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Good bye Fred, see you soon

Fred Chamberlain III recently had his brain placed into cryostasis at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale.

Chronosphere says: "Frederick Rockwell Chamberlain, III was and is of absolutely critical importance to cryonics." He was is also a pioneer of the new science of cybernetic life, and of absolutely critical importance to us, his friends.

Fred and Linda Chamberlain incorporated Alcor in 1972; the minutes of those early Alcor meetings can be viewed by those who might be interested. "His physical presence will be missed by many friends, biological family and chosen family until technology allows a future instantiation to be with us once again," Linda says.

Fred had a great first life, and I am honored to be his friend. In the picture he is wearing a shirt with "Mind uploading - the ultimate out of body experience!" I took this picture at the the Terasem monthly gathering and annual graduation in Vermont, last october. This is how I want to remember Fred, until next time: smiling, in a beautiful sunny day, full of enthusiasm for a wonderful future.

"Though I will have to carry on alone for both of us for a short while before we see each other in cyberspace, Fred is still part of all of us in the Terasem Collective Consciousness and we will continue to enjoy his warm creativity again soon as well as through his poetry and many writings," says Linda. "As they say on the Star Pebble, See you in the next cycle."

The great Truths of Terasem weekly podcasts, by Fred and Linda, is available on iTunes, and transcripts are available on the Truths of Terasem podcasts website.

Mormon Transhumanist Association conference, SLC, April 6

On April 6 I will give a talk on “The Turing Church of Transcendent Engineering” at the 2012 conference of the Mormon Transhumanist Association.

My talk will be based on a revised version of “Transcendent Engineering.” I will also discuss examples of emerging and not yet well understood science that could be relevant to synthetic realities, resurrection, and “quantum archaeology.”

The transcendent science and engineering of our mind children in the far future is probably not understandable and not even remotely imaginable by us, at this stage of our evolution. Yet, some of our current scientific theories seem to hint at possible scientific foundations for transcendent engineering. I wish to show some glimpses at these foundations, with the caveat that we don’t really understand these things yet… and all that I will say is most likely wrong. Reality can only be even stranger then the weirdest theories.

The conference will be held on April 6, 2012 from 9 am to 5 pm at the Salt Lake City Public Library in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Schedule for the Mormon Transhumanist Association Conference 2012.

The conference is open to the public, please register here. For those who cannot attend in person, all talks will be streamed via transfigurism.org, and recorded as well.

Previous conferences sponsored by the Mormon Transhumanist Association include the 2010 Transhumanism and Spirituality conference and the 2009 Mormonism and Engineering conference. 

Speakers will address the themes of Mormonism, Transhumanism, and Transfigurism, with particular attention to topics at the intersection of technology, spirituality, science and religion.

BS watch --- Not mean, but false

Over at Amor Mundi Dale Carrico calls me out in a comment. I am touched by the honor, so I will reciprocate and comment in this very first BS Watch.

First, some context. Dale is basically a good fellow and a very good writer. I must confess that I read him often, and often agree with him. I cannot comment on his blog because a couple of years ago he told me, in public, that I was no longer welcome. The reason he hates me so much is that I am a “Robot Cultist” who “believes that his organismic brain might be “digitized” and thereupon “migrated” (these already questionable metaphors he treats altogether more questionably as scientific hypotheses, of all things) into cyberspace or into a robot body, and thereby quasi-immortalized.”

Carrico is really obsessed with Robot Cultists. He used to participate in 
the Robot Cult
 transhumanist online discussions, and he used to be a Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, but one day he started attacking us with nonsense and lies like an intellectually and emotionally -challenged fool.

Now he asks his readers:

• Is this critique of transhumanism mean?
• If yes, does its meanness undermine the force of the critique?
• If yes, can you think of ways to reformulate the critique so that it retains its substance but becomes comparatively immune to this charge of meanness?

I don’t find the post in question so mean, nothing compared to other posts that I have seen. In general, meanness and personal insults often make things more interesting and fun to read, and I must admit to enjoying a good, mean and dirty verbal fight now and then. Meanness also generates page hits and attracts readers, and I know some persons who have decided to join 
the Robot Cult
 technoprogressive and transhumanist interest groups after reading about us on Amor Mundi, so I think Dale is doing very good work for us.

Of course, those who write mean articles about others should be prepared to take meanness in return. They should also do their homework, stick to verifiable claims, and be very careful to avoid false claims and faulty logic. Otherwise, nobody will take them seriously.

