Re: Uploading and sensory deprivation

From: Eugene Leitl (Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Fri Mar 08 2002 - 10:28:52 MST


On Fri, 8 Mar 2002, Nathan Russell wrote:

> The puppet might have trouble pacing the thinking speed of an upload.
> Even diamond is likely not capable of, say, jogging at one million times
> the speed of a human body.

Early uploads will be s l o w. Last time I looked the slowdown was at
least three orders of magnitude for simple systems. We'll have to shortly
look into how neural emulation codes scale on commodity clusters, but I
doubt news will be very good.

> I've seen a procedure for copying one neuron at a time into a computer,

We're not just talking about most of the CNS (neuropatients miss a lot of
that, but have way better cerebral preservation). You have to imbed that
into a body phantom, and put that into the artificial reality renderer
box.

> but not for producing the proper 'inputs'. It's difficult as it stands
> for us to 'crack', say, the format in which Microsoft encodes their Word
> documents, a format that was written by human beings. Figuring out the
> exact pattern of impulses associated with, say, looking at the Mona Lisa
> with both eyes might be more difficult.

Nope, you render the impact of photons on the retina. I'm referring to the
freeze/slice/scan procedure, as it's the only one which is relevant to our
time frame.

> I suppose I'd become inhuman in a matter of time, but I don't know how
> much time it would take. Understanding things more efficiently would
> definately help, and I wonder how much time I would have for human
> thought if I were constantly busy calculating, for example, the exact
> hyperbolic tangent of the angles of every pair of blades of grass I
> passed, and aware of doing so.

Inhumanity is a wide field. You're describing something distinctly
autistic.



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