's call them technocracy). They will seem somewhat cultlike, and won't have too many members, but their goals will be better: solar panels on every roof, urban agriculture, decentralized supply chains and micro-factories. These things are still impossible, but not unimaginable. The solution to procrastination 130828 Do an absurdly small amount of work. Perhaps then you'll find you're able to do more work. Either way, you will have done the largest amount of work you're capable of doing. Are you a computer simulation, as some cutting edge philosophers predict? 130828 As I've already explained many times before, probably not. According to these published anthropic speculations, you almost can't be a simulation (though it's not quite impossible). However, you are a finite (and quite large) fraction of everything that exists. In this case, quite large only means relatively large. As first explicated in the rarely read novel 'Infinite Thunder', that fraction would be one divided by two raised to your number of possible mind states. "The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn" 130828 by Louisa Gilder This is an extremely bad book. It's bad not in a literary sense, but in a more terrible way: it never explains its subject. It combines and shufflees countless quotes made by people who first studied quantum entanglement in a type of literary novel. Instead of current thinking on the subject, we get their initial speculations artfully arranged. We learn absolutely nothing about the profound mysteries and implications of entanglement, but it does tell us something about the people who studied the field. This is the kind of book hipsters buy to feel clever reading at the coffeeshop. Quantum entanglement is one of the last mysteries still awaiting its breakthrough genius. I now know less about the subject of quantum entanglement than before I started reading. For shame! You are not a gadget 130828 by Jaron Lanier This book points out that today's social media and productivity software tend to reduce complex individual behavior. Most computer tools and interfaces eliminate diversity. Everyone is being made to act and even think alike. Choices are reduced to a few standard templates. It's harder to set up a free website now than it was in the year 2000. Personal websites have joined the long list of things that have faded in the past few years, like Saturday morning cartoons, sitcoms, music videos, plastic model kits (Well, the first of these made a comeback). Instead, users submit their content in standard formats to content aggregators like Youtube, Deviantart, Livejournal. The book also explains the hidden costs of today's abundance of free information. In short, it's no longer possible for most artists and authors to make a living from their creative endeavors. This is not expected to change. What do you hate most? 130828 The answer is different for everyone. For liberal hipsters, it would be the belief that genetic differences cause human races to not only look differently, but also to think differently. What I hate most is interface friction. I understand software about as well as the starship Enterprise. I can talk about its flaws for many hours (software that is). Here are two more things I hate - actually not the things themselves, but the way they're depicted, even though both things are very dangerous. They are chimps and explosions - or at least how they're featured in popular entertainment. In the case of chimpanzees, it turns out movie directors only use cute juvenile animals no older than human toddlers, instead of the troglodytic brutes found in the wild. In the case of explosions, filmmakers like Michael Bay don't simulate accurate high-energy detonations, but prefer colorful napalm fireballs. The worst offender was the Stallone vehicle 'Blown Away'. If they could witness a demonstration of real high explosives at close range, many onlookers would faint, go into shock, lose bladder and bowel control, or drop dead. Some teenagers would probably like it. 130828 virtual prostitution We will know that the barriers to international free trade have been removed if it ever becomes possible for loser guys in rich countries to have cheap online sex chats with young women in the Third World. Organizing the brain's mind July 12th, 4:26 A goal of mind extension software should be to invent more complex mental states. That would include a deep awareness of the past, with many semi-forgotten facts combined in new ways. The more detailed, the better. The user would organize everything that matters to them, all their worthwhile memories, a living legend profounder than a drug. Their lives would be fully described and correlated. Basically, my solution to the problem of immortality is to create a digital memory palace. That's all I got. Both an external memory (mostly of the recent past) and a memory index (like a soul constitution), it would be the work of a lifetime. The most important memories would be amplified, revived, and could be improved. The mind software will create artificial eras lasting weeks or months, with themes recalling lost periods of the past. With increased awareness of past events and trends, life could be made to seem much longer. Eventually, enough lifetime data will be recorded that the user could be recreated even if their brain died, though most of their awareness will migrate to their memory palace even before they die. Users will step back and view themselves with almost godlike detachment. Then they will become something else . . . Life Management Software July 2nd, 4:01 Is it possible to give control of your life to a single program? It would be always on, monitoring whatever you're doing on any device; first through questioning and software tracking, then by wearable sensors. The design will be top-down, every function designed for ease of use. The program will learn everything about its owner that can be described objectively. It will measure recurring actions, and act as a time planner, coach, and overseer. There will