2214 replies to this topic

[Julia36]

State of the art Resurrection science Video short in 'normal' biology.

Dinasor/chicken within 5 years.

Futurist Resurrection is ahead because it is ideas driven and pre-sceince.

http://player.vimeo....video/60822204

Edited by Innocent, 15 June 2013 - 04:59 PM.

[Julia36]

when you're dead you're dead

Extinct men are no different from any other kind of data.

including extinct languages.

Yet these extinct languages are being reconstructed by archaeologists

Automated reconstruction of ancient languages using probabilistic models of sound change


Abstract

One of the oldest problems in linguistics is reconstructing the words that appeared in the protolanguages from which modern languages evolved. Identifying the forms of these ancient languages makes it possible to evaluate proposals about the nature of language change and to draw inferences about human history. Protolanguages are typically reconstructed using a painstaking manual process known as the comparative method. We present a family of probabilistic models of sound change as well as algorithms for performing inference in these models. The resulting system automatically and accurately reconstructs protolanguages from modern languages. We apply this system to 637 Austronesian languages, providing an accurate, large-scale automatic reconstruction of a set of protolanguages. Over 85% of the system’s reconstructions are within one character of the manual reconstruction provided by a linguist specializing in Austronesian languages. Being able to automatically reconstruct large numbers of languages provides a useful way to quantitatively explore hypotheses about the factors determining which sounds in a language are likely to change over time. We demonstrate this by showing that the reconstructed Austronesian protolanguages provide compelling support for a hypothesis about the relationship between the function of a sound and its probability of changing that was first proposed in 1955.



medieval Cornish


BBC:

A new tool has been developed that can reconstruct long-dead languages.
Researchers have created software that can rebuild protolanguages - the ancient tongues from which our modern languages evolved.
To test the system, the team took 637 languages currently spoken in Asia and the Pacific and recreated the early language from which they descended.
The work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

we are using surface techniques including physical artefact assemblies @ present.

But Archaeology is transferring to Information technology...data in computers, where's its acceleration is rising on Moore's Law.

by 2027 descriptions of anyone who has lived will be possible in computers, and micro-robots will be able to assemble the 106 billion dead people from up to 50,000 years ago.


I'll be back is not lunatic Hope spun by political clergy, but Man dreaming of the possible
in advance of his technological capacity.

"The dreamers of the day are dangerous men...for they may act out their dreams with open eyes to make them into reality" T E Lawrence, Archaeologist

• 
  

  A Child's Guide to Quantum Archaeology (300 words). <~ start here!!!

Edited by Innocent, 15 June 2013 - 06:12 PM.

[Julia36]

I really didn't mean to stifle your attempts to think outside the box, but expressing your thoughts in the natural language of physics (mathematics) might be more effective.

I'm a hermit studying rockpools and the stars. Mathematics is only symbols and the rules that govern them.

My sole aim here s ignition of the idea. Sceintists must run with it.


the brain/thoughts are being digitalized and read by computers.


In its infancy, the implications = we can reduce thought - including dreams - to 0000111101101010101010's

This will help us construct prototype brains to modify on large graphs...& build exact brains states on=f the dead.




Scientists Reconstruct Brains' Visions Into Digital Video

"UC Berkeley scientists have developed a system to capture visual activity in human brains and reconstruct it as digital video clips. Eventually, this process will allow you to record and reconstruct your own dreams on a computer screen.
I just can't believe this is happening for real, but according to Professor Jack Gallant—UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the research published today in the journal Current Biology—"this is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery. We are opening a window into the movies in our minds."
Indeed, it's mindblowing. I'm simultaneously excited and terrified. This is how it works:
They used three different subjects for the experiments—incidentally, they were part of the research team because it requires being inside a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging system for hours at a time. The subjects were exposed to two different groups of Hollywood movie trailers as the fMRI system recorded the brain's blood flow through their brains' visual cortex.
The readings were fed into a computer program in which they were divided into three-dimensional pixels units called voxels (volumetric pixels). This process effectively decodes the brain signals generated by moving pictures, connecting the shape and motion information from the movies to specific brain actions. As the sessions progressed, the computer learned more and more about how the visual activity presented on the screen corresponded to the brain activity."

[Julia36]

the big leap (which may be the only one needed) will be when machines attain intelligence.



there is a race to achieve it. eg google has hired top neural net boffin Geff Hinton and given him a free hand.

eg
http://agi-conference.org/2012/



Pretty much anything can be done with a bit of string and a stick IMO





Man is rapidly evolving, putting technology directly inside his body..

In 2 generations we will be supermen, and because of deflating prices, this will be available for everyone...living or dead:





It is INEVITABLE that Superman arises. And inevitable that Christopher Reeve resurrects.



Arguments about consciousness, free will and reality are irrelevant.

Quantum Archaeology will resurrect the dead and let them argue it.

Edited by Innocent, 15 June 2013 - 06:47 PM.

[Julia36]

Great art and great science meet IMO








The question is philosophy is how do we describe the other side of the Singularity?

Edited by Innocent, 15 June 2013 - 07:21 PM.

[Julia36]

They are debating fairey dust at Kuzweilai (neural dust)


as a man of science, I have to say,





ITS A VERY GOOD IDEA!


(Berkeley Professor Brain Computer interfacing, says neural dust that implants itself in your brain could be available in 18 months)

Edited by Innocent, 15 June 2013 - 11:17 PM.

[Julia36]

The world as we know it is about to disappear.

Accelerating change wont slow, isn't slowing, and is going to get faster and faster and faster.

Anything possible will happen.

[Julia36]

Data is going to be retrieved. It is already being captured enabling us to check thru time:







The battle against death has to be fought and won.
Thinking men should urge the discussion of Quantum Archaeology.

Edited by Innocent, 15 June 2013 - 11:48 PM.

[Julia36]

QUANTUM ARCHAEOLOGY


Quantum Archeology (QA) - (Quantum Archaeology) also known as quantum resurrection, quantum information retrieval and time scanning, is a controversial and emerging idea in science about bringing the dead back to life.

Ancestor simulation - although at the end of time - has been speculated to be possible by Frank J. Tiper in 'The Physics of Immortality' in 1994, and Russian Cosmists ideated physical resurrection in the 19th century.

QA posits it will be available near the advent of post-human machine intelligence using emerging statistical probability and number crunching techniques to achieve massively accurate retrodiction. Robotic resurrection would then follow as science and technology converge.

Edited by Innocent, 16 June 2013 - 03:59 PM.

[Julia36]

The



The speed of change accelerates.

When we hit the knee of the curve on a log graph, change happens so fast, you cant say what the next second will bring.

It wont slow down then but accelerate towards light speed.

One tech paradigm -like valve computers --> chips, replaces another.

Man is not the creator, and we are learning to predict technology which is simpler than one brain at present.
of Laws but is built by them.




