Comment author: mwengler 11 December 2014 04:27:16PM 0 points [-]

psychologically, i.e. by interview or memoir writing on the extraction side and "brain-washing" on the implanting side,

I would expect recreating a mind from interviews and memoirs to be about as accurate as building a car based on interviews and memoirs written by someone who had driven cars. which is to say, the part of our mind that talks and writes is not noted for its brilliant and detailed insight into how the vast majority of the mind works.

Comment author: Eniac 13 December 2014 07:05:41PM 0 points [-]

Good point.

I suppose it boils down to what you include when you say "mind". I think the part of our mind that talks and writes is not very different from the part that thinks. So, if you narrowly, but reasonably, define the "mind" as only the conscious, thinking part of our personality, it might not be so farfetched to think a reasonable reconstruction of it from writings is possible.

Thought and language are closely related. Ask yourself: How many of my thoughts could I put into language, given a good effort? My gut feeling is "most of them", but I could be wrong. The same goes for memories. If a memory can not be expressed, can it even be called a memory?

Comment author: DanielLC 10 December 2014 06:56:13AM 0 points [-]

The problem is throwing mass into other mass hard enough to make a black hole in the first place.

Hawking radiation isn't a big deal. In fact, the problem is making a black hole small enough to get a significant amount of it. An atom-sized black hole has around a tenth of a watt of Hawking radiation. I think it might be possible to get extra energy from it. From what I understand, Hawking radiation is just what doesn't fall back in. If you enclose the black hole, you might be able to absorb some of this energy.

Comment author: Eniac 11 December 2014 03:39:52AM *  1 point [-]

Yes, making them would be incredibly hard, and because of their relatively short lifetimes, it would be extremely surprising to find any lying around somewhere. Atom sized black holes would be very heavy and not produce much Hawking readiation, as you say. Smaller ones would produce more Hawking radiation, be even harder to feed, and evaporate much faster.

Comment author: Dahlen 08 December 2014 09:20:39PM *  4 points [-]

Is it possible even in principle to perform a "consciousness transfer" from one human body to another? On the same principle as mind uploading, only the mind ends up in another biological body rather than a computer. Can you transfer "software" from one brain to another in a purely informational way, while preserving the anatomical integrity of the second organism? If so, would the recipient organism come from a fully alive and functional human who would be basically killed for this purpose? Or bred for this purpose? Or would it require a complete brain transplant? (If so, how would neural structures found in the second body heal & connect with the transplanted brain so that a functional central nervous system results?) Wouldn't the person whose consciousness is being transferred experience some sort of personality change due to "inhabiting" a structurally different brain or body?

Is this whole hypothesis just an artifact of reminiscent introjected mind-body dualism, not compatible with modern science? Does the science world even know enough about consciousness and the brain to be able to answer this question?

I'm asking this because ever since I found out about ems and mind uploading, having minds moved to bodies rather than computers seemed to me a more appealing hypothetical solution to the problem of death/mortality. Unfortunately, I lack the necessary background knowledge to think coherently about this idea, so I figured there are many people on LW who don't, and could explain to me whether this whole idea makes sense.

Comment author: Eniac 10 December 2014 05:06:05AM 0 points [-]

The task you describe, at least the part where no whole brain transplant is involved, can be divided into two parts: 1) extracting the essential information about your mind from your brain, and 2) implanting that same information back into another brain.

Either of these could be achieved in two radically different ways: a) psychologically, i.e. by interview or memoir writing on the extraction side and "brain-washing" on the implanting side, or b) technologically, i.e. by functional MRI, electro-encephalography, etc on the extraction side. It is hard for me to envision a technological implantation method.

Either way, it seems to me that once we understand the mind enough to do any of this, it will turn out the easiest to just do the extraction part and then simulate the mind on a computer, instead of implanting it into a new body. Eliminate the wetware, and gain the benefit of regular backups, copious copies, and Moore's law for increasing effectiveness. Also, this would be ethically much more tractable.

