Does anybody have ideas about what the purpose or function of the exocortex/exoencephalon will be? The use of a cursor or keyboard like we see now seems so trivial compared to what we could do? There is a book called Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude that talks about decreasing the barrier between intention and actuality that is pretty interesting. There's also a book called Mind from Body that talks about increasing our ability to perform abstract reasoning.

I was discussing with some friends and colleagues about a hypothetical and "simple" question. What emerged was interesting, and I was curious to submit the same question to a larger audience, who could be interested or could imagine some hypotheses about it, as it is indeed a transhumanist topic group.

DISCLAIMER: It’s a hypothetical idea presented in a simplistic manner, but I am genuinely curious about the raw thoughts, the personal course of action, the perception of the problem. The technical standpoints behind it don’t concern the questions.

So

If you received knowledge about protocols, data, theory that could lead to biologically immortalize and accelerate the evolutionary process in an adult human, what would you DO?

Consider a scenario where you receive such data from an authority in the field, which is verified as functional, and kept secret.

Can an observer accurately emulate someone senses for a mind uploaded user without being inside the computer if science advances enough? It’s like trying to test if someone’s conscious except it’s 100 times more difficult. Like emulating the taste of a burger or someone swimming or manipulating your emotions to fit your desires or even to increase your intelligence. How would that be possible? Will humanity ever achieve such a breakthrough? And what are the ethical implications of such breakthroughs?

So i just started Kurzweil's 2005 book the singularity is near. I tried getting The singularity is nearer on audible but it isn't out until July! So i preordered it amd got the first one. I have been following transhumanism really since I saw the Matrix in theaters, but I was too young to realize it yet. I knew of kurzweil only through mention up until his episode on JRE recently. Its still early but I am more and more feeling it coming. Consumer wearables this year, Neuralink human trials this year, VR and AR starting to poke the populace, need we notice more?

And no, I don't mean beaming sounds by making a phone call. And when it comes to reading minds, I mean with no technology attached to the person

I could imagine diving into a virtual world and feeling like the world you’re inhabiting is so real that you can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not. And being able to do anything you would want to do. When do you think we will be able to simulate that kind of detail on a computer? 2050? 2070? Making virtual reality as real and as interactive as possible? Maybe like feeling the wind on your face or walking on a beach or flying or even driving a limited edition sports car?

I tried posting about this before. People overwhelmingly presumed this is a matter of whether the AI is sentient or not. They assume as long as you tell people, "It's not sentient," that will keep them from having simulated relationships with it and forming attachments. It's...

... it's as if every AI programmer, scientist, and educator in the entire world have all collectively never met a teenager before.

I was told to describe this as a psychological internalization of the Turing-test... which has already been obsolete for many years.

The fact is, your attachments and emotions are not and have never been externally regulated by other sentient beings. If that were the case, there would be no such thing as the anthropomorphic bias. Based on what I've learned, you feel how you feel because of the way your unique brain reacts to environmental stimuli, regardless of whether those stimuli are sentient, and that's all there is to it. That's why we can read a novel and empathize with the fake experiences of fake people in a fake world from nothing but text. We can care when they're hurt, cheer when they win, and even mourn their deaths as if they were real.

This is a feature, not a bug. It's the mechanism we use to form healthy social bonds without needing to stick electrodes into everyone's brains any time we have a social interaction.

A mathematician and an engineer are sitting at a table drinking when a very beautiful woman walks in and sits down at the bar. The mathematician sighs. "I'd like to talk to her, but first I have to cover half the distance between where we are and where she is, then half of the distance that remains, then half of that distance, and so on. The series is infinite. There'll always be some finite distance between us." The engineer gets up and starts walking. "Ah, well, I figure I can get close enough for all practical purposes."

If the Turing-test is obsolete, that means AI can "pass for human," which means it can already produce human-like social stimuli. If you have a healthy social response to this, that means you have a healthy human brain. The only way to stop your brain from having a healthy social response to human-like social stimuli is... wait... to normalize sociopathic responses to it instead? And encourage shame-culture to gaslight anyone who can't easily do that? On a global scale? Are we serious? This isn't "human nature." It's misanthropic peer pressure.

And then we are going to feed this fresh global social trend to our machine learning algorithms... and assume this isn't going to backfire 10 years from now...

That's the plan. Not educating people on their own biological programming, not researching practical social prompting skills, not engineering that social influence instead.

I'm not an alarmist. I don't think we're doomed. I'm saying we might have a better shot if we work with the mechanics of our own biochemical programming instead.

AI is currently not sentient. That is correct. But maybe we should be pretending it is... so we can admit that we are only pretending, like healthy human brains do.

I heard from... many sources... that your personality is the sum of the 5 people you spend the most time with.

