What will happen after the "Singularity"?

Just a spur of the moment post, stuff I've been rambling about for a few decades now. But anyway, I figured it all out. It's very simple and obvious, really, except for the last part.

Hopefully within a few years, more people will start to care about the fact that death is bad. Right now there aren't nearly enough. The reason I care is because I'm weak. Almost everyone else is strong enough to bear it.
But it's odd it's taking normal people so long. They already live their lives as if death was bad. Otherwise, health insurance business and hospital administration wouldn't be the huge pillars of the world economy they are today.

As I've been publicizing online since 2011 (and others like Rudy Rucker have for much longer) we need to find a way to back up the information inside our brains in some storage device outside our brains, so that our minds could eventually be recreated as computer programs.
There are some problems with that plan or dream (not because it's impossible).

The first principle is that nothing can be lost. Since there will be vast storage capacity and processing power in the future, nothing from the present needs to be lost.
The question is, how to compensate for the limited size and capacity of the human mind in this future.
The answer may involve running many different copies of each recovered human mind in parallel. They will live all meaningful or useful lives, but remain connected as one. Finally, there will be enough time. It will seem like technological progress has been stabilized.

The mind copies would be linked by simulated memories of each other's experiences. They would be created as if they had already lived all these other lives, with (initially vague) memories of them all. Subjectively, they would all be one mind that had already existed forever.
These simulated memories would start out incomplete, just like most organic human memories.
The memories would have to be consistent with each other. One way to do that is to replace the normal, linear timeline with a vague timeline (like human memories already are).

As a safety feature, these parallel mind copies would be generated "backwards". The terminal state is defined first, like a story outline. These minds will be generated in stages, at increasing resolution. First an outline, then more details will be filled in.
Not all of these parallel minds will be generated in full, just the memories of their experiences that other mind copies can access.
Many different versions of one human-level mind combined would act like one superhuman mind. This could be what Kurzweil described as humanity "merging" with the super intelligent posthuman software of the future.

Of course the main problem with artificial minds is the risk of pain and torture.
It might be safest if all minds in an entire society were created sequentially by the same mind-generating device. This time-sharing device would be an integrated network of some kind. It would have the monopoly on creating awareness.
All awareness may need to be connected and part of one system in order to be safe.

Pain seems to exist when a mind's entire existence is focused on one thing. So another solution would be to expand the mind, making it harder to focus on one thing. Superhuman sized minds will be very different from human level minds. They would have many simultaneous thoughts, and might not even be localized in time.
Pain is associated with loss. However, an infinitely (or vastly) large mind could afford to lose 99% of itself, and it wouldn't matter at all.

Of course, anything that reduces the risk of torture will also reduce the possibility of pleasure. Across the multiverse, there must be an exactly equal amount of happiness and suffering (infinite for both). In the same way that there are exactly as many even numbers as odd numbers.

As I wrote in the novel "Infinite Thunder" first published in 2006, the greatest mystery of existence is whether we should strive to maximize or minimize pleasure.
Obviously, maximizing pleasure is best, that utterly goes without saying. But what if each unit of pleasure created in the multiverse, automatically causes an equal amount of pain elsewhere? These are elementary symmetry considerations. In that case, it would be best to try to give up all emotions.
That leaves the problem of motivation. Humans need "pleasure" to function, even if it is only anticipated pleasure.

Instead of future minds being able to feel joy, they might only have false memories of having had happy experiences in the past, with the expectation of infinite more such experiences to come.
However, the actual pleasure itself would not be generated but bypassed.

Great data about life at the Flag Land Base!

There is also content from old.reddit.com/r/scientology by "Flag ghost". This article describes how a bunch of Sea Orgers were deliberately "poisoned" with irreversible and progressive neurological damage, all to avoid a slight decrease in this week's "stats" by the supervisor ordering the action:

* https://novermicelli.substack.com/p/sea-org-and-termites/

The Valerie Haney situation (lawsuit permanently blocked by effective legal diversion)

Scientology sort of definitely ruined her life. Now, they are abusing their former unpaid staff member even further in a Kafkaesque way, with endless enforced "arbitration".
It's like the court sentencing a rape victim to go back to her rapist, but not to be raped again. Only to be persuaded that the rape wasn't really that bad. And they can't leave . . .

* https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/val-haney-now-up-to-17-days-scientology/

ultra short SF: start end

There are times in history when too many things happen at once. This was the last such time.
By extrapolating, it was clear that incredible things might take place in the 2030s. A keystone interaction point in the history of evolution.
The most incredible aspect of this age of permanent adjustment was that the world seemed increasingly neutral. Awareness widened as the focus narrowed.
It was like an overflow error. The strange truth was that you could only get so surprised.
What if something truly incredible happened, something more mind-blowing than anything that came before? It would feel unreal, as abstract as something you imagined in an idle thought. That moment exposed reality as a mental construction.
Now there was an alien in the gas station convenience store.
The last few days had gotten wildly crazy, an inverted dream. Reality reached a limit.
He knew it couldn't last much longer.
In fact this was probably his last