Carrico is a Grand Master of strawman arguments, and a consummate liar who never pays any attention to what his “targets” really say. A typical discussion with him goes like this:

DC: Everyone knows that roses are pink, but Robot Cultist X says that roses are green.
X: I am sorry, but I never said that roses are green.
DC: Yes you did, you moron, you and your Robot Cultist friends.
X: I never said that roses are green and I challenge you to find an actual quote, even just one. I have said that most roses are pink or red, but many roses are white or yellow, and some roses have other colors.
DC: Fuck you, asshole. Perhaps you never said that roses are green, but you Robot Cultists want to genetically engineer green and blue roses, and this goes against the finitude and interconnectedness of Nature, and your discourse reinforces the industrial-military-libertropian complex, and… (pages and pages of logorrhea).

Of course, after a few exchanges like this, X stops paying attention and moves on. The problem is not that Carrico’s critique is mean. Mean is tolerable, if it is also interesting and fun. The problem is that it is totally BS. The meanness cannot undermine the force, because there is no force to be undermined. Let’s see:

The post in question is divided into ten separate claims, which I will comment below one by one.

One: Enjoying science fiction is not the same thing as doing science or making science policy.

Carrico can only think in black and white, mutually exclusive categories, and is unable to understand overlapping categories. Many science fiction fans are also very literate in science and have advanced degrees and a long list of peer-reviewed publications to prove it, and many top scientists and science policy wonks are also science fiction fans.

Of course enjoying science fiction is not the same thing as doing science or making science policy, but this does not disqualify persons interested in science fiction from doing science or making science policy, if they have the inclination, skills and qualifications.

I could list many examples, but it would be kind of useless because Carrico ignores facts when they get in the way of his sophistry.

I find it very strange that a person who teaches at a top college is unable to understand the simple words “and, also.”

Two: Indulging in wish-fulfillment fantasies is not the same thing as analysis.

Same as above.

Three: Extrapolating from speculations and stipulations mistreated as data will yield serially failed predictions, none of which amounts to foresight.

Foresight is about speculations on interesting outcomes that may follow from current facts, trends and theoretical models, not about detailed predictions with a date. Those who stay on the beaten path never find new places, and that’s why we need also scouts.

Four: There is nothing brave or useful or distinguished or progressive about saying magic would be cool if it were real, especially since there are so many real problems and real possibilities in the world that need all our bravery, pragmatism, special effort, and progressive struggle.

See comment to One. Many persons who say that magic would be cool if it were real, and try to make some magic real, are also actively engaged in more proximate problems and possibilities. Similarly, many persons who primarily focus on proximate problems and possibilities are also open to and interested in “future magic” speculations.

Five: Promoting as “experts” people with no training in actual professional or academic disciplines, celebrating the “genius” of high-tech billionaires of no real distinction, who have simply appropriated the invention and effort of countless uncelebrated others, and providing rationalizations for the “indispensability” of corporate-military elites who will presumably deliver us medical immortality, offer us nano-abundance, geo-engineer away our environmental catastrophes, and code for us perfect software god parent-substitutes, is not even remotely the same as having real thoughts, doing true philosophy, or making serious policy.

While I might agree with parts of this claim, other parts are just hate speech with no content. Labeling imaginative speculations on emerging technologies “rationalizations for the “indispensability” of corporate-military elites” makes very little sense.

Six: Subcultures that remain very static, very small, very marginal, very megalomaniacal, and very defensive tend to look and conduct themselves more like cults than subcultures.

Very true. I think one of the best examples is the Amor Mundi blog, where Carrico holds court with a handful of brainwashed followers who believe everything he says, and bans those who dare to disagree.

Seven: People who buy a Volkswagon, an Apple computer, or Diesel Jeans aren’t actually joining a political movement no matter what advertising executives say to the contrary, nor are people who watch BSG marathons, write Janeway shipper fanfic, work on a Steampunk casemod, or enjoy CLAMP cosplay actually engaging in political agitation no matter how personally resonant and edifying their experiences may be, or how interesting to ethnographers, nor are people who are invested in “The Future” of the futurologists — which amounts in some respects precisely to such marketing phenomena and in others precisely to such fandom phenomena — really joining or sustaining a political movement or engaged in political agitation in any remotely serious way.

See comment to One. Many persons who enjoy speculating about the future are also engaged in politics, and many political activists also enjoy speculating about the future.

It is interesting to note that, like many other transhumanists, I actually agree with most of Carrico’s politics. I support basic income, wealth redistribution, civil rights, abortion, gay marriage, etc. I do not share Carrico’s totalitarian though-policing attitude typical of the dullest “intellectual” left, but I have similar positions on most actual, concrete issues. I find it strange that Carrico dedicates so much energy to attacking and insulting persons with similar political ideas.

