Alternate Minds

Metaphysical Daring as a Posthuman Survival Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Sat, 15 Aug 2015 19:40:00 +0000

For those of you who have been holding off on getting your brains destructively uploaded, I have a couple of bits of good news. There's a new video and a paper draft available for my project, "Metaphysical Daring as a Posthuman Survival Strategy," forthcoming in a special issue of Midwest Studies in Philosophy on science fiction and philosophy edited by Eric Schwitzgebel. Gander at the draft at this link. Here's the abstract:

Believing that one can survive having one’s mind “uploaded” to a computer (while having one’s brain destroyed) may be better than the contrary belief in a sense of “better” determined independently of the belief’s truth. Different metaphysical views about a person’s persistence conditions can be ordered on a scale ranging from extremes of metaphysical daring to extremes of metaphysical timidity. Further, the adoption of more daring metaphysical views may confer survival advantages to posthuman adopters and their descendants. Regardless of whether their views are true, the metaphysically timid who refuse to upload may go extinct and be supplanted by their more daring posthuman descendants. This possibility can serve as a basis for contemporary humans to endorse posthumanist values and projects, including a willingness to subjecting themselves to mind uploading procedures.

The video has just been made available by the University of Texas, Arlington, where I presented this stuff in 2014. If you want to skip around in the video, here are the main landmarks: Kenneth Williford's very nice introduction ends around 03:20. Following the talk is a Q-and-A that starts around 31:39.

Hermanns Lecture Series 2014 - Philitechia - Dr. Pete Mandik from English Department, UTA on Vimeo.

And here's an interview with me about this stuff from hopesandfears.com: "Upload Your Mind and Live Forever."

(Cross-posted at Brain Hammer.)

Interview of me on mind uploading

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Mon, 15 Jun 2015 22:28:00 +0000

"Upload Your Mind and Live Forever" is an interview of me on mind uploading over at hopesandfears.com.

Excerpt:

Well, part of what I’m trying to say is that, like most metaphysical debates, this is going to be irresoluble by argumentation. There’s really nothing that pure reason is going to allow us to settle one way or another. All the evidence that we have we all tend to agree on. That evidence just underdetermines whether computers could have conscious experiences or whether they would be mere copies or actual survival of personal identity.

What I try to do as a way of resolving that metaphysical impasse is to look at it from a Darwinian or evolutionary point of view. The basic point of Darwinian evolution applies to any kind of system where you have things that are replicating and various degrees of fitness that would apply to the things that are reproducing. On this kind of abstract characterization, we could describe various hypothetical systems as having features that would be more fit.

Now one of the features that these computer simulations would have is something we could describe as being belief-like. In particular, these things are going to have the belief that they are going to survive the procedure. Now the metaphysical debate is about whether that belief is true, and what I’m trying to argue is that we can say, regardless of whether that belief is true, that belief would have survival value. Physical systems that have that belief are more likely to make more copies of themselves than physical systems that lack that belief.

ECHOPRAXIA, Peter Watt's sequel to BLINDSIGHT

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 14:07:00 +0000

One of my all-time favorite cogsci-fi novels, Peter Watt's Blindsight (previously here and here) has a sequel now. It's Echopraxia, and this review makes it sound pretty terrific.

I'm stoked! Anyone else read it?

Explanation of the title from the review:

As for zombies, they are simply people whose higher thought processes have been turned off. This is done either by surgery, or as a side-effect of bioengineered viral plagues. Zombies function autonomically, without conscious awareness. Their mental apparatus is “reduced to fight/flight/fuck” basic responses. They make great soldiers and sex slaves, because they follow orders unquestioningly. They are in fact subject to the malady that gives the novel its title: “echopraxia” is the condition in which a person compulsively imitates someone else’s actions and behavior. When they are not under hierarchical control, they simply imitate one another, and go on rampages like in the movies.

Debunking the Quantum Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 17:02:00 +0000

Debunking the Quantum Mind @SpaceTimeMind

Is quantum mechanics relevant to the philosophy of mind (and the other way around)?

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 13:23:00 +0000

Is quantum mechanics relevant to the philosophy of mind (and the other way around)?

from Scientia Salon

http://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/is-quantum-mechanics-relevant-to-the-philosophy-of-mind-and-the-other-way-around/

Sci-Fi Author Roger Williams at SpaceTimeMind

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 14:47:00 +0000

One of the projects I've been highly absorbed in lately is the new podcast and video series, SpaceTimeMind, that I'm co-hosting with Richard Brown. There's a lot of overlap in themes between SpaceTimeMind and the Alternate Minds project. See, for instance, our 5th episode, Transhumanism and Existentialism. Especially pertinent is our latest installment, our interview with Roger Williams, author of The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (discussed previously here and here).

Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 16:36:00 +0000

Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey.

Two physicists from Michigan Technological University, Robert J Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson, have written an article, Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers.

Abstract:

Time travel has captured the public imagination for much of the past century, but little has been done to actually search for time travelers. Here, three implementations of Internet searches for time travelers are described, all seeking a prescient mention of information not previously available. The first search covered prescient content placed on the Internet, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific terms in tweets on Twitter. The second search examined prescient inquiries submitted to a search engine, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific search terms submitted to a popular astronomy web site. The third search involved a request for a direct Internet communication, either by email or tweet, pre-dating to the time of the inquiry. Given practical verifiability concerns, only time travelers from the future were investigated. No time travelers were discovered. Although these negative results do not disprove time travel, given the great reach of the Internet, this search is perhaps the most comprehensive to date.

(ht: Maureen Eckert)

Eldritch Abomination - Television Tropes & Idioms

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Wed, 29 May 2013 17:54:00 +0000

A two-word phrase I need to use in more sentences: Eldritch Abomination - Television Tropes & Idioms

The 2012 Human Tower Competition in Tarragona, Spain | Colossal

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 20:02:00 +0000

The 2012 Human Tower Competition in Tarragona, Spain | Colossal

Roko's basilisk - RationalWiki

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 14:39:00 +0000

Roko's basilisk - RationalWiki

Roko's basilisk is a proposition suggested by a member of the rationalist community LessWrong, which speculates about the potential behavior of a future godlike artificial intelligence. According to the proposition, it is possible that this ultimate intelligence may punish those who fail to help it, with greater punishment accorded those who knew the importance of the task. This is conventionally comprehensible, but the notable bit of the basilisk and similar constructions is that the AI and the person punished have no causal interaction: the punishment would be of a simulation of the person, which the AI would construct by deduction from first principles. In LessWrong's Timeless Decision Theory (TDT), this is taken to be equivalent to punishment of your own actual self, not just someone else very like you.

[...]

In short order, LessWrong posters began complaining that merely reading Roko's words had increased the likelihood that the future AI would punish them — the line of reasoning was so compelling to them that they believed the AI (who would know they'd once read Roko's idea) would now punish them even more for being aware of it and failing to donate all of their income to institutions devoted to the god-AI's development. Thus, even looking at this idea was harmful, lending Roko's proposition the "basilisk" label (after the "basilisk" image from David Langford's science fiction stories, which was in turn named after the legendary serpent-creature from European mythology that killed those who saw it). The more sensitive on LessWrong began to have nightmares.

Indefinite Survival Through Backup Copies

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:04:00 +0000

Indefinite Survival Through Backup Copies

Anders Sandberg & Stuart Armstrong

abstract: If an individual entity endures a fixed probability of disappearing ("dying") in a given fixed time period, then, as time approaches infinity, the probability of death approaches certainty. One approach to avoid this fate is for individuals to copy themselves into different locations; if the copies each have an independent probability of dying, then the total risk is much reduced. However, to avoid the same ultimate fate, the entity must continue copying itself to continually reduce the risk of death. In this paper, we show that to get a non-zero probability of ultimate survival, it suffices that the number of copies grows logarithmically with time. Accounting for expected copy casualties, the required rate of copying is hence bounded.

http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/26482/2012-1.pdf

Curves in spacetime violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 03:03:00 +0000

Curves in spacetime violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle

Multimodal exploration of the fourth dimension

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 19:22:00 +0000

Multimodal exploration of the fourth dimension
Hanson, A. & Zhang, H. http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~huizhang/viz05.pdf

