Infeasible: Recent Comments

Comment on Aubrey de Grey's Chance of Success: 1 in 48 million

2009-11-24T14:46:32Z

Very interesting article, very well developed and shared. Thank you for let us know the hidden information.

Comment on Eagerly waiting for the end of Transhumanism...

2009-09-13T19:46:40Z

" Kurzweil is using his credentials and technical jargon to pitch a religion to a public that doesn't know any better. The reason he does this is not to convince others in the giant universe-sized computer ball which will be God, but to convince himself. Does he really believe in this stuff, or is this just a scam to make money? One thing is certain, he is either a liar or a fool"

this ridiculous comment is a perfect example of the total illegitimacy of Singularity pseudo-skeptics-

the ONLY way to claim that resurrecting a human is 'religion' is to claim that a human is some MAGICAL and UNQUANTIFIABLE spirit and not a pattern of molecules that can be rebuilt from records and simulations of history [Nick Bostrom estimated that the entire history of all human experience is only about 10^35 bits]-

it reveals the contradiction and absurdity of the very basis of this silly skepticism of OBVIOUS patterns of accelerating complexity in Nature and any physical and causal system-

Comment on Aubrey de Grey's Chance of Success: 1 in 48 million

2009-08-18T16:27:07Z

Yes, I agree, thank you so much for this great information.

Comment on Eagerly waiting for the end of Transhumanism...

2009-06-18T04:47:27Z

Glad to see you are still posting I enjoy your blog very much as I share your sentiments and irritation. I sense that the end is near for this odd cult. Have you read Nassim Taleb's wonderful, best-selling, book "The Black Swan"? Quite a fascinating read and a powerful, although unintentional, refutation of transhumanism.

Comment on Transhumanism: A Christian Sub-Cult

2009-06-10T15:14:48Z

You presume all Transhumanists ascribe to Singularitarianism. If this is true you have not demonstrated it in the above.

In order for your "comparison" to have any validity, you will need to prove at least the following:

-To be a Transhumanist one must be a Singularitarian
-To be a Transhumanist one must both agree with and revere the words, ideas, etc. of Kurzweil, Drexler and De Grey
-Explain what you mean by "Inevitable Techno-Progress", including a formal definition of the quoted term

Failure to prove these points will leave you with nothing more than a proposition founded on hatred of a philosophy you demonstrably know nothing about. In other words, a straw man.

Comment on Transhumanism: A Christian Sub-Cult

2009-05-21T05:11:29Z

It is amazing who far rebellious men will go to avoid their personal accountability to God, yet they have a habit of taking advantage of His intelligently designed handiwork infused with purpose and meaning only to ignore contemplations about their individual purpose and meaning.

Transhumanists, Mormons and the New Age gurus have failed to realize that Jesus Christ was NOT man becoming God. Jesus Christ was God who became a man. Transhumanists and the like have bought into a doctrine of demons which has no reference point to truth leaving their souls eternity lost in the cold, dark, abyss exiled from One and Only God who alone offers salvation in Himself. Transhumanists have unwittingly patterned their new religion after every other religion that serves the god of "self." Jesus commanded that a person follows Him take up their cross and follows Him.

Jesus never came to bring us a religion; He came to give us a Kingdom which we had lost.

ATHEISM IS A CATASTROPHIC FAILURE

http://www.evolutionfacts.blogspot.com

Comment on Gelernter vs. Kurzweil and the Unabomber

2009-04-09T15:57:55Z

I am a big fan of Gelernter and have read his columns in Commentary for some time. He also wrote a great book on the 1939 World's Fair. Gelernter, like me, seems to like technology for its own sake, not for some bizarre pseudo-religious reason like Kurzweil .

Comment on A High-Tech Gambler’s Fallacy

2009-03-27T18:52:50Z

A gambler that bet that computing would be faster every year would have won those bets, and enough bets that if it were merely a Gambler's Fallacy to believe in a 'hot' computer field that the luck of that gambler would be quite astronomical ...

Comment on Is Technology Accelerating? NOPE!

2009-03-22T01:18:25Z

You haven't proven a damn thing. You're the one cherry-picking specific measurements to make your point: GDP doesn't measure everything, it only measures how many dollars of goods and services we produce, and fewer people working fewer hours places downward pressure on this anyways, but quality of life improves. GDP also fails to take into account the DE-flationary trend in terms of percentage of median annual per-capita income [and remember that per-capita income takes into account the entire population, and not just the workforce] that goods of *equal quality* cost, with Kurzweil's computing power graph the most dramatic and objectively measurable of these, but it also applies to everything from the cost of a t-shirt or refridgerator to the cost of keeping the temperature of your home a degree above or below what it is outside.

Bottom Line: You're a clown.

Comment on Who can be bothered with this nonsense?

2009-03-18T05:07:44Z

In my opinion the driver behind some peoples interest in cryonics is the same as the driver behind most peoples interest in achieving an afterlife through a suspension of what they understand as the normal laws of life.
The driver is simply that individual humans don't generally want to just die. They want to live. They want to live more than they want to be intellectually correct (hence they'll tolerate a great deal of wishful thinking in their own worldviews). So why they live they will find ways to hope they they will continue to live even after death. Its a sort of psychological crutch. The cryonicists don't seem to accept the crutch offered by religious mystics as psychologically satisfying but they still don't want to personally just die when they die.

Human beings are composed of cells and their brains, their personalities and memories are composed of inter and intracellular components. We are natural biological phenomenon all the way from the scale of a couple of metres tall (give or take) to the nanoscale of our biomolecular constituents. That's mainstream science. But we are not designed phenomena. The brains we have are the people we are. Cryonicsts are right I think in recognizing that (those that think about it). They are wrong I think in thinking that we can recreate frozen brains into working brains producing the same personalities from preserved snapshots.

Each human brain in a living human is a massively (though not infinitely) complicated consequence of a human genome moving through a massively interactive human environment. And because the environment each of us lived through is a co-creator of our brain with our genome each of us is inevitably, though undesignedly, unique.

And in part that is why cryonics reconstructive scenarios are so infeasible. One's brain is one's brain, it has its unique structure as a result of one's lived experiences. The difference between two human brains even the brains of identical twins with different life experiences will be different at the nanoscale where the synaptic connections are made. Recreating that structure exactly would require at very least scanning that structure exactly to the requisite scale. And then recreating that structure. The recreation process can't be undirected growth like the first time through as there is a very exact target.

Even if a brain made out of biomolecules could be constructed by an outside in manufacturing process as opposed to an undirected inside out growing process the degrees of precision required to make an exact copy of a human brain from a perfect copy would be ridiculously expensive.

One human brain (even call that brain Albert Einstein) isn't sufficiently important to justify the expense of (rather the opportunity cost of) getting it back as opposed to the expense of getting back what that brain did for human culture or improving upon what that brain was valued as having done by the living brains that would have to make allocation decision