Eight: “The Future” is not Narnia, it is not Middle Earth, it is not the United Federation of Planets, it is not Hogwarts, it is not Heaven, it is not Hell — it will be a shared present attesting to stakeholder struggle just as this present is.

Also, water is wet.

Nine: What we mean by life happens in biological bodies, what we mean by intelligence happens in biological brains in society, what we mean by progress happens in historical struggles among the diversity of living intelligent beings who share the present — and to say otherwise is not to be interesting but to be idiotic.

I agree with the last point, “what we mean by progress happens in historical struggles among the diversity of living intelligent beings who share the present.” But the first two points are total BS based on a very weak and very stupid non-argument: “this is how things have always been, and therefore this is how things will continue to be forever.” Wake up, Dale. Nobody walked on the Moon before 1969, and same-sex persons could not marry in the U.S. before 2004.

Ten: We are all vulnerable, we are all promising, we are all more ignorant than we need to be, we are all more capable than we can know, we are all error-prone, we are all interdependent, we are all subject to chance, and we are all going to die.

Probably most persons alive today will die, but I look forward to science and technology permitting a very radical extension of the lifespan of future generations, in biological and non-biological bodies, beginning with today’s toddlers. The other points are true but, given the choice, I prefer being less vulnerable rather than more, less dependent on others rather than more, less ignorant and error-prone, and I will try to live as long as I can by using all available options and without any reverence and respect for the wisdom of nature and similar crap. This is just common sense.

Terasem hangouts

Terasem joiners and friends meet on the 10th of each month, and remote participants can join via Google+ Hangouts. In the picture, the participants in Florida (shown, Martine Rothblatt performing a yoga session), Dan Massey and Alison Gardner from DC, myself from Europe, and a visitor.

These meetings will become even more interesting as the new Extra features in Google+ Hangouts, which combine multi-person video chat with screen sharing and collaboration in Google Docs, are rolled in Hangouts. ReadWriteWeb says: "Hangouts allow users to bring in Google Docs, and smartphone users can use mobile video chat to participate. The addition of screen sharing makes Hangouts a versatile, compelling, free way to conduct remote meetings".

The limit of 10 participants is annoying, but there are interesting news: Hangouts on-air will permit broadcasting hangouts to viewers. Read How Google+ Hangouts will transform traditional TV broadcasting on lostremote.

Interview with venusplusx - Alison Gardner and Dan Massey

I interviewed venusplusx.org polymaths Alison Gardner and Dan Massey on sexual freedom, the occupy movement, transhumanism, the singularity, physics, religion and spirituality, and their forthcoming book. LGBT rights and quantum entanglement in the same talk. Thanks to Khannea Suntzu for filming. Thanks to Hank Pellissier for transcribing part of the interview for the IEET, and join the discussion at IEET | Sexual Freedom - an interview with VenusPlusX.

For this first teleXLR8 show using an interview format I have invited two Renaissance persons interested in everything. All these topics and many others will be explored in forthcoming interviews and talk shows on highly imaginative technologies, science, art, culture and society, hosted by show leaders (to be announced soon), with one or more guests and a selected audience. The videos will be edited and posted online a few days after the shows.

Transcendent Engineering - Terasem Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness

My essay Transcendent Engineering ha just been published on the Terasem Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness. A version of the essay is forthcoming in the Transhumanist Reader edited by Max More and Natasha Vita-More.

The image above is part of a beautiful picture taken by Terasem editor Lori Rhodes to illustrate the article. Thanks Lori!

Expanding previous essays, I argue that science may someday develop the capability to resurrect the dead and build (and/or become) God(s), and propose to base a transhumanist religion (or, better, mythology) on this idea.

Read the rest here...

Discussion: you are welcome to join the ongoing conversation on the Turing Church Facebook group and/or the IEET site: Transcendent Engineering - IEET

Quantum Archaeology

I have often used the almost equivalent term "Time Scanning", but I see that more and more people are using "Quantum Archaeology". A short definition:

Quantum Archaeology is a set of hypothetical far future technologies that, presumably through the application of yet undiscovered quantum effects, will permit reconstructing past events up to any desired resolution in space and time. In particular, Quantum Archaeology will permit reconstructing the life, thoughts, memories and feelings of any person in the past, up to any desired level of detail, and thus resurrecting the original person via "copying to the future."

See this discussion on the KurzweilAI Forum. or search the Forum. QA is frequently discussed there, and Forum member eldras maintains an excellent Quantum Archaeology page with references.

