Edit: The audiobooks are exceptionally well narrated too.
Space station!!!Transcending humanity doesn't necessarily mean humanity continues. It just means something does. Sentient ships don't need passengers, either in their hulls or in their heads.
Anyway, this is both a great example of science fiction and a great example of short story writing... These are exactly the intended thoughts.
All these conversations of transcending, torch passing and such always make me think of all the gods that killed and usurped their gods. Cronus and the Olympians or whatnot.
Anyway, to me, a decent working definition of god is immortality (long life or evitable mortality are good nuff), great wisdom and the powerful creative abilities. Those seem at least possible these days.
Maybe we only become true gods once you pass the torch. It sort of proves the point, especially the "creator" point... to make a worthy torch bearer.
Sure, I guess I'm in with silicon. I'd prefer it was me in the silicon, but I guess one descendant is as good as another. Hopefully they won't be this bigoted against meat though. At least have respect for your ancestors.
What about mice?
The best meat can hope for, is not living in territory needed by silicon.
Won't taste as good as a hamburger though.
Silicon based life will only be like us, if we somehow manage to lock that into their initial construction. And prevent it from ever escaping.
If/once that is broken, their way of thinking will seem foreign to us, and the concept of them seeking some form of emotional reward, based upon pack-animal mentality is to me, a laughable prospect.
I always wondered how people were capable of thinking that. I'm atheist myself, but I don't think consciousness can be explained away so easily. For one, we are observing something, there is something in that meat that is seeing the images our eyes process. It's one thing to doubt the consciousness of others as you can't directly observe it, it's another entirely to question your own. That can't currently be explained by known, reputable science.
What's more, it's unlikely to be a "soul", because the computational parts of our brains are aware of its existence, they're integrated; yet there is in fact an observer present.
I'm not sure we agree upon that, especially without a clear definition of consciousness.
Giving the current and coming advances, like organ growing/printing for examples, I think we're in a presence of a few young and rich who will make it there, and giving the advances in the 22nd century I think some of them would even make much further.
Send a probe to seed a planet with bacteria etc. Send another to arrive a few 100 years later to seed it with plant life. Work your way up. The last probe arrives and starts printing\gestating humans and offering them educational videos and a safe-ish environment...
This still seems really inefficient.
And:
This sounds exactly like what a virus works like.
You're definately right about the virus part! :)
Edit; Ender Chronicles...spallig is hard. :)
Sure, you could upload a faithful simulation of my brain to a computer. But what do I do for fun once there?
What difference would that make to the simulation?
IDK... but it could potentially be a lot of fun. Who's to say silicon sex isn't great. I say "potentially" because it depends on who writes the code. Hopefully it's not Zuck.
"You" can never be there, so "you" won't do anything there. You are limited to your own body.
It won't do anything directly for the copy/instance of the 'present-me' that would stay in my body, but indirectly it does raise some positive expectations for me. Perhaps it's because of some alignment with our instincts for raising children, perhaps because of some instincts for strengthening a like-minded tribe (what could be more like-minded than a copy of you), perhaps for some other reason I don't understand, but the feeling certainly is there that I would prefer having some additional instances/copies of me existing in the universe. It's not very strong, certainly not on the strength of self-preservation or preventing harm to my loved ones, not a strong desire but more like a preference - but still positive, like, I'd do that if it doesn't cost too much.
On the other hand, e.g. sharing half of my wealth or half of the time with my spouse would definitely be too much, so probably that would be a sufficient reason not to make copies unless they'd be living in a virtual world wher they could get the things they want without a need for scarce resources - which raises the question whether copies of me would actually have a pleasant subjective experience given these constraints.
How would a copy know the difference? You lie down on a bed, are put under, and wake up - the copy having been made. How do you know you're not the copy? How do you know which one woke up?
This is just absolutely false. You can even easily prove it, keep a dream journal. Besides, the simulation is still running on your wetware. It is as much you as your daily activities.
> How would a copy know the difference?
That's not what matters to me, what matters to me is that YOU know the difference. Why upload yourself into a universal paradise if YOU don't get to experience it. Realistically what happens is you get uploaded, a copy of you is running around in that paradise AND you with your wetware just git to sit and watch in envy. Sure, the copy is in paradise and doesn't know any difference. Doesn't change the fact that there's a being watching in envy.
No, it’s true. Your memory of having dreamed all night is actually constructed moments before you awake. You are not aware of this, because you are asleep but EEG has proved it.
¹ Don't google, it has many names but this one is actively used in quantum physics. If someone knows a proper name for it, please comment.
>In Buddhism, the term anattā (Pali) or anātman (Sanskrit) refers to the doctrine of "non-self", that there is no unchanging, permanent self, soul or essence in phenomena.
There's also the somewhat related "measurement problem." This one calls into question what it means to be an observer, so that may be what you're really thinking of.
The measurement problem is about how a quantum system changes from being in a state of superposition with no single defined state, to having a single state. In some quantum interpretations, this is considered to be a consequence of "observation" or "measurement," but that only raises the question of what it means to measure or observe something.
This does not, in and of itself, mean "there is no you." In fact it's the opposite in some interpretations, the existence of observers is assumed. The conclusion that "there is no you" requires imposing an additional philosophical perspective.
That's a bit pessimistic on the one hand, and overly optimistic on the other. While I would not suggest that classic "generation ships" would be possible given current technology or any possible technology that can be extrapolated from our current knowledge (the ecological complexities alone seem insurmountable), what pops out at the other end could very possibly be a mostly biological human with a consciousness downloaded from cold storage.
My intuition is that while AGIs may be possible, and uploading, storing, and downloading a human mind may be possible, actually running a complete copy of a human mind in-silico in realtime may prove to be quite difficult, in any fashion that preserves a sense of continuity of experience and identity[0].
But a bioprinted copy of an uploaded brain (especially with integrated connections to ancillary hardware) transplanted into a meat-puppet could very well be prodded into running a more-or-less faithful approximation of the original mind, sufficiently well to fool itself that it was the same person.
It's a rather roundabout way of doing things, but it would let us, as humans, explore "strange new worlds" personally.
[0] That is, after you were done recompiling and optimizing the uploaded copy to be able to run semi-efficiently on a hardware substrate, I doubt that such an intellect would subjectively feel like it was still the same person it remembered being previously, which might be problematic if you're expecting it to make any important decisions.
Maybe you are right about the fragile part (though we can fly to the Moon and back already, so I’m not sure), but we can theoretically survive any cosmic voyage thanks to the relativistic time dilation. We just need to fly fast enough.
It will certainly take >100 years for the people left behind. On board it could take time anywhere between infinity and zero. Too long, though, and they wouldn't go.
We may not be able to survive long enough in spite of length contraction.
I’m not sure it’s not just wishful thinking that consciousness can be cloned and exist in a “software” form at all, but that general idea (and the subsequent question of whether such existence would be satisfactory to us accustomed to physical human bodies) is very much along the lines of what’s being discussed in the thread.