Life Isn’t About Anything In Particular
August 17, 2011
There has been a thought stream plaguing my mind for some time now, and it won’t leave my head. I don’t even know how to frame the subject, or introduce it. There’s two ways you can spin the same idea. You could say life has near infinite possibilities. Another would be to say that life doesn’t seem to be about, or limited to anything in particular.
When I was younger, I used to study a lot of philosophy and I always wondered about the ideal human. How could I become this ideal creature? What would I be like? What would I think about? How would I spend my time? As I wondered about this, I thought of all the ways people define themselves. I wanted to weigh all the different ways of life on a scale, and think out the consequences to each way of thinking, eventually determining an “ideal” way of life. Maybe you define your life in terms of personal relationships. Maybe you define your life in terms of your career, love life, friends, family, hobbies, interests, religion, political positions, or anything. But is life about any of those things? Does it have to be? The deeper you probe into that question, the more puzzling it becomes.
The first point is this: You don’t really care about anything. This fact is the hardest for me to swallow. You can take any person, myself included, and give me ecstasy, or a dose of heroin, or cocaine, and I’m not going to care about anything else while under the influence. I’m not going to care how I look, what I say, what I do, my relationships with others, my career, my family, friends, interests, or anything else. I’ll lose all my interests in the world. If I keep that up, my brain will reprogram itself to want nothing other than that drug because it will release my brain’s reward chemicals and make me feel happy. That’s it. Your entire life is a struggle and hope that your brain releases reward chemicals leaving you feeling happy. If you artificially release those chemicals with drugs, you lose interest in EVERYTHING else.
Does that bother you? It does me. I don’t like it at all.
Have you ever read about experiments neuroscientists do with rats? They’ll hook the rat up to a device which injects it with cocaine if they press a lever. What happens next is quite instructive. It eventually discovers it can get high by pressing the lever, and it soon loses interest in food, sex, water, or anything else. It just sits there, pressing that lever until it gets so weak that it can’t even stand to push the lever down. I’m sad to say this, but human beings, and all the elaborate actions we perform, are just like that rat and lever. We just have to work harder to get our next hit.
This underlying structure of life is so utterly bizarre. The situations by which our brain is hard-wired to release reward chemicals were programmed by natural selection over millions of years. It’s the ultimate basis for the psychological yin and yang of life. Nothing in this world is ugly or beautiful. Nothing in this world has value in and of itself. Nothing in this world is right or wrong. It’s commonly believed that we give life value. While I somewhat agree with that, I also think it’s misleading. It’s not like we have a choice in what we value or find beautiful. Think for a moment and ask how those things got their value? How does our brain decide which things are valuable and which are not? Reward chemicals.
What do you find beautiful? What do you find tasty? What environments do you find most peaceful and appealing? And most of all, how were those preferences chosen? When you look deeply into our psyche, they were chosen by evolution during our development on the African plains. Certain situations are wired into us to release reward chemicals, and these spurts of happiness are what drive us to do the things we do.
Take the other day. I was feeling really depressed. I don’t normally get so depressed but that day I was really feeling out of it. I didn’t feel like doing anything. The most beautiful woman in the world could have approached me and asked me to dinner and I would’ve just shrugged and walked off. I felt terrible. I didn’t care about myself. I didn’t care about the world. I didn’t care about anything. I went home, stared at the wall, and then said, “Why do I feel so terrible today?” Then I took a nap, and when I woke up I felt fine.
After feeling much better, I went walking around outdoors and felt rejuvenated. I had went out for a walk when I was depressed, but I had no interest in anything. Now it was different. I was looking around me, attentive to the breeze, watching the tall grass sway in the wind, and staring up at the poofy clouds. My mind was reflecting on science, and I was once again curious about the mysteries of the universe. It’s reward chemicals.
We’re driven on like cattle, coerced into doing whatever gives us pleasure in our heads. We’re thrown into this world, clueless, and we have to find the things in this world which make us feel fulfilled, happy, and joyful. That’s not an easy job, and many people seem to give up on the quest altogether. They try to content themselves with whatever state they find themselves in. But all in all, our brains are stingy with the rewards. They egg us on for continual improvement, new novel experiences, and change.
When I look at all the suffering and misery in the world, I wonder about the point of this exercise. I look at our origins, starting from the big bang and working your way to the formation of our solar system, the Earth, and the evolution of life. Then I just lay in bed wondering, “Why? This isn’t a very good way of doing things.”
Recently I was reading a book by Howard Bloom. It might’ve been Genius of the Beast. Anyways, he made a really interesting point. He noted how the human body has a shut-down mechanism when it doesn’t integrate with the world around it. If you don’t feel like you fit in, and don’t feel like you have any purpose for living, and are not important to a cause, social group, family unit, etc., your body goes into this chemical shutdown mode. You fall into depression, which releases chemicals like cortisol, which start destroying your arteries, brain cells, and heart tissue. You go into a resource conservation mode, which includes wanting to just lie in bed, you stop eating, and withdraw from all social contact. Basically you just want to crawl into a hole and die.
This goes against what a lot of evolutionary biologists tell you. They say we’re self-replicating machines, primarily concerned with our selves, and spreading our genes. But how does depression and the release of cortisol help spread our genes? Bloom argues that we’re part of a social organism and that is what’s really growing and evolving. You have to see the whole. We’re social organisms and if you disconnect us from the pack, and remove purpose from our lives, we go into shutdown mode. I think he’s right.
People want more than material comfort. As I searched for the ideal man, when I was young and naive, my first conclusions were that ideally you’d want a big comfortable home, nice things, and plenty to do with yourself. But no, the human brain isn’t that rational. Your brain compares your life to others, and it also constantly asks if you’re contributing toward some advancement of your species, and your group. If not, no amount of material possessions is going to make you feel happy. Your life needs purpose! But what is purpose?
I don’t know if this is a perfect conception of purpose, but generally, you have to find something you believe in. It doesn’t matter what it is. You may join some alien conspiracy group who believes little grey men are going to come pick you up ten years from now, and your purpose in life is to spread the word that our future saviors are on the way. If you believe that, truly, deeply, you can live a happy and fulfilled life taking part in that group’s activities and advancing your cause.
