Thursday, October 22, 2026
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.
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