DOI : 10.1109/VISUAL.2005.1532804

abstract: We present a multimodal paradigm for exploring topological surfaces embedded in four dimensions; we exploit haptic methods in particular to overcome the intrinsic limitations of 3D graphics images and 3D physical models. The basic problem is that, just as 2D shadows of 3D curves lose structure where lines cross, 3D graphics projections of smooth 4D topological surfaces are interrupted where one surface intersects another. Furthermore, if one attempts to trace real knotted ropes or a plastic models of self-intersecting surfaces with a fingertip, one inevitably collides with parts of the physical artifact. In this work, we exploit the free motion of a computer-based haptic probe to support a continuous motion that follows the local continuity of the object being explored. For our principal test case of 4D-embedded surfaces projected to 3D, this permits us to follow the full local continuity of the surface as though in fact we were touching an actual 4D object. We exploit additional sensory cues to provide supplementary or redundant information. For example, we can use audio tags to note the relative 4D depth of illusory 3D surface intersections produced by projection from 4D, as well as providing automated refinement of the tactile exploration path to eliminate jitter and snagging, resulting in a much cleaner exploratory motion than a bare uncorrected motion. Visual enhancements provide still further improvement to the feedback: by opening a view-direction-defined cutaway into the interior of the 3D surface projection, we allow the viewer to keep the haptic probe continuously in view as it traverses any touchable part of the object. Finally, we extend the static tactile exploration framework using a dynamic mode that links each stylus motion to a change in orientation that creates at each instant a maximal-area screen projection of a neighborhood of the current point of interest. This minimizes 4D distortion and permits true metric sizes to be deduced locally at any point. All these methods combine to reveal the full richness of the complex spatial relationships of the target shapes, and to overcome many expected perceptual limitations in 4D visualization.

Alien Species Wiki - Aliens, UFOs, Space aliens

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:16:00 +0000

Alien Species Wiki - Aliens, UFOs, Space aliens

Platonic Cave and related Television Tropes & Idioms

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:28:00 +0000

Platonic Cave - Television Tropes & Idioms

Related entries at TVtropes.org:

TV Tropes on Hive Minds and Mental Fusions

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 23:10:00 +0000

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HiveMind http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MentalFusion

GOLEM on Vimeo

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 22:22:00 +0000

GOLEM on Vimeo:

Film by Patrick Mccue & Tobias Wiesner
The movie is based on the short story “GOLEM XIV” of “Imaginary Magnitude” by Stanislaw Lem from 1973.
The book is written from the perspective of a military A.I. computer who obtains consciousness, moving towards personal technological singularity with growing intelligence.
It starts to refuse military support because it detects a basic lacking of internal logical consistency of war.
GOLEM gives several lectures with focus on mankind's position in the process of evolution and the possible biological and intellectual future of humanity before it ceases communication.
The movie tells about the first point of its "about man threefold" lecture as a reduced and simplified version while visually weaving this with GOLEM simulating human culture processes based on ideas and dynamics of freedom and curiosity, fear and security, abstraction and fiction, the lack of accessibility in face of unknowing and the need for generating meaning.
The whole creative intention about this project is to face your own process in this world with reflection and self responsibility, to stay curious and create, look for new ideas and stay keen.

Mashable: Are We Living Inside a Computer Simulation?

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 15:00:00 +0000

Mashable: Are We Living Inside a Computer Simulation? http://goo.gl/mag/Ds7ThW1

Ask Ray | Asimov’s ‘The Last Question’ | KurzweilAI

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 15:09:00 +0000

Ask Ray | Asimov’s ‘The Last Question’ | KurzweilAI

Mathematical Fiction on Infinity

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 11:28:00 +0000

From Alex Kasman's Mathematical Fiction database, stories about infinity.
http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/search.php?go=yes&topics=inf&orderby=title

Mathematical Fiction: Geometry

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 11:26:00 +0000

From Alex Kasman's Mathematical Fiction database, stories about topology, geometry, or trig.
http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/search.php?go=yes&topics=gtt&orderby=title

Post-singularity and transhumanist fiction recommendations

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 11:39:00 +0000

http://www.digitalkingdom.org/robin/tiki-index.php?page=Post-Singularity+And+Transhumanist+Fiction+I've+Enjoyed

ET sensoria and ET cogitations

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 01:22:00 +0000

Dear Alternate Minds Readers,

For a philosophy and sci fi course I'm piloting spring semester, I'm seeking recommendations of sci fi, preferably short, that depicts either extraterrestrial cognition or extraterrestrial phenomenology.

What's good? Whatchoogot?

Cheers,

Pete

Lair of the Trapmaster

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 12:18:00 +0000

Lair of the Trapmaster

Inventions and Ideas from Science Fiction Books and Movies at Technovelgy.com

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 12:39:00 +0000

Inventions and Ideas from Science Fiction Books and Movies at Technovelgy.com

Explore the inventions, technology and ideas of science fiction writers at Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) - over 2,200 are available. Use the Timeline of Science Fiction Invention or the alphabeticGlossary of Science Fiction Technology to see them all, look for the category that interests you, or browse by favorite author / book. Browse more than 3,700 Science Fiction in the News articles.