Kurzweil on Rolling Stone: When Man & Machine Merge

Found via the mailing list of the Society for Universal Immortalism and Cryonet. KurzweilAI.net: Rolling Stone contributor David Kushner's interview with "the world's scariest techno prophet," Ray Kurzweil, "When Man & Machine Merge," appears in the February 19 issue, now on newsstands. See the Cryonet link above for a PDF.

The article is a high level summary of The Singularity is Near, with some very interesting ideas about the universe coming alive with intelligence embodied in computronium, and the possibility to bring back the dead via personality reconstruction based on known information and other people's memories of them. I think the published predictions of Kurzweil, for example a Singularity in 2045 (see below) may be overoptimistic, but I find his bold attitude a welcome and refreshing change from the cautious, timid, watered down, and at times defeatist contemporary "mainstream" transhumanist literature. A Singularity may come a few decades after 2045, or many decades, or never. So what? Mind uploading may not be developed in the 21st century, but only in the 22nd or 23rd. So what? Kurzweil is indicating the road to the future, and a beautiful future it is. Let’s go! Even if we may go slower than Ray hopes.

Some excerpts:

In our lifetime, Kurzweil believes, machines will not only surpass humans in intelligence - they will irrevocably alter what it means to be human. Cell-size robots will zap disease from our bloodstream. Superintelligent nanotechnology, operating on a molecular scale, will scrub pollution from our atmosphere. Our minds, our skills, our memories, our very consciousness will be backed up on computers -- allowing us, in essence, to live forever, all our data saved by supersmart machines.

Kurzweil is very specific about when this epic shift will take place. By 2045, he predicts, machines and humans will merge, redefining life as we know it. The moment is known as the Singularity, referring to the term used in astrophysics to describe the point inside a black hole wherethe ordinary laws of physics cease to apply. To prepare himself and the rest of the world for the era of conscious machines, Kurzweil has turned himself into the chief prophet of the coming Techno Rapture. "Maybe the Singularity takes a few years longer to get here," he finally replies. "But I cant really imagine that I'm significantly off."

The takeoff starts with computers embedding themselves -- from GPS systems to iPhones -- into the fabric ofour lives. Then, 10 years from now, computing power will finally catch up with our brains. For $ 1000 you'll be able to store as much memory on a chip as you can in your head. Virtual realities -- projected directly onto your retinas -- will become indistinguishable from your own. Kurzweil compares this leap to when humans learned how to fly.

"We will be able to redesign all the systems in our bodies and brains to be far more capable and durable." A person is a mind file. A person is a software program -- a very profound one, and we have no backup. So when our hardware dies, our software dies with it. By scanning ihe contents of your brain, nanobots will be able to transfer everything you know, everything you have ever experienced, into a robot or a virtual reality program. If something happens to your physical body, no problem. Your mind will live on -- forever.

Nanobots will replicate and spread throughout the tiniest recesses of matter, transformingthe host -- say, a tree or a stone -- into a computational device. He calls this intelligence-infested matter "computronium, which is matter and energy organized at optimum level for computation. Using nanotechnology, we're going to turn a rock into a computer." As the nanobots spread computer intelligence beyond our planet, the universe itself will awaken as if a giant switch is finaliy being turned on. "The universe is not conscious -- yet," Kurzweil has written. "But it will be."

Kurzweil slips outhis cellphone and holds it up. "It's now in your pockets, and it will make its way into our bodies and brain," he concludes. All of human progress, he suggests, has been moving toward the moment when we merge with technology, when all of our BlackBerries and Facebook pages and instant messages and Wiis become fully integrated with humanity.

Kurzweil's most ambitious plan for life after the Singularity, however, is also his most personal: Using technology, he plans to bring his dead father back to life. "We can find some of his DNA around his grave site -- that's a lot of information right there," he says. "The AI will send down some nanobots and get some bone or teeth and extract some DNA and put it all together. Then they'Il get some information from my brain and anyone else who still remembers him." When I ask how exactly they'Il extract the knowledge from his brain, Kurzweil bristles, as if the answer should be obvious: "Just send nanobots into mybrain and reconstruct my recollections and memories." The machines will capture everything: the piggyback ride to agrocery store, the bedtime reading of Tom Swift, the moment he and his father rejoiced when the letter of acceptance from MIT arrived. To provide the nanobots with even more information, Kurzweil is safeguarding the boxes of his dad's mementos, so the artificial intelligence has as much data as possibie from which to reconstruct him. Father 2.0 could take many forms, he says, from a virtual reality avatar to fully functioning robot.