And here’s what’s so stupid. You can be the most brilliant human being on the planet. You may understand technology and science beyond any other of your time. You may be a master of philosophy and government, and be literate in all the classics. You’re the very pinnacle of refinement. If aliens were to truly visit the planet, they would search the land and say, “This human is the finest of them all!” You may have used your intelligence to control vast resources from coast to coast all across the planet. But still, if you don’t feel you have purpose, yet that loon from the alien conspiracy group does, THEY will be happy and you will not! The loons are just wasting time and energy, not doing anything constructive or worthwhile. But still, they’re happy and you’re not. What a stupid system! But such is life.
What’s so ironic about this madness is that the same knowledge which aids you in your survival, such as understanding the world, your true origins, etc., also makes you feel depressed. It’s just how we’re emotionally wired. It’s much more emotionally fulfilling to delude yourself that we were created by some spirit being who floated over the deep, and that the purpose of our lives is to serve this father figure who loves you unconditionally than to understand what’s really going on.
Those who are religious and superstitious often ascribe everything to some divine plan and purpose. When a person falls ill with some sickness, they don’t say, “What is the cause and how can we avert this in the future?” They instead say, “All things happen for a reason, and God has a plan for this, and God’s ways are higher than our ways!” In reality the disease is caused by a bacterial infection and bacteria are mindless creatures who know nothing but, “Replicate, replicate, must replicate. Must make more copies of myself. Destroy and eat any material around me that I can digest to make more copies. Replicate, replicate, must replicate.” Yet they ascribe the sickness to some sort of divine justice, sin, and so forth, and even feel emotionally fulfilled and righteous as they bring down condemnation on innocent people. When you’re intelligent, you look at how the body evolved, see that it’s a poorly constructed nano-machine, and then say, “Well, it’s starting to break down on you” or “your body’s immune system is malfunctioning”, and so forth. You see random viruses attacking the body’s cells and think, “This is just random and stupid! These viruses don’t even have a mind. They just destroy and make copies of themselves!” Oh, but the misery and suffering people endure sure is real!
I can imagine brilliant biologists, geneticists, physicians, and biophysicists working on cures for diseases and reflecting on the grand scheme of things, thinking to themselves, “This is all rather depressing. Our bodies evolved through a violent, brutal struggle for survival. A lot of the body’s designs aren’t even good, and here we are, with no choice but to work our butts off to fix everything nature did poorly.” Yet in the same hospital is some simple minded religious man running around, praying for the sick, feeling as if he’s changing the world. The people really advancing mankind often feel depressed and empty, while the religious man feels euphoric, like he’s saving people’s souls and sending them to paradise. He even feels he’s infusing them with some magical spiritual energy which will cure the problem. It’s all very ridiculous.
That’s a very short primer on how these reward chemicals are released in ways that aren’t even advantageous to our survival. I could go on and on about that, but let’s move on.
Let’s get back to material abundance and how that in itself won’t make us happy. I’ve written about future technologies here on my blog, and have painted a bright future for them. In fact, I do think they have the potential to make our lives much better than today. But even if we have nanotechnology, advanced AI systems, super-computers, and material abundance beyond our wildest dreams, that in itself is no guarantee for happiness. Why? What will be our purpose? Without purpose we feel worthless.
What gives most people’s lives meaning? Cooking food for your spouse and loved ones? Taking care of the children? Running a company? Doing research and learning new things? Advancing humanity in some way? Serving your community by helping those less fortunate? I think we all want to contribute something worthwhile to the world, and be important to our loved ones, and our community. But as we’re designing our new technology, have we taken this into account? Is that the direction we’re moving toward? More involvement? More purpose? More meaning? No, not at all. We’re moving rapidly toward automation.
Nanofactories will produce our food and any product humans (or computers) have ever designed. Robots will be around to help us with any task we desire, and they will be better than us at just about everything. Advanced machine intelligence will do thinking for us and leave us in the dark. Automation will exist everywhere, and our technology will completely displace us and any purpose we currently have. Considering that meaning and purpose are what we most desire from this life, we’re leaving out something very critical here. The actions we’re doing, assuming we don’t destroy ourselves with our technology, rationally are the right direction to go. Having technology that can cure our bodies of disease, keep us well feed, secure from disaster, and so forth, are the obvious route we need to go. But still, we’re going to struggle to find happiness and purpose in the coming era, absent us modifying our brains.
The fact of the matter is this: we want luxury and security, but we’re not smart enough, nor talented enough to bring that world into existence. Our world is filled with conflict and poverty, and if you ask me, it’s because we’re not intelligent enough to organize ourselves properly. Our technology is also too primitive. To even bring about a modicum of material abundance, we have to destroy and pollute our environment. Most of the human race is deficient in high level intelligence and lacks the understanding necessary to bring about a technological utopia. Eventually our society and its technology is going to get too difficult for anyone but the most brilliant among us to understand. The rest of us will be useless. Most of us struggle with even elementary mathematics, much less designing 3D molecular quantum computer processors. Our future machine intelligence systems will be able to handle this heavy thinking, but it will make our personal handiwork look like a joke. We’ll become a bunch of stupid primates surrounded by super-intelligent machines, and their thoughts will be too far away for us to comprehend. So what do we want, security, or purpose?
I think about virtual reality, how we’ll eventually be able to change ourselves genetically, and the potential of integrating with the machines, and think that maybe we’ll be ok. Maybe we’ll change our brains and desires, or something. But honestly, I don’t know. I have no idea what to think about the future and the purpose of our technology. I remember once seeing a Twilight Zone episode where a man received anything he asked or wished for without any effort. Soon he found himself going insane and wanted out. He wanted to wake up from the nightmare. An angel appeared before him and said, “Oh? You thought this was heaven? Oh no my friend, this is hell!”
I’ve written past posts on here, wondering about things that may go wrong during this transition. Nanomachines may replicate and destroy the biosphere. Intelligent machines may grow too powerful for us to control, and act unpredictable, possibly wiping us off the face of the planet. We may end up all dying in a nuclear war, or we may pollute the planet to such an extent that it’s no longer inhabitable. The list of doomsday scenarios grows each and every day. And when I look at how difficult this transition is going to be, and how uninformed people are, I just wonder. The outlook is pretty bleak.
Today I was watching a video where the renowned quantum physicist David Bohm was talking with Jiddu Krishnamurti. They began by reflecting on what to say to the youth, as their future appears so bleak and grim. Throughout the discussion they attribute our problems to thinking incorrectly about a wide range of things, such as not thinking in terms of the whole, and mistaking various fragments as wholes when they’re not. I found it interesting.