be rules for all activities, controlled by updateable screens, using different programs for different jobs. At first the software won't understand what it's doing. It will aim high, seeking its user's true purpose by combining metaphors created by other users. Even the simplest productivity tools like activity counters and motion sensors will require sophisticated tracking. One tool will record user distractions, asking them what they're thinking whenever they're zoning out. The program will try to understand its user's personality. Then it will implement whatever life improvement methods appear most likely to work. For humans, the hardest possible sentences are words of true advice (the key word being true). Almost no one can do it, though that hasn't stopped everyone from trying. In order to tell each user how to change their life, data from many different users will have to be compared to detect common traits. Subjects may have to be tricked through long chains of intermediate deceptions. This may lead to the end of secrecy. How hard would it be to reveal all your preferences? Purchase lists, price points, personal obsessions, celebrity crushes. Much of this information would be shared with coworkers, teachers, social networks, and advertisers and retailers. Especially advertisers and retailers. For good or evil, life management software may become the greatest unification tool since the invention of religion. The Next Big Thing July 1st, 13:59 The only thing that can improve the world is technology. This would be true even if the answer to all social problems turned out to be to simplify everyone's life. The world is stuck in a dull interval that may last decades. The start of the twenty-first century resembles the start of the twentieth. The real problem is that no effort is being made to find ways to make people smarter. It does happen by accident, as in the famous Flynn effect, which is caused by the slow discovery of slightly better metaphors explaining and describing reality. The world only changes in tiny steps at the bottom, as new management tools and apps are invented. Economic growth mostly comes from downsizing. There are no grand visions, like a World State or new independence movements. Real change may come from two as yet unimagined technologies. These are mind extension software, and its derivative, mind backup software. They will begin as simple life management programs that slowly demand more commitment. That software alone will transform society if it ever becomes widely adopted. The Top-Down Solution June 18th, 4:29 It will be the ultimate autobiography. Starting with a blank screen, users will fill in the outlines of their lives. The software will impose levels of resolution, allowing the user to zoom in to the past, adding more detail with each step, while focusing on the facts. Much of the data will be extracted through multiple choice tests that look like simple pop quizzes, answering yes/no questions in succession. Lost details of the past will be restored to memory. The subject will be pushed and prodded into pre-designed templates. Each user will be compared to similar known personality types. Every place they ever visited will be mapped. Historical locations and eras will be linked to shared databases. The software can make the timeline come alive by: Finding hidden patterns, using data from many users to make predictions, identifying settings and lifestyles that encouraged creativity, creating VR simulations of the past. Users will also list events by category, with vague timestamps. The most important category will be a list of happy memories. Then lists of all the user's interests. They will also define the setting of their ideal lifestyle. Other Top-Down testing lists include: Linking memories to specific locations, listing common reactions to common occurrences, problem solving and reaction tests, measuring political beliefs, and recreating daily timelines from different periods. The Bottom-Up Solution June 12th, 3:02 This is where it will all start: The first and most important step is to begin an open-ended essay, written in the present tense. There is only one restriction. The text must remain confined within the boundaries of your mind. It will focus on the smallest details, every step in the chain of motivations that brought you to this point. Very self-centered, this would be ideal for introverts. The stories will meander aimlessly, generating new keywords and concept nodes. You will even make stuff up, filling in details about old friends and places. That doesn't matter, as the stories would accurately describe your present memories, which are all that need to be preserved. The past is already dead. The point is to write a true story, not a database. A summation of all the things that matter, it will give meaning to a lifetime. To contain all the important truths it doesn't even have to be readable. Inevitably, it will be almost unreadable to humans. The storylines will cycle back and forth across time and space, revealing long-term patterns. They will zoom in and out, focusing on the tiniest details and the surrounding settings. There will be many repetitions, and descriptions of frequently recurring events. Favorite settings and situations will emerge. These will evoke vague feelings hinting at spiritual insights. Diaries go back thousands of years. Psychometry is still a brand-new art. Eventually, the fragments will have to be arranged chronologically. Mind Reconstruction: the Unification Problem June 6th, 23:01 Someone is going to have to do it first. They will have to write down everything about their existence, all their memories and biases, everything that matters to them. By forcing themselves to describe their life in full, they may also find ways to improve it, mostly by simplifying things. It will require many computer programs working together. Different pioneers will approach the problem from both ends. Some will focus on the big picture, describing their lives in broad outlines, slowly filling in