Max More's surprise birthday party in Second Life

So the "special event" in Second Life that had been announced was Max More's surprise birthday party, which Natasha and I had been organizing in secret. Max had been asked to come to SL to say a few words of introduction for a undisclosed "European thinker, rather well known in the transhumanist community." Even if this description does fit Max, he was indeed surprised. I said a few words about finding his writings online in the mid 90s and how his ideas put my and so many other person's minds on permanent fire, and thanked him. I had asked for volunteers to sing a birthday song but nobody dared, so I sang myself "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" and wish to apologize to all those whose hearing was permanently damaged. About 55 people came to the party, I am sure many more would have come if we had announced what the event was. Well, I had written "What I can say is this: you should attend! Don't tell me later that I did not warn you!", hadn't I.

See Stephen's Flickr page for many other pictures and the cosmeng.org wiki for the full chat log. This was a surprise social event so don't expect a lecture, but the chat log has many interesting bits on the relationship between Extropy and Transhumanism, the Principles of Extropy (BEST DO IT SO!), the early history of the Extropy Institute, the Bean Dip Catastrophe, religion, Max' forthcoming book and, of course, the future. Bill summarized everyone's feelings: "We want more Max! More Max!"

More poop

My favorite opponent has commented on my In space nobody will have to poop post, both here and on his own blog. In his post Cyborg Angels Live Forever and Never Ever Have to Poop he has awarded me the title of High Pristine Yes!Tronic Pontifex of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, which I graciously accept (more on Yes!Tronism later). Another post with a long, boring and meaningless title includes a letter of insults personally addressed to me in the comments, with all the straw-man "arguments" and false accusations that I expected (the author has grudgingly corrected some of his most evidently false statements).

A more recent post on WingnutTrons Demand Their Place in the Futurological Sun is, as much as I hate having to admit it, a masterpiece of comic writing. I have been laughing ten minutes non stop, and sometimes I still laugh. Dale, why must you waste your talent on hate pieces? According to this piece, Transhumanism Robot Cultism is divided in three main camps: The HumanityPlusTron sect, represented by the late lamented WTA now renamed Humanity+; the Yes!Tron sect, represented by the Order of Cosmic Engineers "and comparable kooks who say "oh my YES!" to full-throated Rapture of the Nerds superlativity and who are having no truck at all with the moderation and political correctness of the HumanityPlusTronic sect"; and the WingnutTron sect, represented by "unapologetic retro-futurists and libertopians in full on movement-conservative Obama-epoch panic". I think I will try to persuade Dale to join our Robot Cult: his talent should really be used for something worthy.

In the comment thread of one of these articles a reader has suggested that, perhaps, he should make a little effort every now and then to formulate his "superlativity critique" in a less jerky and more constructive way. But he disagrees: "To adapt the critique to ameliorate the distress of these readers makes less sense than it might seem to do, since I think the necessary adaptations (pitching the critique at a different level of generality, approving their preferred frames, including within the sphere of the non-problematic a host of actually quite marginal and "speculative" claims which fail to pass muster in consensus discourses but which they declare to be straightforwardly "factual" and "technical" and so on) would blunt the force of the critique on its own terms into near irrelevance."

Translating this in early 21st century English: he will not start offering serious arguments instead of personal insults, and he thinks the necessary adaptations (discussing engineering issues in engineering terms, acknowledging scientific facts and the opinions of many respected scientists defined by The Times as "some of the world’s finest minds", and so on) would blunt the force of the critique on its own terms into near irrelevance. Well, I can certainly agree on this last point.

In another post he expresses astonishment and indignation at the outrageous fact that others may dare to disagree with him. Well, I can only reply by quoting his own last statement: "I guess, "okay," will have to suffice for now.".

