X-Message-Number: 5332
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 1995 20:19:23 -0800
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: SCI.CRYONICS Uploading And Growth
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In #5323 (Thomas Donaldson) On Sat, 2 Dec 1995 Wrote:
>if we look around us we see that there are many things
>which show no appearance of being computer programs
At first glance they don't appear to be programs, at first glance a picture
on a television set does not appear to be made of thousands of little dots.
>if you want to claim that we are "already in a computer"
>you're welcome to do so, but [it] will basically strip
>your claim of all empirical sense
Why? The Norton disk doctor program can examine the Norton disk doctor
program. I don't see why in principle an artificial life form might not
discover that if it looked close enough at a curved line in it's world it
would find the curve a bit jagged and made of pixels. It might start to
understand the language it was written in. It might even discover
contradictions (bugs) in the operating system.
I don't claim that anything like that has been proven in our world, yet.
I must however admit that sometimes when I think about the quantum (digital)
nature of physics and the weirdness of quantum mechanics I wonder if it could
be true.
>our senses give us the results of lots of processing
And the universe itself performs a lot of processing, and does it very
quickly, before the signal even reaches our senses.
>nor will the computers into which we are "uploaded" look
>or operate at all like the silicon ones we use now.
Obviously, otherwise we could do uploading right now.
In #5324 (Thomas Donaldson) Wrote:
>To say that a rate of growth is exponential, without
>giving the exponent (the coefficient of the x term in
>exp(c * x)) says nothing at all.
I think it says a great deal. Eventually an exponential function [F(x)=n^x]
will grow MUCH faster than ANY geometric function [F(x)=x^n] and MUCH, MUCH
faster than ANY arithmetic function [F(x)=x*n]. This is ALWAYS true,
provided that n is greater than 1, even if by a very small amount, although
it may take quite a long time before the explosive growth of the function
becomes apparent.
>it seems to me that since we HAVE past records of the
>growth of cryonics, it would be foolish not to use them
>to make such an estimate.
Yes, certainly. To repeat, I don't know how fast Cryonics will grow and I'm
not saying your estimate is wrong, only that it could be, and shouldn't be
taken as gospel. If you could always extrapolate past trends into the future
with a straight line, then predicting would be easy. It's not.
>Christianity took HUNDREDS of years to spread through
>the Roman Empire.
As late as 303 AD, practicing Christianity, or practicing any nontraditional
religion for that matter, was a capital crime in Rome. Although there were no
polling organizations around at the time, this practice seems to have enjoyed
a great deal of popular support, indeed that is the main reason they were in
force.
Twenty years later in 323 AD, The Emperor Of The Roman Empire, Constantine,
publicly announced that he himself was a Christian.
As in Geology, slow steady change is important in human affairs, but also as
in Geology, sudden catastrophes are important too. Large comets rarely hit the
earth, but when they do the change is profound, the last one hit 65 million
years ago and led the way for the rise of mammals, and incidentally us. When
will a large "comet" strike the realm of human affairs? Almost immediately,
geologically speaking.
John K Clark
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