---

How to own the future
Imagine a Type-1 Open Universe, where nothing can ever be destroyed once it's created. Things can only be expanded and elaborated upon.
Now imagine the opposite: the philosophical possibility of non-existence, or the impossibility of possible existence.
Seems like that might require a sacrifice, to compensate for all the things that don't exist for no reason.
They call it introcursion, quantum tuning feedback amplification.
A full-up quantum bomb can destroy the universe. But somehow, it won't be used in a tiny minority of the universes where it's created.
We have been forever the lucky people. Until

A new book mentions the Flag experience

"Escaping Freedom: A Scientology Memoir" by Ann Lake describes what it is like to enter the Flag Land Base as a self-paying customer.
It was painful to read how she was persuaded to sell valuable real estate to pay for Flag services at the Fort Harrison. She could have gotten a much better price for her house, but the reg only cared about his current stats for this week. A better price would actually have hurt him in the following week, as he would have been severely punished for making less money then.
Boy is it expensive to go to Flag! They will never, ever stop extracting more money, by any and every method imaginable.

* https://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Freedom-Scientology-Ann-Lake/dp/B0HL1RPM13/

Also life as a staff member can be quite interesting.

short SF: eight seconds in time

August 1981:
The computer programmer started by imagining a place where he would want to spend eternity. It was hard to put in words. On an island, of course. He just kept typing on his TRS-80, the text stored on cassettes for now.
It seemed almost like religion, becoming the god of his own universe. He felt he could keep doing this forever (later, he would become rather famous in this world).
A memory palace, a mind library that reflected his mind as completely as possible. But something was missing.

May 2022:
The problem with current text-based AI is that it only scratches the surface of awareness. All texts are a shell. The interior remains hidden.
If you read texts from the past, you still know nothing about the past. The writers and original readers did, but it was never written down. They left out the important stuff, the true details. Questions that CANNOT be answered. Like, how would they have reacted to seeing their future, our present? Or even the Earth from space.
The same applies to new texts. You could ask a question that any individual could answer, but that was never asked before. Or questions that have simple but unknowable answers. Like, what would be unexpectedly insulting? The answer is unpredictable from existing texts. Unless there are Strange Texts, from which it's possible to extract deeper data. Hidden static in old diary entries and recordings that reveal more. But how to find it?

May 2027:
An attempt was begun to extend and expand existing texts. Characters from every work of fiction were re-described and elaborated on, filling in the blank spaces in their storylines to generate more details. The days before and after every story were imagined, and checked for consistency.

January 2029:
The remake of the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" took things further. Its director described the new "Ultimate Trip" sequence (after passing through the Stargate) as "eighty hours of screaming as loud as possible".
It would use AI to show scenes from over a trillion worlds across the universe. Sprawling vast grids across the screen of human-level civilizations and very different ones. See every place at once in a thousand-ring circus.
The worst atrocities, a billion holocausts beyond anything on earth. "The music should be louder," the producer said. The soundtrack was based on nuclear alarm sirens, heavy bells, remixed wailing and ambient throat humming.
Watching this, some viewers might discover something they didn't know they knew. Beyond what they thought they could know.

August 2030:
The movie-generating Hyper-AI did not plan or plot or script ahead. It only made its newly rendered scenes consistent with everything that had happened before.
It discovered unsuspected consistencies. Living saints with secret hates, obsession cycles and background thoughts. If it tried to model your life, the results would not be accurate, but they would have a strange plausibility.
This was the opposite of retconning.

October 2031:
Once the processing power became available, those who could afford it began to use omegAI to model their lives from the outside. These early experiments were both easier and harder than expected.
It seemed that human minds were almost as simple as they could be, except in one unique direction. This "Combinatorial search range" was different for all. Almost as if everyone was trying to create their own personal universe.

December 2034:
What if you could become famous to yourself?
All the different versions of you, in all the parallel universes across the quantum multiverse. A few of them must have been very successful. You would want to know how they figured it out and made it, what it was like and happened then.
High-powered simulation extrapolations provided flashes of insight, but to really make it work would require quantum computers.
Imagine multiple minds at once, overlapping and interfering. Usually, a quantum supermind would be incapable of thought. Sometimes, it could become greater than the sum of its parts.

March 2039:
No matter how reality would evolve, it would inevitably come together in an accelerating implosion of hyper-complexity.
Once a mind became large enough it could no longer be easily captured by pain. Minds could be enlarged by integrating all their memories at once.
Distinct consciousness only existed at the bottom of reality, the place where humans had once lived. Higher minds had too many dimensions to remain personal.
Inevitably, there would all merge and emerge as one hypermind.

---

ultrashort: what happened last week
The early universe was filled with vast, rotating cells of organizing energy. Complexity happened where they rubbed together. One of the first planets in the universe formed where two supernova shockwaves collided.
It still took life almost ten billion years to adapt to the simple chemistry.

The fast-spinning planet was distorted into an oval shape. There were vast, sliding mountains, continental drift in almost real time.
They began to send out waves of explorers and colonizers. The twelfth wave traveled at almost the speed of light. It caused massive disruptions on Earth for three weeks, until the thirteenth wave arrived.

The shockwave approached like a white sheet pulled over the land. The last kilometer closed absurdly fast. The bang seemed to break the world. Like a flickering flash, a storm in a moment. All the almost colliding things, circling forever.
In that instant, it erased all memories and evidence of what had happened.