| mind uploading research group |
Thu Jan 20 21:03:04 EST 2000
Randal A. Koene
The second bulletin at last. December's issue was omitted due to problems on and around the intended release-date with the workstation that runs the posting cron-job... not year two thousand issues mind you. It seems we all entered the year 2000 rather well and peacefully.
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On breaks from the hectics of my dissertation research, I've had the occasional moment to muse and ponder ``the now'' and ``the future''. I have some rather big wishes for this year and beyond. Yes, I do wish that all of humanity could become instantly civil and leave behind the crude idiocy of violence and war. There are already too many tales to tell of the barbarism of the preceding centuries and millennia. We, as a species, can do well with a fresh and innocent new perspective, advancement to another level of intelligence and civilization.
Bearing whatever attitude towards the ``millennium hype'' amuses each one of us the most, many of us have in common that we have grown up in a time and in an environment that has instilled in us a sense that emphasizes the year 2000 as a psychological threshold: Most science fiction depicts events in 2000 and beyond, this time is filled with the promise of progress, anything progressive or modern has been labeled ``2000-something-or-other''. While we may look back at the 1900s with curious nostalgia a thousand years from now, the year 2000 and the twentieth century come prepared with a forward-looking mentality that permeats a greater swath of the human population than ever before.
So I've been thinking about many things, such as intelligence in the universe, the paradigm itself. Intelligence as an acceleration of change, beyond the rates that genetic evolution could support, will take over the role as primary director of evolution. The ability and the liberty to choose physical form and functional specifications of body and of brain, and therefore the spatial and temporal span and capabilities of mind, consciousness, identity and awareness, are essential to a truly advanced species.
The popular perception of what intelligent species throughout the universe ``must'' be like appears to be a mirror image of the popular self-perception of the time. It is reasonable therefore, that most of us on MURG, already anticipating a new state of being, are aware of and understand the unlikely nature of those popular perceptions. An advanced intelligent species, say one having experienced between one hundred and a billion years of development beyond our own, will very likely have mastered the control of form and function, both of itself and its environment, from very large to very small levels of detail. At the very minimum, we can postulate that if and when we meet them, we will find that they have achieved the equivalent of mind uploading, thereby improving their ability to cope with a variety of environments and their ability to continually optimize the maintenance and utilization of mental information processes. It stands to reason then, that to rank among the truly advanced species, our species also must achieve that level of ability.
In this bulletin, permit me to make a broad and far-reaching statement:
In the third millennium, the twenty-first century and even this decade, the human species and its intellect, Earth and all that it holds, will transform, mature and evolve. Mind uploading, an important part of that process, is now a specific project that many of us and numerous others are dedicated to. Momentum is building, and humanity is waking up to these goals. Whereas in the majority of the last decades, the last century and millennium, the possibilities and promises of mind uploading were great dreams, they are now tangible projects with its achievement in sight.
Mind uploading is important, as are many other advances currently in development, but beyond that there are many more great quests and goals. Some should be approached and dealt with in the near future, such as the dangers to Earth life on a single - and in cosmic terms very fragile - planet. Some are best brainstormed with the brightest intellects of the universe, such as the ``nature and life-span'' of the universe itself.
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There is much to be done for the organization and planning of Whole Brain Emulation and mind uploading, involving research outlines and project stages, P.R., making contacts, carreers, colaboration, projects and institute. I haven't had much time for any of these myself recently, due to my busy dissertation research schedule.
The minduploading.org site is coming along nicely, and is beginning to collect resources such as interesting articles and news. Individual projects are progressing also, such as Peter McCluskey's Imaneuron. And some of us have managed to attain carreer positions related to mind uploading efforts, see Eugene's job at 21st Century Medicine.
The concept of mind uploading continues to become more and more entrenched in popular futurism, with appearances on all our favourite television shows. Previously this involved the obvious candidates, such as the X-Files and Psi Factor. Now apparently (although I have not seen this myself), a mind uploading method was described by the character ``Ross'' to a woman friend of his on the popular show ``Friends''.
Meanwhile, life extension research of all sorts is progressing, not only by advancing the sciences, but also by changing general perceptions about it from early incredulity to anticipation of specific achievents in genetics, nanotechnology, biotechnology, microbiological engineering, neuroscience, the replication of neuronal circuitry, and much more.
Previous Mind Uploading Bulletin (Nov. 21, 1999): minduploading.org/mu-status-bulletin.19991121.html
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Forward, faster, always!
Cheers,
rak@minduploading.org