I enjoyed reading the Temptation of Christ article. One thing that struck me is that the Jesus character responded far more reasonably than your typical deluded person does when asked questions which challenge their beliefs, at least in my experience.

In my experience, when a person's beliefs are driven by emotion, he tends to have much more of a "concede nothing" mentality -- even if he is sane. Can Jesus in the story use this as evidence that he really is Jesus? Again we run into the problem that irrationality blinds the irrational to their own irrationality. But it's still worth considering I think.

Meh, another buzzword. I actually don't think we'll see nanosurgery for a very long time, and we should be able to solve the problem of "death" many generations of tech before we can do nano-surgery.

Think about what you actually need to do this. You need a small robot, composed of non-biological parts at the nanoscale. Presumably, this would be diamondoid components such as motors, gears, bearings, etc as well as internal power storage, propulsion, sensors, and so on. The reason for non-biological parts is that biological parts are too floppy and unpredictable and are too difficult to rationally engineer into a working machine.

Anyways, this machine is very precisely made, probably manufactured in a perfect vacuum at low temperatures. Putting it into a dirty liquid environment will require many generations of engineering past the first generation of nanomachinery that can only function in a perfect vacuum at low temperatures. And it has to deal with power and communication issues.

Now, how does this machine actually repair anything? Perhaps it can clean up plaques in the arteries, but how does it fix the faulty DNA in damaged skin cells that cause the skin to sag with age? How does it enter a living cell without damaging it? How does it operate inside a living cell without getting shoved around away from where it needs to be? How do it's sensors work in such a chaotic environment?

I'm not saying it can't be done. In fact, I am pretty sure it can be done. I'm saying that this is a VERY VERY hard engineering problem, one that would require inconceivable amounts of effort. Using modern techniques this problem may in fact be so complex to solve that even if we had the information about biology and the nanoscale needed to even start on this project, it might be infeasible with modern resources.

If you have these machines, you have a machine that can create other nanomachines, with atomically precise components. Your machine probably needs a vacuum and low temperatures, as before. Well, that machine can probably make variants of itself that are far simpler to design than a biologically compatible repair robot. Say a variant that instead of performing additive manufacturing at the nanoscale, it can tear down an existing object at the nanoscale and inform the control machinery about the pattern it finds.

Anyways, long story short : with a lot less effort, the same technology needed for nanosurgery to be possible could deconstruct preserved human brains and build computers powerful enough to simulate these brains accurately and at high speed. This solves the problem of "death" quite neatly : rather than trying to patch up your decaying mass of biological tissue with nanosurgery, you get yourself preserved and converted into a computer simulation that does not decay at all.

It's easy to point fingers at a very sick subset of scientific endeavors - biomedical research. The reasons it is messed up and not very productive are myriad. Fake and non-reproducible results that waste everyone's time are one facet of the problem. The big one I observed was that trying to make a useful tool to solve a real problem with the human body is NOT something that the traditional model can handle very well. The human body is so immensely complex. This means that "easy" solutions are not going to work. You can't repair a jet engine by putting sawdust in the engine oil or some other cheap trick, can you? Why would you think a very small molecule that can interact with any one of tens of thousands of proteins in an unpredictable manner could fix anything either? (or a beam of radiation, or chopping out an entire sub-system and replacing it with a shoddy substitute made by cannibalizing something else, or delivering crude electric shocks to a huge region. I've just named nearly every trick in the arsenal)

Most biomedical research is slanted towards this "cheap trick" solution, however. The reason is because the model encourages it. University research teams usually consist of a principle investigator and a small cadre of graduate students, and a relatively small budget. They are under a deadline to come up with something-anything useful within a few years, and the failures don't receive tenure and are fired. Pharmaceutical research teams also want a quick and cheap solution, generally, for a similar reason. Most of the low hanging fruit - small molecule drugs that are safe and effective - has already been plucked, and in any case there is a limit to the problems in biological systems that can actually be fixed with small molecules. If a complex machine is broken, you usually need to shut it off and replace major components. You are not going to be able to spray some magic oil and fix the fault.

For example, how might you plausible cure cancer? Well, what do cancer cells share in common? Markers on the outside of the cells? Nope, if there were, the immune system would usually detect them. Are the cells always making some foreign protein? Nope, same problem. All tumors share mutated genes, and thus have mRNAs present in the cells that you can detect.

So how might you exploit this? Somehow you have to build a tool that can get into cells near the tumor and detect the ones with these faulty mRNAs(and kills them). Also, this tool needs to not affect healthy cells.