the gaps. Other will start from the present moment, describing their current perception with extreme precision. Unifying their efforts will be only slightly harder than solving String Theory. A last hope June 5th, 5:12 What if you've made a terrible mistake? You were born too early. That means you are going to die even before the relatively primitive mind-backup technology described in this blog becomes available. Everything will be lost. Since there's no god, there can be no afterlife. Or could there be? The only way your mind data could be reconstructed would be if there was a detailed description of your mind. If we rule out time machines or cryonics, what is left? (Perhaps, a version of quantum immortality can stay.) The only solution is to leave a type of testament. A semi-random, semi-autobiographical text file. In fact, the more random the better. Start anywhere, and don't be afraid to ramble. It does not have to be compelling or readable. All that matters is that it contains as much information as possible. Hopefully, your most important memories, traits, and preferences will remain for future historians to incorporate into their simulations of ancient humanity. The only question is what to write down and record. The End of Man June 2nd, 2:02 We may be living at the start of a horror movie, but don't realize it yet. The monster is the System. Few economists are willing to admit our economy has cancer. Perhaps it could be treated, but there is no plan to do so. Part of the problem is there haven't been enough bankruptcies. That includes limiting the endless entitlements promised to powerful interest groups, which remain untouchable. Instead, the learned economists are focused on keeping the present system going at all cost. They take their lessons from the 1930s. That's unfortunate, because the economy has changed in the last quarter century: humans have become less valuable. Only a skilled elite is thriving. Not the slightest effort is being made to improve the rest. It's a political no-no to notice innate differences in intelligence, yet almost no one thinks it's possible to make people smarter. No research is being done in the field of human information transmission. In fact it's not a field at all. Education and healthcare are actually becoming less efficient by the day. Government bureaucrats labor tirelessly to create new barriers. Drug trials are more expensive than ever. There was no reason for the endless horrors of history, except for the core horror: while living in a state of low-grade terror, the populace is utterly opposed to innovation. Possible human mind reconstruction tools: June 1st, 7:50 -Start by talking about anything at all -Open-source multiple-choice tests can determine the mixture of personality types -Everyone's data will be added to their lifetime database, which will be constantly sorted and analyzed -Create a simple self simulation,like the Sims -Create an exact description of where you are now. Past memories can be added later -Describe everyone you know -List all the really important things in your life -Try to simulate and then create false memories with VR simulations -Imagine all your alternate selves in parallel timestreams -Create a detailed adventure story featuring your ideal self in this world -Design your ideal home environment or Memory Palace, perhaps a spaceship or paradise island -Describe your ideal future digital self -Create a 'self religion', with a long-term evolution plan -Total Reality Description: an integrated model of the known universe Posthuman 'immortality' will lead to the end of the self May 31st, 2:21 The first principle is that nothing valuable should be lost. Life is a search for the least bad possible reality. That means rejecting all the bad possibilities, not erasing the good ones. Everything that matters will be backed up, and eventually connected. This will form the basis of a shared awareness, though not in a way anyone can predict. A larger group mind will be like a vast smooth cloud, canceling out most of the unpredictable horrors of individual existence. It's a matter of basic statistics, like insurance. Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke: a review May 28th, 0:44 Our proposed mind reconstruction project could eventually change society in ways vaguely resembling some of the themes in the novel "Childhood's End" by Arthur C. Clarke, so it's time to look at the similarities and the differences. Someone like Arthur C. Clarke only comes along once a century. Today, no one is writing in such a grandiose, cosmic style. While there exist equally smart writers, their field of view is much narrower. There's more to write about than ever before, but the mental barriers seem to be rising even faster. Someone who is genuinely fascinated by the big picture should also be an outsider. The best way to depict the great mysteries is through powerful first impressions, like a moonwalk. It's a mistake to lump Clarke in with the rest of the science fiction genre (which shouldn't even be a genre, as it's too diverse), despite the fact that his work follows from earlier fantastical authors like Wells, Stapledon, and the Campbell and Gernsback schools. Childhood's End is quite simply one of the most awesome books ever written. It is also the most successful trolling attempt of all time. At the core of the book is endless secrecy, with vast powers abiding behind the horizon, a trick developed in the pulp magazines of the Thirties and Forties and perfected here. Original themes can be improved by using them as the base for new stories. That's how action heroes (from Clint to Arnold) and villains (Lecter, Terminators) became more unstoppable with each iteration. The book hints and teases at its mysteries from many directions. Without prior notice, vast spaceships appear to hover imposingly above the world's cities. This image alone inspired later movies and TV series (in a different story, Clarke also came up with the idea of blowing up the Empire State Building as seen in Independence