All of GeraldMonroe's Comments + Replies

Care to elaborate?

You just woke up. You don't know if the coin was head or tails, and you have no further information. You knew it was 50-50 before going to sleep. No new information, no new answer. I don't see what the "twist" is. Monty Hall, there's another information input - the door the host opens never has the prize behind it.

Or, another perspective : a perfect erasure of someone's memories and restoration of their body to the pre-event state is exactly the same as if the event in question never occurred. So delete the 1 million from consideration. It's just 1 interview post waking. Heads or Tails?

The designer had a specific design goal : "thou shalt replicate adequately well under the following environmental conditions"...

Given the complex, intricate mechanisms that humans seem to have that allow for this, the "designer" did a pretty good job.

Cognitive biases boost replication under the environmental conditions they were meant for, and they save on the brainpower required.

So yes, I agree with you. If the human brain system were an engineered product, it clearly meets all of the system requirements the client (mother nature) ... (read more)

I agree that Voldemort seems to be holding the idiot ball this chapter. With that said, you'd kind of expect an immortal god-wizard who's 10 steps ahead to be buffed with poison and magic protections up the wazoo, etc.

Why does he need to create a Horcrux immediately? Theory :

Each horcrux, even with Voldemort's modified ritual, is just a snapshot of Voldemort's mind-state at the instant the horcrux was made. What Voldemort has somehow managed using magic is to interconnect all these Horcruxes into a network, and build some kind of non-biological system to "run" his personality based on the snapshots.

This explains why he was able to observe the stars and think about his mistakes for 8 years until someone touched one of his horcruxes. Somehow, his network send... (read more)

One thing I would like to be mentioned is why these methods might work.

Assume the best possible scanning method is used, such that the future reanimators have a map of where every atom was bonded in your brain.

There's going to be frost damage, even if cryoprotectant is used - there will be areas it didn't reach, cracks from low temperature stresses, oxidation damage from time spent in the cryostat, and so on.

Future software could computationally reverse many of these damaging events - but there will be uncertainty in that there would be multiple soluti... (read more)

The reason while you had limited instruction in shooting a weapon was probably due to a related problem I observed.

The military spends lavish sums on expensive capital equipment and human resources, but it seems to pinch pennies on the small stuff. For example, I recall being assigned numerous times to various cleanup details, and noticed we would never have any shortage of manpower - often 10+ people, but there would be an acute shortage of mops, cleaning rags, and chemicals.

Similarly, we all had rifles, but live ammunition to train with was in very sh... (read more)

Your statement would be a safe bet based on the past 50 years. 50 years ago, or 1963, was 4 years before the Saturn V first launched. Using modern figures of 3.3 billion/launch, including R&D costs, that comes to approximately $28,000 per Kg to low earth orbit. The same math says that the Space Shuttle cost about $61,000 per Kg.

(I'm lumping in the total cost of the entire program in both cases divided by the number of launches. There's problems with this method, but it means that costs can't be hidden by accounting tricks as easily)

With that said, ... (read more)

Why is there a solar wind, then?

Prediction : Harry has stolen a march on Quirrelmort. I predict that between the time Professor Mcgonagall unlocked his time turner and Quirrelmort entered the room, he already used the device to visit the library's restricted section.

At least, I hope so : I really want to learn how "spell creation" is done, per EY's interpretation. That will tell us a lot about what magic actually is and what can be done to achieve Real Ultimate Power.

Furthermore, this would be fully rational. Harry's analysis of what to do next should have already made i... (read more)

Why do we have to solve it? In his latest book, he states that he calculates you can get the thermal noise down to 1/10 the diameter of a carbon atom or less if you use stiff enough components.

Furthermore, you can solve it empirically. Just build a piece of machinery that tries to accomplish a given task, and measure it's success rate. Systematically tweak the design and measure the performance of each variant. Eventually, you find a design that meets spec. That's how chemists do it today, actually.

Edit : to the -1, here's a link where a certain chemi... (read more)

From reading Radical Abundance :

Drexler believes that not only are stable gears possible, but that every component of a modern, macroscale assembly-line can be shrunk to the nanoscale.  He believes this because his calculations, and some experiments show that this works.  

He believes that " Nanomachines made of stiff materials can be engineered to employ familiar kinds of moving parts, using bearings that slide, gears that mesh, and springs that stretch and compress (along with latching mechanisms, planetary gears, constant-speed couplings, four-bar... (read more)

This problem is very easy to solve using induction. Base step : the minimum "replicative subunit". For life, that is usually a single cell. For nano-machinery, it is somewhat larger. For the sake of penciling in numbers, suppose you need a robot with a scoop and basic mining tools, a vacuum chamber, a 3d printer able to melt metal powder, a nanomachinery production system that is itself composed of nanomachinery, a plasma furnace, a set of pipes and tubes and storage tanks for producing the feedstock the nanomachinery needs, and a power sourc... (read more)

Bacteria, as well as all life, are stuck at a local maximum because evolution cannot find optimal solutions. Part of Drexler's work is to estimate what the theoretical optimum solutions can do.

