Month: February 2018

Why existence exists as opposed to not exists.

Bear with me here… I’ll get to the point at the end.

QM (quantum mechanics) is a religion.

Granted we are on to something with much of QM, or else the tools we build based on those assumptions wouldn’t work, but extending them to existential scales is essentially a leap of faith.

Faith needn’t be wrong. You can believe a random thing and by chance have it line up with reality. Especially if you’re constantly adapting your faith to observations, which is what QM has done. Think of it like the scientific method applied to a dogma.

Usage of the term “possibility” here is when you clearly see the religious nature of QM. There are no probabilities. There are simply events which occur, and our imagination. When our imagination and occurrence match, we call that prediction. There’s no such thing as random, there is only unpredictability, which is OUR limit, a cognitive limit, not reality’s. Not a physical limit.

The cat is either alive or dead in the box. There are no superposed states. There are just states. Some we know some we don’t.

And don’t tell me about the double slit and particle duality.

https://marty-green.blogspot.com/2016/02/there-are-no-pea-shooters-for-photons.html

In order for possibilities to be a “real” thing you have to create space for them of infinite size outside events that existed. But there’s a logical problem, a possibility is always by definition something that didn’t happen or hasn’t happened yet. A possibility is a non-happening. That is functionally identical to a position of faith.

The moment something you have faith in actually happens it stops being a matter of faith and becomes a matter of fact. Believing a fact before you can prove it is just imagination. Just like the moment a possibility happens it becomes an occurrence.

I can say it’s possible for one of the infinite possibilities to annihilate all others, but we exist, so clearly that didn’t happen, thus that is not among the set of possible outcomes anywhere since the definition impacts all others. Thus constraint is required: You MUST grant that a universe that destroys all others past and future universes cannot ever be an occurrence. And if something can never occur, can it be a possibility? No. Just like a false faith, an impossible possibility isn’t possible. In order for something to even be a possibility, it has to be possible. It has to have a non zero chance of occurring or having already occurred. It’s thus not possible for some all-other-universes-annihilating universe to exist, as proven by the existence of ours.

That means the space outside occurrence is finite. Just as science expanded, room for faith based answers contracted, the room for “possibilities” similarly contracts for the same reasons. All possibility is like that, and the more you dig in the more constrained it gets. Like entropy, it’s unidirectional. The advancement of understanding is the elaboration of constraint. The idea of infinite possibilities is a cognitive artifact, a belief system, an imagining. Not a state of reality. QM is a religion in the sense that it invents possibilities to suit its needs in the exact same way religion invents spiritual external contexts to suit its needs. Possibilities are dogmas and imagination, nothing more.

The universe is 100% deterministic. Randomness is as cognitive and illusory as the behavior of movie or book characters. Just because you don’t yet know what they’ll do next means they have more than 1 option.

The only broad version of QM that is completely secular in this sense is a the hidden variable one. The question of why there is something vs nothing implies it was ever possible for there to be nothing, and that’s wrong. Because as I’ve shown, there is only occurrence and imagination. Fact and concept. Nothing is a concept, not a fact.

However, subjectivity is important, it obviously exists. A sufficiently convincing illusion is no different from reality in terms of experience and the illusion of free will, chance, and probability is absolute.

Science co-opting chance and possibility here is an example of it encroaching on philosophies turf. And good policy must embrace both subjectivity and objectivity because sentience is both.

It is my view that a complimentary synthesis can be found and there is no need for compromise: https://underlore.com/deism-v-atheism-how-and-why/

The Theseus Transfer

How I intend to outlive or upgrade my own brain.

I’ve named this process after the ship of Theseus. This is how I intend to ultimately escape the confines of my body without just making a copy.

I’m aware of similar processes, most closely Moravec’s, but his process is destructive and makes more assumptions than mine. I believe his process results in a copy, not a migrated original.

My process preserves consciousness equally well as passage of time in an original brain does. It’s less disruptive or risky in this sense than mere sleep is. Any argument against the result of this process being the original must apply to existing original brains as well.

The Process Itself

All that is required is a construct superior to original neurons in durability, behavior, and motion, that can position itself, follow these steps, and ultimately replace individual neurons such that adjacent neurons both synthetic and original can operate normally.

For a baseline Theseus transfer these synthetic (apprentice?) neurons (SN) must do the following.

  1. Swim up to existing neurons and take position nearby.
  2. Learn to predict their actions based on surrounding neurons of either type.
  3. Detect when the observed neuron dies.
  4. Move in and replace those functions fast enough to prevent disruption/detection at the conscious level.

Step 2 may not even require anything like processing power. It may be done mechanically or biochemically depending on what original neurons actually do. If they are entirely rule based themselves then production, positioning, and replacement becomes all that’s needed for a bare bones substrate migration. Ultimately this list and any upgrades to it are technical problems. And nothing about the baseline list is impossible.

Once that is accomplished, the mind is now going to slowly, cell by cell, migrate to the new substrate. The mind being transferred will no more detect these change-overs than it does now when a brain cell dies.

The Potential

What you can do with this foundation as a starting point quickly becomes staggering and assuming technical abilities starts to be more a set of philosophical exercises than technological projections. I’m reminded of the idea that sufficiently advanced technology appears magical. This is definitely related. I leave the Sci-Fi and fantasy repercussions to your imagination.

I strongly request you comment (as always) here if you see anything like a flaw in my logic or the concept.