A practical analogy for QA:

A few weeks ago I wiped clean an old website of mine (I deleted everything, html and php pages, and the entire mysql database). Only yesterday I realized that I had deleted the only existing copy of an article that I wrote in 2005 jointly with one of my favorite SF writers. The article was dead, and with no backup copies anywhere. I was really mad.

Then today I thought that perhaps the (Holy?) Ghost in the Machine (Internet) had made a backup copy of the article. I found a copy on the Internet Archive, incomplete but good enough as a starting point for reconstruction (resurrection).

So I have resurrected the article. It has taken some work, but here it is, and I think some people here may like it:

Shadows and the concept of self
By Giulio Prisco and Richard L. Miller

We die, and if we have no backup copies (e.g. a chemically preserved brain, a frozen body, a mindfile) our death is irreversible.

Or is it?

Perhaps the machinery of the universe creates backup copies, and if our descendants (or aliens, or AIs) find our backup copies, they will be able to resurrect us.

How? Some preliminary thoughts:

1) Other times are special cases of other universes (other branches of the MWI multiverse). If quantum entanglement extends across time, then it should be possible to find present systems correlated to past systems.

2) In the MWI there is no collapse of the state vector that irreversibly discards information. This should imply that information is preserved in the multiverse.

3) Reversible computing is the most energy-efficient form of computing, because only destroying information requires energy. If reversible computing is the most energy-efficient form of computing, it makes sense to think that the universe does reversible computing, and all information lost is available in "hidden output registers" that we could eventually find and read.

Turing Church Online Workshop 2

In the picture above taken in teleXLR8 I am with Frank Tipler, in a preparation meeting for the Turing Church Online Workshop 2. I am a big Tipler fan, see for example Interview with Frank. J. Tipler (Nov. 2002), and Review of The Physics of Christianity, by Frank Tipler.

Frank gave a great talk at the Workshop (see also this video for the full Q/A session).



Quotes from Tipler’s talk and Q/A:

“If we don’t move into space, if we and our downloads and our art int siblings do not move into space, the entire biosphere is doomed. if we are so foolish as to remain on the planet earth then we and the entire biosphere will be annihilated. Fortunately I don’t expect this to happen, I expect that the human race and its artificial intelligences and downloads will eventually move out into space and ultimately take over the universe.”

“Everything can be reduced to the laws of physics, in particular to the laws of physics which we now know.”

He mentions that we are used to think that Newtonian physics has been superseded by general relativity and quantum mechanics, so we cannot rule out that the physics which we now know will be superseded by new physics, but he thinks general relativity and quantum physics are implied by Newtonian physics.

“Newton was correct!”

“General relativity is really Newtonian mechanics made consistent with the idea that the speed of light is the same for all observers, which is an automatic consequence of maxwell’s equations.”

“As it was proved by the great mathematician Elie Cartan in the 1920s, gravity is curvature for Newton also, and once you combine that with the insights of Enstein and Lorentz then the Newtonian equations automatically become the Einstein equations.”
Ref.: General Relativity As an Aether Theory, arxiv.org/pdf/1007.4572

“Quantum mechanics really is a subset of Newtonian mechanics in its most general form called Hamilton-Jacobi theory, that means there was no scientific revolution in the 1920.”
Ref.: Hamilton-Jacobi Many-Worlds Theory and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, arxiv.org/abs/1007.4566

“We already have a theory of everything.”

“Reality is deterministic.”

“There are parallel universes out there. Many world, many universes, is already built into the laws of physics, was in the laws of physics in the early 19th centuty, physicists would just not admit what their own equation were screaming at them.”

He says that lack holes cannot evaporate because of unitarity, but in an ever expanding universe they would necessarily evaporate, which would violate the laws of physics.

He concludes that it is not possible for the universe to expand forever, it must eventually expand to a max size and then re-contract. but this would also lead to contradictions with thermodynamics. Only one possible re-contraction mechanism is consistent with all the laws of physics:

“Intelligent life manipulating the entire universe, forcing it into a series of patterns that allow this intelligent life to continue to exist.”

“Only this makes the laws of physics mutually consistent.”

“The laws of physics have dictated that we will survive.”

“If the laws of physics are for us, for the biosphere, for the eventual existence of human downloads and the eventual exist of artificial intelligence, what on earth can be against us. Inevitably we will take over the entire universe.”

“As we approach the final singularity, the laws of physics also dictate that our knowledge and computing capacity is expanding without limits. Eventually it will become possible to emulate, to make a perfect copy of, every previous state of the entire universe.”

“We will be brought back into the future, brought back into existence as computer emulations in the far future.”