One consequence of Accelerating technology is increased ability to describe the past.

WE must do this far into the quantum realm as we master its laws.

The Singularity is approaching, and no-one is dead, because everyone is recoverable.
The first micro-organisms extinct for aens have been reassembled by calculation.

Dead men will soon be awoken to full health...including presidents kings and tyrants.


TECHNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY
BY VERNOR VINGE

The original version of this article was presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993: http://www-rohan.sds...ingularity.html
-- Vernor Vinge

Except for these annotations (and the correction of a few typographical errors), I have tried not to make any changes in this reprinting of the 1993 WER essay.
-- Vernor Vinge, January 2003 [This annotated version was done for the Spring 2003 issue of Whole Earth Review, http://wholeearth.com/ ]


1. What Is The Singularity?

The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater-than-human intelligence. Science may achieve this breakthrough by several means (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur):

• Computers that are "awake" and superhumanly intelligent may be developed. (To date, there has been much controversy as to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is "yes," then there is little doubt that more intelligent beings can be constructed shortly thereafter.)
• Large computer networks (and their associated users) may "wake up" as superhumanly intelligent entities.
• Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
• Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect.

The first three possibilities depend on improvements in computer hardware.
Actually, the fourth possibility also depends on improvements in computer hardware, although in an indirect way.
Progress in hardware has followed an amazingly steady curve in the last few decades. Based on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater-than-human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (Charles Platt has pointed out that AI enthusiasts have been making claims like this for thirty years. Just so I'm not guilty of a relative-time ambiguity, let me be more specific: I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.)
Now in 2003, I still think this time range statement is reasonable.

What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities -- on a still-shorter time scale. The best analogy I see is to the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work -- the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct what-if's in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection could. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals.

This change will be a throwing-away of all the human rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye -- an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that were thought might only happen in "a million years" (if ever) will likely happen in the next century.

It's fair to call this event a singularity ("the Singularity" for the purposes of this piece). It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules, a point that will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs until the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens, it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown. In the 1950s very few saw it: Stan Ulam¹ paraphrased John von Neumann as saying:

One conversation centered on the ever-accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

Von Neumann even uses the term singularity, though it appears he is thinking of normal progress, not the creation of superhuman intellect. (For me, the superhumanity is the essence of the Singularity. Without that we would get a glut of technical riches, never properly absorbed.)

The 1960s saw recognition of some of the implications of superhuman intelligence. I. J. Good² wrote:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind ... [cites three of his earlier papers]. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. . . . It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make.

Good has captured the essence of the runaway, but he does not pursue its most disturbing consequences. Any intelligent machine of the sort he describes would not be humankind's "tool" -- any more than humans are the tools of rabbits, robins, or chimpanzees.

Through the sixties and seventies and eighties, recognition of the cataclysm spread. Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers who felt the first concrete impact. After all, the "hard" science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable . . . soon. Once, galactic empires might have seemed a Posthuman domain. Now, sadly, even interplanetary ones are.
In fact, nowadays in the early twenty-first century, space adventure stories may be categorized by how the authors deal with the plausibility of superhuman machines. We science-fiction writers have a bag of tricks for denying their possibility or keeping them at a safe distance from our plots.

What about the coming decades, as we slide toward the edge? How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view? For a while yet, the general critics of machine sapience will have good press. After all, until we have hardware as powerful as a human brain it is probably foolish to think we'll be able to create human-equivalent (or greater) intelligence. (There is the farfetched possibility that we could make a human equivalent out of less powerful hardware -- if we were willing to give up speed, if we were willing to settle for an artificial being that was literally slow. But it's much more likely that devising the software will be a tricky process, involving lots of false starts and experimentation. If so, then the arrival of self-aware machines will not happen until after the development of hardware that is substantially more powerful than humans' natural equipment.)

But as time passes, we should see more symptoms. The dilemma felt by science-fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors. (I have heard thoughtful comicbook writers worry about how to create spectacular effects when everything visible can be produced by the technologically commonplace.) We will see automation replacing higher- and higher-level jobs. We have tools right now (symbolic math programs, cad/cam) that release us from most low-level drudgery. Put another way: the work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity. In the coming of the Singularity, we will see the predictions of true technological unemployment finally come true.

Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.

And what of the arrival of the Singularity itself? What can be said of its actual appearance? Since it involves an intellectual runaway, it will probably occur faster than any technical revolution seen so far. The precipitating event will likely be unexpected -- perhaps even by the researchers involved ("But all our previous models were catatonic! We were just tweaking some parameters . . ."). If networking is widespread enough (into ubiquitous embedded systems), it may seem as if our artifacts as a whole had suddenly awakened.

And what happens a month or two (or a day or two) after that? I have only analogies to point to: The rise of humankind. We will be in the Posthuman era. And for all my technological optimism, I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years' remove . . . instead of twenty.

2. Can the Singularity Be Avoided?

Well, maybe it won't happen at all: sometimes I try to imagine the symptoms we should expect to see if the Singularity is not to develop. There are the widely respected arguments of Penrose³ and Searle⁴ against the practicality of machine sapience. In August 1992, Thinking Machines Corporation held a workshop to investigate "How We Will Build a Machine That Thinks." As you might guess from the workshop's title, the participants were not especially supportive of the arguments against machine intelligence. In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds. However, there was much debate about the raw hardware power present in organic brains. A minority felt that the largest 1992 computers were within three orders of magnitude of the power of the human brain. The majority of the participants agreed with Hans Moravec's estimate⁵ that we are ten to forty years away from hardware parity. And yet there was another minority who conjectured that the computational competence of single neurons may be far higher than generally believed. If so, our present computer hardware might be as much as ten orders of magnitude short of the equipment we carry around in our heads. If this is true (or for that matter, if the Penrose or Searle critique is valid), we might never see a Singularity. Instead, in the early '00s we would find our hardware performance curves beginning to level off -- because of our inability to automate the design work needed to support further hardware improvements. We'd end up with some very powerful hardware, but without the ability to push it further. Commercial digital signal processing might be awesome, giving an analog appearance even to digital operations, but nothing would ever "wake up" and there would never be the intellectual runaway that is the essence of the Singularity. It would likely be seen as a golden age . . . and it would also be an end of progress. This is very like the future predicted by Gunther Stent,⁶ who explicitly cites the development of transhuman intelligence as a sufficient condition to break his projections.
The preceding paragraph misses what I think is the strongest argument against the possibility of the Technological Singularity: even if we can make computers that have the raw hardware power, we may not be able to organize the parts to behave in a superhuman way. To techno-geeky reductionist types, this would probably appear as a "failure to solve the problem of software complexity." Larger and larger software projects would be attempted, but software engineering would not be up to the challenge, and we would never master the biological models that might make possible the "teaching" or "embryonic development" of machines. In the end, there might be the following semi-whimsical Murphy's Counterpoint to Moore's Law:

The maximum possible effectiveness of a software system increases in direct proportion to the log of the effectiveness (ie, speed, bandwidth, memory capacity) of the underlying hardware.

