X-Message-Number: 5323
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Just what is this "reality"?
Date: Sat, 2 Dec 1995 10:37:00 -0800 (PST)

Hi again, especially to the Nanopeople:

Peter Merel and John Clark once more miss the point. My definition of "reality"
was deliberate, and I am well aware that it would include the results of 
some computer programs. Of course, if we look around us we see that there are
many things which show no appearance of being computer programs (and if you
want to claim that we are "already in a computer" you're welcome to do so, but
to include those OTHER things will basically strip your claim of all empirical
sense: yes, God may well exist, but he never shows himself in the world or in
our minds?). 


It was specifically because I knew very well that our senses give us the 
resultsof lots of processing that I made that definition. Saul's version 
attempts to
encapsulate it: if you fall off a cliff in virtual reality, it's a scary 
experience but nothing more. If you fall off a cliff in reality, you die.

Whether it can be summarized so easily I'm quite unsure. If we did NOT die but
found ourselves waking from a dream (computer-created or not), that too would
be one more unexpected event --- and a sign that contrary to what we thought
as we saw the ground fast approaching us, we had NOT been living in reality.
But regardless of twiddles about definitions, it's very clear that adding 
one more layer of unreality by deciding to live in a "virtual reality" which
you know, beforehand, has been specifically created, is an act which will,
longterm or shortterm, become an act of suicide.

And now for the hyperintelligences of 100 years from now:

Vernor Vinge, as most people on the Net know, is an author of science FICTION.
SF has sometimes raised issues but it's solutions to them have generally fallen
into the ridiculous. It hasn't even dealt totally with technology, of which 
our growing understanding of genetics and growth and development play a large

and increasing part: the number of stories in which immortality becomes 
possibleremains a small proportion. Usually such stories leave such technology 
to
aliens, and when they do not, to mad scientists, and when they do not give it
to mad scientists it still never goes well.

I do not pretend to predict the future. I will, though, say first that I doubt
very much that it will take millions or even thousands of years to decide
whether a suspendee and be revived and to revive them. I would put it in the
low hundreds. Not only that, but a serious study of how brains AND computers
work tells me that the entire idea of "intelligence" will need rethinking. 
Even some animals have specific memory abilities much exceeding our own.
There are lots of specific abilities which brains or computers can implement;
we may discover a need, in the future, for abilities which we can't now   
specify. Whether such abilities make us more "intelligent" becomes no more than
a matter of definitions. And most importantly, if WE (collectively) discover
such needs, and implement them on OURSELVES, then none of them will imply
that we have forgotten our previous selves, nor forgotten our interest in 
reviving our friends and our predecessors. If anything I would expect that
interest to increase --- not because of any specific changes, but because 
we would presumably have our ability to revive people increased, if only a 
little bit.

Of course, any such process, uploading, redesign of our living wetware brains,
or whatever, would be applied to human beings much like us: ergo, if revived,
we could certainly follow the same path to those abilities.  

And finally, if you really want to talk about "hyperintelligence" bringing up
Einstein is a very bad idea. First, Einstein did not invent SPECIAL relativity;
the equations and their interpretation both had been worked out by Minkowski
and Poincare. Second, even for General Relativity the tools needed and the
questions it tries to answer lay all about: Riemannian and other kinds of
manifolds, by that time, had been studied in some detail by earlier research in
math. Despite a desire to attach such things to Heroes, it's very unlikely
that one or more people would not have worked out, either separately or 
together, some version of General Relativity. After all, Einstein, though 
certain quite intelligent (in his way) was only a human being and had the
kind of abilities other human beings also have. A reading of current physics,

in which theoretical physicists are still grappling with some way to 
incorporaterelativity into current theory (the thing to look for is the number 
and variety
of suggestions and attempts tht different physicists have made, not the 
finished answer) shows just how such things happen in reality.

And as for "uploading", as a mathematician who has paid close attention to 
developments in biology, biochemistry, and molecular biology for years, I 
will say that it's very unlikely to happen in the way most exponents of 
uploading envision, nor will the computers into which we are "uploaded"
look or operate at all like the silicon ones we use now. That whole question
about uploading will become moot: revivals may not consist of giving one
simple drug and seeing the suspendee sit up, but they won't involve 
computers of the present kind either. I would say about this, however, that
it is quite irrelevant to the key issues which Nanopeople raise. After all,
just becoming a computer --- if we have anything to say about it --- will
hardly change our desires and wishes. And one of these will be to revive 
suspended patients.

Sure: add 10,000 years and we may all be forgotten. But it's very unlikely that
revival will need 10,000 years.

			Best and long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson


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