Day). The advanced aliens won't show themselves, but relay their instructions by radio, and meetings behind one-way glass. The UN General Secretary manages to push a lamp against the glass, and he sees something in the moment before the door on the other side slams shut. Of course every development was planned long in advance. The alien Overlords command mankind to form a world state, and a long era of human prosperity begins. After half a century of social improvement, during which all existing religions have faded away, humans are ready for the first real meeting: the alien beings turn out to look rather like giant devils. Apparently they tried to interfere in human affairs once before in ancient history, and failed dramatically. Or did they? We learn that every Overlord is a hundred times smarter than a human. In a strange scene, it is hinted there exist even higher forces in the universe that sometimes communicate through Ouija boards. A human character manages to stow away on an Overlord spaceship returning to their home planet, but again it is hinted the Overlords wanted that to happen. There is a final interval of domestic tranquility, as we follow the goings-on of a family moving to an artists island colony, interrupted only by a tsunami and an Overlord visit. The end arrives when their young son starts having fantastic dreams about remote planets. From there the effects spread with lightning speed. All the children in the world suddenly manifest psychic powers and stop interacting with their parents. In fact they stop moving at all, except for an unfathomable collective 'dance'. That was the plan all along. Now some more nuggets of the truth can be revealed: The children represent the next stage of posthuman evolution. They are subject to paranormal forces higher than anything humans can even begin to understand or imagine, as far above human concerns as humans are above ants. The Overlords quickly ship the world's children to their own continent, where they begin ninety years of telepathic yoga drills. Their minds merge into a single supermind that won't interact with humanity in any way. They won't so much as say hello. No more children are ever born. Eventually, they will join the great cosmic Overmind, which also won't have anything to do with lesser beings, and engage in fabulous activities beyond all conceivable comprehension. What they are doing is fantastically meaningful and important, though we can't understand in any way why it is these things. If the Overlords hadn't intervened, some humans would have discovered these psychic forces by accident, and transformed into a type of psychic cancer cloud threatening parts of the universe. The remaining humans have nothing left to do but wait and die. If this great cosmic spirit is so advanced, why won't it communicate? Humans are capable of interacting with lower lifeforms and even inanimate matter. There is of course no mention of the remaining humans attempting to disown their meaningless descendants. In fact very little of the human reaction is shown. Someone might have proposed to 'fork' humanity, perhaps striving to become like the Overlords, with none of this psychic mumbo jumbo. Of course they would probably have been stopped for unfathomable reasons. The Overlords themselves can't transcend and join the Overmind, since they have already reached their full evolutionary potential. For some reason, they regret this, yet they don't seem to make any efforts to force their own evolution. Eighty years later, the stowaway returns to Earth from the Overlord homeworld (having learned surprisingly little), and finds all the real humans are dead. The 'children' are preparing to transform into entities of pure spiritual energy, which they accomplish by blowing up the world, and the story is over. All the cultural and historical achievements of mankind have been vaporized. All that remains are some artifacts in an Overlord museum. The Overmind has not the slightest interest in such matters. In fact it may eventually blow up the whole universe. It's a brilliant misdirection. The book depicts the replacement of mankind by something completely different in every way as being somehow appropriate. Of course any real evolving civilization should have no trouble retaining its past records. They would form an ever-shrinking percentage of its memory. Memory, and the resulting continuity of the self, may be the essence of awareness. In the future there will be higher versions of the Golden Rule. A plausible candidate for such a rule may be: remember your past. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChildhoodsEnd 2025 May 20th, 0:54 If it was a science fiction story, it would start in a luxury facility on a tropical island. Ultrawealthy executives and celebrities would arrive discreetly in helicopters and supersonic business jets, to be whisked away to beachfront condos. In reality, it will begin in people's home offices and cut-rate industrial parks; like early cryonics work, but with a higher nerd quotient. Eventually, there will be specialized consultants and therapists. The goal will be to precisely measure and define the customer's personality, a process to be repeated at ever greater resolution. Everything that matters to the test subject, all their valuable memories, will be reconstructed and described, first in natural language then in logical software. Millions of trivial details will be listed one by one. Most personality flaws and useless bad memories can be forgotten. To get there, the program will explore the forgotten details of their lives. Entire regions of the past will be recreated in virtual reality. This may start in Japan. The resulting library of the soul will become a model of the subject's ideal self. It should be started as early in the process as possible. Then they can fill it with all the things that matter to them. It's the kind of thing to attract systematic personalities. If they're lucky, they will develop an accumulation addiction, a desire to create a vast