In this singularity-free world, the future would be bleak for programmers. (Imagine having to cope with hundreds of years of legacy software!)
So over the coming years, I think two of the most important trends to watch are our progress with large software projects and our progress in applying biological paradigms to massively networked and massively parallel systems.

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will. Even if all the governments of the world were to understand the "threat" and be in deadly fear of it, progress toward the goal would continue. The competitive advantage -- economic, military, even artistic -- of every advance in automation is so compelling that forbidding such things merely assures that someone else will get them first.

Eric Drexler has provided spectacular insights about how far technical improvement may go.⁷ He agrees that superhuman intelligences will be available in the near future. But Drexler argues that we can confine such transhuman devices so that their results can be examined and used safely.

I argue that confinement is intrinsically impractical. Imagine yourself locked in your home with only limited data access to the outside, to your masters. If those masters thought at a rate -- say -- one million times slower than you, there is little doubt that over a period of years (your time) you could come up with a way to escape. I call this "fast thinking" form of superintelligence "weak superhumanity." Such a "weakly superhuman" entity would probably burn out in a few weeks of outside time. "Strong superhumanity" would be more than cranking up the clock speed on a human-equivalent mind. It's hard to say precisely what "strong superhumanity" would be like, but the difference appears to be profound. Imagine running a dog mind at very high speed. Would a thousand years of doggy living add up to any human insight? Many speculations about superintelligence seem to be based on the weakly superhuman model. I believe that our best guesses about the post-Singularity world can be obtained by thinking on the nature of strong superhumanity. I will return to this point.

Another approach to confinement is to build rules into the mind of the created superhuman entity
(for example, Asimov's Laws of Robotics). I think that any rules strict enough to be effective would also produce a device whose ability was clearly inferior to the unfettered versions (so human competition would favor the development of the more dangerous models).

If the Singularity can not be prevented or confined, just how bad could the Posthuman era be? Well . . . pretty bad. The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility. (Or, as Eric Drexler put it of nanotechnology: given all that such technology can do, perhaps governments would simply decide that they no longer need citizens.) Yet physical extinction may not be the scariest possibility. Think of the different ways we relate to animals. A Posthuman world would still have plenty of niches where human-equivalent automation would be desirable: embedded systems in autonomous devices, self-aware daemons in the lower functioning of larger sentients. (A strongly superhuman intelligence would likely be a Society of Mind⁸ with some very competent components.) Some of these human equivalents might be used for nothing more than digital signal processing. Others might be very humanlike, yet with a onesidedness, a dedication that would put them in a mental hospital in our era. Though none of these creatures might be flesh-and-blood humans, they might be the closest things in the new environment to what we call human now.
I believe I. J. Good had something to say about this (though I can't find the reference): Good proposed a meta-golden rule, which might be paraphrased as "Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your superiors." It's a wonderful, paradoxical idea (and most of my friends don't believe it) since the game-theoretic payoff is so hard to articulate. Yet if we were able to follow it, in some sense that might say something about the plausibility of such kindness in this universe.

I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology. And yet: we are the initiators. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. We have the freedom to establish initial conditions, to make things happen in ways that are less inimical than others.
Whether foresight and good planning can make any difference may depend on whether the Technological Singularity comes as a "hard takeoff" or a "soft takeoff". A hard takeoff is one in which the transition to superhuman control takes just a few hundred hours (as in Greg Bear's "Blood Music"). It seems to me that hard takeoffs would be very hard to plan for; they would be like the avalanches I speak of here in the 1993 essay. The most nightmarish form of a hard takeoff might one arising from an arms race, with two nation states racing forward with their separate "manhattan projects" for superhuman power. The equivalent of decades of human level espionage might be compressed into the last few hours of the race, and all human control and judgment surrendered to some very destructive goals.
On the other hand, a soft takeoff is a transition that takes decades, perhaps more than a century. This situation seems much more amenable to planning and to thoughtful experimentation. Hans Moravec discusses such a soft transition in Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind.

Of course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what the right guiding nudge really is:


3. Other Paths to the Singularity

When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project. But as I noted at the beginning of this article, there are other paths to superhumanity. Computer networks and human-computer interfaces seem more mundane than AI, yet they could lead to the Singularity. I call this contrasting approach Intelligence Amplification (IA). IA is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized for what it is by its developers. But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence. Even now, the team of a Ph.D. human and good computer workstation (even an off-net workstation) could probably max any written intelligence test in existence.

And it's very likely that IA is a much easier road to the achievement of superhumanity than pure AI. In humans, the hardest development problems have already been solved. Building up from within ourselves ought to be easier than figuring out what we really are and then building machines that are all of that. And there is at least conjectural precedent for this approach. Cairns-Smith⁹ has speculated that biological life may have begun as an adjunct to still more primitive life based on crystalline growth. Lynn Margulis (in 10 and elsewhere) has made strong arguments that mutualism is a great driving force in evolution.

Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored. AI advances will often have applications in IA, and vice versa. I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potentially wild) as artificial intelligence. With that insight, we may see projects that are not as directly applicable as conventional interface and network design work, but which serve to advance us toward the Singularity along the IA path.

Here are some possible projects that take on special significance, given the IA point of view:

Human/computer team automation: Take problems that are normally considered for purely machine solution (like hillclimbing problems), and design programs and interfaces that take advantage of humans' intuition and available computer hardware. Considering the bizarreness of higher-dimensional hillclimbing problems (and the neat algorithms that have been devised for their solution), some very interesting displays and control tools could be provided to the human team member.

Human/computer symbiosis in art: Combine the graphic generation capability of modern machines and the esthetic sensibility of humans. Of course, an enormous amount of research has gone into designing computer aids for artists. I'm suggesting that we explicitly aim for a greater merging of competence, that we explicitly recognize the cooperative approach that is possible. Karl Sims has done wonderful work in this direction.¹¹

Human/computer teams at chess tournaments: We already have programs that can play better than almost all humans. But how much work has been done on how this power could be used by a human, to get something even better? If such teams were allowed in at least some chess tournaments, it could have the positive effect on IA research that allowing computers in tournaments had for the corresponding niche in AI.
In the last few years, Grandmaster Garry Kasparov has developed the idea of chess matches between computer-assisted players (google on the keyphrases "kasparov" and "advanced chess"). As far as I know, such human/computer teams are not allowed to participate in more general chess tournaments.

Interfaces that allow computer and network access without requiring the human to be tied to one spot, sitting in front of a computer. (This aspect of IA fits so well with known economic advantages that lots of effort is already being spent on it.)