I got to thinking about science fiction shows like Star Trek. You’ll notice that even though the year is like 2300, and by then we’ll have computers with trillions and trillions of times more computational power, and machines capable of thinking millions of times faster than human beings, far exceeding us in knowledge, intelligence, and every aspect of life, still they have humans in charge. Why? How exciting would it be to watch each episode when the humans play no significant role. The computer chooses their next destination. The computer researches the alien lifeforms they find. The computer fights each battle. The humans just basically tag along, sitting around in the ship’s lobby, bored, with nothing to do. They goof around in the holodeck, have wild sexual orgies, and stare out the window.
But you can also take another look at this same issue. Think about our ancestors. Think about their lives chasing herds of animals, and working their days in the fields. What life would your prefer? Their lives were monotonous, brutal, and boring. Technology created new opportunities for people, allowing them to spend their time doing new things, instead of just struggling to survive.
I personally love technology. I spend way too much time on my computer, watching lectures from all over the world. I have so many books stored on my computer that I’ve lost count. When I was a child, I was bored all the time. Now I’m never bored. I wish I never aged and never had to work. I’ll just list a bunch of things I would do with myself if I had the time.
I would learn to paint, particularly landscapes. I think it’s amazing that you can take what’s in your imagination and make it a reality there on your canvas. That’s also what has always drew me to computer graphics and simulations. You can create any world you can imagine inside the computer. Video games today are so beautiful. There are entire worlds in there. You can play a game like Final Fantasy XIV and walk through huge forests, deserts, and castles. It looks real. In fact, it looks better than the real world. The lighting is perfect, the colors are bright, and everyone is dressed fashionably and having a good time. You even get to listen to beautiful orchestrated music while you explore! Can’t beat that.
I would learn to compose music, first starting with the keyboard and later learning other instruments as well. The keyboard seems to have the most potential to me because in conjunction with the computer, it can emulate most other instruments as well.
I’d build vehicles, particularly custom motorcycles, and ride all around the world. I’d study architecture, and help design the most beautiful cities and structures imaginable. I’d build exotic flying machines, such as luxurious airships, and I’d soar through the atmosphere with my legs hanging off the side.
I’d research mathematics, such as number theory. I’d master every aspect of physics. I’d build probes and send them out into space. I’d build huge telescopes and observe every aspect of the heavens. I’d build huge lighted fountains which turned on at night creating a euphoric waltz, following you as you made your way down the park walkway. I’d design holographic creatures which would dance across the water like tiny ballerinas, and lighted butterfly creatures would fill the sky like lightning bugs.
I’d design my own creatures in the lab, some robotic, some biological. I’d build huge amusement parks, such as giant water slides, and roller coasters which zoom you through glass tunnels underneath the ocean, filled with creatures and glowing fish of all sorts.
I don’t want to die, at least not for a long long time. The more I learn about the possibilities of this world, the longer I want to stay here. I’d love to build all those things. I’m only limited by time and access to resources. But the question for all of us is whether the joy comes from having these things to experience, or building them ourselves. If we just want to have these things, then building technology like advanced AI intelligence systems is the way to go. They can help design all of this for us very rapidly with us guiding the process. They would work out all the technical details. But if we want to do it ourselves, then we should stop what we’re doing.
Does life consist in cooking meals for our spouse? In raising children? In acquiring a suburban home? In sitting through lectures in classrooms? In working jobs? In being important? I don’t think so. I don’t mind nanoassemblers creating food for me. I don’t want children and I wouldn’t mind them being grown in a lab. It’d be nice to never have to go to work, and I’d prefer to be an unnamed citizen of the techno-utopia than the richest baron in this current world. But the thing is, how will I feel if everyone can build these things? If everyone has equal access to the “mother-brain” computer, which can help us build and design anything, either in reality, or in virtual reality? I don’t know. Maybe I’d have to experience it for myself to see if I cared?
But one question even plagues me more than all of this: I don’t necessarily “care” about anything. If I were to rewire my brain, I could be perfectly content in the world as it is right now. My brain creates the dissatisfaction. Heroin addicts are fine with nodding off in a corner someplace. The things I listed are the things I would want to do now if I had the capability. But those desires are determined by my current physical make-up. If I can change that, then I can change my desires. Nothing is set in stone. And if I integrate with the machines, and my intelligence is billions of times what it is now, what would I do with myself then? What an intriguing thought. My motorcycle would probably turn into a space-cycle which can zoom across the surface of stars or something crazy. I’d put on some heat/anti-gravity suit and zoom through the solar flares screaming, “Wooohooooo”. Who knows what I’d do but it all sounds exciting.
One strangely rational route would be to get rid of any conditions for happiness. What if we put our brains in vats, filled them with drugs keeping us in pure ecstasy, and then had the nanorobots repair the damage the drugs do to us, keeping us indefinitely stoned. We could have unconscious machines keep us going, fed, and so forth. If all we care about is happiness, why risk ever being unhappy, displeased, or bored? Why go through all the trouble of toiling to exist just to hope you may become happy? This sounds pathetic, but isn’t there a line of sound reasoning behind this? The conclusion is kind of a dark one: what’s the point of living? Isn’t life basically continually working in hopes of having happy experiences? What’s the point of love when there’s such a high chance of getting hurt? The point of careers and struggling to understand the world? The point of toiling under the sun? Is there a purpose to any of it? I don’t know, and that’s my problem. As I’ve said, our brains don’t inherently value experiences for the experiences themselves. When I was depressed, I didn’t value anything. But once those reward chemicals were flowing, just like a friend on drugs, I became fascinated with everything and everyone. Think of your stoner friend who picks up some simple object and exclaims, “This is AWESOME! WHOOOOOAAAAAAA! I never knew a pencil was like this. Have you ever felt a pencil on your fingers? WHOOOAAAAAA!”
This is my life. When I suffer from depression, it’s not normally tied to events which happen to me. My life is generally uneventful. My autobiography would be really boring to read. I don’t have relationships with women, or have fights with my family, nobody is ever angry with me, I don’t have fallouts with my teachers, or coworkers. But when I’m down, it’s when I wonder about the point of this exercise we call life. Currently I’m thinking that saying, “Reward chemicals are all there is to it” is too simple. The reward chemicals make the brain conduct electricity in a slightly different way, which induces a different conscious state. Understanding that is the next step for me. How and why these states of consciousness are created. How does that all work? There may well be a lot of subtleties I’m missing. I’m quite sure of it actually.