My statement "tear apart planets" assumed too much knowledge on the part of the reader. I thought it was frankly pretty obvious. If you have a controllable piece of industrial machinery that uses electricity and can process common elements into copies of itself, but runs no faster than bacteria, tearing apart a planet is a straightforward engineering e... (read more)

Alas, cryonics may be screwed with regards to this. It simply may not be physically possible to freeze something as large and delicate as a brain without enough damage to prevent you from thawing it and have it still work. This is of course is no big deal if you just want the brain for the pattern it contains. You can computationally reverse the cracks and to a lesser extent some of the more severe damage the same way we can computationally reconstruct a shredded document.

The point is, I think in terms of relative difficulty, the order is :

1. Whole bra

This is also wrong. The actual proposals for MNT involve creating a system that is very stable, so you can measure it safely. The actual machinery is a bunch of parts that are as strong as they can possibly be made (this is why the usual proposals involve covalent bonded carbon aka diamond) so they are stable and you can poke them with a probe. You keep the box as cold as practical.

It's true that even if you set everything up perfectly, there are some events that can't be observed directly, such as bonding and rearrangements that could destroy the mac... (read more)

The way biological nanotechnology (aka the body you are using to read this) solves this problem is it bonds the molecule being "worked on" to a larger, more stable molecule. This means instead of whole box of legos shaking around everywhere, as you put it, it's a single lego shaking around bonded to a tool (the tool is composed of more legos, true, but it's made of a LOT of legos connected in a way that makes it fairly stable). The tool is able to grab the other lego you want to stick to the first one, and is able to press the two together in a ... (read more)

Nanosystems discusses theoretical maximums. However, even if you make the assumption that living cells are as good as it gets, an e-coli, which we know from extensive analysis uses around 25,000 moving parts, can double itself in 20 minutes.

So in theory, you have some kind of nano-robotic system that is able to build stuff. Probably not any old stuff - but it could produce tiny subunits that can be assembled to make other nano-robotic systems, and other similar things.

And if it ran as fast as an e-coli, it could build itself every 20 minutes.

That's still pretty much a revolution, a technology that could be used to tear apart planets. It just might take a bit longer than it takes in pulp sci-fi.

I wanted to make a concrete proposal. Why does it have to be autonomous? Because in urban combat, the combatants will usually choose a firing position that has cover. They "pop up" from the cover, take a few shots, then position themselves behind cover again. An autonomous system could presumably accurately return fire much faster than human reflexes. (it wouldn't be instant, there's a delay for the servos of the automated gun to aim at the target, and delays related to signals - you have to wait for the sound to reach all the acoustic senso... (read more)

Let's talk actual hardware.

Here's a practical, autonomous kill system that is possibly feasible with current technology. A network of drone helicopters armed with rifles and sensors that can detect the muzzle flashes, sound, and in some cases projectiles of an AK-47 being fired.

Sort of this aircraft : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_Rotorcraft_Sniper_System

Combined with sensors based on this patent : http://www.google.com/patents/US5686889

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator

and this one http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&... (read more)

An optimal de novo AI, sure. Keep in mind that human beings have to design this thing, and so the first version will be very far from optimal. I think it's a plausible guess to say that it will need on the order of the same hardware requirements as an efficient whole brain emulator.

And this assumption shows why all the promises made by past AI researchers have so far failed : we are still a factor of 10,000 or so away from having the hardware requirements, even using supercomputers.

These people's objections are not entirely unfounded. It's true that there is little evidence the brain exploits QM effects (which is not to say that it is completely certain it does not). However, if you try to pencil in real numbers for the hardware requirements for a whole brain emulation, they are quite absurd. Assumptions differ, but it is possible that to build a computational system with sufficient nodes to emulate all 100 trillion synapses would cost hundreds of billions to over a trillion dollars if you had to use today's hardware to do it.

Th... (read more)

A stable outcome is possible where such a self-improving AI is unable to form.

The outcome can happen if the "human based" AIs occupy all ecological space within this solar system. That is, there might be humans alive, but all significant resources would be policed by the AIs. Assuming a self-improving AI, no matter how smart, still needs access to matter and energy to grow, then it would not ever be able to gain a foothold.

The real life example is earth's biosphere : all living things are restricted to a subset of the possible solution space for a similar reason, and have been for several billion years.

Alternate Proposal : here's a specific, alternate proposal developed with feedback from members of the #FAI channel on IRC.