More symmetrical decision support systems. A popular research/product area in recent years has been decision support systems. This is a form of IA, but may be too focused on systems that are oracular. As much as the program giving the user information, there must be the idea of the user giving the program guidance.

Local area nets to make human teams more effective than their component members. This is generally the area of "groupware"; the change in viewpoint here would be to regard the group activity as a combination organism.

In one sense, this suggestion's goal might be to invent a "Rules of Order" for such combination operations. For instance, group focus might be more easily maintained than in classical meetings. Individual members' expertise could be isolated from ego issues so that the contribution of different members is focused on the team project. And of course shared databases could be used much more conveniently than in conventional committee operations.

The Internet as a combination human/machine tool. Of all the items on the list, progress in this is proceeding the fastest. The power and influence of the Internet are vastly underestimated. The very anarchy of the worldwide net's development is evidence of its potential. As connectivity, bandwidth, archive size, and computer speed all increase, we are seeing something like Lynn Margulis' vision of the biosphere as data processor recapitulated, but at a million times greater speed and with millions of humanly intelligent agents (ourselves).
Bruce Sterling illustrates the subtle way that such a development might come to pervade daily life in "Maneki Neko", The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1998. For a nonfiction look at the possibilities of humanity+technology as a compound creature, I recommend Gregory Stock's Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism, Simon & Schuster, 1993.
But would the result be self-aware? Or perhaps self-awareness is a necessary feature of intelligence only within a limited size range?

The above examples illustrate research that can be done within the context of contemporary computer science departments. There are other paradigms. For example, much of the work in artificial intelligence and neural nets would benefit from a closer connection with biological life. Instead of simply trying to model and understand biological life with computers, research could be directed toward the creation of composite systems that rely on biological life for guidance, or for the features we don't understand well enough yet to implement in hardware. A longtime dream of science fiction has been direct brain-to-computer interfaces. In fact, concrete work is being done in this area:

Limb prosthetics is a topic of direct commercial applicability. Nerve-to-silicon transducers can be made. This is an exciting near-term step toward direct communication.

Direct links into brains seem feasible, if the bit rate is low: given human learning flexibility, the actual brain neuron targets might not have to be precisely selected. Even 100 bits per second would be of great use to stroke victims who would otherwise be confined to menu-driven interfaces.

Plugging into the optic trunk has the potential for bandwidths of 1 Mbit/second or so. But for this, we need to know the fine-scale architecture of vision, and we need to place an enormous web of electrodes with exquisite precision. If we want our high-bandwidth connection to add to the paths already present in the brain, the problem becomes vastly more intractable. Just sticking a grid of high-bandwidth receivers into a brain certainly won't do it. But suppose that the high-bandwidth grid were present as the brain structure was setting up, as the embryo developed. That suggests:

Animal embryo experiments. I wouldn't expect any IA success in the first years of such research, but giving developing brains access to complex simulated neural structures might, in the long run, produce animals with additional sense paths and interesting intellectual abilities.

I had hoped that this discussion of IA would yield some clearly safer approaches to the Singularity (after all, IA allows our participation in a kind of transcendence). Alas, about all I am sure of is that these proposals should be considered, that they may give us more options. But as for safety -- some of the suggestions are a little scary on their face. IA for individual humans creates a rather sinister elite. We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light. Much of that deadliness may not be necessary in today's world, one where losers take on the winners' tricks and are coopted into the winners' enterprises. A creature that was built de novo might possibly be a much more benign entity than one based on fang and talon.

The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being. I think a closer look at the notion of strong superhumanity can show why that is.

4. Strong Superhumanity and the Best We Can Ask For

Suppose we could tailor the Singularity. Suppose we could attain our most extravagant hopes. What then would we ask for? That humans themselves would become their own successors, that whatever injustice occurred would be tempered by our knowledge of our roots. For those who remained unaltered, the goal would be benign treatment (perhaps even giving the stay-behinds the appearance of being masters of godlike slaves). It could be a golden age that also involved progress (leaping Stent's barrier). Immortality (or at least a lifetime as long as we can make the universe survive) would be achievable.

But in this brightest and kindest world, the philosophical problems themselves become intimidating. A mind that stays at the same capacity cannot live forever; after a few thousand years it would look more like a repeating tape loop than a person. (The most chilling picture I have seen of this is Larry Niven's story "The Ethics of Madness".) To live indefinitely long, the mind itself must grow . . . and when it becomes great enough, and looks back . . . what fellow-feeling can it have with the soul that it was originally? The later being would be everything the original was, but vastly more. And so even for the individual, the Cairns-Smith or Lynn Margulis notion of new life growing incrementally out of the old must still be valid.

This "problem" about immortality comes up in much more direct ways. The notion of ego and self-awareness has been the bedrock of the hardheaded rationalism of the last few centuries. Yet now the notion of self-awareness is under attack from the artificial intelligence people. Intelligence Amplification undercuts our concept of ego from another direction. The post-Singularity world will involve extremely high-bandwidth networking. A central feature of strongly superhuman entities will likely be their ability to communicate at variable bandwidths, including ones far higher than speech or written messages. What happens when pieces of ego can be copied and merged, when self-awareness can grow or shrink to fit the nature of the problems under consideration? These are essential features of strong superhumanity and the Singularity. Thinking about them, one begins to feel how essentially strange and different the Posthuman era will be -- no matter how cleverly and benignly it is brought to be.
I discuss this in slightly more detail in "Nature, Bloody in Tooth and Claw?", an essay presented at the 1996 British National Science Fiction Convention, available at http://www-rohan.sds.../evolution.html

From one angle, the vision fits many of our happiest dreams: a time unending, where we can truly know one another and understand the deepest mysteries. From another angle, it's a lot like the worst-case scenario I imagined earlier.

In fact, I think the new era is simply too different to fit into the classical frame of good and evil. That frame is based on the idea of isolated, immutable minds connected by tenuous, low-bandwith links. But the post-Singularity world does fit with the larger tradition of change and cooperation that started long ago (perhaps even before the rise of biological life). I think certain notions of ethics would apply in such an era. Research into IA and high-bandwidth communications should improve this understanding. I see just the glimmerings of this now; perhaps there are rules for distinguishing self from others on the basis of bandwidth of connection. And while mind and self will be vastly more labile than in the past, much of what we value (knowledge, memory, thought) need never be lost. I think Freeman Dyson has it right when he says, "God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension."¹²



References

1. Ulam, S., "Tribute to John von Neumann", Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 64. no. 3, May 1958, pp. 1-49.