I’ve became much more interested in art, architecture, and music than I used to be. In the past, I was mostly concerned with the nature of intelligence and understanding the universe’s core laws. But now I’m learning the detailed workings of intelligence (such as models of the neocortex), and I’ve been mastering the universe’s core laws of physics, and as I’ve done so, I’ve been coming to appreciate the emotional aspects of life as well. I think it’s because I’ve been letting go of a reductionist worldview, and have been looking more into emergent processes. For example, I got to thinking that understanding the laws of physics is too simple, because it’s oftentimes complicated to apply those simple laws to real world processes. And when you do so, you find complex, unpredictable behaviors which you’d never have anticipated from the simple laws themselves. Just think of the three body problem, for example.
I’m starting to focus on a principle that the whole is oftentimes more than the sum of its parts, and when applied to our lives, my thoughts seem to move toward love, compassion, joy, and the experiences and consequences of those dynamics, which is what makes life really worth living. In the past I’ve focused on things like sensory organs, electrical currents pulsing through our nerves, and so on. That all is important, but a new phenomenon emerges when all of those things come together in a brain, and we call it our lives. I see that I’ve been blind to a great deal of the world around me. Just as Bohm and Krishnamurti were discussing, the whole is often overlooked, and we get stuck in fragmented worldviews. We mistake fragments for wholes, when really those fragments are not self-sufficient wholes which can exist in isolation. I think this new line of thinking, if I work on it for a while, will shed a lot of light on this reward chemicals problem I’m working on. Neurons are not wholes, they are fragments, and if you don’t look at them in the entirety of the entire brain, and that brain within an organism, and that organism within and environment, you can’t understand what’s going on.
But, before I leave this topic, I must also say that I find this all very difficult because the idea that everything influences everything else is anathema to a scientist. Scientists learn about the world by identifying relevant forces and dynamics, and focusing their thoughts on those things. If everything influences everything else, then you can’t isolate causes, and there is no science. You can’t make predictions or perform tests. So reconciling these ideas may take me some time. I’m going to have to continue looking into intelligence, seeing what those neural algorithms are actually doing, and think about their limitations in understand the world as it really is.
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Nanotechnology and Disassemblers
August 7, 2011
I can’t say how long before we see this come into full fruition, but we’ll soon be entering an age of atomically precise manufacturing. We will build our products using “nanofactories”. If we want something, we will download a blueprint and construct it using raw-materials. Countless tiny machines will build the products, atom by atom, molecule by molecule. For example, if you want a new laptop computer, you will simply go online, download the blueprint, and then have your nanofactory appliance build it for you. The same will apply for food, or anything you can presently hold in your hands.
But you may be wondering how the blueprints will be created? How will people share the physical things they create as easily as we share videos on Youtube today? What if you wanted to share a flat-screen TV, or a Playstation console? How about a hot bowl of soup, a hardback book, or a set of power tools? How will blueprints be created for these things? Enter molecular disassemblers!
In his book Engines of Creation 2.0: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, Eric Drexler tells how all of this is going to work.
“Molecular computers will control molecular assemblers, providing the swift flow of instructions needed to direct the placement of vast numbers of atoms. Nanocomputers with molecular memory devices will also store data generated by a process that is the opposite of assembly.
Assemblers will help engineers synthesize things; their relatives, disassemblers, will help scientists and engineers analyze things. The case for assemblers rests on the ability of enzymes and chemical reactions to form bonds, and of machines to control the process. The case for disassemblers rests on the ability of enzymes and chemical reactions to break bonds, and of machines to control the process. Enzymes, acids, oxidizers, alkali metals, ions, and reactive groups of atoms called free radicals — all can break bonds and remove groups of atoms. Because nothing is absolutely immune to corrosion, it seems that molecular tools will be able to take anything apart, a few atoms at a time. What is more, a nanomachine could (at need or convenience) apply mechanical force as well, in effect prying groups of atoms free.
A nanomachine able to do this, while recording what it removes layer by layer, is a disassembler. Assemblers, disassemblers, and nanocomputers will work together. For example, a nanocomputer system will be able to direct the disassembly of an object, record its structure, and then direct the assembly of perfect copies. And this gives some hint of the power of nanotechnology.”
- Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation 2.0 – The Coming Era of Nanotechnology
This same technology will get rid of all our trash problems, and will rid our world of pollution. You won’t throw things away; you’ll have them disassembled back into raw materials. We’ll keep reusing the same atoms for everything. We’ll be digging up our trash which we’ve buried in the past, and mining important raw materials for use in our new products!
See how important computers are? They’re not only allowing us to simulate brains, create medicines and cures for diseases, and play in virtual reality, they will also be lifting our world completely out of poverty. There will no longer be the haves and the have nots. Everything will be so cheap that it will pretty much be free. And it’s not all that far away. Surely within a few generations. I’ll see a lot of it during my lifetime. As a physicist, I can specialize in nanotechnology, and it’s currently one of the hottest fields out there – and for good reason!
And won’t these machines suck up huge amounts of energy to produce these products? No, not at all. Very little energy to do both processes. In fact, these nanomachines will SAVE energy compared to what we’re currently using. Also, to top it off, they will allow us to build solar panels that can harvest energy WAYYYYY more sunlight than our current solar panels. We’ll no longer need dangerous energy sources such as nuclear energy, or the dirty burning of fossil fuels. We’ll shoot solar panels up into space and harvest all the energy we need. We’ll have plenty of energy, and people will be free from poverty and want.
Also, considering our bodies are nanomachines, built using the DNA blueprint system, we’ll be able to decode it, and fix our bodies and any problems we encounter. Little robots will go into your blood capillaries and repair your body from the inside, keeping you healthy and strong. You won’t have to waste energy running on a treadmill to say in shape. You’ll always feel good and strong. These same nanomachines will be able to build muscles in your body, and women can augment their breasts, change their hair length, or whatever they want.
“Molecular assemblers will bring a revolution without parallel since the development of ribosomes, the primitive assemblers in the cell. The resulting nanotechnology can help life spread beyond Earth — a step without parallel since life spread beyond the seas. It can help mind emerge in machines — a step without parallel since mind emerged in primates. And it can let our minds renew and remake our bodies — a step without any parallel at all.
These revolutions will bring dangers and opportunities too vast for the human imagination to grasp. Yet the principles of change that have applied to molecules, cells, beasts, minds, and machines should endure even in an age of biotechnology, nanomachines, and artificial minds. The same principles that have applied at sea, on land, and in the air should endure as we spread Earth’s life toward the stars.”
- Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation 2.0
There will be new struggles, but the old miseries of death, disease, boredom, and poverty will be conquered. Hopefully we’ll be able to use our technology to remove our violent instincts as well, so we don’t use this powerful technology to kill ourselves. Or maybe people will vent those passions in virtual reality warfare. I don’t know. But if we can get over these final hurdles, the human race will be safe. I sometimes lose hope, but overall, I think we’ll make it.
Future generations will have so much fun. As I’ve said before, I hope cures come out allowing me to live several hundred years, at least. I want to see all of this happen. I want to plug into VR and have some fun! And can you imagine being able to work with the mother brain, which has all human knowledge stored in it, to create your VR world? You just talk to it, making demands, and it creates anything you ask, working out all the complicated details. You can go to construct your dream home and specify all that you want. “I want statues over here. I want a giant fountain here. I want a lake with a dock here. I want this area to be carpeted. No, no red carpet. Go with white. This is too rough, something softer.” The computer responds, “As you wish.” Everything that we’ve ever created, thought of, or dreamt up, all will be available for use. And the super computer will make it all work together. It will know you better than you know yourself, for it will have learned what humans like and don’t like after interacting with billions of humans for hundreds, and later thousands of years.
The Christian concept of heaven sounds shallow compared to this. We don’t need deities to get there. We just need to work for a bit longer on our technology.
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Simulation Of The Human Brain
August 4, 2011
We live in exciting times. Within the next 15~20 years we will be simulating the entire human brain within computer simulations. Within 40~50 years, we will have machines which can think at millions (and later billions, and even later, trillions) of times the speed of a human being and process information in the same way our brains do. Wow!
I’d like to introduce you all to a rather new discipline called neuroinformatics. This new field is the bridge between neuroscience (brain research) and information science (computers, etc). From the ground up, scientists are building models of the brain, neuron by neuron, and simulating their interactions in super-computers. The most advanced project along these lines that I know about is called the Blue Brain Project. Their goal is to completely simulate the human brain, neuron by neuron, within super-computers. They want to make this tool available to all scientists around the world, so you can simulate any sort of brain area or circuitry, model it, and perform your experiments.
For example, scientists will be modeling autism all the way down to the firing of individual neurons. They’ll be able to pinpoint detailed causal chains and create powerful and effective cures. The same goes for any other mental disorder. Alzheimers, epilepsy, depression… your days are numbered! With more and more powerful computers, the simulations will get better and better, and medical science will be creating powerful cures.
From what I can tell, the project is very far along. The main thing holding them back is computational power. They simply don’t have the computational speed to simulate all the connections within a human brain. There’s just too many neurons and too many connections. But as for their computational model, and their understanding of individual neurons, their types, synaptic connections, and so on, they’re already done. It’s all ready to go. They just need more computational power to simulate larger neural networks. They’re already simulating various sections of the brain and their model’s results are yielding the same results as experiments done on real brains. The firing patterns and outputs are all the same.
Below you’ll find an amazing lecture delivered by Dr. Henry Markram who is the director of the Blue Brain Project. I love this presentation because it’s all graphical and 3D. In it, he outlines the roadmap to simulating the human brain with computers, where we are currently, and where we need to be headed. He concludes the lecture by saying that if computational speeds continue to increase at their current rates, they should be able to simulate the entire human brain by 2023. That’s very exciting. Watch the presentation below (It has 3 parts and is 45 minutes long).
If you’re around my age (30′ish) or younger, within your lifetime you will see computer intelligence soar off the map. It will not be long before computers are far more intelligent than human beings. They’re going to think like us yet at speeds billions of times faster with memory capacities far beyond our wildest dreams. They’ll also be able to share information between themselves at the speed of light. It’s so incredible and exciting!
It kind of pisses me off that I may die before all of this comes into existence. We’re on the very verge of it though. By “verge” I mean within a few hundred years, maximum. It’s going to be awesome. When I was out for a walk yesterday, I was thinking that this “mother brain” computer will eventually be running our entire world economy. I imagine that observational equipment of all sorts will be placed across the Earth’s surface (cameras, temperature sensors, vibrational sensors, audio microphones, etc), and all of it will be feeding into the mother brain which will be monitoring everything. This brain will learn how everything works, be able to monitor the entire planet, and keep us from destroying ourselves. I think it will also completely eliminate poverty, disease, and pollution.
This won’t happen instantly, but as computational speed increases, and more and more knowledge is put into the computer, it will get smarter and smarter. It will learn by interacting with us, as we teach it to do the things we need it to do and help us with. People’s cell phones will evolve into complex devices where people can communicate with the mother brain at all times, asking questions, asking for guidance, and so on. The mother brain will then help us direct our activities to balance and achieve everyone’s goals. Our current capitalist system is anarchic and disorganized, but this new mother brain will be able to organize us all effectively. Communicating with it through our computers, intelligent handheld devices, and so on, we will all be taking part in a dynamic process of reorganizing our world, culture, and society. It will know how each and every resource is produced, where it’s located, and understand each and every intermediate step of production. It will be able to make detailed plans to help us achieve our goals, and it will constantly be searching for ways to optimize the process and make things easier for all of us.
I found myself daydreaming about interacting with this computer. I imagined walking through the park, looking at a flower bed and speaking aloud, “Computer, what type of flower is this? Tell me about it.” Then a holographic gardener appeared and told me all about the flower and answered every question I had about it. I began asking about the detailed cellular structure of the plant, how it transported nutrients from the soil, and so forth, and the computer generated interactive 3D holographic simulations, blowing the process up big enough for me to see. The daydream alone was euphoric. There’d be no need for books or classrooms. You’d learn by direct interaction with the world around you.
I then told the gardner, “You know, I’m getting hungry. I’ve been in the mood for spaghetti and garlic bread sticks.” Then the gardener said, “One moment please.” Within five minutes, as I was listening to the gardner, a robot courier in a hover car pulled up and delivered me the food, along with a chair and stand. I ate my fill, yet I didn’t have have to worry about my weight or cholesterol because tiny nanobots were swimming around in my body, monitoring all my vitamin levels, blood pressure, and so forth, keeping me in perfect health. I then got up and walked off, and the robots cleaned up the mess.