digital empire. It may become the best hobby of all time. 2020 May 19th, 1:38 My favorite definition of science fiction is a possible but unlikely situation that the author does not believe will actually happen. Fiction trumps science. The story is dramatically implausible, not a prediction. The truth will be both stranger and more mundane In the rare cases that vaguely SF-like events do happen in reality (like a massive terrorist attack) there is a profound sense of strangeness. Almost always, normalcy is soon restored. And yet, within a few years the world could change beyond recognition. The human immortality project will rely in equal parts on hype and fear. It might take an eccentric billionaire willing to risk everything. A profit-based, top-end luxury service, it will offer the ultimate service: meaningful interrogation. That will take something as rare as a scifi hero: a brilliant listener. Then the client's mind can begin to be copied into an insanely elaborate flowchart, to be later recreated outside their mortal brain. The problems of human brain scanning and mind uploading May 15th, 4:05 At this early stage, the biggest flaw seems to be that a brain scan would have to be absolutely perfect, almost like a teleporter. All the tiny flaws would keep the reconstructed simulated brain from working. It looks like all the mind's deep functions will still have to be reverse engineered. This article gets the necessary timeframe right, well into the twenty-second century: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Strange-Neuroscience-of/132819/ Before the dawn May 13th, 4:42 Just spent another day online, researching the current state of mind downloading. Damn, talk about depressing. Basically, I'm looking for research that could lead to a destructive brain scanner. It would scan and record all the connections between a brain's neurons. Unfortunately, they are very much stuck on the basics. Neuroanatomy in all its forms is a respectable field, but a ridiculous amount of work still has to be done. Eventually, there will be a series of breakthroughs, and then humanity will change. In some unknown future year, the first human brains will be scanned and converted into self-controlling, living VR games. Of course I'm doomed, having been born many decades to early. (no subject) May 2nd, 0:52 In the long-term, this project implies the end of the individual. It involves reverse-engineering human memories and personalities. If such a thing is possible, all human knowledge will eventually be disassembled into one vast shared database: the world mind. a new technology blog! May 2nd, 0:51 Now that the PC is dead, it's time for the next big thing. A new breakthrough is long overdue. Some say it should be a way to lower the cost of education or healthcare. There certainly hasn't been any progress there. Though it seems highly premature, the indirect pursuit of human immortality could be it. Presumably only a small minority will care, but it will be an elite group. The death of death (for some) April 29th, 1:43 Even the simplest mind backup method as described earlier seems decades away, but there may be opportunities for early adopters. The hardest part will be getting started. It's a cultural, not a technical problem. Perhaps by 2035, millions of people will have created detailed timelines of their lives as part of their online activities. As yet unimagined AI software will analyze and map their lives, and create backup personas of each user. Far simpler than their physical brains, these digital mind copies will capture their distinctiveness. Each persona will become an extension of the user's awareness, performing simple tasks while serving their interests. The first step will be background software discreetly recording all user activities. It will create timelines complete with photos, location lists, and online preferences. The breakthrough will be a new online service offering to make its users immortal. It may start as a video game of each user's life, where they can recreate their history from their memories, with vastly improved versions of past experiences. Rewriting the past could reveal many personality traits. An equally remote goal is the invention of training and education software, or rather re-education software. The lack of any progress in human teaching methods is the greatest and least mentioned scandal. The best way to record a human mind may be to try to improve it. Training programs will naturally measure user knowledge, strengths, and abilities. The ultimate outcome will be to convert an increasing fraction of each user into software. Of course no one can imagine such a thing. It will be the most incredible thing that ever happened. (no subject) April 29th 2013, 1:42 Problem: The economy has entered a state of permanent stagnation. http://www.theonion.com/articles/nation-starting-to-realize-new-era-of-american-inn,32156/ Solution: Opting out from the economy. http://theumlaut.com/2013/04/18/why-choosing-to-make-less-money-is-easier-than-ever/ How to write down your memories and become immortal April 26th, 3:56 People back up their pictures and diaries, why not their souls? Unlike direct brain scanning, this form of immortality could actually be started with currently known technology. There are at least three ways to create a memory and personality archive. Top Down: a general historical overview of a lifetime divided into stages and phases Bottom Up: individual memories described in the greatest detail Link Chain: a prolonged free association trip starting from one memory A combination of methods will be necessary to maintain interest. It would take a lifetime to record the outline of a lifetime. Direct brain scanning remains inconceivably remote. More likely, intelligent software will become capable of observing every aspect of its owner's existence. Its main purpose will be to manage the user's life. Mind backup will require fundamentally new ways to extract incomplete memories. The hard part will be recognizing the hidden data in