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THE HUMAN MACHINE MERGER: ARE WE HEADED FOR THE MATRIX?
Most viewers of The Matrix consider the more fanciful elements--intelligent computers, downloading information into the human brain, virtual reality indistinguishable from real life--to be fun as science fiction, but quite remote from real life. Most viewers would be wrong. As renowned computer scientist and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil explains, these elements are very feasible and are quite likely to be a reality within our lifetimes.
To be published in Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy
and Religion in The Matrix (Ben
Bella Books, April 2003). Published on KurzweilAI.net March
3, 2003.
The Matrix is set in a world one hundred years in the future,
a world offering a seemingly miraculous array of technological marvels—sentient
(if malevolent) programs, the ability to directly download capabilities
into the human brain, and the creation of virtual realities indistinguishable
from the real world. For most viewers these developments may appear
to be pure science fiction:interesting to consider, but of little
relevance to the world outside the movie theatre. But this view
is shortsighted. In my view, these developments will become a reality
within the next three to four decades.
I've become a student of technology trends as an outgrowth of my
career as an inventor. If you work on creating technologies, you
need to anticipate where technology will be at points in the future
so that your project will be feasible and useful when it's completed,
not just when you started. Over the course of a few decades of anticipating
technology, I've become a student of technology trends and have
developed mathematical models of how technologies in different areas
are developing.
This has given me the ability to invent things that use the materials
of the future, not just limiting my ideas to the resources we have
today. Alan Kay has noted, "To anticipate the future we need to
invent it." So we can invent with future capabilities if we have
some idea of what they will be.
Perhaps the most important insight that I've gained, which people
are quick to agree with but very slow to really internalize and
appreciate all of its implications, is the accelerating pace of
technical change itself.
One Nobel laureate recently said to me: "There's no way we're going
to see self-replicating nanotechnological entities for at least
a hundred years." And yes, that's actually a reasonable estimate
of how much work it will take. It'll take a hundred years of progress,
at today's rate of progress, to get self-replicating nanotechnological
entities. But the rate of progress is not going to remain at today's
rate; according to my models, it's doubling every decade.
We will make a hundred years of progress at today's rate of progress
in 25 years. The next ten years will be like twenty, and the following
ten years will be like 40. The 21st century will therefore be like
20,000 years of progress—at today's rate. The twentieth century,
as revolutionary as it was, did not have a hundred years of progress
at today's rate; since we accelerated up to today's rate, it really
was about 20 years of progress. The 21st century will be about a
thousand times greater, in terms of change and paradigm shift, than
the 20th century.
A lot of these trends stem from thinking about the implications
of Moore's Law. Moore's Law refers to integrated circuits and famously
states that the computing power available for a given price will
double every twelve to twenty-four months. Moore's Law has become
a synonym for the exponential growth of computing.
I've been thinking about Moore's Law and its context for at least
twenty years. What is the real nature of this exponential trend?
Where does it come from? Is it an example of something deeper and
more profound? As I will show, the exponential growth of
computing goes substantially beyond Moore's Law. Indeed, exponential
growth goes beyond just computation, and applies to every area of
information-based technology, technology that will ultimately reshape
our world.
Observers have pointed out that Moore's Law is going to come to
an end. According to Intel and other industry experts, we'll run
out of space on an integrated circuit within fifteen years, because
the key features will only be a few atoms in width. So will that
be the end of the exponential growth of computing?
That's a very important question as we ponder the nature of the
21st century. To address this question, I put 49 famous computers
on an exponential graph. Down at the lower left hand corner is the
data processing machinery that was used in the 1890 American census
(calculating equipment using punch cards). In 1940, Alan Turing
developed a computer based on telephone relays that cracked the
German enigma code and gave Winston Churchill a transcription of
nearly all the Nazi messages. Churchill needed to use these transcriptions
with great discretion, because he realized that using them could
tip off the Germans prematurely.
If, for example, he had warned Coventry authorities that their
city was going to be bombed, the Germans would have seen the preparations
and realized that their code had been cracked. However, in the Battle
of Britain, the English flyers seemed to magically know where the
German flyers were at all times.
In 1952, CBS used a more sophisticated computer based on vacuum
tubes to predict the election of a U.S. president, President Eisenhower.
In the upper right-hand corner is the computer sitting on your desk
right now.