There were small floating machines up in the sky, manipulating the weather. It was always a beautiful day, not too hot, not too cold. The new homes had no roofs and nobody locked their doors because the mother brain computer acted as the ultimate security system, observing and watching everything. You could never steal. But why would you? You could just ask the computer to make you whatever you wanted! And if you wanted to be alone, you could tell robot sentinels to keep people out of your yard, and monitor your property to keep things quiet and peaceful. Nobody could ever sneak past them, no matter how hard they tried. You’d live in total safety.
I imagined if I wanted to visit my friends, I just plugged into virtual reality and met them in some virtual world. Or if we were to meet in real life, I’d just wormhole there. “Computer, create a wormhole between the area in front of me and so and so’s front door.” A wormhole appears and I walk through it and knock on their door.
I love physics, computers, and technology. I want to build this technology so future generations live pampered spoiled lives. Even the lowest pauper of this upcoming world will live in infinitely greater luxury than the richest Wall Street baron of today. I want our great great great grandchildren to hear about our lives in history lectures and think to themselves, “I can’t believe people had to live so miserably. They didn’t even have virtual reality, where they could experience anything they could imagine! How did they manage?” I’ll then wake up for a short moment in my grave and give a thumbs up toward the sky, knowing I played a part in moving the world in the right direction.
I guess nobody knows the future for certain. Maybe things will turn out badly, I don’t know. But this has some serious potential. Lately I’ve been thinking that it’s such a shame that I’m aging and will one day die. The longer I live in this world, the more I love it. Sure, currently humanity is in a nasty mess, and the United States is buried in debt, and politicians and their actions are disappointing. But their time is numbered. This new world is around the corner, and things are going to get a lot better. I guess it’s because I spend most of my time these days reflecting on science and technology. I see so many possibilities and I even have a general grasp as to how to bring those changes into the world. The only thing separating me from those amazing possibilities is time. Even if all of you died, and I was the only human left alive, as long I wasn’t aging, and had access to food, I could rebuild the world. I could draw my blood and analyze my DNA, build super-computers, and then reconstruct my fellow humans to live with. I could rebuild all the technology. I just need time! TIME! I’m not given enough time on this Earth. I finally start figuring stuff out and then my body falls apart and I die. We need to stop aging and death.
I think I get so excited about life because when I think about what my brain is, it’s a learning machine. I’m capable of finding patterns as to how the world works, and then I’m able to use that new knowledge, in conjunction with my imagination, to change the world into what I want it to be. My mind is a bridge between what currently is, and infinite possibilities. With each new day, I’m navigating through those infinite possibilities, and by my choices, I can direct myself into pure bliss if I just had enough time to figure out the patterns. These machines we’re building are amplifications of that same principle, so they’ll take us there faster. They learn faster and think faster, and can navigate through the various possibilities at light speed. The computer can simulate infinite possibilities, including virtual worlds and virtual reality. They can simulate what would happen if we were to try various actions before we do them! They’re super-minds with super-imaginations. That’s what I think drew me to computer programming all those years ago when I was just a young boy. Computers are not glorified calculators; they’re information processors, and that information can be anything, including thought and imagination.
Lately I’ve been considering that life is evolving more and more rapidly. First we had atoms, which came together into molecules, and proteins, and cells, and so forth. Then, in order for those organisms to change their forms, they had to evolve, and that took millions and billions of years. With the advent of the brain, we were no longer hard-wired to perform mindless reflexes, but we could learn and choose between different possibilities which could be evaluated and imagined, and to a slight degree, experienced, all within a very short time-frame. Now we’re shortening that process by many orders of magnitude with computers and electronic intelligence. Growing up, we had to learn how to move our arms and legs, and how to get around in the world. Now we’re building a brain that can control any sort of robotic body, with any type of appendages, in any sort of environment. Using simulations, we can program and artificially evolve these robotic minds to control spacecraft and bodies in strange and foreign worlds. We’re preparing for exploration of the cosmos! This isn’t just about life on Earth, it’s also about our expansion out into the universe! We’ll be blasting robotic probes of all sorts out into space, and moving outward to explore every nook and cranny of the infinite cosmos awaiting us.
I’ve also been thinking about the survival advantages to virtual reality. Is it just escapism? No! Not at all! It allows our brains to experience new environments and learn how to control and interact in them. Take the game Mirror’s Edge. Imagine being immersed in virtual reality, doing these same sorts of tasks. You’d become super-skilled in evasion and movement, and if you were in control of a robotic body, or even your own body, this gives you huge survival advantages. It also helps you explore and experience new environments without danger.
We can also take part in vast simulations in competition between ourselves. We’ll play war games against one another in VR, and that will enhance our brains without us dying! We’ll learn how to do all sorts of new skills, command infantries, and become more and more intelligent, ever learning how to behave in all sorts of new novel situations, without ever being in danger of injury. We’ll also be pitting AI algorithms against one another in competitions, to see which one is better at controlling resources. Then, if we’re invaded aliens or something, and we had to fight a war for real, we’d own them! We’d be masters at fighting wars. Robots would start creating weapons of all sorts and our minds would be infused remotely into the robotic bodies and crafts, and we’d be able to fight them off with no problem. Also the AI algorithms would become intelligent and skilled, and they too would be controlling the robotic drones to fight for us.
We’d also play other types of simulations and games, and we’d have to outsmart one another. In games of strategy for instance, we’d compete, getting smarter and smarter. The same is true for our AI. Deceit has its advantages if you aren’t injured by it. Imagine playing a difficult video game, where all the characters in the game are lying to you, yet some are telling you the truth. You have to choose your allies carefully and not be deceived. You’d get better and better at life strategies, always growing smarter, learning from your mistakes. In real life, deceit is painful because we often can’t recover from the pain and injury caused by it. But in VR, you can lose at a game and then just try again. You can hit the reset button and play again until you figure it out. This greatly expands critical thinking and judgement.
Video games are not mindless wastes of time. They’re evolving into virtual experiences by which we can rapidly compete with one another in new and novel ways, ever expanding our minds without fear of injury and danger.
Just a thought.
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Different Sizes Of Infinity
July 31, 2011
There’s probably no better way to spend your weekend than pondering infinity with Georg Cantor. Everybody loves number theory, don’t they? Might be a physicist thing, I don’t know. I enjoy thinking about infinity. Speaking of which, do you know that there are multiple sizes of infinity? Well, there are! Being the awesome guy that I am, I’ll take a few moments and quickly demonstrate this incredible result.
