Open thread, Oct. 20 - Oct. 26, 2014

MrMind

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

It seems likely that you could get much of the benefit of cryopreservation for a fraction of the cost, without actually getting your head frozen, by just recording your life in great detail.

A while back, I started tracking e.g. every time I switch between windows, or send out an HTTP request, etc. - not with this in mind, but just so I can draw pretty graphs. It doesn't seem that it would be beyond a superintelligent AI to reconstruct my mind from this data. For better fidelity, maybe include some brain scans and your DNA sequence.

And this sort of preservation might be more reliable than cryopreservation in many ways - frozen brains would be destroyed by a nuclear war, for instance, whereas if you put a hard disk in a box and buried it in a desert somewhere that would probably stay safe for a few millennia. To be more sure, you might even launch such a "horcrux" into space, where pre-singularity people won't get their grubby monkey fingers on it.

If the entire internet were backed up in this way, that might be a lot of people effectively preserved.

Thoughts?

(Also, upon doing something like this, you should increase your belief that you're in an ancestor simulation, since you've just made that more feasible.)

(Also, this would go badly in the case of a "valley of bad utility functions" fooming AI.)

Mentioning the possibility of my mind being recreated by a superintelligence after my death, you had my curiosity[1], but with 'drawing pretty graphs' you have my attention. I want to draw pretty graphs about my activity too. How do you do this? I want to do it for and to myself. Feel free to send me a PM about it, if you don't want to continue the conversation here.

[1] gwern's comment below in the parallel child thread helped.

11skeptical_lurker12y

I've heard this idea before, and it has never seemed convincing. Suppose you managed to record one useful bit per second, 24/7, for thirty years. That's approximately one billion bits. There are approximately 100 billion neurons, each with many synapses. How many polynomials of degree n can fit m points for n>m? Infinity many. Its actually worse than this, because even if you record orders or magnitude more data than the brain contains, perhaps by recording speech and video, then maybe you could recreate the speech and movement centres of the brain with some degree of accuracy, but not recover other areas that seem more fundamental to your identity, because the information is not evenly distributed. Its easy to get into a 'happy death spiral' around superintelligence, but even godlike entities cannot do things which are simply impossible. I suppose it might be worth recording information about yourself on the basis of low cost and a small chance of astronomically large payoff, and regardless it could be useful for data mining or interesting for future historians. But I can't see that it has anywhere near the chance of success of cryonics. Incidentally, a plastinisied brain could be put in a box and buried in a random location and survive for a long time, especially in Antarctica.

5Gunnar_Zarncke12y

I considered training a simple AI in mimicking my cognitive habits and responses. The simplest form would be a chat-bot trained on all my spoken and written words. Archiving lots of audios/videos could also help.

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