One insight we can see on this chart is that Moore's Law was not
the first but the fifth paradigm to provide exponential growth of
computing power. Each vertical line represents the movement into
a different paradigm: electro-mechanical, relay-based, vacuum tubes,
transistors, integrated circuits. Every time a paradigm ran out
of steam, another paradigm came along and picked up where that paradigm
left off.
People are very quick to criticize exponential trends, saying that
ultimately they'll run out of resources, like rabbits in Australia.
But every time one particular paradigm reached its limits, another,
completely different method would continue the exponential growth.
They were making vacuum tubes smaller and smaller but finally got
to a point where they couldn't make them any smaller and maintain
the vacuum. Then transistors came along, which are not just small
vacuum tubes. They're a completely different paradigm.
Every horizontal level on this graph represents a multiplication
of computing power by a factor of a hundred. A straight line in
an exponential graph means exponential growth. What we see here
is that the rate of exponential growth is itself growing exponentially.
We doubled the computing power every three years at the beginning
of the century, every two years in the middle, and we're now doubling
it every year.
It's obvious what the sixth paradigm will be: computing in three
dimensions. After all, we live in a three-dimensional world and
our brain is organized in three dimensions. The brain uses a very
inefficient type of circuitry. Neurons are very large "devices,"
and they're extremely slow. They use electrochemical signaling that
provides only about 200 calculations per second, but the brain gets
its prodigious power from parallel computing resulting from being
organized in three dimensions. Three-dimensional computing technologies
are beginning to emerge. There's an experimental technology at MIT's
Media Lab that has 300 layers of circuitry. In recent years, there
have been substantial strides in developing three-dimensional circuits
that operate at the molecular level.
Nanotubes, which are my favorite, are hexagonal arrays of carbon
atoms that can be organized to form any type of electronic circuit.
You can create the equivalent of transistors and other electrical
devices. They're physically very strong, with 50 times the strength
of steel. The thermal issues appear to be manageable. A one-inch
cube of nanotube circuitry would be a million times more powerful
than the computing capacity of the human brain.
Over the last several years, there has been a sea change in the
level of confidence in building three-dimensional circuits and achieving
at least the hardware capacity to emulate human intelligence. This
has raised a more salient issue, namely that "Moore's Law may be
true for hardware but it's not true for software."
From my own four decades of experience with software development,
I believe that is not the case. Software productivity is increasing
very rapidly. As an example from one of my own companies, in 15
years, we went from a $5,000 speech-recognition system that recognized
a thousand words poorly, without continuous speech, to a $50 product
with a hundred-thousand-word vocabulary that's far more accurate.
That's typical for software products. With all of the efforts in
new software development tools, software productivity has also been
growing exponentially, albeit with a smaller exponent than we see
in hardware.
Many other technologies are improving exponentially. When the genome
project was started about 15 years ago, skeptics pointed out that
at the rate at which we can scan the genome, it will take 10,000
years to finish the project. The mainstream view was that there
would be improvements, but there was no way that the project could
be completed in 15 years. But the price-performance and throughput
of DNA sequencing doubled every year, and the project was completed
in less than 15 years. In twelve years, we went from a cost of $10
to sequence a DNA base pair to a tenth of a cent.
Even longevity has been improving exponentially. In the 18th century,
every year we added a few days to human life expectancy. In the
19th century, every year, we added a few weeks. We're now adding
about 120 days every year to human life expectancy. And with the
revolutions now in an early stage in genomics, therapeutic cloning,
rational drug design, and the other biotechnology transformations,
many observers including myself anticipate that within ten years
we'll be adding more than a year, every year. So, if you can hang
in there for another ten years, we'll get ahead of the power curve
and be able to live long enough to see the remarkable century ahead.
Miniaturization is another very important exponential trend. We're
making things smaller at a rate of 5.6 per linear dimension per
decade. Bill Joy, in the essay following this one, has, as one of
his recommendations, to essentially forgo nanotechnology. But nanotechnology
is not a single unified field, only worked on by nanotechnologists.
Nanotechnology is simply the inevitable end result of the pervasive
trend toward making things smaller, which we've been doing for many
decades.
Above is a chart of computing's exponential growth, projected into
the 21st century. Right now, your typical $1000 PC is somewhere
between an insect and a mouse brain. The human brain has about 100
billion neurons, with about 1,000 connections from one neuron to
another. These connections operate very slowly, on the order of
200 calculations per second, but 100 billion neurons times 1,000
connections creates 100 trillion-fold parallelism. Multiplying that
by 200 calculations per second yields 20 million billion calculations
per second, or, in computing terminology, 20 billion MIPS. We'll
have 20 billion MIPS for $1000 by the year 2020.