“Since the computer capacity must by the laws of physics expand without limits as we are going into the final singularity, that means these emulations can also continue to exist forever and also interact with the various versions of themselves.”

“When we emulate basically all possibilities consistent with the laws of physics, we will actually get the particular one of you and I which are actually here in this auditorium.”

“These all possibilities are already there currently. This is called the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, but I claim it is not one interpretation, it is really the only interpretation consistent with the laws of physics.”

In the Q/A

“The expansion of the universe will be turned off by our human download descendants plus our artificial intelligence siblings.”

“The universe cannot expand forever because this would be inconsistent with the laws of physics.”

“What the mathematics is telling us is that actually there are three singularities out there, a final singularity, an initial singularity, and a third singularity, which you can see only if you look at the universe from the multiverse point of view, which connects the other two. So, really you have got three singularities, which, you can show mathematically, are one and the same. So, we have in other words a tri-une God, a God who is three but is one.”

“Christianity can be experimentally confirmed.”

The other speakers, James Hughes, Martine Rothblatt, Remi Sussan, Lincoln Cannon, Brent Allsop, Dan Massey, Mike Perry, Andrew Warner, Fred & Linda Chamberlain, and Ben Goertzel, gave great talks. The full videos of all talks and Q/A sessions are available online. The Workshop explored transhumanist spirituality and “Religion 2.0″, the convergence of science and religion, highly imaginative future science and technologies for resurrection, emerging science and technologies for immortality, social and memetic engineering. It was held on December 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of the death of my mother, and I cannot think of a better memorial.

I could not deliver my own talk because my Internet connection was vary bad (it has been very bad for a few weeks after a power surge that must have damaged something in the router). The slides of my presentation are below.

Turing Church Online Workshop 2

View more presentations from Giulio Prisco

The Turing Church Online Workshop 3 will be held in the winter of 2012 and focus on the elusive concepts of time scanning and resurrection by copying-to-the-future, often called Quantum Archaeology.

Anna Ferrari, March 27, 1929 - December 11, 2001

Anna Ferrari, March 27, 1929 - December 11, 2001

INTERNET RISING

INTERNET RISING is a digi-documentary investigating the evolving relationships between the Internet and collective consciousness of humanity. It provokes many questions about ancient and modern paradoxes of life, its pleasures and pains... and the gray area contrasts in between - but most of all it is meant to be an inspiring conversation starter.

INTERNET RISING is a labor of love comprising a rapid fire mashup stream of live interviews all conducted within the web sphere. The film's participants include many profound personalities and key internet influencers ranging from professors, corporate academics, futurists, researchers, writers, bloggers, media creators, activists, gamers, educators, scientists, artists, innovators - real humans, all of whom provide amazing insights into how our state of the world is changing and transforming via various forces of economic, social, geographic, political, philosophical development... all centered around technology's transformative and generative power.

La Voz de la Ciencia - Is the Singularity Near?

A spectre is haunting the world - the spectre of the Singularity. All the powers of the old world have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: The Pope and the ayatollahs, the banks and the political parties, and "bioethicists" of both the right and the left.

Read more on La Voz de la Ciencia (in Spanish)...

The futurists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at the Singularity. Humans 1.0 have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a universe to win.

Between the opening and closing paragraphs adapted from the Manifesto of Karl Marx, my article ¿Está cerca la Singularidad? (in Spanish), published by La Voz de la Ciencia.

The article is a simple and fairly standard overview of the Singularity, with some (less standard) considerations on Singularity politics and spirituality.

La Voz de la Ciencia is an open multidisciplinary project of Aviador Dro on the scientific and technological challenges of the XXI century, from the perspective of their impact on society and the human mind through a unified double vision, scientific and artistic.

Aviador Dro (short for El Aviador Dro Y Sus Obreros Especializados) is an electronic band from Spain formed in Madrid in 1979 with influences such as Gary Numan, Devo and Kraftwerk. They were part of the Movida Madrileña. The article includes the lyrics of their forthcoming musical El momento de la Singularidad.

In this video interview after a talk of Ray Kurzweil in Madrid, my good friend Alejandro Sacristán (aka Aviador Dro's CTA 102) outlines the Singularity (in Spanish).

Turing Church Online Workshop 2, OpenQwaq, Sunday December 11

The Turing Church Online Workshop 2 will be held on Sunday, December 11, 2011, with a format similar to the Turing Church Online Workshop 1 on November 20, 2010, beginning at 9am PST (noon EST, 5pm UK, 6pm Continental EU).

The Workshop will explore transhumanist spirituality and “Religion 2.0″, the convergence of science and religion, highly imaginative future science and technologies for resurrection, emerging science and technologies for immortality, social and memetic engineering.