Instead of building non-human optimizing algorithms, we develop accurate whole brain emulations of once living people. The simulation hardware is a set of custom designed chips with hardware restricts that prevent external writes to the memory cells storing the parameters for each emulated synapse. That is to say, the emulated neural network can update it's synapses and develop new ones (aka it can learn) but the wires that allow it ... (read more)

How would you build such an AI? Most or all proposals for developing a super-human AI require extensive feedback between the AI and the environment. A machine cannot iteratively learn how to become super-intelligent if it has no way of testing improvements to itself versus the real universe and feedback from it's operators, can it?

I'll allow that if an extremely computationally expensive simulation of the real world were used, it is at least possible to imagine that the AI could iteratively make itself smarter by using the simulation to test improvements... (read more)

If you think about voting decisions as an intelligent collective entity making decisions, the question naturally arises : why does the system work at all? Sure, there are massive flaws, but overall the governments of the United States does maintain a powerful military, build and maintain a decent set of roads, keep the mail delivered, care for millions via the VA, etc, etc, etc.

(note : state government is typically selected through even more arbitrary and uninformed votes)

If you think of the masses as a collective with an IQ down in the mentally retarded ... (read more)

As in, the number and type of neurotransmitter receptors embedded in each synapse.

This isn't "disappointing", this was expected. The initial wiring layout is random, though there's some pruning that occurs in early brain development.

This isn't true. Viruses are subject to evolutionary pressure even inside a single patient. They don't replicate perfectly (partly because they have to be small and simple, and don't have very good control of the cellular environment they are inside, being invaders and all) and so variants of the particle compete with one another. Because of this, features that might be desired in a bioweapon but are not needed in order for the virus to replicate can get lost.

For instance, a bioweapon virus might contain genes for botulism toxin in order to kill the ho... (read more)

The latter. I've read of limited successes in other fields of research (no one is publicly trying to make something like this) that indicate it's just barely possible, maybe, with some luck.

One nasty thing is that the virus doesn't have to be safe. It just has to work, and it's not a problem if it permanently damages the people it doesn't kill. So, creating a weapon like this is fundamentally much easier than trying to create, say, a treatment for cancer using similar methods.

There are advantages to local production. Every time a customer orders something (whether it be an individual or a company consuming resources), if instead of huge single purpose factories located at a few places in the world, you have general purpose fabrication plants located nearby, it greatly reduces the time lag between an order being placed and a product received.

No need to warehouse final products - you might produce "general purpose" subunits and stockpile those, and every time someone places an order, you assemble the desired final prod... (read more)

The theory goes : plagues that are especially deadly must spread through the body extremely quickly. Otherwise, they give the immune system time for the B cells to formulate an antibody. Yet, if the plague spreads quickly, it has a short incubation period, and it means that hosts will die before spreading it. Ebola is thought to fit in this part of the ecology, and this is one reason why the virus is rare.

A virus that spread itself like the flu but also killed like ebola would be pushed by evolution away from these properties because it would kill off i... (read more)

An example of a nasty trick that would make for a relatively easy to produce and deploy bio-weapon : http://www.plospathogens.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1001257

Inhaled prions have extremely long incubation times (years), so it would be possible for an attacker to expose huge numbers of people unknowingly to them. The disease it causes is slow and insidious, and as of today, there is no way to detect it until post-mortem. There's no treatment, either. I'm not certain of the procedure for making prions in massive quantities in the lab... (read more)

Again, this is one of those approaches that sounds good at a conference, but when you actually sit there and think about it rationally, it shows it's flaws.

Even if you know exactly what pathway to hit, a small molecule by definition will get everywhere and gum up the works for many, many other systems in the body. It's almost impossible not to. Sure, there's a tiny solution space of small molecules that are safe enough to use despite this, but even then you're going to have side effects and you still have not fixed anything. The reason the cells are g... (read more)

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... (read more)

The method I described WILL work. The laws of physics say it will. Small scale experiments show it working. It isn't that complicated to understand. Bad mRNA present = cell dies. All tumors, no matter what, have bad mRNAs, wherever they happen to be found in the body.

But it has to be developed and refined, with huge resources put into each element of the problem.

Here, specifically, is the difference between my proposed method and the current 'state of the art'. Ok, so the NIH holds a big meeting. They draw a massive flow chart. Team 1,2,3 - your e... (read more)

You missed the boat completely. Not modding down because this is an easy cognitive error to make, and I just hit you with a wall of text that does need better editing.

I just said that the model of "basic research" is WRONG. You can't throw billions at individual groups, each eating away a tiny piece of the puzzle doing basic research and expect to get a working device that fixes the real problems.

You'll get rafts of "papers" that each try to inform the world about some tiny element about how things work, but fail miserably in their ... (read more)

George the Giant or invisible cosmic springs that are too small to ever measure? Also a bunch of extra spatial dimensions that information can travel through without us being to see it. I see what you did there.