Now that won't automatically give us human levels of intelligence,
because the organization, the software, the content and the embedded
knowledge are equally important. Below I will address the scenario
in which I envision achieving the software of human intelligence,
but I believe it is clear that we will have the requisite computing
power. By 2050, $1000 of computing will equal one billion human
brains. That might be off by a year or two, but the 21st century
won't be wanting for computational resources.
Now let's consider the virtual-reality framework envisioned by
The Matrix—a virtual reality which is indistinguishable from
true reality. This will be feasible, but I do quibble with one point.
The thick cable entering Neo's brainstem made for a powerful visual,
but it's unnecessary; all of these connections can be wireless.
Let's go out to 2029 and put together some of the trends that I've
discussed. By that time, we'll be able to build nanobots, microscopic-sized
robots that can go inside your capillaries and travel through your
brain and scan the brain from inside. We can almost build these
kinds of circuits today. We can't make them quite small enough,
but we can make them fairly small.
The Department of Defense is developing tiny robotic devices called
"Smart Dust." The current generation is one millimeter—that's
too big for this scenario—but these tiny devices can be dropped
from a plane, and find positions with great precision. You can have
many thousands of these on a wireless local area network. They can
then take visual images, communicate with each other, coordinate,
send messages back, act as nearly invisible spies, and accomplish
a variety of military objectives.
We are already building blood-cell-sized devices that go inside
the blood stream, and there are four major conferences on the topic
of "bioMEMS" (biological Micro Electronic Mechanical Systems). The
nanobots I am envisioning for 2029 will not necessarily require
their own navigation. They could move involuntarily through the
bloodstream and, as they travel by different neural features, communicate
with them the same way that we now communicate with different cells
within a cell phone system.
Brain-scanning resolution, speeds, and costs are all exploding
exponentially. With every new generation of brain scanning we can
see with finer and finer resolution. There's a technology today
that allows us to view many of the salient details of the human
brain. Of course, there's still no full agreement on what those
details are, but we can see brain features with very high resolution,
provided the scanning tip is right next to the features. We can
scan a brain today and see the brain's activity with very fine detail;
you just have to move the scanning tip all throughout the brain
so that it's in close proximity to every neural feature.
Now how are we going to do that without making a mess of things?
The answer is to send the scanners inside the brain. By design,
our capillaries travel by every interneuronal connection, every
neuron and every neural feature. We can send billions of these scanning
robots, all on a wireless local area network, and they would all
scan the brain from inside and create a very high-resolution map
of everything that's going on.
What are we going to do with the massive database of neural information
that develops? One thing we will do is reverse-engineer the brain,
that is, understand the basic principles of how it works. This is
an endeavor we have already started. We already have high resolution
scans of certain areas of the brain. The brain is not one organ;
it's comprised of several hundred specialized regions, each organized
differently. We have scanned certain areas of the auditory and visual
cortex, and have used this information to design more intelligent
software. Carver Mead at Caltech, for example, has developed powerful,
digitally controlled analog chips that are based on these biologically
inspired models from the reverse engineering of portions of the
visual and auditory systems. His visual sensing chips are used in
high-end digital cameras.
We have demonstrated that we are able to understand these algorithms,
but they're different from the algorithms that we typically run
on our computers. They're not sequential and they're not logical;
they're chaotic, highly parallel, and self-organizing. They have
a holographic nature in that there's no chief-executive-officer
neuron. You can eliminate any of the neurons, cut any of the wires,
and it makes little difference—the information and the processes
are distributed throughout a complex region.
Based on these insights, we have developed a number of biologically
inspired models today. This is the field I work in, using techniques
such as evolutionary "genetic algorithms" and "neural nets," which
use biologically inspired models. Today's neural nets are mathematically
simplified, but as we get a more powerful understanding of the principles
of operation of different brain regions, we will be in a position
to develop much more powerful, biologically inspired models. Ultimately
we can create and recreate these processes, retaining their inherently
massively parallel, digitally controlled analog, chaotic, and self-organizing
properties. We will be able to recreate the types of processes that
occur in the hundreds of different brain regions, and create entities—they
actually won't be in silicon, they'll probably be using something
like nanotubes—that have the complexity, richness, and depth
of human intelligence.