It seems to me this could also be the solution to the unfriendly AI problem. What if the AI are us? Then yielding the world to them would not be so much of a problem, suddenly.

Comment author: Punoxysm 08 December 2014 09:00:49PM 7 points [-]

Can anyone link a deep discussion, including energy and time requirements, issues with spaceship shielding from radiation and collisions, etc., that would be involved in interstellar travel? I ask because I am wondering whether this is substantially more difficult than we often imagine, and perhaps a bottleneck in the Drake Equation

Comment author: Eniac 10 December 2014 04:41:14AM 2 points [-]

You might want to check out Centauri Dreams, best blog ever and dedicated to this issue.

Comment author: DanielLC 09 December 2014 06:03:21PM 1 point [-]

It can, as long as you don't mind that you won't get it back when you're done. You have to constantly fuel the black hole anyway. Just throw the fuel in from the opposite direction that you want the black hole to go.

Comment author: Eniac 10 December 2014 04:34:38AM 4 points [-]

Throwing mass into a black hole is harder than it sounds. Conveniently sized black holes that you actually would have a chance at moving around are extremely small, much smaller than atoms, I believe. I think they would just sit there without eating much, despite strenous efforts at feeding them. The cross-section is way too small.

To make matters worse, such holes would emit a lot of Hawking radiation, which would a) interfere with trying to feed them, and b) quickly evaporate them ending in an intense flash of gamma rays.

Comment author: Kyre 09 December 2014 05:13:05AM 10 points [-]

I thought this sounded familiar

Comment author: Eniac 10 December 2014 04:24:40AM 2 points [-]

Hah, thanks for pointing this out. I must have read or heard of this before and then forgotten about it, except in my subconscious. Looks like they have done the math, too, and it figures. Cool!

Comment author: knb 08 December 2014 11:29:52PM 9 points [-]

Would it be possible to slow down or stop the rise of sea level (due to global warming) by pumping water out of the oceans and onto the continents?

Comment author: Eniac 09 December 2014 01:31:18AM 1 point [-]

Well, this is not pumping, but it might be much more efficient: As I understand, the polar ice caps are in an equilibrium between snowfall and runoff. If you could somehow wall in a large portion of polar ice, such that it cannot flow away, it might rise to a much higher level and sequester enough water to make a difference in sea levels. A super-large version of a hydroelectric dam, in effect, for ice.

It might also help to have a very high wall around the patch to keep air from circulating, keeping the cold polar air where it is and reduce evaporation/sublimation.

Comment author: calef 08 December 2014 10:59:42PM *  15 points [-]

According to http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0503520 we would need to be able to boost our current orbital radius to about 7 AU.

This would correspond to a change in specific orbital energy of 132712440018/(2(1 AU)) to 132712440018 / (2(7 AU)). (where the 12-digit constant is the standard gravitational parameter of the sun. This is like 5.6 * 10^10 in Joules / Kilogram, or about 3.4 * 10^34 Joules when we restore the reduced mass of the earth/sun (which I'm approximating as just the mass of the earth).

Wolframalpha helpfully supplies that this is 28 times the total energy released by the sun in 1 year.

Or, if you like, it's equivalent to the total mass energy of ~3.7 * 10^18 Kilograms of matter (about 1.5% the mass of the asteroid Vespa).

So until we're able to harness and control energy on the order of magnitude of the total energetic output of the sun for multiple years, we won't be able to do this any time soon.

There might be an exceedingly clever way to do this by playing with orbits of nearby asteroids to perturb the orbit of the earth over long timescales, but the change in energy we're talking about here is pretty huge.

Comment author: Eniac 09 December 2014 01:10:30AM 11 points [-]

I think you have something there. You could design a complex, but at least metastable orbit for an asteroid sized object that, in each period, would fly by both Earth and, say, Jupiter. Because it is metastable, only very small course corrections would be necessary to keep it going, and it could be arranged such that at every pass Earth gets pushed out just a little bit, and Jupiter pulled in. With the right sized asteroid, it seems feasible that this process could yield the desired results after billions of years.

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