Two sf story ideas
A couple of ideas for vaguely Singularitarian short stories that I've had kicking about for a while, but which I can't see how to take from "idea" to "completed story". If anyone wants to write them, be my guest. There are no doubt lots of reasons why these ideas are stupid, and I'd be grateful if you'd point them out to me. On the other hand, if
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I'm surprised by that - say more? Is this a Mitchell Porter thing?
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Do you have any good arguments why this wouldn't be the case?
[Yes, I should read the whole WBE roadmap rather than just commentaries on it. It's on the list...]
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b) Why would you expect pessimism to give you information about reality here?
c) can't really address here
d) This again seems a bit general - I think we should be working out whether the brain is using a particular trick by looking for it, not just assuming it has all tricks.
This doesn't seem to me to add up to "almost certainly".
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a2) Doug*'s arguments don't add up to "quantum level necessary", but they do to my mind add up to "a very low-level simulation is necessary". Which is enough for my purposes, but obviously the difference is very important for anyone trying practical WBE.
* oops.
b) By itself, I wouldn't - but it's worth asking oneself if WBE proponents are suffering from the Planning Fallacy, and if so which of their assumptions might be excessively optimistic. Again, I should probably read the WBE roadmap before accusing its authors of anything, but over-optimism on their part is a priori likely ( ... )
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Speaking with Doug about this in person, he was swayed by my argument that the number of distinct, novel protein interactions in the brain will be a great deal less than the total number of interactions, and so you can reasonably hope to build up a library of all the interactions you expect to encounter and what the likely outcomes are.
I recommend the WBE roadmap, it's an interesting read. You might also enjoy learning about the Blue Brain Project - see eg this TED talk by Henry Markram. I think within twenty years we stand a decent chance of having everything we need to scan and simulate a mouse brain except the means to scan that much material at that high a resolution.
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You might also be interested in progress at http://carboncopies.org - an organization founded by Suzanne Gildert and myself (Randal A. Koene) that continues where Anders and the rest of our WBE group left off in 2007 with the Whole Brain Emulation roadmap that was developed at the FHI workshop in Oxford.
While still technology agnostic, carboncopies.org explores the gamut of Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds (ASIM), which is a somewhat more objective-oriented term than the oft-confusing uploading, downloading, offloading, etc.
Cheers,
Randal
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From a story perspective, it might be interesting to make "upload" a pejorative term used by the activists, and all of the technical/legal writing and pro-SIM activists using "substrate-independent mind" instead.
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Cheers,
Randal
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