Teilhard and Transhumanism

The Journal of Evolution and Technology of the IEET has a very interesting and thoughtful article by Eric Steinhart on Teilhard de Chardin and Transhumanism.

Teilhard is almost surely the first to discuss the acceleration of technological progress to a Singularity in which human intelligence will become super-intelligence. He discusses the spread of human intelligence into the universe and its amplification into a cosmic intelligence. More recently, his work has been taken up by transhumanist authors including Moravec and Kurzweil. Wikipedia: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French philosopher and Jesuit priest... In his posthumously published book, The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard writes of the unfolding of the material cosmos, from primordial particles to the development of life, human beings and the noosphere, and finally to his vision of the Omega Point in the future, which is "pulling" all creation towards it. He was a leading proponent of orthogenesis, the idea that evolution occurs in a directional, goal driven way. To Teilhard, evolution unfolded from cell to organism to planet to solar system and whole-universe (see Gaia theory). Such theories are generally termed teleological views of evolution. Teilhard attempts to make sense of the universe by its evolutionary process. He interprets mankind as the axis of evolution into higher consciousness, and postulates that a supreme consciousness, God, must be drawing the universe towards him. Human beings, Teilhard argued, represent the layer of consciousness which has "folded back in upon itself", and has become self-conscious. Julian Huxley, Teilhard's scientific colleague, described it like this: "evolution is nothing but matter become conscious of itself. So in addition to the geosphere and the biosphere, Teilhard posited another sphere, which is the realm of human beings, the realm of reflective thought: the noosphere.

While the author is hardly the first to explore the relations between Teilhard's thinking and contemporary transhumanism, the article is a good and accessible summary of Teilhard's ideas written for transhumanist readers with some knowledge of the work of more modern thinkers like Moravec, Tipler and Kurzweil, whose ideas are used as entry points. Following Moravec, many transhumanists imagine our post-human mind children and Exes leaving the Earth and biology behind and spreading into the universe as pure information processors running on post-biological computational supports. In Teilhard's language, this is entering the pleroma: the critical point [where] future human intelligence will no longer be realized by any network of material particles and forces. We will cease to be realized by matter. This does not contradict the naturalistic thesis that we are entirely physical. It simply implies that not every physical thing is a material thing -- physics has deeper levels. The pleroma is physical, but its physicality is deeper than material... For Teilhard, spirit looks very much like energetic information. Spirit is software in action. As humanity becomes super-intelligent, it will cease to be material and will become purely informational. Future intelligence will cease to be materially realized. Evolution will pass into the pleroma. Steinhart explains Teilhard's pleroma with examples from the computational physics of Fredkin, Zuse and other scientists who consider information and computation as the basic fabric of physical reality at a fundamental level.

The resurrection of the dead is the religious concept that most transhumanist find harder to swallow. Perhaps because they had to make significant efforts to break free from religious upbringings, and are afraid of falling back into blind faith. As a religious person, Teilhard did not have any problems with the concepts of resurrection and afterlife: "For Teilhard, faith in Christ is the conviction that the cosmic process is tending to a final state in which all persons are saved. Salvation is the recovery and perfection of what is most personal in every human. Teilhard often writes about this salvation in psychological terms (e.g., in terms of consciousness)." The possibility of resurrection as re-instantiation of consciousness has also been discussed by more modern authors like Tipler and Moravec, who consider the resurrection of the dead of past ages as something that science and engineering may permit achieving in the far future.

Both Tipler and Moravec think that we may find ourselves resurrected in the far future as computational emulations of our current selves, and "copied to the future". I have illustrated this concept with the short video clip CA Resurrection, made with a Game of Life program. The protagonist pattern is doomed to certain death by interaction with an environment that, except in very carefully controlled conditions, is very unfriendly to the stability of patterns (sounds familiar?), but is copied before death and restored to life in a friendlier environment.

Universal Immortalists do not propose any specific engineering approach to resurrection, but consider it as an objective that future technology may be able to achieve, someday, based on future scientific advances. In his book ”Forever for All”, R. Michael Perry writes: “To that end, we dedicate ourselves to finding a way one day to bring back all persons who have ever lived, so they can join in our eternal adventure”. Perry considers resurrection as something that may one day be achieved by engineering, rather than by "supernatural" means, but I think Teilhard would not disagree. As I mentioned, most transhumanist don't like the concept of resurrection at all, and most religious people don't like the idea of resurrection as something that will be achieved by engineering, but I think this meme has a very strong potential to bridge the gap between transhumanism and religion.