2. Good, I. J., "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine", in Advances in Computers, vol 6, Franz L. Alt and Morris Rubinoff, eds., 31-88, 1965, Academic Press.
In preparing these annotations, I took a close look at this paper. In fact, Good's essay is even more insightful than the quote shown here. For instance, he speculates that an interim step to the "ultraintelligent machine" may be a symbiotic relationship between humans and machines, and proposes human/computer chess-playing teams. With regard to such chess, he even proposes shuffling initial positions, an idea that Garry Kasparov has also discussed (see Kasparov's 1998 interview at http://www.chessclub...pinterview.html).
Thanks to Robert Bradbury, Good's essay is online at http://www.aeiveos.c...-IJ/SCtFUM.html

3. Penrose, Roger, The Emperor's New Mind, Oxford University Press, 1989.

4. Searle, John R., "Minds, Brains, and Programs", in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 3, Cambridge University Press, 1980.
The essay is reprinted in The Mind's I, edited by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, Basic Books, 1981 (my source for this reference). This reprinting contains an excellent critique of the Searle essay.

5. Moravec, Hans, Mind Children, Harvard University Press, 1988.
More recently, Hans Moravec has presented his reasoning in Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, Oxford University Press, 1999.
Another recent reference is Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Penquin USA, 2000.

6. Stent, Gunther S., The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress, The Natural History Press, 1969.

7. Drexler, K. Eric, Engines of Creation, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1986.

8. Minsky, Marvin, Society of Mind, Simon and Schuster, 1985.

9. Cairns-Smith, A. G., Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, Cambridge University Press, 1985.

10. Margulis, Lynn and Dorian Sagan, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution From Our Microbial Ancestors, Summit Books, 1986.

11. Sims, Karl, "Interactive Evolution of Dynamical Systems", Thinking Machines Corporation, Technical Report Series (published in Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life, Paris, MIT Press, December 1991).

12. Dyson, Freeman, Infinite in All Directions, Harper & Row, 1988.

Other Sources

Alfvén, Hannes, writing as Olof Johanneson, The End of Man?, Award Books, 1969. Earlier published as The Tale of the Big Computer, Coward-McCann, translated from a book copyright 1966 Albert Bonniers Forlag AB with English translation copyright 1966 by Victor Gollancz, Ltd.

Anderson, Poul, "Kings Who Die", If, March 1962, 8-36. The earliest story I know about intelligence amplification via computer/brain linkage.

Asimov, Isaac, "Runaround", Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942, 94. Reprinted in Robot Visions, Isaac Asimov, ROC, 1990, where Asimov also describes the development of his robotics stories.

Barrow, John D. and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford University Press, 1986.

Bear, Greg, "Blood Music", Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact, June, 1983. Expanded into the novel _Blood Music_, Morrow, 1985.

Conrad, Michael, et al., "Towards an Artificial Brain", BioSystems, vol. 23, 175-218, 1989.

Dyson, Freeman, "Physics and Biology in an Open Universe", Review of Modern Physics, vol. 51, 447-460, 1979.

Herbert, Frank, Dune, Berkley Books, 1985. However, this novel was serialized in Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact in the 1960s.

Kovacs, G. T. A., et al., "Regeneration Microelectrode Array for Peripheral Nerve Recording and Stimulation", IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol. 39, no. 9, 893-902.

Niven, Larry, "The Ethics of Madness", If, April 1967, 82-108. Reprinted in Neutron Star, Larry Niven, Ballantine Books, 1968.

Platt, Charles, private communication.

Rasmussen, S. et al., "Computational Connectionism within Neurons: a Model of Cytoskeletal Automata Subserving Neural Networks", in Emergent Computation, Stephanie Forrest, ed., 428-449, MIT Press, 1991.

Stapledon, Olaf, The Starmaker, Berkeley Books, 1961. From the date on the forward, probably written before 1937.

Swanwick Michael, Vacuum Flowers, serialized in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, December(?) 1986 - February 1987.

Thearling, Kurt, "How We Will Build a Machine That Thinks", a workshop at Thinking Machines Corporation, August 24-26, 1992. Personal communication.

Vinge, Vernor, "Bookworm, Run!", Analog, March 1966, 8-40. Early intelligence amplification story. The hero is the first experimental subject -- a chimpanzee raised to human intelligence.

Vinge, Vernor, "True Names", Binary Star Number 5, Dell, 1981.

Vinge, Vernor, "First Word", Omni, January 1983, 10.
Earlier essay on "the singularity".

[Julia36]

Everything by number, order and measurement.

Everything is built by laws: that is true for the planet and true for the cell.
True for the galaxy and true for the quantum.

Where there is law there is prediction.

With enough calculation power Man will be able to resurrect the dead.



The first human resurrection may take place after sentient artificial intelligence, about 2027

[Julia36]

WATSON ibm AVATOR

One of the smartest machines in the world. Analyses structured and unstructured data, and the first of the machines with basic 'understanding'.

Moved to tackle medical problems, 90% of nurses are guided by it who have
access to it in their field.


It wont stop getting smarter and bring artificial intelligence to every doctor's surgery, then to every mobile phone.

Asimov wrote about such a machine: MULTIVAC which spanned the galaxy.



IBM and Google-NASA are competing to build one.

"...through many iterations of computer technology, each more powerful and ethereal than the last. Each of these computers is asked the question, and each returns the same response until finally the universe dies. At that point Multivac (now existing entirely in hyperspace) has collected all the data it can, and so poses the question to itself. Asimov claimed this to be the favourite of his stories.
" wiki

WATSON'S ARCHTECTURE






It will be cloned world-wide

Edited by Innocent, 16 June 2013 - 04:41 PM.

[Julia36]

DATA is not capable of staying hidden.

No information is ever lost.

That is the wildly speculative stab by archaeology.

Physics now says it is true: information cannot be lost.

Since dead men are information..they MUST be recoverable with enough computing power.

We will have enough about 2027.

Data from end of the last ice age illuminate the precarious nature of global ocean chemistry

http://phys.org/news...ous-nature.html


Oceans were different when the titanic sailed. They had a different chemistry.

With enough calculation the history of every event in them including the very atoms - will be set down in the giant
quantum archaeology grid



Present day computers will seem like museum pieces in under 10 years,
for the machines that are coming are vast, fast and QUANTUM.




As more Qbits are added, the number of calculations rises.

Google-NASA's purchase of a 500+ Qbit computer from Dwave puts it more powerful that all other classical computers in the world combined.

What is more amazing is that mathematics has over taken quantum computing (Super-recursive algorithms).



The ocean the Titanic sailed through just over 100 years ago was very different from the one we swim in today. Global warming is increasing ocean temperatures and harming marine food webs. Nitrogen run-off from fertilizers is causing coastal dead zones. A McGill-led international research team has now completed the first global study of changes that occurred in a crucial component of ocean chemistry, the nitrogen cycle, at the end of the last ice age. The results of their study confirm that oceans are good at balancing the nitrogen cycle on a global scale. But the data also shows that it is a slow process that may take many centuries, or even millennia, raising worries about the effects of the scale and speed of current changes in the ocean.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news...nature.html#jCp

[Julia36]

The push to NIL cost.