Our machines today are still a million times simpler than the human
brain, which is one key reason that they still don't have the endearing
qualities of people. They don't yet have our ability to get the
joke, to be funny, to understand people, to respond appropriately
to emotion, or to have spiritual experiences. These are not side
effects of human intelligence, or distractions; they are the cutting
edge of human intelligence. It will require a technology of the
complexity of the human brain to create entities that have those
kinds of attractive and convincing features.
Getting back to virtual reality, let's consider a scenario involving
a direct connection between the human brain and these nanobot-based
implants. There are a number of different technologies that have
already been demonstrated for communicating in both directions between
the wet, analog world of neurons and the digital world of electronics.
One such technology, called a neuron transistor, provides this two-way
communication. If a neuron fires, this neuron transistor detects
that electromagnetic pulse, so that's communication from the neuron
to the electronics. It can also cause the neuron to fire or prevent
it from firing.
For full-immersion virtual reality, we will send billions of these
nanobots to take up positions by every nerve fiber coming from all
of our senses. If you want to be in real reality, they sit there
and do nothing. If you want to be in virtual reality, they suppress
the signals coming from our real senses and replace them with the
signals that you would have been receiving if you were in the virtual
environment.
In this scenario, we will have virtual reality from within and
it will be able to recreate all of our senses. These will be shared
environments, so you can go there with one person or many people.
Going to a Web site will mean entering a virtual-reality environment
encompassing all of our senses, and not just the five senses, but
also emotions, sexual pleasure, humor. There are actually neurological
correlates of all of these sensations and emotions, which I discuss
in my book The Age of the Spiritual Machines.
For example, surgeons conducting open-brain surgery on a young
woman (while awake) found that stimulating a particular spot in
the girl's brain would cause her to laugh. The surgeons thought
that they were just stimulating an involuntary laugh reflex. But
they discovered that they were stimulating the perception of humor:
whenever they stimulated this spot, she found everything hilarious.
"You guys are just so funny standing there" was a typical remark.
Using these nanobot-based implants, you will be able to enhance
or modify your emotional responses to different experiences. That
can be part of the overlay of these virtual-reality environments.
You will also be able to have different bodies for different experiences.
Just as people today project their images from Web cams in their
apartment, people will beam their whole flow of sensory and even
emotional experiences out on the Web, so you can, ' la the plot
concept of the movie Being John Malkovich, experience the
lives of other people.
Ultimately, these nanobots will expand human intelligence and our
abilities and facilities in many different ways. Because they're
communicating with each other wirelessly, they can create new neural
connections. These can expand our memory, cognitive faculties, and
pattern-recognition abilities. We will expand human intelligence
by expanding its current paradigm of massive interneuronal connections
as well as through intimate connection to non-biological forms of
intelligence.
We will also be able to download knowledge, something that machines
can do today that we are unable to do. For example, we spent several
years training one research computer to understand human speech
using the biologically inspired models—neural nets, Markov
models, genetic algorithms, self-organizing patterns—that are
based on our crude current understanding of self-organizing systems
in the biological world. A major part of the engineering project
was collecting thousands of hours of speech from different speakers
in different dialects and then exposing this to the system and having
it try to recognize the speech. It made mistakes, and then we had
it adjust automatically, and self-organize to better reflect what
it had learned.
Over many months of this kind of training, it made substantial
improvements in its ability to recognize speech. Today, if you want
your personal computer to recognize human speech, you don't have
to spend years training it the same painstaking way, as we need
to do with every human child. You can just load the evolved models,
it's called "loading the software." So machines can share their
knowledge. We don't have quick downloading ports on our brains.
But as we build nonbiological analogs of our neurons, interconnections,
and neurotransmitter levels where our skills and memories are stored,
we won't leave out the equivalent of downloading ports. We'll be
able to download capabilities as easily as Trinity downloads the
program that allows her to fly the B-212 helicopter.
When you talk to somebody in the year 2040, you will be talking
to someone who may happen to be of biological origin but whose mental
processes are a hybrid of biological and electronic thinking processes,
working intimately together. Instead of being restricted, as we
are today, to a mere hundred trillion connections in our brain,
we'll be able to expand substantially beyond this level. Our biological
thinking is flat; the human race has an estimated 1026
calculations per second, and that biologically determined figure
is not going to grow. But nonbiological intelligence is growing
exponentially. The crossover point, according to my calculations,
is in the 2030s; some people call this the Singularity.
As we get to 2050, the bulk of our thinking'which in my opinion
is still an expression of human civilization'will be nonbiological.