Steinhart argues that transhumanists should study Teilhard's writings, not only as part of the history of transhumanist philosophy, but also because of their relevance to the memetic war between religion and transhumanism, which is beginning to develop and can only become much more intense. The conclusions of the article: Transhumanism and Christianity share common themes and are likely to meet soon in a fateful way. Conservative Christians stand ready to condemn transhumanism as a heretical sect and to politically suppress the use of technology for human enhancement. A study of Teilhard can help in this defense... As the cultural profile of transhumanism rises, conservative Christian groups are beginning to notice it. There are two ways this encounter can go. On the one hand, the encounter can involve mutual hostility. The transhumanists and conservative Christians will denounce one another as enemies. Each side will attack a cartoon version of the other. Such hostility could be fatal for transhumanism in the West. On the other hand, the encounter can be more diplomatic. If transhumanists learn more about the similarities between Christianity and transhumanism, they can respond carefully and successfully to attacks. Since Teilhard is clearly in favor of the use of technology for human enhancement, and since his arguments for human enhancement are developed within a Christian framework, a study of Teilhard can help transhumanists defend against religious conservatives.

In space nobody will have to poop

Of course, a well known anti-transhumanist has reacted to the recent YES! to Transhumanism statement with a blog post titled Yes!Trons Defending "The Transhumanist Core" from the HumanityPlusTrons.

The author claims not to take seriously the "batshit crazy" transhumanists, which I find difficult to believe it considered the time he spends writing about them. One wonders whether he has any life or real work to do. I must admit to reading his blog frequently, because he is a very good writer who usually has intelligent (other) things to say when he forgets for a moment his obsession with transhumanists, but of course I do not bother reading his posts against transhumanists (50% or more of the content of his blog). Also, I don't need reading them because I already know his arguments empty words by heart, like "how can we account for the conspicuous prevalence in actually existing transhumanist-identified discourses of questions of personally overcoming ageing, death, embodiment, material history (as stakeholder contestation), conventional cognitive and morphological traits and capacities, or on imagined but presumably proximate technoconstituted entities who are assumed to exhibit such overcomings". Typical Carrico's bull writing style, taken from his complains against of the Oxford English Dictionary which, in a new entry, defines transhumanism as “a belief that the human race can evolve beyond its current limitations, esp. by the use of science and technology”.

His summary of "the whole let's freeze our brains while awaiting the Robot God to immortalize us in a cyberspatial paradise "program"" of the Cosmic Engineers is "In a nutshell, in space nobody will have to poop".

The author is not obsessed only with transhumanists, but also with poop, which he considers as a symbol of The Sacred Body: “it is true that life is lived in bodies, and that bodies are various and vulnerable and mortal and hungry for connection, and that embracing embodied life demands an embrace of all this about bodies. To deny their variation, their vulnerability, their mortality, their sociability is to deny the body”, that will save us from the body-loathing of “Transhumanists who want to talk about living forever in computers and not having bodies that have to poop” because they are “dispirited at the prospect of continuing to have to poop or whatever it is that freaks you out so much about bodily life”.

In other words poop, also known as shit or, in its bovine form, bullshit, the sublime act of sitting on a toilet to crap, is what makes bodily life worth living. Even better if it is a long and painful crap, to remind us that we live in A Mortal, Frail And Vulnerable Body. The author makes this point often with, very appropriately, long and painful verbal diarrhea Diarrhea. To which, I can only reply that I have nothing against poop, but somehow I do not consider it as a central defining feature of my human identity, and can even think of a couple of other things that make life more worth living.

YES! to Transhumanism

http://cosmeng.org/index.php/YES%21_to_Transhumanism

YES! to Transhumanism

Transhumanism is both a reason-based worldview and a cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability, for those who choose it, of fundamentally improving the human condition by means of science and technology. Transhumanists seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values.

Visionary, bold and fun. That is what transhumanism has always been.

