dragon
Member 1535
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Contributor to projects:
The great enhancement debate
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Polytopia
(M, 22)
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Immortal since Jan 24, 2008
Uplinks: 0, Generation 3
Interests: nanotech, religion, philosophy, language, morality, self-deceit, instinct, bigotry, dancing, loving, hating & chemistry. I'm not particularly well suited to small talk.
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    A Place for Our Minds to Live... (Forever)
    Project: Polytopia
    I really enjoy my carnal existence; eating, drinking & exercising. But strangely I quite appreciate the idea of living forever - despite all of the negative connotations associated with it - what if this "Polytopia" was to be a hyperspace - kinda like second life, but controlled in the first person by our electrical selves, preserved after death and immortalized within a flash like memory device. Possibly with the ability to maintain contact with the living world. A way to preserve our souls.

    Along with the second life type programming it would probably be more of a world of the soul - where the electrical brain replica of our own can create and transform objects around it...

    Fri, Sep 26, 2008  Permanent link

    Sent to project: Polytopia
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    aeonbeat     Sun, Oct 19, 2008  Permanent link
    but even our "real" life is like this.. us controlled by us... it's still an infoverse, everything we percept, sense is information anyway. the new model is cognitive. besides, life would be boring without death :) even worse :D
    Wildcat     Mon, Oct 20, 2008  Permanent link
    Gouranga: "us controlled by us"

    interesting way to put it, how do you mean "controlled"? as I see it the common use of the word control is completely out of touch with the way 'things are'. our minds do not really have 'control' over anything, what we have , at the best of times, is something more akin to an interested observer . Note that even to be interested in that which we are observing about ourselves operating in the world is remotely connected to awareness and is more often than not a slight variation on our conscious experience of being 'us/me'.

    as to 'life would be boring without death'.. allow me to disagree, death to me, is so banal and so expected that for all practical purposes it serves no purpose whatsoever to the conscious aware mind, other than to correlate a certain 'local-bio' end to that which is, to my eyes, endless (life).

    immortality, whether technical in nature ( a la mind upload scenario) or otherwise is really nothing more than the removal of certainty, a break with inevitability giving the result of immersing our commonality into ambiguity and uncertainty, the very backbone of creativity and all life.
    aeonbeat     Mon, Oct 20, 2008  Permanent link
    by control i mean as being aware, like in control of the nerve system and being responsible to the consequences we provoke with anything we do. as we're observing everything from a distance and using our meatsuit to participate in this multiplayer life. i imagine it like i'm in my head not exactly controlling this machine that is to be me, but more like guiding it. the body as an extension to the nerve body, think of it more like the example nova spivack gave with the snail and its shell.

    death is real and has it's purpose, whether it's a test or something else, but i have to agree with you about the endless life, although i imagine the being beyond death unpersonalized, unindividual. individual immortality is different.


    Wildcat     Mon, Oct 20, 2008  Permanent link
    our nervous system can be seen as an ecological bio/conceptual response and interaction machine that has little need for a consciously aware emergent system for it to operate in its environment. in fact it will not be untrue to state that in most cases 'we' actually create an interference to the 'natural' nervous operating system of our 'meatsuits' (kudos for this word). having said the above I understand perfectly what you refer to, however as I see it, we are just now in the process of creating a reality that is extending our nervous system into the ambient ecology in which we presently exists. Given enough time to extend said nervous system into different layers of reality (think Drexler/Minsky) we may perchance reach a sufficient level of conscious awareness to state that 'control' (though I must admit I do not like the word) by awareness has been attained.

    concerning the death issue, I do not understand in what fashion is death 'real' and 'purposeful'? a test? of what? by whom? for what purpose?
    as I see it, aging and death in their present form is simply an accidental/circumstantial happenstance of a carbon based life-form under evolutionary pressures of lack. given time enough to create an economy of abundance (bio/nano/eco) ,death will be relegated to the dustbin of history as just one more issue we have managed to 'overcome'.



    aeonbeat     Mon, Oct 20, 2008  Permanent link
    if there was no death we wouldn't probably strive for polytopia? once you start to think how to overcome it, you're already participating, while collaborating. what do you think?
    rene     Tue, Oct 21, 2008  Permanent link
    This exchange reminds me of SpaceWeaver’s great post on immortality. An article he quotes suggests that immortality will render culture as we know it today moot because the meaning of the greatest works of the human imagination may mean little or nothing to medical immortals. In his post, Spaceweaver, who is one of SpaceCollective’s essential minds, invites the site's members to reflect, discuss and perhaps open a continuous exchange of thoughts and emotions regarding the prospect of extreme life extension. I think we should follow up on that.

    dragon     Wed, Oct 22, 2008  Permanent link
    Well gouranga, escaping death may be a pandora's box. But while some of us strive for it, I have no doubt we will continue working to get there. I am with wildcat in that we'll do all we can to get past death, and overcome it. True immortality can not be claimed until one truly has 'lived forever' and there is a tense disturbance between those words. Until we get there we're simply extending our own life spans, and that's already happening.

    The issue of control is very interesting indeed. I'll have to get back to that later...
    aeonbeat     Thu, Oct 23, 2008  Permanent link
    what do we need immortality for actually? i don't want to leave a wrong impression that i'm against it or something... i still don't know enough
    Wildcat     Thu, Oct 23, 2008  Permanent link
    there's no problem here Gouranga, I don't think that given the REAL opportunity, many humans will deny themselves the choice of immortality (you can always choose to terminate an infinite life, but until you have the possibility the whole argument is moot).

    as to why we need immortality: on the very basic level it is a philosophical position that is germane to the conceptual understanding of freedom and liberty, the foundation upon which we sit as humans is one in which limited amount of time is a 'given', all givens should be reconsidered once we have the scientific/technological possibility to overcome them. So fundamentally we do not speak of 'need' but of a direct extension of our 'natural' tendency to be free from constraints, be they lack of food, of energy, of time, of sensation or any other sort of lack you can imagine. It follows that immortality is not a need in and of itself but a natural consequence of our ability to overcome our inherent limitations.

    on another note, following rene's suggestion I am reposting this comment on Spaceweaver immortality thread and maybe this discussion is better continued there? (all for the purpose of clarity and coherency)
    aeonbeat     Thu, Oct 23, 2008  Permanent link
    thanks
    AsylumSeaker     Fri, Nov 7, 2008  Permanent link
    RE: Life boring without death.
    The way I see it...
    I'm not content with my self now and I don't think I will be once I'm immortal. It's impossible to remain the same person for long. I think I'll live as many different ways in 20 lifetimes as 20 separate people would.
     
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