The technical implementation of the Workshop will be managed by teleXLR8 using the OpenQwaq VR technology. There are a limited number of seats available for those who wish to attend. On Sunday November 27 and Sunday December 4 at at 9am PST (noon EST, 5pm UK, 6pm Continental EU) there will be meetup and practice sessions for speakers and participants.

Some speakers in the pictures above.

Program: Turing Church online workshop 2 | KurzweilAI

Speakers, morning session, 9am PST to noon PST:

• Giulio Prisco
• James Hughes
• Martine Rothblatt
• Frank Tipler
• Ben Goertzel
• Remi Sussan

Speakers, afternoon session, 1pm PST to 4pm PST

• Lincoln Cannon
• Brent Allsop
• Dan Massey
• Andrew Warner
• Mike Perry
• Fred and Linda Chamberlain (pre-recorded talk)

EU idiocracy

Pasted from The Telegraph | EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration:

Brussels bureaucrats were ridiculed yesterday after banning drink manufacturers from claiming that water can prevent dehydration.
EU officials concluded that, following a three-year investigation, there was no evidence to prove the previously undisputed fact.
Producers of bottled water are now forbidden by law from making the claim and will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the edict, which comes into force in the UK next month.
Last night, critics claimed the EU was at odds with both science and common sense. Conservative MEP Roger Helmer said: “This is stupidity writ large.
“The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are: highly-paid, highly-pensioned officials worrying about the obvious qualities of water and trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true.
“If ever there were an episode which demonstrates the folly of the great European project then this is it.”

See also Slashdot | In the EU, Water Doesn't (Officially) Prevent Dehydration.

See also my comments to Peter Wicks article on IEET | The Future of Europe, for example:

Europe is that place where there are long and byzantine regulations about the curvature of bananas (not a joke, but a fact). And of course the buddies of the politicians and civil servants responsible for this idiocy have companies that receive fat EU grants to measure the curvature of bananas, write long unread reports on the catastrophic sociological effects of non compliant bananas etc. All with my money and yours, and while there are some real problems to address.

I am the first to ridicule nanny-state idiocracy, of which Brussels gives us the funniest (and saddest) examples every day, but I don't think the scamocracy of big banks and corporations is any better. I find surreal the discussions between naive libertarians who love corporations and hate governments, and naive socialists who love governments and hate corporations. Today big governments, big banks and big corporations are one and the same entrenched power elite.

From a discussion on the zerostate blog:

Capitalism can be good:

Smart and hard working baker Joe knows how to make good bread. He finds a capitalist partner and opens a bakery. At the beginning he works in the bakery himself with his family, then he hires some workers. Then he opens a few other bakeries, treats and pays his workers well, and continues to make good bread and sell it at reasonable prices. Everyone wins, Joe and his family, the workers, the investors, and the rest of us who can eat good bread.

And capitalism can be bad:

Finance shark Jim bribes his buddies in government to pass regulations that put Joe (and all other small bakers) out of business. Then he opens a chain of bakeries that produce tasteless and toxic bread and sell it at outrageous prices. Of course, he continues to bribe his buddies in government to protect his monopoly. After a few years he is a billionaire who scams financial markets to bring entire currencies and economies down. He owns banks protected by the government and bailed out with citizen’s money when he needs. Every few years he (and his buddies in government) engineer a financial crisis to force people out of their homes and buy them back cheap. Everybody loses but Jim and his buddies.

I suggest that we forget the terms “capitalism” or “anti-capitalism”, and just build a system where Joe’s methods work and Jim’s methods don’t.

We need a real third-way (not one of the jokes proposed by traditional politicians, but a real third way). I want the fair EU society and its welfare safety nets without an idiotic and corrupted nanny-state bureaucracy, and I want the dynamic US society without savage social darwinism and religious fundamentalism. Is this too much to ask?

We have a cure to death right here

Ken Hayworth gave an interactive online talk and Q/A in teleXLR8 on How to create a Connectome Observatory of the mouse brain and beyond, on November 13 2011. See the complete report A Connectome Observatory for nanoscale brain imaging on KurzweilAI.

New technologies now permit imaging brain tissue at resolutions approaching 5x5x5nm. voxel size, down to the protein level. “This is more than sufficient resolution to determine all the connectivity and the properties of the synapses that are needed to explain the functionality of the brain circuits,” Ken said.

“In 100 years, if we have the technology to bring someone back, it won’t be in a biological body,” Ken said in a New York Times article last year. “It is these scanning techniques and mind-uploading that, I think, will bring people back. This is a taboo topic in the scientific community. But we have a cure to death right here. Why aren’t we pursuing it?”