One of the reasons calculation is growing so fast is that the costs are falling like twins towers.

Synthesizing DNA 10,000 times cheaper


"It sounds like science fiction but is real: San Francisco-based startup Cambrian Genomics is creating the world's first DNA laser printer.
Synthetic biology has the potential to create new organisms that could do an infinite number of things. But the cost of synthesizing DNA is currently prohibitively expensive. The cost of writing DNA, or DNA synthesis, is roughly $1 per base pair of DNA. The amount of base pairs in the human genome would cost approximately 3 billion to synthesise."

http://www.3ders.org...r-printer-3.jpg


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yscphwaWNs&feature=player_embedded#t=0s

Edited by Innocent, 16 June 2013 - 05:35 PM.

[Julia36]

So we're all coming back with power like Man of Steel

[Elus]

Innocent, you sound like you have lost someone very dear, and are trying to backwards rationalize why we'll be able to bring them back from the dead. Are you sure you're not trying to convince yourself that this will be possible in order to cope with the loss of a loved one?

You post a lot of scientifically valid stuff mixed with a lot of pseudoscience, and it's important to separate the two.

In order to work backwards through time using the laws of physics, you must first capture the present state of the system. According to the uncertainty principle, we know this to be impossible, as we cannot know both the present position and momentum of a particle. Quantum archaeology will not work because we cannot possible capture all the information of the present.

Edited by Elus, 16 June 2013 - 06:26 PM.

[Julia36]

In order to work backwards through time using the laws of physics, you must first capture the present state of the system. According to the uncertainty principle, we know this to be impossible, as we cannot know both the present position and momentum of a particle. Quantum archaeology will not work because we cannot possible capture all the information of the present.

1. Does the quantum realm work by laws or not?
2. Do you accept that 'information is incapable of being destroyed'?



Speed of technological advance is obviously going to dwarf any perspective we have on science.

Things that look too complex are often attributed with impossibility or mysticism, which Quantum Theory is @ present.

It incorporates, free will, the observer, consciousness, non-causation,plus the impossibility to measure it.
It is in conflict with Relativity which is empirical, provable, demonstrable and testable.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (I see Bell's work was confirmed this week) is where we are at present.

There is nothing mystical nor miraculous about a dead person...or a living person.

They are data.

And data can be manipulated.

You dont need to capture all the information in the present to retrodict the past.

Moreover most of the reconstruction archaeology will be done in the classical world.


Information is incapable of being destroyed that is the deepest physics I know.

On a personal note I've read for 20 different degrees and wrote 100 volumes of philosophy before I tackled this subject, so its possible I'm not the idiot you think.

I dont care if 99% of scientists say I am wrong, the fact we are resurrecting extinct stuff 800 million years old in evolutionary biology proves QA is correct.

Edited by Innocent, 16 June 2013 - 07:38 PM.

[Elus]

Yes, to accurately simulate the past, you need to capture all present information. Butterfly effect works backwards too.

If you miss a small piece of information, it will drastically affect the backwards simulation.

There is nothing to suggest that just because information cannot be destroyed it is available to us. Uncertainty principle confirms this.

You're also speculating about new physics with zero evidence. This is pseudoscience.

[Julia36]

Yes, to accurately simulate the past, you need to capture all present information.

Not so, there are fewer events in the past than the future.

Events in the present have common ancestors

Butterfly effect works backwards too.

What is the butterfly affect? A small change CAUSES (NB causation - you were arguing from Quantum Theory which is non-causation...unless you are adopting the Many Worlds Interpretation, in which case the world is determined).



Causation isn't so simple.
eg In statistics it isn't used much because things are too complicated.

If the butterfly causes a whirlwind in London, the whirlwind causes the butterfly.
Things I suggest are interactive. I think this because experiments we can do in scale isolation are reversible. We know quantum experiment are reversible.

I am not quibbling about quantum events, but you said they are unmeasurable at measurable speed.
I take issue with a theory that leads to contradiction and paradox, and throws out sceice maxims like never hypothesise in advance of the facts (from Galileo).

The position I take is at least tenable as Einstein took it.

ie we dont know enough yet to distinguish the causality.
Gerard tHooft (nobel prize) is also a superdeterminist (see his email to me opn the google quantum archaeology site.

But we can calculate space-time coordinates and start probability what goes there using the laws of physics, working round what we dont know yet: Sort of Jigsaw join the dots!

If you miss a small piece of information, it will drastically affect the backwards simulation.

No, here's the beauty of QA: you do archaeology! You construct AROUND what you dont know.

eg When we reconstruct ancient DNA we dont have much of it. We work from the tree of life to incredible minutiae.

In fact most DNA degenerates fast and we construct it back probabilistically.

But as we plot in a
quantumarchaeology grid -

causally, algorithmically, probabilistically, and by reference to the laws of physics, we will be able to read off coordinates for events @ present cryptic to us.

There is nothing to suggest that just because information cannot be destroyed it is available to us.

That's true, but I'd like to have a stab at it!

And we're already doing testable (theory falsifiable) reconstructions. Some of those are very old indeed.

Uncertainty principle confirms this.

This principle just means we cant measure speed and position @ once in the quantum.

Can we in the larger world? How?

by having measuring systems that can to do it.

You're also speculating about new physics...

I think the explanations about the quantum are highly speculative, and the conclusions about it based on stats and not physics.



But kind of you to observe so. In physics we work by models and shouldn't say we KNOW anything...just that X is consistent 'within this model'.

A new model universe may indeed arise. Undoubtedly more laws of physics will be discovered. Wondrous things. i think it inevitable new physics will be discovered but my belief is that ALL of it will be laws,

ie IF this THEN that.
So laws MUST mean predictability


You dont take up point 1.

Do you agree the quantum world is governed by laws?

Because if it is, then the quantum realm is defined by laws.

People are data and from the vast structured data in the Records we can describe much in the present.

It all leads back to fewer, therefore common time lines eventually, in the past.



Big Data, Small Data.

in maths there is no problem about scale. Something big is made of something small.


Quantum Theory is is the pseudo-science IMO since it posits that there are two seprate physic for the bog and for the small.

Many world Theory has no such division and Schroedinger's cat (Schroedinger was jeering at QT BTW)

is safe.

Data.



.

but even if it muddles through and makes a unified theory, it will be goverend by immutable laws.


The Quantum world is not separate from the larger world they both operate by the laws of hsyics and they must be consistent.

I dont buy spontaneous creation of quantum particles.

One difficulty is that science is so complicated and counter-intuitive few people can understand it without serious study.

It is often said 'no-one understand quantum theory.

If true we shouldn't be arguing it.

And also Quantum Archaeology cannot be refuted by it.



So I reiterate does the quantum world operate solely by laws?

Every one who has tried to counter Einstein has eventually come unstuck.

His grasp of natural philosophy was the biggest known to mankind.