When I first heard this, I thought, “That doesn’t even make sense. How can you have more than infinity? Different sizes of infinity? How can something that’s boundless even be compared? Infinity is infinity, isn’t it?” Well, yes, but there are some subtleties to consider.
Let’s begin with the natural numbers. What are the natural numbers? They’re the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and so on, forever. There are an infinite number of natural numbers. They never end. Ok, so far so good.
Next let’s consider the real numbers. The real numbers are basically any number with an infinite number of digits after the decimal point. Some examples include: 0.3333333333…, 0.23468828273…, and 12.25000000…, and so on. The “…” at the end means that the digits continue indefinitely.
Now let’s pair up each natural number to a unique real number. They don’t have to be in any particular order. For this example I pair up my natural numbers to real numbers less than 1, but there’s no rule saying this has to be the case.
1 -> 0.33333333333…
2 -> 0.23468828273…
3 -> 0.2500000000…
4 -> 0.22222222222…
5 -> 0.66892735820…
….
And so on. Here’s the question of the day: Since we have an infinite amount of natural numbers to work with, is it possible for us to pair up each and every real number to a natural number? The answer is no, we can’t. There will be an infinite amount of real numbers we missed, even if we pair each and every natural number to a unique real number. Let me explain.
I’m going to now construct a real number that is not paired up on your listing, no matter which numbers you choose. To construct this number, take the first digit from the first number, and change it to something else. Next take the second digit from the second number, and change it to something else. Next take the third digit from the third number, and change it to something else. And so on, indefinitely, changing the nth digit of the nth number. In this example, I’ll go with: 0.44930…… For this particular example, this number will never be paired up with any natural number. It’ll be left out. More generally, this process is called a Cantor diagonal and can be viewed as followed:
You should see that there are an infinite number of such diagonals which we’ve missed. That means that no matter how we pair up our natural numbers to the real numbers, there will be an infinite number of real numbers left over. There are an infinite number of natural numbers, but in some strange sense, there are infinitely more real numbers. So, there must be different sizes of infinity!
What does this mean? What are the implications? If there is more than one size of infinity, are there possibly others as well? Cantor proposed the Continuum Hypothesis in 1877, stating:
There is no set whose cardinality is strictly between that of the integers and that of the real numbers.
- Georg Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis
Cardinality means the number of items in a set. For example, if you have a set of playing cards, it’s cardinality is 52. Though I’m only an amateur, I believe this statement is saying that there are no different sizes of infinity between the infinite amount integers (-3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, …), and the infinite amount of real numbers. In this post, I’ve shown that there are an infinite number of natural numbers, and an infinite number of real numbers. We all know there are also an infinite number of integers, you’re just adding the negative natural numbers as well. As we’re seeing, in some strange sense, the infinite number of real numbers is greater than the infinite number of natural numbers. Cantor is proposing that you’re not going to be able to find a set whose size is between those two infinite sizes. The infinite size of the real numbers is the next “step” from the infinite size of of the integers. Has your mind exploded yet?
The dilemma plagued the minds of many prominent mathematicians, including Bertrand Russell, Kurt Godel, and David Hilbert, as they struggled to figure out what was going on here.
Just as a matter of protocol, when pondering infinity, you must wear a suit, talk in a distinct British accent, smoke a pipe, and always look profoundly toward the sky in contemplation. When spoken to, you must reply, “Yes, indeed,” and then take a puff of your pipe. If you need an example, reference the picture above.
In 1940, Godel was able to demonstrate that the Continuum Hypothesis couldn’t be disproven using mathematical set theory. A little over twenty years later, a brilliant young mathematician by the name of Paul Cohen proved that mathematical logic is incapable of proving whether the Continuum Hypothesis is true, or false. I’d like to further reflect on this matter with all of you, but to put it bluntly, mathematicians seem to enjoy making their work as terse and difficult to read as possible, using their own jargon lingo, and complicated symbols to express their ideas. I’ve been wading through it all for years now, and have slowly been coming to an understanding of a lot of it. Though I’m not going to take any time discussing this, there are actually an infinite number of sizes of infinity! Who would have thought?
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The Magical World Of Our Neocortex
July 23, 2011
I’ve been learning a lot about the neocortex lately, and have come across some really fascinating information that I’d like to share. What if I were to tell you I could turn your tongue into a third eye? Sound bizarre? You’d be surprised! Let’s talk a little about a concept neuroscientists call “pattern equivalency.”
The idea that patterns from different senses are equivalent inside your brain is quite surprising, and although well understood, it still isn’t widely appreciated. More examples are in order. The first one you can reproduce at home. All you need is a friend, a freestanding cardboard screen, and a fake hand. For your first time running this experiment, it would be ideal if you had a rubber hand, such as you might buy at a Halloween store, but it will also work if you just trace your hand on a sheet of blank paper. Lay your real hand on a tabletop a few inches away from the fake one and align them the same (fingertips pointed in the same direction, palms either both up or both down). Then place the screen between the two hands so that all you can see is the false one. While you stare at the fake hand, your friend’s job is to simultaneously stroke both hands at corresponding points. For example, your friend could stroke both pinkies from knuckle to nail at the same speed, then issue three quick taps to the second joint of both index fingers with the same timing, then stroke a few light circles on the back of each hand, and so on. After a short time, areas in your brain where visual and somatosensory patterns come together— one of those association areas I mentioned earlier in this chapter— become confused. You will actually feel the sensations being applied to the dummy hand as if it were your own.
Another fascinating example of this “pattern equivalency” is called sensory substitution. It may revolutionize life for people who lose their sight in childhood, and might someday be a boon to people who are born blind. It also might spawn new machine interface technologies for the rest of us.
Realizing that the brain is all about patterns, Paul Bach y Rita, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, has developed a method for displaying visual patterns on the human tongue. Wearing this display device, blind persons are learning to “see” via sensations on the tongue.
Here is how it works. The subject wears a small camera on his forehead and a chip on his tongue. Visual images are translated pixel for pixel into points of pressure on the tongue. A visual scene that can be displayed as hundreds of pixels on a crude television screen can be turned into a pattern of hundreds of tiny pressure points on the tongue. The brain quickly learns to interpret the patterns correctly.
One of the first people to wear the tongue-mounted device is Erik Weihenmayer, a world-class athlete who went blind at age thirteen and who lectures widely about not letting blindness stop his ambitions. In 2002, Weihenmayer summited Mount Everest, becoming the first blind person ever to undertake, much less accomplish, such a goal.