In the Q&A, participants compared connectome preservation via the chemical brain preservation techniques proposed by Ken’s Brain Preservation Foundation to cryonics. See the full video of the talk and Q/A below.



Last year I wrote a post on Chemical brain preservation: cryonics for uploaders, also republished by the Cryonics Institute. Excerpt:

This resolution is sufficient to image the smallest brain structures which, according to current scientific knowledge, are the physical substrate of our thoughts, memories, feelings, emotional responses, hopes, dreams and identity. It is important to stress that this can be done with current technology... the information in a chemically preserved brain can be retrieved and run on a different substrate ("mind uploading"). This makes chemical brain preservation a storage technique optimized for future nanoscale scanning, and an ideal form of "cryonics for uploaders". For those who accept scanning the brain and running the information in the scan file on a different substrate as a valid form of identity preservation, chemical brain preservation seems clearly superior to cryopreservation.

After listening to Ken's talk, I am persuaded that the required brain imaging resolution can be achieved NOW with existing technology (and can only improve). So we just need to build operational pipelines for preparation, readout and storage and medical research facilities (and regulations or better absence thereof) able to preserve brains with sufficient accuracy for future readout and personality retrieval.

Ken prefers to discuss brain preservation technology as a scientific research topic instead of speculating on future availability for human patients (see his article on the Alcor Cryonics magazine and Mike Perry's reply). But in response to questions by Mike Perry and myself he said “If there was really a concerted effort to develop brain preservation technology, it would be easy to have highly reliable hospital brain preservation procedures ready to go in any hospital before the end of the decade. It is all a matter of will.”

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that we have a cure to death right here.

Google+ Hangouts with extras combines multi-person video chat with screen sharing and collaboration in Google Docs

Last year after Google I/O 2010 I wrote "the most interesting development to watch, still a rumor, is Google Meetings: a multiuser videoconferencing application for the Google cloud. If Google Meetings is integrated with the other applications in the Google Apps suite, it could very rapidly become the favorite solution for desktop business videoconferencing and collaboration."

That was before Google+. The new Google+ Hangouts with Extras feature, recently announced, does just that: "Hangouts with extras, which combines multi-person video chat with screen sharing and collaboration in Google Docs, lets you work together on projects even when your team can't be in the same room. Whether you’re out of town, working on a project with a distributed group, or just don’t feel like walking to the next building for your meeting, Hangouts with extras can give your team the productivity boost it needs." Awesome.

Online talk next Sunday: Ken Hayworth on How to create a Connectome Observatory of the mouse brain and beyond

Ken Hayworth will give an online talk next Sunday Nov. 13 at 10am PST in teleXLR8, on How to create a Connectome Observatory of the mouse brain and beyond. If you wish to attend:
- If you have a teleXLR8 account created in 2011, you can just show up.
- If you have a teleXLR8 account created in 2010, I will need to create a new account for you. Please contact me.
Please read: IMPORTANT – invitations and logistics
http://telexlr8.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/important-invitations-and-logistics/

How to create a Connectome Observatory of the mouse brain and beyond | KurzweilAI
http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-to-create-a-connectome-observatory-of-the-mouse-brain-and-beyond

Dr. Kenneth Hayworth will present an online talk and Q/A on How to create a Connectome Observatory of the mouse brain and beyond on Sunday, November 13, at 10am PST.

He will present a plan to map the mouse brain at very high resolution.

The talk will be in teleXLR8, a 3D interactive video conferencing space. Please contact the organizers if you wish to attend the talk.

Hayworth is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, a co-founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation, and designer of the Automatic Tape-Collecting Lathe Ultramicrotome (ATLUM), which could allow efficient nanoscale imaging of brain tissues.

“In 100 years, if we have the technology to bring someone back, it won’t be in a biological body,” he said in a New York Times article last year. “It is these scanning techniques and mind-uploading that, I think, will bring people back. This is a taboo topic in the scientific community. But we have a cure to death right here. Why aren’t we pursuing it?”

See also:
Ken Hayworth on How to create a Connectome Observatory of the mouse brain and beyond, OpenQwaq, November 13 2011, 10am PST | teleXLR8
http://telexlr8.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/ken-hayworth-on-how-to-create-a-connectome-observatory-of-the-mouse-brain-and-beyond-openqwaq-november-13-2011-10am-pst/

Back from trip to NYC and Vermont

In the picture taken by my daughter I am in the New York subway with my late lamented Terasem travel bag, which was stolen by an asshole on the Amtrak train to Vermont. To the asshole: I guess you can make some money by selling the computers and cellphones in the bag, and there was some cash too, but I hope you spend it all on diarrhea pills.