So although we dont know much about the quantum, and the present Quantum Theory is is absolute conflict with Relatively 9which IS measurable and observable) I think Einstein's brute forcing of his mind into the basic maxims of science is the way to go.

It is not possible to have law and non-causality.

You dont run your life by it.
Neither does a star.
Neither does an insect, a cell, an atom a quark a photon
nor any event we can measure.


QA doesn't reply on my being right about this, just on the existence of law in the quantum.

What exactly do you think it is I'll be resurrecting?

Do you think we couldn't resurrect the dead in a infinite number of years?
If you dont we are just discussing size of calculation.


I wonder if you've read Sherlock Homes?

Science and detective work are similar.







Meantime I'll resurrect my ancestors, point by point, line line line, Grid, motions, laws, patterns, events, probability deductions, life trees, causation, eliminations, cross-referencing, calculating, multiple simultaneous equations from the Records

Edited by Innocent, 16 June 2013 - 09:59 PM.

[Julia36]

This is just a debate about how far you think Archaeology can go.


We're just kinds playing on the edge of what's possible.

I refuse to see a division between science and art.



The world is stranger than we can think,but nowhere is it not lawful.

And in no experiment where we have grasped the variables is it irreversible.

That is true in classical physics, and true in quantum physics.

[Elus]

You stated that quantum mechanics is pseudoscience. I'm afraid I don't have anything further to discuss with you. Good luck.

Edited by Elus, 16 June 2013 - 10:17 PM.

[Julia36]

You stated that quantum mechanics is pseudoscience. I'm afraid I don't have anything further to discuss with you. Good luck.

You go too fast ELUS.

Einstein went painfully slowly, that why he was great.


No I didn't say quantum mechanics was pseudo-science.

I said:

Quantum Theory was,
and my answer was contextual after you said I had some pseudo-science and some science and they should be separated out.


I said quantum mechanics was statistics (echoing tHooft)

it is statistical theory using probability, but is presently unable to measure

QuantumArchaeology - Google Sites


see:

My point was you cannot have explanation (theory) in advance of the facts.

That contravenes Galileo's 1st maxim.

Edited by Innocent, 16 June 2013 - 10:33 PM.

[Julia36]

https://www.youtube....h?v=OamFZCFfQkg

Edited by Innocent, 16 June 2013 - 10:43 PM.

[Julia36]

Edited by Innocent, 16 June 2013 - 10:47 PM.

[Julia36]

Quantum Archaeology is not premised on the success nor failure of the Quantum Theory.

I dont want it to fall into an argument of its consistency with Quantum Theory because we're all agreed no one understand quantum theory. which is full of paradoxes and is in conflict with ordinary science.

Quantum Archaeology assumes that the world is governed by the laws of physics, we can know enough of them to make sense of it; that calculation capacity will increase; that there are enough events in the present converging on common ancestor line histories
to plot the past you need relevant bits and scales;

That archaeology will be possible in the quantum world as it is in the meso and macro worlds;

that the physics maxim "information is incapable of destruction" means that information may be recoverable given enough time;
that the time needed for reconstruction of the past is determined by the size of calculations possible;
and that the size of calculations possible is increasing.


It doesn't matter to the dead when they are recovered.

Rescue in a trillion years is just as good as rescue next week when it comes to whether you can survive or not.

Given an eternal cosmos is it logically impossible to dismiss resurrection of the dead , since whatever is possible---however improbable always happens in infinite systems theory Cantorian infinity maths).

Quantum Archaeology isn't nutty it is consistent with science known and calculation expected.

Artificial Intelligence is expected top achieve Super-intelligence and make simulations of the entire universe.

The idea we are in such a simulation has been advanced by serious philosophers (Prof Nick Bostrom @ Oxford) with approximate calculations needed to achieve it. (google).

Quantum Archaeology....an archaeology voyaging into the quantum world in the Planck Scale---below 100 nanometres, is surely imaginable, and the paper written is an argument to get it debated as a new scientific area of enquiry:

QuantumArchaeology


It is no more a philosopher's job to work out the science than it is a scientist's job to work out philosophy.

Writing on Quantum Archaeology, the suspended Professor Robert Ettinger whose work founded this site and this organisation said:

( Feb 2008 to me: "I suspect--although I don't know--that there is a Law of Conservation of information, so that in principle no information is ever lost and is in principle capable of recovery"

We are capturing information once lost about things long forgotten. Quantum archaeology is attempting the theory preceding the science about how to reconfigure dead information, by tracing cause and effect timelines before the moment of death for any person who has ever lived.
Ettinger's brilliant solution was to capture as much of a clinically dead person as possible in a cryonic suspension.
He anticipated that future techniques would allow revival and rejuvenation, and that as much information as possible should be stored, beginning with the brain. This wise and early philosophy began the transhumanist movement. Frank Tipler's best seller, The Physics of Immortality is a tribute to Ettinger's The Prospect of Immortality.

The Prospect of Immortality. which launched transhumanism was not a best seller.

Ettinger had to give it away to people listed in who's who and campaign hard for his idea to be debated.

It is still fringe to most, because it is an argument to the future.


"IT HASN'T BEEN DONE YET "

Objections from Ettinger that a theoretically objective perspective may not encompass a subjective one - which should also be assigned validity, and may be much more important for survival in human terms - are hard to dispel. He has urged caution in quantum archaeology and gives the example of the human mind uploaded into a robot to demonstrate:

“...it may eventually be possible to simulate as large a portion of spacetime as desired, to any desired degree of accuracy. But that does not necessarily mean that a simulated person would be alive in our sense, i.e. capable of having subjective experiences.... A simulation is a description of a thing and not the thing itself.”

and again

“In general, the map is not the territory. A description of a thing is not the thing, except in the case that the "thing" is itself an abstraction or description. In particular, a description of a physical object is not that object and lacks some of the properties of the object, as well as including some properties that the object does not have. Further, an automaton that behaves like a person is not necessarily a person, i.e. alive in our sense, capable of subjective experience or feeling. In other words, a person has qualia. A quale is a physical state or phenomenon, not yet understood, but not necessarily duplicable in inorganic matter."- Robert Ettinger 2007, 2008 (to me).



-but this is not now cmpletely the case.

Archaeological restrodiction as a part of phylotological evolutionary biology has indeed already done it.
It has resurrected extinct functions of micro-organisms and piblished in peer reviewed journals:

http://www.nature.co...he-dead-1.10261

"Our strategy was to use 'molecular time travel' to reconstruct and experimentally characterize all the proteins in this molecular machine just before and after it increased in complexity," said the study's senior author Dr.Joe Thornton.





It would be difficult to argue Quantum Archaeology could not be done down to only the 5 nanometres required for a human brain/memory/body reconstruction, and to only say 5 million years ago, when a lab has already done back to 800 million years
as the proton pump



Very few such resurrections may have been done, but in science it takes only one repeatable experiment to establish the truth of an hypthesis.