I don't believe that the Matrix scenario of malevolent artificial
intelligences in mortal conflict with humans is inevitable. At that
point, the nonbiological portion of our thinking will still be human
thinking, because it's going to be derived from human thinking.
Its programming will be created by humans, or created by machines
that are created by humans, or created by machines that are based
on reverse-engineering of the human brain or downloads of human
thinking, or one of many other intimate connections between human
and machine thinking that we can't even contemplate today.
A common reaction to this is that this is a dystopian vision, because
I am "placing humanity with the machines." But that's because most
people have a prejudice against machines. Most observers don't truly
understand what machines are ultimately capable of, because all
the machines that they've ever "met" are very limited, compared
to people. But that won't be true of machines circa 2030 and 2040.
When machines are derived from human intelligence and are a million
times more capable, we'll have a different respect for machines,
and there won't be a clear distinction between human and machine
intelligence. We will effectively merge with our technology.
We are already well down this road. If all the machines in the
world stopped today, our civilization would grind to a halt. That
wasn't true as recently as thirty years ago. In 2040, human and
machine intelligence will be deeply and intimately melded. We will
become capable of far more profound experiences of many diverse
kinds. We'll be able to "recreate the world" according to our imaginations
and enter environments as amazing as that of The Matrix,
but, hopefully, a world more open to creative human expression and
experience.
SOURCES
BOOKS
Kurzweil, Ray, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers
Exceed Intelligence (Penguin USA, 2000).
' 2003 BenBella
Books. Published on KurzweilAI.net with permission.
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Mind·X Discussion About This Article:
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Seperate realities and consciousness
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There is a strong parallel between the concept behind the Matrix and dreaming, particularly lucid dreaming - where the dreamer is aware he or she is dreaming while dreaming. The parallel of course is the experience of a separate reality. I expect the experience of full-immersion in a virtual reality to be very similar to the experience of lucid dreaming. But what will be the consequence of being able to move between all these different realities?
It will make people - or intelligent machines - wonder how real our so-called reality actually is. In the end it will become clear that the only thing that persists in all of these realities is consciousness itself, not the world, not even you as a person, but undefined consciousness itself.
We will find our home is consciousness, not any one of the realities we'll experience. Of course, this can be realized even now, but experiencing a multitude of seperate realities will put all realites in a new, more dream-like perspective. Consciousness will naturally emerge as the "really real" because it's the only common ground in all realities.
So, by all means, take the red pill!
For more on "consciousness":
http://www.7freedom.com/consciousness.htm
Timothy Schoorel |
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Re: Seperate realities and consciousness
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1. What's the difference between Morpheus and Agent Smith?
Suppose you are Neo and you have heard both Morpheus and Agent Smith make eloquent speeches about how they see the world, about their reasons, about their feelings. Based on that you have to answer a fundamental question, that is: Who is real? Who is conscious?
Morpheus? Agent Smith? Both? None?
All you can say is that you know that you are conscious and that's all. You cannot say the same about other people. You see them, you smell them, you touch them, and you talk to them. They talk back to you and it seems they react as conscious beings would do. But how can you be sure? How can another person prove to you that he/she really exists as a being having emotions and volitions?
If in a hardware or software simulation of a human being, words and gestures are produced by lines of programmed software, a similar process occur when you dream. In your dreams there are other people with whom you interact and they appear as conscious as the persons in real life but it's only your brain simulating them. So where is the difference? If you cannot tell a machine simulating conscience from a real conscious machine, if you cannot tell a dreamed person from the real one, then how can you judge what conscience is in the first place?
2. What's the difference between Zion and The Matrix?
Suppose that you are Neo again. You are sound asleep and you are dreaming. While you dream the dreamscape is what is real, maybe the sun is shining and you feel the summer breeze. It seems real. The images of persons that populate the dreamscape are like real persons. They interact with you as expected, they get angry if you annoy them, they even laugh at your jokes. Well everything seems coherent. Maybe deep inside you feel that this reality is not solid enough, that there must be something else, but then you reject the whole idea as nonsense'
Suddenly you awake and perceive with sadness or relief that what you tough was reality was just another dream.
So now you are in the real world and must do the things real people do: brush your teeth, eat your cereal and crawl to your boring workplace, right? Not today. Today events will occur that will end with you taking a red pill and...
Suddenly you awake and perceive in excruciating agony that what you tough was reality was nothing more than a massive computer simulation.