If you break down the components of the tool, you realize it would have to be quite complex, with many sub-elements that have to be developed. You cannot solve this problem with 10 people and a few million dollars. You probably need many interrelated teams, all of whom are tasked with developing separate components of the tool. (with prizes if they succeed, and multiple teams working on each component using a different method to minimize risks)

No one is going to magically publish a working paper in Nature tomorrow where they have succeeded in such an effort overnight. Yet, this is basically what the current system expects. Somehow someone is going to cure cancer tomorrow without there being an actual integrated plan, with the billions of dollars in resources needed, and a sound game plan that minimizes risk and rewards individual successes.

Professors I have pointed this out to say that no central agency can possibly "know" what a successful cancer cure might look like. The current system just funds anyone who wants to try anything, assuming they pass review and have the right credentials. Thus a large variety of things are tried. I don't see it. I don't think there is a valid solution to cancer that can be found with a small team just trying things with a million or 2 of equipment, supplies, and personnel.

Growing replacement organs is a similar endeavor. Small teams have managed to show that it is viable - but they cannot actually solve the serious problems because they lack the resources to go about it in a systematic and likely to succeed way. While Wake Forest has demonstrated years ago that they can make a small heart that beats, there isn't a huge team of thousands systematically attacking each element of the problem that has to be solved to make full scale replacement hearts.

One final note : this ultimately points to gross misapplication of resources. Our society spends billions to kill a few Muslims who MIGHT kill some people violently. It spends billions to incarcerate millions of people for life who individually MIGHT commit some murders. It spends billions on nursing homes and end of life care to statistically extend the lives of millions by a matter of months.

Yet real solutions to problems that kill nearly everyone, for certain, are not worth the money to solve them in a systematic way.

The reason for this is lack of rationality. Human beings fear emotionally extremely rare causes of death much more than extremely likely, "natural" causes. They fear the idea of a few disgruntled Muslims or a criminal who was let out of prison murdering them far more than they fear their heart suddenly failing or their tissues developing a tumor when they are old.

My take on the Doomsday Argument is that it boils down to the mundane and rather non-apocalyptic statement: "All other things being equal, I should expect to be born during a period in history when birthrates [of beings in my reference class] are high."

I can't quite see why this should imply anything at all about the shape of the population curve in the immediate future, let alone the long-term future.

"Lossless communication" doesn't quite seem to capture what is special about human communication. The difference is more about complexity of communication than losslessness. Being able to communicate using a fully recursive grammar is the key difference. I think that's the concept you're heading towards with "losslessness".

But which came first: being able to communicate using a fully recursive grammar, or participating in a viciously competitive political/social hierarchy and having the resulting selection pressure dramatically increase the size and complexity of our brains over what is, in geological terms, a ridiculously short period of time?

It occurred to me that I have no idea what people mean by the word "observer". Rather, I don't know if a solid reductionist definition for observation exists. The best I can come up with is "an optimization process that models its environment". This is vague enough to include everything we associate with the word, but it would also include non-conscious systems. Is that okay? I don't really know.

The religion and retirement things are ones I've read about before and believe; the school, first-born, and altitude seem plausible; the big butts and flying strike me as dubious.

A potentially-existent immortal mind that knows and understands you down to the microphysical level and loves you and appreciates being loved by you?

Except for the stipulation of a feminine gender, that is /exactly/ the mode of relationship Christians advocate developing, and claim to have developed with God.

being able to think whatever I like without monitoring

Total, ubiquitous and universally available surveillance, including automated facial expression and body language analysis (every citizen being, given some work, able to check out every hour of someone else's life the way we check Facebook status, plus low-level AI monitoring) is part of a short Weirdtopia story I'm writing. I've decided to set it on a planet in the Warhammer 40k universe BTW.

having my thoughts censorsed/deleted

Now that would be completely unacceptable indeed. Is, say, being on the business end of the mental health system in the worst way possible something like that? For myself, I don't consider a life with something like that to be worth living.

My preferences are A > E > B > The rest. I am definitely not free before 6:30pm Monday-Friday. I am fine with the library as a location, but would mention the price of parking. If one chooses to use the underground parking garage, the first 30 minutes are free (or first two hours if you have a disability decal), and then it is $1.50 per half hour afterwards.

There is metered parking outside that is cheaper ($0.75 per half hour, I think), but I believe is capped at a 2 hour duration (which might be totally fine if the meetup is less than that), and must be paid up front, whereas the garage is paid as you leave.

As far as alternative venues go, using libraries as the theme, the Taylorsville (4870 South, 2700 West) and Murray (5300 South, 166 East) libraries are right off the freeway, and have free parking.

Regardless of venue, it seems that our merry band are scattered around the valley a bit. I would be happy to offer my car for carpool services if it would help someone make the meetup. I'd prefer to keep the bounds of such service within Sandy to North Salt Lake, and West Valley to Mount Olympus, but don't let that stop you from asking if it will make or break your ability to come to the meetup!