Transhumanists have always sought personal improvement; to free themselves from all the limitations of biology; to radically upgrade their mental and physical faculties; and to beat a path to the stars.

This is what transhumanism is. What it has always been. This is what transhumanism ought to continue to be.

With due concern, we fully and deeply realize that there are, have always been and will continue to be complex scientific, technical, cultural, moral, societal and political challenges to deal with. They require careful assessment, planning, and leadership. These challenges need to be met head on with due courage, forbearance, focused attention, rationality, compassion, empathy and wisdom.

We must and will continue to do our best to overcome them. We will persevere to mitigate their potential and actual dangers, while safeguarding the maximizing of their potential and actual benefits.

Some however are advancing that transhumanists should abandon their efforts at realizing -or even promoting- their radical futurist worldview... in favor of exclusively -or at least primarily- focusing on today's world issues. Transhumanist organizations should, in their view, become nothing more than nice, soft spoken, moderate, ethical, responsible and politically correct quasi-mainstream social clubs.

To such suggestions and proposals, we unequivocally say: NO!

As citizens, we have to and will do our best to play an active and positive role in today's world.

But that is not what transhumanism at its origin and core is about. There are numerous suitable organizations within which transhumanist citizens can and should play an active and positive role in today's world, including organizations in the environmental movement, political parties and movements, philanthropic organizations, research institutes, commercial enterprises.

We however categorically refuse to abandon our core original transhumanist vision of a radically better future for our species and ourselves.

We say YES to transhumanism. To the undiluted, unadulterated, uncompromising original core of transhumanism, that is.

This Position Statement YES! to Transhumanism was collaboratively authored by members of the Order of Cosmic Engineers - http://cosmeng.org/.

Review of The Physics of Christianity, by Frank Tipler

Most readers know that I am very interested in the ideas of Frank Tipler. I consider myself a Soft Tiplerianist in the sense that I relate deeply to Tipler’s high level concept that future technology may be able to resurrect the dead of past ages by some kind of “copying them to the future" and, in the spirit of “There are more things in Heaven and Earth...”, allow myself to contemplate such possibilities. There may be a point where consciousness becomes a important factor in the destiny of the universe, where conscious beings develop the capability to choose and build the universe they _want_ to inhabit, and invite the dead of past ages to join the party by copying them to the future. I have used “Soft Tiplerianism” to indicate this soft rationalist, high level and not detailed concept that will, I hope, be detailed and realized by future scientists and engineers.

In The Physics of Immortality, Tipler proposed that intelligent beings of a far future epoch close to the gravitational collapse of the universe (the so called Big Crunch) may develop the capability to steer the dynamics of the collapsing universe in such a way as to make unlimited subjective time, energy, and computational power available to them before reaching the final singularity. Having done so, they may wish to restore to consciousness all sentient beings of the past, perhaps through a “brute force” computational emulation of the past history of the universe. So after death we may wake up in a simulated environment with many of the features assigned to the afterlife world by the major religions. (from my Interview with Frank J. Tipler of November 2002).

I don't think we know enough physics to guess the specifics of how our descendants in the far future may do spacetime engineering, and I don't think we can guess the motivation of beings very different from us. In other words we cannot know _how_ they will be able to engineer spacetime, and we cannot know _why_ they may choose to resurrect sentient beings of past ages. But I think in The Physics of Immortality Tipler makes a good case to show _that_ future sentient beings may be capable of spacetime engineering at the grandest scale. He shows that some high level visions of religions, such as the cosmic role of life and consciousness and the possibility of the resurrection of the dead, may be basically compatible with science.

Tipler has been criticized, by both sides, for mixing religion with science. He has also been criticized for making wrong scientific assumptions. For example, it appears that the expansion of the universe is accelerating and that the universe, left to itself, will never enter the gravitational collapse phase which is a prerequisite for the Omega Point scenario to happen (see below for Tipler's proposed workaround). As a Stone Age (20th and 21st centuries) scientist, Tipler is certainly wrong on many points that will be corrected by future scientists. But dismissing him as a crank is really like dismissing Leonardo as a crank because his aircraft sketches wouldn’t fly, which is just stupid. Leonardo was a genius who got the _concepts_ right, and later engineers equipped with more detailed knowledge have realized his visions.