Hey, but now is for real! Now you know what The Matrix is: It's the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Exactly, so how can you tell when the blindfold has been removed?
You where fooled by your brain dreaming reality, then you where fooled by an electronic brain simulating reality. Now, how can you be sure that you are not been fooled by this cool dressed man named Morpheus. Where it all ends?
If you accept that a particular reality is a dream or a simulation, what stops you from accepting that the world in which this reality is being simulated is not another simulation.
It cannot be that The Matrix is not but an insignificant part of realities inside realities?
'you dream that a computer simulates that you dream a dream'
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Re: Seperate realities and consciousness
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In response to 1:
Your question is how one can judge what conscience - being conscious - is in the first place. The article by David Chalmers on this website, "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness", takes the first steps in laying down a framework for judging whether something or someone is a conscious entity. Mr. Chalmers basically says that we may not be able to prove consciousness, but that there is a possibility that we might understand the requirements for "subjective experience". I can see his point and I think his approach to this problem is very promising.
When you say "All you can say is that you know that you are conscious and that's all.", I think this is not correct. All I can say is that there is consciousness. In this consciousness different realities appear, exist, and dissapear. In this consciousness different "me's" appear, exist, and dissapear. It seems to me that this unmovable consciousness is much, much more fundamental than any human being or intelligent machine could ever be.
I do not think that consciousness emerges from within the human being, rather, the human being and all of these realities that we are talking about emerge from consciousness! But David Chalmers is right in that there are requirements for "subjective experience". For example, if I stop eating and drinking, pretty soon the subjective experience of "Timothy" will disappear. Consciousness however, does not disappear as should be clear from the fact that many people have died in your lifetime, yet you are still conscious!
In response to 2:
As I said in the post you replied to, none of the realities we will ever experience is ultimately real. This was what I was trying to convey. Neither Zion nor The Matrix is ultimately real. Consciousness will be understood as the "really real", as the ultimate reality. For no reality can exist without consciousness. If there was no awareness whatsoever, then in what way would reality exist? Consciousness is the background, the in-ground of any so-called reality.
Links:
Article by David Chalmers:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/ar ticles/art0512.html
Consciousness does not emerge from within the human being:
http://www.7freedom.com/humanparadigm.htm
Timothy Schoorel
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Re: Seperate realities and consciousness
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The question of how and when subjective experience arises from the physical is beginning to be answered by science, the question of why may or may not be of a different order. It's possible that we discover that experience simply has to arise from the physical in order for the physical to exist. Subjective experience could be a Quantum Mechanical imperative: without subjective experience no physical universe.
When you say "a conscious being" you continue and seem to mean consciousness itself. Consciousness itself however is not "a being", is not divided into seperate "consciousnesses". Spiritual traditions may have called it "The Supreme Being", or "the Creator". But consciousness is impersonal, has no will of its own and therefor the universe is a natural and spontanuous thing, rather than the result of a willfull act of creating.
If you did not mean consciousness itself but an entity that has a level of complexity and sophistication that results in subjective experience then it's just a question of whether the conditions for subjective experience are fulfilled or not, and not a question of "a consciousness willing to experience" something.
You say: "When dreaming, experiences are not arising from physical stimulus." This may be true but dreams do arise from some physical process in the brain. In other words, the subjective experience still has a physiological basis.
Your last comment: "But like in a dream you just don't remember.", is not necessarily true: in a dream there is the possibility of being aware that you are dreaming - as I pointed out in my first post in this thread. And it is just as possible to realize that you are really this undefined, unmovable, boundless and placeless consciousness: that's when you discover the reality beyond "the Matrix", beyond experience. In Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta this is called Realization, Self-Realization or Enlightenment. This may not be a very common phenomenon but has nevertheless occured many times throughout human history.
Links:
For more on "Enlightenment":
http://www.7freedom.com/enlightenment.htm
Timothy Schoorel
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Re: THE HUMAN MACHINE MERGER: ARE WE HEADED FOR THE MATRIX?