I was a few days in Vermont where I attended the Terasem monthly gathering and annual graduation. In the video below I listen to Martine Rothblatt who talks of satellite radio, electric cars and solar energy... driving an electric sport car powered by solar energy in beautiful Vermont. Awesome.



On Cctober 13 I gave a talk on Transhumanism and Religion at Manhattan College. Thanks to Robert Geraci for organizing the talk, and thanks to all participants for the great questions and comments.

On October 15 and 16 I attended the Singularity Summit 2011. See my Singularity Summit 2011 roundup report at KurzweilAI.

In the picture below I am with my good friend Guillermo Santamaria, whom I met at the Summit face to face for the first time. I met many other friends face to face for the first time, including Robert Geraci and Rachel Haywire, who is organizing the Extreme Futurist Festival in December in LA to bridge counterculture and academia ("if the original Burning Man was to meet the Singularity Summit, you would have Extreme Futurist Fest 2011"). An event not to be missed (though I am afraid I will have to miss it).

I was happy to meet again many good friends (too many to list). A special mention to Alison Gardner and Dan Massey (please see their website VenusPlusX and support their work), who also came to my talk on October 13. After David Brin's talk at the Singularity Summit (David said that the Singularity community should seek a dialog with religious people), Dan and I agreed that the religion of Science and the religion of Love are one and the same, or at least they should be.

Why Technoprogressives Should Join the Pirate Party

Join the Facebook group Space Piratez to discuss Why techno-progressives should join the Pirate Party?

IEET - Why Technoprogressives Should Join the Pirate Party

The liberation of people through technology, and the liberation of technology from the oppressive forces that want to control it, is part of the pirate DNA. This will be reflected at some point in actual policies of the Pirate Party, the party of the future...

Technoprogressives follow current developments in science and technology, and we see that someday, perhaps soon, we will be able to change the traditional human condition in novel and very radical ways. The next generations of technologies for human enhancement will permit overcoming unwanted biological accidents such as wrong gender, disability, undesired physical or cognitive shortcomings, perhaps even aging and death.

As it happened in information technologies, established research labs are leading the initial development phases, but open source citizen collectives of infohackers, biohackers, neurohackers, and nanohackers may gradually take the lead, in the open or underground. The latter may be the case, since the powers will try to control the development of human enhancement technologies, and the result can only be pushing development underground.

Make no mistake: hackers are much smarter than 9-to-5 workers, and they work much harder because they do what they like and like what they do. This will be a very unwelcome development for big governments, big corporations, and big banks, which, by their very nature, wish to control us-the-sheeple and keep us in chains. When these issue will be in the political arena they will fight back, and a very dirty fight it will be. We need a presence in mainstream politics to be prepared.

Read the rest at IEET...

IEET - Hank Pellissier interviews German Pirate Party political director Marina Weisband

IEET - Hank Pellissier interviews German Pirate Party political director Marina Weisband

Last week, the Pirate Party of Berlin, Germany, garnered a shocking 8.9% of the votes in the city-state’s election to place 15 representatives in Berlin’s parliament. In a story on the result, the New York Times described Pirate Party leaders as "disarmingly honest… in their 20s and 30s… with no lack of confidence."

Hank Pellissier has interviewed the German Pirate Party political director Marina Weisband. Read the interview on the IEET website...

Buoyed by their Berlin success, the Pirate Party is sailing full speed towards the next German national election, scheduled in two years. A poll by the Forsa Institute indicates that 7% of the population aims to vote for the upstart new movement. Founded just five years ago in Sweden, the Pirates have quickly become a global force with chapters in more than forty nations.

The interview has been translated in many languages, here is an Italian translation.

I am persuaded that this young "Party of the Internet, and of the Future" is the best political outlet for H+ and technoprogressive policies. Why H+ and technoprogressives should join the Pirate Party? I can think of many reasons.

Perhaps the main reason is that Pirates want to combine personal liberty and social farrness, and clearly affirm the importance of both. Pirates are for BIG, and many of us here are for BIG. But Pirates are also for personal freedom and a slim administration.

The Pirate Party is the party of the Internet, and by extension it is the party of disruptive and revolutionary technologies, not afraid of radical change. The PP is the party of the future. It is the party of the young (like Marina), and I am one of those who think that the young are always right.

It is the only political party that I can see, in a future when these issues will be raised, clearly and openly embracing total self-ownership and morphological freedom.