I have read the new book of Frank Tipler, The Physics of Christianity, only recently, because it has received some very bad reviews from very smart people like John Walker. In his new book, Tipler tries to zoom much below the higher level concepts described in the first book and show that some specific myths of a specific religion, Christianity, may be basically compatible with science.

The first part of the book is a concise summary of fundamental physics as it is understood today. Tipler does not use mathematics, but I don't think the book is really understandable to people with no background in theoretical physics. To those who do have a background in physics, I recommend reading also the professional versions of his summary: The structure of the world from pure numbers and Feynman-Weinberg Quantum Gravity and the Extended Standard Model as a Theory of Everything. Tipler assumes Everett's Many World Interpretation of quantum physics as the only viable and valid interpretation, and claims that, contrary to the opinion of most theoretical physicists, Feynman and Weinberg developed in the 60s a basic skeleton of a valid theory of quantum gravity. Intrigued by this claim, I am reading the Feynman Lectures on Gravitation. I am unable to judge the validity of Tipler's claim at the moment -- I was trained in theoretical physics and, with some effort, I am still able to read and understand Tipler's maths and physics, but alas not fluently enough.

After his summary of modern physics, Tipler refines his Omega Point model of the far future history of the universe and suggests that, by purposefully annihilating baryons, sentient life will be able to stop the accelerating expansion of the universe and start its gravitational collapse, which is a necessary prerequisite for his Omega Point scenario. I don't know if our descendants will choose or need to do that, but I am very keen of the "fix what you don't like" transhumanist attitude attitude supported by Ray Kurzweil‘s last sentence in The Age of Spiritual Machines: “So will the Universe end in a big crunch, or in an infinite expansion of dead stars, or in some other manner? In my view, the primary issue is not the mass of the Universe, or the possible existence of antigravity, or of Einstein’s so-called cosmological constant. Rather, the fate of the Universe is a decision yet to be made, one which we will intelligently consider when the time is right”. According to Tipler, life will choose a big crunch in order to achieve an Omega Point, and resurrect sentient beings of past ages in appropriate computational realities fueled by the unlimited computing power available.

The diagram above, which is the heart of Tipler's cosmology, has time on the vertical axis and the radius of the universe on the horizontal axes. Reality is really a multiverse in Everett's MWI sense, and different branches of the multiverse (universes) are shown as different curves in the diagram. All universe begin and end as singularities. Another singularity (the vertical line) is found "at the edge of the multiverse" and can be defined as the limit of all paths across universes, at a constant time and heading to smaller sizes. It can be seen that Tipler thinks that intelligent life will be able to trigger a gravitational collapse (perhaps through baryon annihilation) in all universes.

In the second part of the book, Tipler tries show that some specific myths of a specific religion, Christianity, may be basically compatible with science. He identifies the three singularities in the diagram with the three persons of the Trinity. The Son, Jesus, can be identified with the singularity at the edge of the multiverse. The virgin birth of Jesus, his incarnation, his resurrection, and several specific miracles are discussed and "explained" in terms of modern physics in the framework of Tipler's cosmology. Well...

With his extensive knowledge of physics and religion, Tipler tries to show that his conclusions are plausible and even proposes falsifiable experiments to prove them. But I think the second part of the book is "not in the same universe" as the first one, and much less interesting. I find it off-topic like, say, describing in detail the provincial geography of the Earth in a cosmology essay on the large scale structure of the universe. I am very interested in Tipler's cosmic vision and interpretation of the fabric of reality, but I just don't find "details" like the virgin birth interesting enough.

Of course, most Christians do find them very important. But when I hear hoof beats I think horse not zebra. So, regardless of the validity of Tipler's speculations in the second part of the book, I still think of Jesus the son of Joseph as a great _man_, one of the greatest of our history. The Mind near the Omega Point may well choose to consider Jesus, among the countless sentient inhabitants of spacetime, as especially worth of attention and encouragement, but I don't think it will need to mess with the details of human biology, or with the chemistry of water and wine. I think the first part of The Physics of Christianity is a great book, a revised and streamlined version of The Physics of Immortality with some new very interesting insights and more intuitive metaphors. But I don't care much for the second part.