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After reading this article I am both terrified of, but anticipating the future that we will see within the next couple of decades. Although I am very closely following the improvements and breathroughs in technologies of our time, and for one would love to see the future described in the article, I am also terrified of the possibilities that humans as a whole could do wrong with it. A world where tiny robots have the ability to control our 5 senses have the ability to, in a both practical and ironical sense, shut us down. I am not going to discuss the possibilities that certain groups of extremists might do with these technologies, as we hear these scenarios from our government on a daily basis in the United States. (As of 9-11) This technology might also have the power to effectively destroy the social structure that we live by today. Here is one scenario; Suppose a company needs highly intelligent scientists to work on the anti-gravity airplane that it has started working on. The company, instead of hiring a graduate from MIT and paying him/her 200 thousand dollars annually might instead hire a bum off the streets, implement nanobots into the individual's brain, and upload the information necessary for him to begin his work. This would effectively lead to the collapse of Universities, as students will no longer need to go to college to recieve the education necessary to become a scientists, or a professional in any field for that matter. In a sense, everybody would be capable of getting the job done, but not enough jobs to go around. This would also give a ton of power to the Government, corporate businesses, and so on. I hope that this scenario will never become reality, but we can never stop ourselves from wondering what the possibilities of such technologies could lead us to in the future. |
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Re: The Eventuality of The Human Machine
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We have to make predictions.
To guarantee safeties.
The wave of technological acceleration may be modified by individuals ating OUTSIDE the trend, and speeding it up.
The fundamental tennant that everything human can be classified beggars belief.
Implotion may well have occurred as a sine qua non of life or even atomic existance. the quark, the lepton, the plank, the elctron, upon whom the long night of A.I. mmust fall, are nothing to what infinite implotions may lie withing what is presently too small for science even to theorise about.
There is the vastness of the infinite, the density of imagination to-the power of N at any level that we must surley run into.
I couldn't care a quark whether you resurrect a matrixed copy of my mother with red hair, instead of green hair, may not seem much of a difference, but because of the issues of the butterfly effect, may make all the difference.
Ta Salutant!
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Re: THE HUMAN MACHINE MERGER: ARE WE HEADED FOR THE MATRIX?
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I have decided there are 2 possible explanations of what "reality" is right now.
1. This is reality... the first and only timeline for humans. The human race will never make it passed a few decades from now before we make time travel and other major acomplishments, because, you see, if we "had" made it we would be getting time travelers back to here in this time right now. That would mean that this splits #1 in half... well accually like 1,000,000,000 (prolly infinite) peices because of the never ending timeline. Therefor humans must have traveled back this this time many many times because all of the timelines inhead of us.
Going back to the point of #1 we wont make it to the timeline point. I dont know how the entire human race can be destroyed though... unless the machines totaly wipe us out or our entire planet gets destroyed... so my guess would be the AI that form.
2. We are in the matrix as of now because since there has noone been time traveld back to us right now. In the matrix the machines will reset the matrix or change it, without us ever knowing it because of our consiousness only operates at a certain speed. I have a website that describes in everyway that the matrix can and quite possible that even relate to our physics. Our wold is made up of a super computer and everything is programed and binary code is what is under the electron size. It writes everything that is to be done telling everything its job and place. Out side of the matrix could be our one and only timeline, waitting to be destroyed or already destroyed from the AI that we created. Or that could also be a matrix... never ending. Its not hard to relize that that is probably what will happen when we create AI... it will be like creating an unstable supersmart advancing enemy just waiting to destroy us. so outside of our matrix the world IS accually scorched by storms and there is no sunlight... Undoubtedly what we would do if we knew they ran on solar power right? Anyway, what would be there power? why not use your enemy to take advantage of? There arnt many other sources of power that are reproducing that the machines could use without any natural resources left. So they grow humans and use their brain impulses and all of the other things that produce energy in our body... so we have to live to make this energy. Therefore the machines put us in a matrix. For us to live our lives "living". Our brains are hooked up to their supercomputer that they wrote and have most power over it.Then the last humans get ahold of the technology and understand how to move in and out of the matrix, maybey trying to sabotage the machines from inside out. Also since the matrix is a program and computer, couldnt they very well make the past and future? Just implant memories and stuff. I think in the matrix everything is fate unless you know about it and you can make choices... just like the movie. They probably wouldnt have all of those nueral impants and such, because by that time the AI will probably allready have started their attack. So there still probably is even a rod in your head?
In all i think the possiblity of us in the matrix is about an 80 percent chance. Most of you would probably dissagree strongly and prolly think im crazy but go ahead. Your not the one doing everything in they're power to find a way out, and get unplugged. Therefor as of now, i am dedicating my life to getting out, and understanding all of this. But who knows? i could give up and admit im a moron in a few days or months. Im searching.... and in my opinion the matrix is mad-possible so beleive waht you want. The idea from the movie might have been sparked from somthing, or maybey the humans interfereing with the machines and telling us to create it... for us to relize what is happening. Or i could be wrong and our planet is going to blow up in a few decades? Post replies please. |
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Re: THE HUMAN MACHINE MERGER: ARE WE HEADED FOR THE MATRIX?