all the ramblings. The answer is hidden in the mysterious structure of the human brain. Long-term memory could be described as tens of thousands of 'short stories' describing distinct events, locations, and situations. These all link to each other, through important 'nodes' that form the personality core. To become a long term memory, an event needs to be described in the brain's internal language. If that process is ever understood, direct mind downloading may become possible. Early attempts at Artificial Intelligence reveal that common sense understanding actually requires immense background knowledge of the world. For a thought to enter awareness, thousands of other memories must also be activated. To describe all these connections between memories, each individual memory must take up gigabits of brainspace. However, a reasonable description of most memories might only require a few text paragraphs that humans (but not software) could easily understand. Of course everyone has so many memories that only a small (but hopefully representative) fraction could be recorded by precisely describing them. The best compromise may be to focus entirely on the human subject as they are in the present. Better than religion April 25th, 3:13 The first symptom is the realization that the universe is beyond horrible. It should be rejected as is. It's infuriating how few people can see this truth. That is the easy part. The second symptom is the dream of technological salvation, to improve nature by replacing it. Progress has slowed lately, but thanks to the power of compound interest and exponential growth, all the awesomeness is still in the future. Some people hope they can be rescued themselves. There is a chance that some people born after 1980 may become immortal. If so, our descendants will be saved by incredibly powerful computers. The hardest research will be done in the last few years before brain downloading becomes technically possible. For the countless victims of history, it will of course be too late. Their memories, dreams and nightmares will be doomed to eternal oblivion. What humans know is only the tiniest sliver of reality. Any really advanced supercivilization will seek to create its own artificial universe. While rejecting the world, nothing that exists should be destroyed, only improved. Everything worthwhile will be digitized. The invention of immortality April 23rd, 4:40 This blog is about the greatest project of all time. It's about the solution to all human problems. The process hasn't actually begun yet. For decades, futurists have been announcing humanity's upcoming salvation. It seems almost easy, though all the hard work still has to be done. There is a bit of a messianic component. If you're going to write about stuff you don't really understand, you might as well aim high. Right now we're still living in the dark ages. The world may even be regressing again. The most fundamental truths (like the excessive complexity of physics) can't even be mentioned, let alone discussed. It's actually a very stable state. The lack of change means humanity's distant descendants may still live recognizable human lives, but the settings will be fantastically different. If all goes well, they will be pure software. Their worlds will get messy without getting dirty, and can be easily rearranged. They will never get bored or depressed, and will have access to unlimited pleasures. The sooner the better. Of course there are even more immense dangers. Unimaginable horrors will be just as easy to simulate as pleasures. This problem will have to be dealt with sooner than anyone may like. The moral minefield is closer than expected. As explained in no fewer than seven books so far, the field of anthropic philosophy will have to handle the ultimate problem of reality. It involves the problem of involuntary existence. There is no other problem. For best results, future minds should be integrated at all levels with their society. The long-term evolution of posthuman society will value stability above all else. Post-human evolution will be severely restricted. Perhaps every day will be like the first day in heaven. The Arcalon Library April 14th, 6:11 Elite contributors describe the future in fiction and non-fiction. Buy the complete collection before it's too late! Several titles will only remain available for a limited time. http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/jackarcalon Singularity Bytes by Jack Arcalon March 13th, 7:26 Singularity Bytes Jack Arcalon's third hard science fiction short story collection. 61 1/2 short and ultra-short SF stories, plus one short novelette. Set in pre- and post-mortal human futures, the book includes: A series of 'alternate world' catastrophes that actually happened in countless parallel timelines, including nuclear wars and deep impacts, The first detailed story about the technical aspects of virtual reality sex, Visits to two planets in our solar system and unimagined worlds in other galaxies, Unstoppable killing machines, Brief vignettes of cosmic strangeness, And more problems affecting artificial universes expanding to infinity. The final story 'Antilibertarian' is a 'worst case' extrapolation about what may happen if current political and social trends continue. themes: AI, virtual reality, spaceflight, astronomy, posthuman, anthropic theory, physics, aliens Paperback version: http://www.lulu.com/shop/jack-arcalon/singularity-bytes/paperback/product-20723078.html Ebook version: http://www.lulu.com/shop/jack-arcalon/singularity-bytes/ebook/product-20723093.html New book is ready March 13th, 7:17 One of our online bookstores: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/jackarcalon Start a memory folder January 2nd, 0:03 The longest step (but the easiest to start) will be to create the most detailed autobiography possible. Begin with a single page, and keep adding data until you die. Organizing that data into a mind copy will of course be exponentially harder, but that work may be done by as yet unimagined