All of Manuel_Mörtelmaier's Comments + Replies

Awww... I was so looking forward to a heartwarming description of a family feast some years later where Akon delivers a toast to the SHs for "finally restoring the natural order of things."

HAPPY ENDING.

Upon due reflection, I have edited the story somewhat to include the final line, in accordance with your suggestion.

24 comments and no one got the reference yet?

Actually its's the other way round: The beginning of the first episode of the new TV series, especially the hands, and the globe, is a reference to your work, Eliezer.

Be warned; every time you mention catgirls into a discussion on applied theology, a physicist writes some Permutation City self-insertion fanfic.

And every time a physicist plays God, we get one step closer to making catgirls reality.

Alternatively, every time someone calls the Singularity "The Rapture of the Nerds", some catgirls get physical with each other.

(Complete list.)

Yoshitoshi Abe does a decent job at describing an Afterlife Weirdtopia in Haibane Renmei. Wikipedia could be seen as Knowledge Weirdtopia that became reality.

8sketerpot
When I watched Haibane Renmei, I loved the implication that they were living in the first of a series of afterlives. Of course, once you're on your fourth or fifth "afterlife", I imagine the whole thing starts to seem more like one big episodic life, with the afterlife transitions keeping it fresh and interesting so that people don't get bored. I think this is a weirdtopia that would appeal to a lot of people here. The afterlife in Heibane Renmei looks like the entry funnel into a bunch of afterlives with progressively more fun potential. Like a mental hospital with patients slowly recovering, and then checking out when they're ready. Incidentally, we see this same sort of thing in Angel Beats, but with more guns and booby-trapped underground lairs. Not as brilliant, but more accessible and definitely a lot of fun.

You're implying that the functioning of biological systems is highly sensitive to maintaining the "right" concentration of several active compounds. This is generally not correct. Quite to the contrary, "Robustness is one of the fundamental characteristics of biological systems." (Hiroaki Kitano, Molecular Systems Biology, 3:137, 2007; a good review article that contains multiple pointers to relevant publications.)

Note that this finding is quite in line with your point that functional modification of human brains is highly nontrivial - ... (read more)

1SecondWind
Jonathan Livingston Seagull doggedly pursues his passion, improving continuously, and as he does so, the needs and limits of his body fall away. By flying, he no longer needs to eat. By flying, he no longer needs to age. By flying, he no longer needs to die. Richard Bach allows his character to surpass realistic diminishing returns, distractions, and danger. That, uh... that sounds pretty good.

CatAI (1998): "Precautions"/"The Prime Directive of AI"/"Inconsistency problem".

My memory may fail me, and the relevant archives don't go back that far, but I recall Ben (and/or possibly other people) suggesting you going to college, or at least enroll for a grad program in AI, on the Extropy chat list around 1999/2000. I think these suggestions were related to, but not solely based on, your financial situation at that time (which ultimately led to the creation of the SIAI, so maybe we should be glad it turned out the way it did, even if, in my opinion, following the advice would have been beneficial to you and your work.)