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Hmm....I have a different question. I don't mean to be too doubting, but when I first read the predictions on this site, I become very excited and relieved. I'm 18 years old: so if what's here claimed is true, as long as I live a safe and healthy life, barring some unforeseeable and unlikely accident within the next 30 or 40 years, I need not fear death, basically ever. Well, once again, I would dearly love to believe that, but I have to ask of Ray Kurzweil himself, or anyone else who might know the answer: exactly what is he basing all this on? Where are studies or concrete, scientifically-proven citations to back these predictions up? I really don't mean to be hostile or overly-zealous, but If I'm seriously going to believe these things (not that everything about this site doesn't indicate to me that he is a very well-respected and reputable theorist), I would like to see actual studies or concrete data that shows yes, these things really will be possible by or close to the projected timeframes. |
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Re: THE HUMAN MACHINE MERGER: ARE WE HEADED FOR THE MATRIX?
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Well, it's hard for Ray to provide studies of these impending technologies if they haven't been invented yet. As he indicates in the article, inorder to be a sucsessful inventor, one must look into the future. If not, your invention will be outdated before it's completed.
The Average Life span has doubled in the last 150 years. With the impending biotech boom, we might be able to double the average life span within the next 75 years, and that's a conservative estimate. Reasearchers have doubled the lifespans of fruit flies, by minipulating the genes, which reduces the amount of calories that can be absorbed by the fruit flies cells. The same holds true for humans, those with a low caloric intake, outlive those with a higher caloric intake. So it's only a matter of time until these gene therapies are available for humans.
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Re: THE HUMAN MACHINE MERGER: ARE WE HEADED FOR THE MATRIX?
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Ray Kurzweil's prediction of computing power growing double exponentially does not seem far fetched, but what does is his lax prognostication of the Matrix style virtual-reality. The availability of this magnitude of computing power does not directly imply that software can also be created to have the capability of simulating such a complex virtual reality. A virtual experience of this complexity would require software that is capable of consistently triggering millions of simulated brain signals to the user's brain. This in itself is an extremely difficult task. Albeit that high resolution maps of the biochemical signaling system of the human brain will be available but the extent of how various mechanisms of the brain work in parallel is hardly known. It may take many more decades after we achieve this caliber of computing power before the true nature of the brain is fully understood.
Even after there is a sufficient understanding of the brain, this knowledge will need to be modeled into a computer simulation of the brain. As of present, all current models attempt to approximate the total complexity of brain. The design of software that is capable of mimicking and not approximating the complexity of the brain will require an extraordinarily advanced software model. It is not to say that this type of model will be out of reach in the future, but developing software of this complexity will take quite a bit of time. When software becomes this complex, imagine how difficult it would be to locate a simple software bug.
A Matrix style virtual-reality also raises questions about whether or not this type of technology will still be legal in the future. Let's take human cloning for example. Human cloning is a technology with the potential to clone humans but it has been made illegal in most of the world because it has not proven to be medically safe or scientifically sound. During the development of this brain stimulating technology, what if the software works incorrectly due to a bug or miscalculation and causes the user permanent brain damage? There is also the possibility that virtual realities could be created which are so horrific or disturbing that they psychologically damage an individual. These issues can easily lead to legislation against the further growth of this technology.
Cheers.
[1] Hauser, Marc D., 'How does the brain generate computation?', 2001, Available at HTTP: http://www.edge.org/documents/day/day_hauser.html
(15 July 2007)
[2] Arnborg, Stefan, Ingrid Agartz, Mikael Nordstrom, Hakan Hall and Goran Sedvall, 'Human Brain Informatics ' Understanding Causes of Mental Illness', 2000, Available at HTTP: http://www.ercim.org/publication/Ercim_News/enw43/ arnborg.html
(15 July 2007)
[3] Vaughn, 'Mind Hacks: Brain simulation project ' the early years', 2007, Available at HTTP: http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/03/brain_simula tion_pro.html
(15 July 2007)
[4] Johnson-Frey, Scott H., 'Stimulation through simulation? Motor imagery and functional reorganization in hemiplegic stroke patients', 2004, Available at HTTP: http://freylab.uoregon.edu/documents/publications/ 017.pdf
(15 July 2007)
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