computers. How to begin January 2nd, 0:02 The first step of mind mapping is to start recording everything. Keep track of your location, calendar, all purchases, and Net activities from now on. That alone will require an all-encompassing new software environment. A new way of life. The Method January 2nd, 0:01 To become digitally immortal, you will first have to change yourself, by reorganizing, standardizing, and most of all simplifying your mind. This process will reveal the unique parts of your personality, as your most important memories and interests are recreated. You will have to discard many useless traits and biases. Ultimately it would also give your life meaning. This will become humanity's final obsession. The second principle of this blog January 1st, 23:55 Of course it all seems unlikely. In fact, it can be shown to be impossible: No matter how many years you spend answering questions about yourself, any attempt to reconstruct your mind from the answers alone will be incomplete. Even incredibly detailed observations of every part of your life will be inadequate. Could there be a better way? That question will be our main focus. Human mind downloading January 1st, 23:52 It helps that the layout of human brains is consistent. While mostly unmapped, the basic architecture of human brains is much simpler than all their memories. Mind reconstructions would happen by comparing the subject to other, similar people. a future obsession January 1st, 23:52 The only hope for any type of afterlife would be to copy your mind while you're still alive. After your death, the mind copy could be converted into a self-aware simulation. Of course the logical principles behind awareness would have to be discovered first if such a thing is possible. A mind simulation might require a computer as powerful as all of today's chips combined. The immense journey: mind mapping January 1st, 23:49 Almost nothing is known about human memory, that vast network of connections arranged in mysterious layers like a frozen explosion. Could such an impenetrable labyrinth be meaningfully recreated merely by observing its behavior? The mind mapping subject could be asked to describe all their memories. They would tell the story of their life to a very smart computer able to ask leading questions. It seems impossible, but the alternative is total oblivion. The first principle of this blog is that direct brain scanning (as seen in scifi movies and popular science books) will be much too difficult to achieve for many decades to come. The Simple Immortality Project (new blog title) by Jack Arcalon The Exit Solution December 22nd, 2012 This world is rather bad. In fact a case could be made it is extremely horrible, depending on one's position. Attitude also matters. The simplest and most neglected solution to this problem is to basically reject the world. Actually, that is only the first step. I've been thinking about what it means. The best possible future would be to replace human reality with a computer simulation. Finding a way to let everyone escape into cyberspace is the noblest goal. More people should make it their priority. It could be a new lifestyle. Of course almost no one has made this transition yet. New project underway December 22nd, 2012 Time to change the focus of this blog a little bit. New short SF story anthology: A Sextillion Skies October 4th, 2012 A Sextillion Skies 73 hard-SF short stories by Jack Arcalon Because technobabble should mean something! A collection of 73 short and ultra-short science fiction stories, and one longer novelette, about speculative technology, science, and philosophy. Major themes include the colonization of space, new physics, space wars, inhabitable virtual environments, grand conspiracies, social evolution, mind and brain scanning, machine intelligence, the post-human Singularity, geometrically expanding hyperminds, and the ultimate limits of the knowable. Themes: the Singularity, AI, anthropic principle, hard science fiction, short short stories, philosophy, space exploration, aliens The second SF anthology. By the same author: > Rocksliderider v. Eyewallsurfer > Infinite Thunder PAPERBACK EDITION: http://www.lulu.com/shop/jack-arcalon/a-sextillion-skies/paperback/product-20375816.html EBOOK EDITION: http://www.lulu.com/shop/jack-arcalon/a-sextillion-skies/ebook/product-20375838.html I blame the bureaucrats September 1st, 2012 And the liberals. On the end of progress: http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2010/06/human-capability-peaked-about-1975-and.html Any week now . . . August 24th, 2012 Short story collection 2 New book coming soon! August 22nd, 2012 Final editing is now in progress . . . ROCKSLIDERIDER VERSUS EYEWALLSURFER August 22nd, 2012 40 hard SF short stories by Jack Arcalon Forty hard science fiction short stories, set in the distant and not too distant future. Extreme philosophical speculations, anthropic paradoxes, Singularity stories, alien intelligences, and the evolution of strange, almost immortal societies. Paperback: http://www.lulu.com/shop/jack-arcalon/rocksliderider-versus-eyewallsurfer/paperback/product-20207762.html ebook: http://www.lulu.com/shop/jack-arcalon/rocksliderider-versus-eyewallsurfer-ebook/ebook/product-20207809.html How the libertarians could double their vote total in the November 2012 US presidential election July 14th, 2012 All it would take is one good slogan, pasted on a few billboards and many bumper stickers: RADICAL CHANGE Gary Johnson 2012 This is the one thing no other candidate would ever promise. And the promise would be absolutely true. If all the voters could be convinced of this fact, the libertarian vote could approach 2%, by far its highest percentage ever. The Angry Futurist (new paperback book) April 14th, 2012 Columns, articles, and essays about the problems of progress. The world is getting stranger, not better. http://www.lulu.com/shop/arcalon-productions/the-angry-futurist/paperback/product-20042381.html short SF story Alternate Timelines: Space Future