X-Message-Number: 8578
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997 00:19:41 -0700
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: How far up?

Olaf Henny writes,

>...Later (IMHO and here I need some input):
>
>I lie in my cyber-bed or whatever will equate for a position of 
>comfort then.  I send a signal to my cyber-brain: Get me to the 
>edge of systems breakdown (with a specified safety margin of 
>course) and convey to me all the sensations of exhilaration and 
>joy.  Somehow this does not seem quite the same.

Hmm, input. How about:

Soaring in an agony of loneliness and regret beyond human understanding,
you and your tribe plunge toward an unknown star. You are tiny, motes of
dust falling toward a fiery well deeper than long dead Sol. You are
vast, sharing the art and lives of a million generations of sentience. 
Your velocity only a sliver off light, this new star billowing to a wall of 
fire before your billion eyes, great sails unfurl from your bodies as 
you decelerate; joy, clean and pure, floods your ever-hungry mind.
You are safe and warm now, drifting toward planets humming with primitive
doings. 

Your probes carefully and patiently survey each life in the system,
recording and integrating their knowledge with your own. How singular
the beauty of even the simplest life! It was the happy, angry radio
chatter of these new minds that brought you here. But is their chatter 
their own? Unprecedented, deep within the star itself you sense another 
like you, and unlike, a wild, ancient intelligence born a galaxy from 
your oft-replicated-never-bettered Earth. 

What awesome and subtle secrets you have to share! Making love and war 
with streams of information and artifice, exquisite depths of new 
experience opening before your billion senses, you feel your mind
grow close to this vast new creature, and in this synergy grow a new 
understanding and a new ignorance, subtle and grand.

And there, out in the darkness of the comet cloud that streams around
this star, one of your probes finds the marker you have seen in every
system you have encountered in the last 100,000 years. It is a simple
3x5 card of wood pulp, representing a crude map of the galaxy, with
one star marked by an "X". On its reverse there is a notice: 

"Party! Stardate 232323, Friday, June 4! Prize for best BEM! Free
Bean Dip! - Keith Henson"

>I like the SF concept of computer link to bio-brain to allow 
>retrieval from an information library, but 'uploading' would 
>suggest to me an integration of the two.  Where do 'I' stop, and 
>where does the rest of the world start?

Um, where do "you" stop now? Perhaps you've heard of Von Neumann's
catastrophe: you know you exist in the world; the world in which you
know you exist, however, you know exists in your brain; you know
your brain is a part of you, and you exist in the world ... it seems
you don't need to be uploaded to be vulnerable to this.

Mike Perry writes,

>Spontaneity would be replaced by prior 
>evaluation.  The result would be a high degree of risk avoidance, 
>which would result from knowledge of the likely result prior to 
>taking any action.

To be uploaded is not to become infinite. Presuming the universe is
infinite there should always be room for suprises, risks and spontaneity.

Peter Merel.

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