The picture above is from Richard Dawkins net
which says of it

To understand how the ring increased in complexity, Thornton and his colleagues "resurrected" the ancestral versions of the ring proteins just before and just after the third subunit was incorporated. To do this, the researchers used a large cluster of computers to analyze the gene sequences of 139 modern-day ring proteins, tracing evolution backwards through time along the Tree of Life to identify the most likely ancestral sequences. They then used biochemical methods to synthesize those ancient genes and express them in modern yeast cells.

Quantum Archaeology is now a fact.

We can debate whether to use aterkists around the word resurrection or term it recreation, but the fact remains we are capable of archaeolgicaly reassembling structures that pump protons.

And a proton in in the Quantum scale.

It must be foreseeable that with increased mastery of the very small we are going to be able to do lots of archaeology there?


A Proton

It is a question of number.

We must calculate

the great point about the cosmos is that things are in classes, with degrees of freedom limited by laws.

Things are defined by laws.

In physics we call things events.

Events and the laws that govern them are what make the known world.

The size of calculation is mind boggling, but it a matter of size of number alone. Nothing more.

The proton whose surrounding machinery we are already deducing is indeed at the quantum scale

Theorized William Prout (1815)
Discovered Ernest Rutherford (1917–1919, named by him, 1920)
Mass 1.672621777(74)×10−27 kg,
938.272046(21) MeV/c2,
1.007276466812(90) u
Mean lifetime >2.1×1029 years (stable)
Electric charge +1 e
1.602176565(35)×10−19 C
Charge radius 0.8775(51) fm
Electric dipole moment <5.4×10−24 e·cm
Electric polarizability 1.20(6)×10−3 fm3
Magnetic moment
1.410606743(33)×10−26 J·T−1,
1.521032210(12)×10−3 μB,
2.792847356(23) μN,
Magnetic polarizability 1.9(5)×10−4 fm3
Spin 1⁄2
Isospin 1⁄2
Parity +1
Condensed I(JP) = 1⁄2(1⁄2+)


In terms of proof of concept, Quantum Archaeology is at least as sound as Cryonics itself.


NB That does not mean one should not get cryonically suspended.
I signed an insurance agreement for cryonic suspension in the 1990's and my choice would still be to get suspended if I die, because information is conserved about me and I wish to be as safe as possible.

But what I do is really irrelevant.

If Quantum Archaeology is rigorously debated and found to be impossible it shoud be thrown out.

If it is found to be not impossible , it should be retained.
But if it is found proven, cryonicists should immediately incorporate it into cryonics for their own sakes.

Both ideas require future science capabilities.

Theoretically knowledge about the human being to 5 nanometres.


Generally Quantum Archaeology is about more than resurrecting men.

It is about doing Archaeology in the quantum realm.

I'll post this on Kurzweilai as debates rage about it there.

Grateful for any input

Edited by Innocent, 17 June 2013 - 06:16 AM.

[Julia36]

Inner Life of a Cell + Others Harvard


http://multimedia.mc....edu/media.html






The Register, today:

http://www.theregist...ly_predictable/

At exaflops we should be able equal one human brain capacity and simulate a brain.


When that is done- if we can extract rules for intelligence increase, runaway artificial intelligence may be achieved.

It's a mistake to try and do Quantum Archaeology all at once.

There are too many maxims to synthesise.

But we are already making quantum machines (for 3 years) and quantum computers.

Dead men are not very complicated to resurrect correctly in the vastness of coming science.
Brute force computing should do it.

Predicting the future is the hard bit.

Edited by Innocent, 17 June 2013 - 07:21 AM.

[Julia36]

New research constructs ant family tree

Archaeology is booming!

"New research by evolutionary biologists Dr. Corrie Moreau of Chicago's Field Museum and Dr. Charles Bell of the University of New Orleans is helping answer these questions. Their findings are presented in the journal Evolution.

The scientists used DNA sequence data to build the largest ant tree-of-life to date. This tree-of-life, or family tree of ants, not only allowed them to better understand which ant species are related, but also made it possible to infer the age for modern ants because information from the fossil record in the form of geologic time was included in the research."


http://phys.org/news...y-tree.html#jCp





Using a combination of advanced ancient DNA techniques and tools to reconstruct the past climate, Coolen, Giosan, and their colleagues have determined how communities of plankton have responded to changes in climate and the influence of humans over the last 11,400 years. Results published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), available online.

we are building a maps of the past in disparate data bases and can do geometry from them to required co-ordinates using the laws of phsyics.

Edited by Innocent, 17 June 2013 - 08:20 AM.

[Julia36]

PCR could rapidly amplify DNA from one molecule to billions, allowing sequencing from human hairs or ancient DNA." wiki

Molecular anthropology has been around for a while.

But Molecular Archaeology is too new to be on wikipedia yet, although Baron Renfrew, arguably the greatest living archaeologist


coined
Archaeogenetics


With these ancient organisms, now extinct may be 'resurrected'

When we raise the power of calculators individuals..including their memories should
be resurrectable.



5 YEAR PLAN TO RESURRECT MAMMOTHS


Is it possible so soon? Scientists still baffled by their disappearance...


"Akira Iritani certainly seems to think so. The 84-year-old reproductive biologist has been trying to clone a mammoth for at least a decade, with a team of Japanese and Russian scientists. They have tried to use tissues from several frozen Siberian specimens including, most recently, a well-preserved thighbone. Last year, Iritani told reporters, “I think we have a reasonable chance of success and a healthy mammoth could be born in four or five years.”
A few months ago, a second team led by Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk also expressed interest in cloning a mammoth."

Wooly mammoth blood recovered from frozen carcass, Russian scientists say

Read more: http://www.foxnews.c.../#ixzz2WShz5vMq

Different time estimates for different scientists exist because of the way their labs work, I guess..
Success in all will be down to computing and technology though.



First the species, - then the individual.

When you can make an exact copy of a dead being, it is moot whether they are 'them' without environmental memories.

Quantum Archaeology seeks to retrieve full memories as well.

Edited by Innocent, 17 June 2013 - 08:59 AM.

[Julia36]

Cicero the Yonger has experience successfully governing Syria ( 25 BC)

[platypus]

But after 10 years Quantum Archaeology is still ridiculed on unsceitific grounds, and when I have answered one argument the same argument is thrown up again as if It had not been refuted, and I am shouted a lunatic in streams of ad hominems attacks.

It is ridiculed since you have been unable to refute any of the criticisms. Frankly it seems that you don't yet understands physics, computation, simulation or mathematics enough to even do a basic assessment of the QA-challenge and you've admitted yourself that you're only doing philosophy. You're not a credible front to a movement that is essentially technological and your refusal to address any specifics makes the situation worse.