April 14th, 2012 The immense Soviet shuttle Bolshoi could lift almost a thousand tons to low earth orbit. Its brightness changed as it rotated end over end in the lethal sunlight. Luminescent white on top, a tennis-court-sized red flag on a great ogival delta wing, its underside a charred black hide. Its destination was the wheel-shaped Great Circle international space station, which had taken a thousand Bolshoi launches to assemble. In a nearby orbit, NASA was building its experimental nuclear cruiser, while ESA assembled the giant elements of its solar power array. Japan had a Fifth Generation robot space factory, while China was attempting to leapfrog ahead by building the first moon city. India was preparing to launch a mysterious oval disk from Sri Lanka Spaceport. Various corporations and non-profits operated dozens of smaller orbiting complexes and observatories. The universe roared electromagnetic static in all frequencies. The New Alliance was already listening for aliens. Humanity had finally reached maturity. People used logical and programming terms in daily conversation. Ever subtler levels of coolness were being perfected. It was agreed this was the most interesting time in history. In fact, things would never get more interesting. Human competition was likely to end within a decade. It was inevitable. The Master Plan demanded it. The Plan had emerged spontaneously during the fourth decade of detente, combining the resolutions of the Great Party Congress, the RAND proposals, and the MIT/MITI project. In January 2010, the Western and Communist computer networks had been linked for the first time. To prevent paranoid nightmares from coming true, all computers received a new core commandment, inalterably encoded at every level. The Master Plan valued ethical survival above all. Stability came second. Using the purest logic, it attempted to calculate the solution to every human problem. A series of compromises would result in inexorable progress. After a few weeks, the Plan computers were already looking a millennium ahead. It turned out that humans, or at least human-like beings, could survive forever while spreading across the universe, living human-like lives. Of course they would have to be improved first. Immortality was merely the first step. Eventually every human cell would become aware of its purpose, and ultimately every particle. The universe would be made of subatomic computers serving the Master Plan. While still recognizable, future society would be immensely more advanced than it appeared. Man's descendants would be the surface layer. Destiny made real, they would live the most meaningful lives. Laboring in the background, the Plan computers would calculate every conceivable future, rejecting all but one. It had already begun. Civilization would represent the highest refinement of awareness. In their austere academies and throne rooms, human descendants would ponder social paradoxes for centuries at a time, their answers illuminating infinitely deeper mathematical systems. Feuds would be rare but drawn out for ages. When the universe perished a trillion years from now, Posthumanity might have advanced enough to create a better one. Distant civilizations had already set out on this path. As the Plan looked further ahead, corporations formed to take advantage of its insights. In just a few weeks the international scene changed completely. In Earth orbit, the opportunities were greatest. It was feared some space complexes might declare independence. Others might be too dangerous for the new order. Two stations suspended operations. Officially, the crews expected to be recalled to Earth to receive the first cybernetic implants. In fact they appeared to be combining their stations into a powerful complex to stake a claim to the asteroid belt. They thought they were pioneers. Contingency plans were prepared, Special Forces put on alert. This was the most dangerous time. The Master Plan needed to stabilize mankind during its transition. It needed a distraction. One option was to send America's nuclear space cruiser Ayn Rand to the newly discovered ice planet Aphelos, one light-week above the plane of the ecliptic. Returning the crew to Earth would require all nations to cooperate to build a rescue ship. This might bring humanity together. Even stranger notions soon emerged. The shuttle Bolshoi circularized its orbit by firing its ion thrusters, and maneuvered to deploy its payload. Rumors that it carried the largest fusion bomb ever built, assembled from the redundant heavy hydrogen stocks of the world's remaining nuclear powers, were not quite true. In fact, it was merely a tightly folded, spherical framework to contain the world's heavy hydrogen: a shell designed to precisely focus its detonation energy in one point of spacetime. One million metric megatons of power might be enough to tear a hole in reality, if the energy could be maximally compressed by a Feynman-Witten InfraLens. The measured diameter of that self-healing rip, as revealed by patterns in the rebounding shockwave, would reveal the exact ratios between the elemental forces of nature. These ratios could be written down as a very long number. It was already known that that number contained a binary message. Even the Hyperconducting-Hypercollider could only read the start of that message. There were hints of a strange alphabet, the top of a bitmap image that looked like a hand. Floating at the center of the Great Wheel, the commander watched the station rotate around him. White-clad workers looked like angels below. Outside, the shell slowly unfolded into a geodetic globe, like an immense digital simulation come to life. The glittering latticework seemed to trap the stars within it. Nearby hung the nuclear cruiser that would transport the ensemble to the far side of the sun, where the detonation would occur. Every spare screen was filled with news, opinion, and slightly hysterical speculation, the birth pangs of a new era. It looked like this might be a busy month. |