In 2003, Weihenmayer tried on the tongue unit and saw images for the first time since his childhood. He was able to discern a ball rolling on the floor toward him, reach for a soft drink on a table, and play the game Rock, Paper, Scissors. Later he walked down a hallway, saw the door openings, examined a door and its frame, and noted that there was a sign on it. Images initially experienced as sensations on the tongue were soon experienced as images in space.
These examples show once again that the cortex is extremely flexible and that the inputs to the brain are just patterns. It doesn’t matter where the patterns come from; as long as they correlate over time in consistent ways, the brain can make sense of them.
- Jeff Hawkins, from his book On Intelligence: How A New Understanding Of The Brain Will Lead To The Creation Of Truly Intelligent Machines
That blows my mind. If you vibrate your tongue in the same sorts of patterns and frequencies as visual images, it will become like an eye, and you will soon see images in space. You can make a blind man see by vibrating his tongue! I mean, what in the world! If you don’t understand how the brain works, that will sound almost unbelievable, but it’s true.
I suppose if you wanted a third eye, you could mount a camera on top of your head and start vibrating your tongue appropriately. Soon you would stop feeling “touch” and “taste” sensations, and would instead see from your tongue. You could probably do the same thing by wrapping a special device around your leg, vibrating your thighs and legs appropriately, and you would probably begin to see images from another fourth camera, which you could have pointing behind you. You’d be four eyed monster! Bwahahahaha!
That’s the very sort of mad scientist stuff I’m into. That is too cool!
Ok, so why does this work? How does this work? I’m glad you asked, my young Padawans. I will now teach you the dark art of sensory perception! Get ready!
In 1978, Vernon Mountcastle, a neuroscientist from John Hopkins University in Baltimore, published a paper entitled An Organizing Principle For Cerebral Function. He made the observation that no matter which area of the cortex he examined, whether it be Brocas area (responsible for our ability to speak language), auditory cortex (allowing us to hear), visual cortex (allowing us to see and perceive objects in space), or motor cortex (allowing us to control and move our bodies), they all had the same basic organizational structure. Sure, they varied a little bit, such as in thickness, length of horizontal connections, synapse density, and so forth, but overall, the sections were so similar that they had to be doing the same sort of operation. Every area of the cortex has the same layering, cell types, and connections.
Interesting. But what does that mean? Ever since we were small children, we’ve been taught that we have five senses – sight, sound, touch, hearing, and smell. But then you look at the brain areas in our cortex which we know produce these senses, and you see that they’re all basically structured the same. What’s going on?
We can’t experiment with human brains, but we have done some very interesting experiments on animals. For example, you can take a baby ferret and rewire its brain, sending its visual signals to the auditory sections of its brain, and the auditory signals to the visual area of its brain. What happens? The brain area that normally develops into auditory cortex turns into visual cortex, and vice versa. Scientists have done similar sorts of experiments on rats, running their sense of touch to their visual cortex, and as you’d probably guess, that area specializes for touch, not vision. The cortex of animals, including ourselves, is very plastic. It can be transformed into any sensory modality, depending on the inputs.
Our cortex is not specialized for any particular function at birth. If you’re born deaf, your brain will use the “auditory” cortex to process visual information. If you’re born blind, your “visual” cortex will be converted into a very sensitive area for touch, used primarily in reading braille. If a neocortical area is not receiving the normal inputs it’s “supposed” to receive, it will start to rewire itself, sending out connections, looking for inputs. So basically, these areas of the brain develop based on the inputs they receive.
So how do we turn your tongue into a third eye? We vibrate a 2D image onto its surface, having the various vibrational pressure intensities correspond to different colors. The brain will interpret the changes appropriately, and you will see from your tongue. Your cortex will begin to rewire itself, and turn your tongue sensory cortex into visual cortex. This will take a little time though. At first you’ll feel it as random vibrations on your tongue. But in time, you’ll become conscious of visual images. Then when you stop the vibrations and take off the device, it will, in time, revert back to a normal tongue. No permanent harm done.
I remember watching cartoons when I was a kid and there would be these evil mad scientists who would turn themselves into monsters. They’d have ten eye-balls, and wings, and a stinging tail, and the good guy would be like, “Dr. X, you monster! What have you done!” The villain would then cry out, “We’ll see if you have what it takes to stop me!” And then an epic battle would take place. As a kid I wondered how a human being could transform himself or herself into something like that. Now I kind of know. I somewhat understand the principles as to how to do that, but there are way too many technicalities. I’d have to pump blood to my wings, wiring in a vein structure, and linking muscles to motor cortex. I’d have to alter my heartbeat to accommodate the extra body mass, and so on. But I can see that if you were smart enough, and had the brain power, you could build yourself any sort of body, with vastly superior intelligence. When our entire cortex is unfolded and stretched out, it’s about the size of a dinner napkin. Imagine if you grew additional brain cortex, and wired it in appropriately as well. You could be ten times as smart.
The key point is “wired in appropriately”. Dolphins and whales have a lot more cortex than we do, though they’re not near as intelligent. Cortex alone isn’t all there is to it. It has to be wired into your sensory systems appropriately. Also, you can see that we already can build eyeballs out of cameras and make the blind see with them. With time, I wonder when we’ll move beyond biological bodies, and build new bodies out of nanotechnology, using robotic and computer parts. There’s still a lot of secrets as to why cortex vibrating according to various inputs creates conscious sensations. There’s very few things in this world which interest me more. To me, that’s the key to everything.
A while back, I think it was Everett who asked me what I thought about death, and what I believed happened when we died. This quest to understand consciousness, and what creates it, is the same problem as life and death. This matter organizes into these patterns, based on self-organizing systems (evolution, etc), and then when coming together into neural networks, we become conscious. I don’t think “I” die upon death. “Jason” will die. All my memories and past experiences, which are stored in my brain, will die. But the fundamental existence which “I” am is not this physical body. This physical body creates signals, which vibrates my cortex, which makes me conscious for the moment, but when this body dies and rots in the ground, I don’t see any reason to believe that some other matter, somewhere else in the universe, may not start vibrating, and I wake up as something or someone else. It sounds like Buddhist or Hindu reincarnation, but it’s what I believe in these days. I’ll probably wake up as something else, and not remember any of my past forms of existence. I may be some winged creature on another planet across the cosmos. Who knows. Question is, how does my personal subjective consciousness enter and work within my brain’s cortex? That’s what I need to know.
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