Ultimately I'd say there is nothing wrong with the primitives thinking, as long as they are willing to upgrade their model as better evidence becomes available. When the primitives finally send someone to check the other side of the mountain and see no giant, they need to eventually assume that the cause must be somewhere else they cannot see, li... (read more)

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 engin... (read more)

Won't reality eventually sort this out?

Essentially what is being said here is that "the scientific establishment in the West (mostly the USA) is becoming dysfunctional. If the current trend continues, enough science will be wrong or fraudulent that no forward progress is made at all."

However, science isn't just an abstract idea with intangible moral rules. If scientists fake results on a large scale, they will cease discovering useful new ideas or create anything that is objectively better than what Western society currently has. This will hav... (read more)

1. How, precisely, would this happen? We aren't writing sci-fi here. There's dozens of countries on this planet with world class R&D occurring each and every day. The key technology needed to revive frozen brains is the development of nanoscale machine tools that are versatile enough to aid in manufacturing more copies of themselves. This sort of technology would change many industries, and in the short term would give the developers of the tech (assuming they had some means of keeping control of it) enormous economic and military advantages.

   a. E

How would registry of the trials work?

When I heard a lecture on this subject (there is pretty damning statistical evidence that drug trials are always slanted towards the company paying for the trials) the only viable proposal I heard discussed was to have the testing completely performed and controlled by an unbiased third party. (probably the government)

Worse : a sensible system would in fact not ONLY give you a "robot body made of titanium" but would maintain multiple backup copies in vaults (and for security reasons, not all of the physical vault locations would be known to you, or anyone) and would use systems to constantly stream updated memory state data to these backup records. (stored as incremental backups, of course)

More than likely, the outcome for "successfully" committing suicide would be to wake up again and face some form of negative consequences for your actions. Suicide could actually be prosecuted as a crime.

This depends heavily on assumptions. Consider this : the oldest cryonics patients have survived more than 30 years. The loss per decade for reasonably well funded cryonics organizations is currently 0.

If you check a chart of causes of death, the overwhelming majority of causes are ones where a cryonics team could be there.

You would have to choose a legal method of suicide in some of these cases, however (like voluntarily dehydrating yourself to the point of death), or your brain would deteriorate from progressive disease to the point of probably being ... (read more)

We can and we can't. Here's an 11 year old article where rats successfully regained function : http://www.jneurosci.org/content/21/23/9334.abstract

That's just an example. I think that if society were far more tolerant of risks, and there was more funding, and the teams working on the problem were organized and led properly, then human patient successes would be seen in the near future.

There are fractures like that in existing patients. Note that my hypothesis is that some of the cells would still be viable. I did not say any neurons were viable. I'm merely saying that cryonics is provably better than dehydration or plastination because of this viability factor.

Despite this, IF patients frozen using current techniques can ever be revived, the techniques used will more than likely require a destructive scan of their brains, followed by loading into some kind of hardware or software emulator.

Trying to think of what this might subjective... (read more)

Yes, but it doesn't fracture everywhere. Hence, if you rewarmed a tissue that was cryogenically frozen, some cells would probably still be viable. Hence, my hypothesis that if you took samples from a current patient where things were done right, some of the cells would still be alive.

A related article : http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n6/full/ncomms1890.html?WT.mc_id=FBK_NCOMMS

Why this proposal is a bad one :

Cryonics is based upon a working technology, cryogenic freezing of living tissues.

The latest cryonics techiques use M22, an ice crystal growth inhibitor that has been used to preserve small organs and successfully thaw them. More than likely, if you were to rewarm some of the tissues from a cryonics patient frozen today, some of the original cells would still be alive and viable. I don't know if this particular experiment has been performed, however : there is a reason why cryonics has a bad reputation for pseudoscience.... (read more)

The original dichotomy is correct if you think about the consequences of cryonic success.

IF and only if cryonics succeeds, the world had developed the technology to restore you from a cracked, solid mass of brain tissue. (the liquid nitrogen will fracture your brain because it cools it below the glass transition point)

Also, as sort of a secondary thing, it has figured out a way to give you a new body or a quality substitute. (it's secondary because growing a new body is technically possible, if unethical, today)

Anyways, this technical capacity means that... (read more)

Once dead it doesn't matter what happened or didn't happen. This thought has been disturbing me for around 3 years now.

The context was this : it was the first week of medical school. We went to the anatomy lab, and looked at the cadavars. Practically from day 1 we had to do dissections that felt incredibly wrong and disturbing (chopping deep into the person's back). So, while in the lab with the corpses, seeing everyone else around me cheerfully talking about various things, I could not understand everyone else's irrational points of view. THIS was wh... (read more)