{"quotes":[{"text":"It is singularity which often makes the worst part of our suffering, as it always does of our conduct.","author":"Jane Austen","tags":["actions","lady-russell","life-lessons","singularity","suffering"],"id":12157,"author_id":"Jane+Austen"},{"text":"Retrograde time is forward time which has passed the turning point; then as it turns back it is freighted with the load of accumulated knowledge. It is information rich. Logically, then, in its retrograde tracking, it would divest itself of its knowledge: teach rather than learn, so that when it arrived at the other end, it would be information poor, even info empty.","author":"Philip K. Dick","tags":["big-bang","big-crunch","esp","evolution","future","radio","signal","singularity","time"],"id":13053,"author_id":"Philip+K.+Dick"},{"text":"Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience.... If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will - or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual - then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic. Humans are free. We can commmit suicide for the benefit of a Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion. Or we can believe in ourselves. By chance, it might turn out we are real.","author":"Jaron Lanier","tags":["creativity","culture","experience","free-will","freedom","individuality","journalism","philosophy","singularity","technology","thought-experiments","zombies"],"id":43067,"author_id":"Jaron+Lanier"},{"text":"All perception is the result of electrical impulses in the brain - the world of the individual is tantamount to a highly advanced computer running and analyzing programs in its working memory.","author":"Kevin Michel","tags":["ai","brain","computers","hologram","holography","illusion","many-worlds-interpretation","maya","quantum-mechanics","quantum-theory","singularity"],"id":44147,"author_id":"Kevin+Michel"},{"text":"Someday they would discover that the stars were not sacred, but made from the same material as their bodies. They would learn it was the stars that created their worlds, that worlds created their minds, that minds created tools, and tools could create stars. Growing, sprawling, thriving until they too became masters of their own understanding, chasing enlightenment with the fervor of having nothing to lose, launching from their homelands like fireworks with glorious yellow tails.","author":"Jake Vander-Ark","tags":["cosmology","creativity","extraterrestrials","globalization","humanism","living-life-to-the-fullest","singularity","technology"],"id":46341,"author_id":"Jake+Vander-Ark"},{"text":"The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists - and I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I'm thinking of the earliest incarnations of Marxism, for instance, before Stalinism and Maoism killed millions.Movements associated with Freud and Marx both claimed foundations in rationality and the scientific understanding of the world. Both perceived themselves to be at war with the weird, manipulative fantasies of religions. And yet both invented their own fantasies that were just as weird.The same thing is happening again. A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly. It soon presents its own eschatology and its own revelations about what is really going on - portentous events that no one but the initiated can appreciate. The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud's calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians.","author":"Jaron Lanier","tags":["computers","freud","freudians","internet","marx","marxism","singularity","technology"],"id":48123,"author_id":"Jaron+Lanier"},{"text":"You can't hack your destiny, brute force...You need a back door, a side channel into Life.","author":"Clyde DeSouza","tags":["artificial-intelligence","cyberpunk","destiny","emotional-intelligence","fate","hacking","life-lessons","life-philosophy","singularity","transcendence","transhumanism"],"id":50889,"author_id":"Clyde+DeSouza"},{"text":"It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be...  This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.","author":"Isaac Asimov","tags":["ai","change","singularity","the-singularity"],"id":69132,"author_id":"Isaac+Asimov"},{"text":"I saw them do it. Chip vandals. Right there on Commerce, behind the main road...They cut his head open. They know I watched.","author":"Anna L. Davis","tags":["biohacking","biotech","culture","cyberpunk","internet","open-source","sci-fi","singularity","society","technology","transhumanism"],"id":79819,"author_id":"Anna+L.+Davis"},{"text":"When General Genius built the first mentar [Artificial Intelligence] mind in the last half of the twenty-first century, it based its design on the only proven conscious material then known, namely, our brains. Specifically, the complex structure of our synaptic network. Scientists substituted an electrochemical substrate for our slower, messier biological one. Our brains are an evolutionary hodgepodge of newer structures built on top of more ancient ones, a jury-rigged system that has gotten us this far, despite its inefficiency, but was crying out for a top-to-bottom overhaul.Or so the General genius engineers presumed. One of their chief goals was to make minds as portable as possible, to be easily transferred, stored, and active in multiple media: electronic, chemical, photonic, you name it. Thus there didn't seem to be a need for a mentar body, only for interchangeable containers. They designed the mentar mind to be as fungible as a bank transfer.And so they eliminated our most ancient brain structures for regulating metabolic functions, and they adapted our sensory/motor networks to the control of peripherals.As it turns out, intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls. This was intelligence the mentars never inherited from us....The genius of the irrational......We gave them only rational functions -- the ability to think and feel, but no irrational functions... Have you ever been in a tight situation where you relied on your 'gut instinct'? This is the body's intelligence, not the mind's. Every living cell possesses it. The mentar substrate has no indomitable will to survive, but ours does.Likewise, mentars have no 'fire in the belly,' but we do. They don't experience pure avarice or greed or pride. They're not very curious, or playful, or proud. They lack a sense of wonder and spirit of adventure. They have little initiative. Granted, their cognition is miraculous, but their personalities are rather pedantic.But probably their chief shortcoming is the lack of intuition. Of all the irrational faculties, intuition in the most powerful. Some say intuition transcends space-time. Have you ever heard of a mentar having a lucky hunch? They can bring incredible amounts of cognitive and computational power to bear on a seemingly intractable problem, only to see a dumb human with a lucky hunch walk away with the prize every time. Then there's luck itself. Some people have it, most don't, and no mentar does.So this makes them want our bodies...Our bodies, ape bodies, dog bodies, jellyfish bodies. They've tried them all. Every cell knows some neat tricks or survival, but the problem with cellular knowledge is that it's not at all fungible; nor are our memories. We're pretty much trapped in our containers.","author":"David Marusek","tags":["ai","biology","consciousness","evolution","sentience","singularity","soul"],"id":96579,"author_id":"David+Marusek"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":30,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}