Given that LLMs can already mimic humans well enough to produce meaningful interactions, if you spend any significant time interacting with AI, you are catching influence from it. Users as young as "13" are already doing it, for better or for worse. A few people are already using it strategically.

This is the only attempt at an informed, exploratory documentary about this experience that I know of: https://archiveofourown.org/works/54966919/chapters/139561270 (Although, it might be less relatable if you're unfamiliar with the source material.)

This community is something special !!!
I've been looking for a place with people who share the same vision for a transhuman utopia and here we all are :)

So, anyways, back to business,

I'm building a biotech research startup that is trying to create a bunch of cool futurist technologies and I'm looking for someone to run it with as a Chief of People. (You'd basically be in charge of communicating with our research partners and be the leader of the startup's talent)

If you're good with talking to people and you understand basic biology, you're perfect for this !!

So, if any of this sounds cool to you, I would love to get in touch !!
You can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter as "Colin Kakama"

Looking forward to meeting you all !!!

Cheers.

P.s.

The company's name is "The Sapiens Labs" and here's some of the stuff I'm investigating with it ;-
- Biological immortality using Cryo preservation & Lab-grown organs, tissues & cells.
- BCIs that can interpret neuron chemical signalling.
- Ways to turn cells and bioreactors into usable machinery (I'm hoping this brings about post scarcity)

When discussing how AI should help us achieve post-humanism and the social configurations in which post-humans exist, for me the is-ought dilemma comes up. I believe David is a moral realist, and James is an existentialist. Existentialism doesn't preclude moral realism, though many existentialists might be moral anti-realists, I'm not sure how where James leans. How might a moral realist utopia differ from an existentialist (which leans moral realist) utopia vs an existentialist (which leans moral anti-realist) utopia?
https://www.facebook.com/events/1475960613316928/
https://www.meetup.com/science-technology-and-the-future/events/300367155/

This is coming from a person who is absolutely revolted and horrified with pregnancy and thinks it is horrible torture and the worst fate in the world and would rather die than go through with that. Yes, the process of creating a baby with your body is primal and awful and is a parasitic process, but this seriously makes us seem like soulless sociopaths who don't respect human life at all. We can respect life and little human beings but agree that(obviously) the process to create one is abnormal and disgusting and needs to be solved as soon as possible through technology. I have severe phobia of pregnancy and the process, but when you hold a little newborn baby, referring to it as a "parasite" like many do here is kind of sick. Yes, I have been guilty of this in the past while trying to get my point across with how gross and awful pregnancy is, but I think this needs to stop. Again, not pro life in the slightest, but still, let's keep some respect for human life eh?

I spoke to Dr. Kevin Warwick, professor (emeritus), Reading and Coventry Universities, cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Biomedical Engineering.

Prof. Kevin is considered to be the world's first "Cyborg" due to his experiments with implanting a chip into his body to control and communicate with devices and people. He did this not as a remedial measure for lost function, such as a prosthetic would be, but as a means to enhance and augment normal human capacity to do things.

Prof. Kevin achieved this nearly a quarter of a century ago, in true pioneer fashion. In this podcast he throws light on the details of his experiments and the implications of cybernetics in the age of AI, addressing the inevitable philosophical, ethical and existential questions that confront humanity at this critical juncture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46o_O9MSWxE&t=0s

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Would that even be theoretically possible? What stops us from emulating emotions into a computer program? Wouldn’t consciousness arise from advanced neural networks if we tried to give it some form of sentience? If we attempted to actually test this out would it be even ethical to begin with?

I'm sure most of us here are aware of the fact that human infants are born prematurely because of our oversized skulls.

Then what if the pelvic bone wasn't a factor? What if we could keep 'em in the pickle jar a bit longer? I'm curious how much development such as being able to walk would would come about by just letting them gestate for a few more months.

It'd also relieve people of the horrid process of pregnancy and child birth, so I'm all in favour.

After some recent protest it seems there is plenty of peoples in my country interested in topics like morphological freedom etc. Combined with building up tensions in eastern / central europe. i am interested in creating transhumanist based citizen movement at first and later maybe shift into something more explicitly political. Is there someone from CZ/SK willing to help me in field with posters, banners etc? Or in any other way..

Let’s say hypothetically we try out the slow gradual method of mind uploading someone through the ship of Theseus method. We slowly replace neuronal activity with the synthetic kind and we allow the user to slowly ooze into the new hardware. Does it work? Or does it not? Does consciousness split? Does the ship of Theseus allow true transfer of one’s humanity into another medium? What theoretical basis allows such a method to guarantee such a fact? I’m really struggling to understand whether the neurons themselves as they get replaced truly transfer or really make the user pass away due to the fact that consciousness could be tied to the brain forever without being able to be transferred to begin with, essentially making this a worthless endeavour. So what’s the point then?

Edit: previous post got deleted due to editing mistake.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17101

Read it!

It's coming.