Fear of Immortality

This is in reference to a post I recently read which talks about how there will be a boom in Artificial Intelligence which would make it as intelligent as humans and soon after that a lot more intelligent than us. It talks about the exponential growth of intelligence. It shows that AI would actually reach a point where it evolves in the range of earthworm to human in few years, days or even hours. Please read the really well researched post here.

A consequence of this Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) is that we would either become immortal or extinct. While this may seem like a piece of fictional fantasy, it is extraordinarily plausible. The top people of the world in AI are not debating on whether it will come or not, but on when it will come. And that too in just the range of this century or the next. Nevertheless, we are almost sure that at least our grandchildren will get to see 'beings' hyperbolically more intelligent than them. Beings which we created. 

While this does not appeal to us as we are not used to AI super-beings other than in sci-fi movies which we dismiss as full-on fantasy, what we might appreciate is that even if we don't reach ASI soon enough, we should, in the near future, be good enough in Nanotechnology and other branches of science which would assist Biology to the point that it won't be Biology any more. We would be making our own blood, our own hands, and our own brains. If you get your hand chopped off, you can order another from Amazon. If you get a brain cancer, you don't go to a neurosurgeon but an engineer who 'repairs' it to as-good-as-new. Our cells won't age. Eternal youth, immortality would not be words we just find in books. Something which Voldemort had to lose his soul for would be available at a drug store in plastic bottles. 

This being a brief summary of (my interpretation of) the attached post, I would like to build on how the world would be when humans are immortal. I hope you appreciate that we are not talking about Elves from The Lord of the Rings, but about a very realistic scenario when "love you till eternity" could be possible literally.

Life & Mathematics

Do you think you are better than me? Or do you think I am doing better in life than you? Do you think Steve Jobs was a better human than you? Or do you think that Hitler was the worst man that ever lived?

All of us are the same. All humans. All animals. All plants. All rivers. All rocks. All mass. All energy.

It is just as it happened that you are where you are in your life, and I am where I am. What Osama Bin Laden did was something that he did because of the shoes he was in. Sachin Tendulkar is no God.

We are just fragments of humanity whose life happens to be a particular permutation based on certain probabilities, which depend on our genetic build-up and the circumstances that we are in. And on how the universe has developed right from when it began to when you read this word. Osama was just the drop of urine which bounces back on your hand when you piss in a urinal. It sucks, yes. But it had nothing to do with how it happened to be the one in a million. It was just a probabilistic event. Something that had to happen.

We say that there are murderers in our society. But then, in a population of billions, there have to be all kinds of people, right? There have to be men who rape women, and then there are men who aren’t attracted to women. There are all kinds of probabilities that can happen. Therefore they exist.

We may be moving towards a more likable environment. But our threshold of utopia is also changing. Take a Neanderthal and have him sleep on a feather mattress in a closed room next to those he loves, with all the food he needs for the next week in his kitchen. That is beyond utopia for him. That is something that he couldn’t have even imagined, sleeping in the open every day, hoping that no animal tears apart the guts of his daughter the next day.

We will always have evil in our society. Because evil is something that is on the boundaries of our definition of good. And our definition of good is getting constricted every day. With each day, a part of this evil gets chopped off due to natural de-selection. But goodness shall always have a boundary. And on the boundary shall always reside some of those who we think are evil to the world.

We might be in a rat race, but what we are trying to do is to be in this central zone, as far as we can be from the edge that is going to be chopped off in the next selection cycle. We are hoping to survive. That’s all that there is to it.

If you think that everyone dies, you are thinking on an individualistic level. All of life, is just one. You, me, your dog, the tree on which your dog pisses, everything alive, is just one. We are basically branches of the first human zygote. Which itself was a section of the first bacteria that ever lived.

But what we have is this Midas touch that is making everything non-living we touch turn into life. And that is how we are accumulating our protoplasm. But the code that lies in each nucleus is just a minor variation from our parents. And these minor variations are what we call change. Change is everything. Because that is how these permutations happen.

Change is what led our forefathers to create Gandhi, Osama, you and me. Change is the cause of all kinds of branches in the world so that evolution has options to choose. If you want the society to get better, it has to see the worse too.

I’m not asking you to stop thinking like an individual. But just expand your mind and realize that you are nothing but a tiny part of life. That all of life strives to continue living.

Also, a word on extra-terrestrial life. We are heavily biased in our definition of life by the structure of the first DNA molecule that happened to be created on Earth. It was coincidence.

Outside our planet, there might be something very different. Something which hardly looks like our definition of life, but is intelligent and is conscious of its existence. It may have resulted from a very different molecule than what we are familiar with so much. And the difference that it would result in would be something that is truly unimaginable. Just think how different an apple and you are, coming from the same molecule. Imagine if the base of all evolution was something very different. That is why we cannot perceive life outside our planet. It is because we need to open our minds, not our telescopes.

Every river and every rock is life. They may not reproduce, but they continue existing. They may not be conscious of their existence, but are we? Do we know why we breathe or why we live? We may find individual purposes to our lives. But they are just things that we want to do. Things that assist humanity and life. Nothing that gives us a reason for our existence in this universe. Nothing that tells us why the universe exists. Nothing which tells us if this is even real. Nothing which truly defines real.

But as we live in this abstracted world, we love and we laugh. Whatever this is, it feels amazing. And as we live like Schrodinger’s cats, we may as well appreciate that we are both inside the box and outside. We pretend to know if we are alive or not, but what if we are just in the heaven of a long dead Neanderthal.

Schrödinger fuction for the soul

You know, back in the days when we used to be dealing with classical physics, the concept of determinism came up. La Place said that everything in the universe obeys a set of laws. So every particle in our mind, body and soul is obeying these laws. It has no option but to follow them which leads to a singular path that it can follow. This plots our destiny.

But in this century with the germination of quantum physics, the singular path has become a singular region.

Now we can wander in our own singular regions. But at least we can wander. A light cone with us at its center surrounds us. The only region accessible to any particle of our body. And it has to obey the regional laws. Not the pathological laws.

It's like our conscious mind is a wave. It can flow here and about but it ends up oscillating about a singular path.

The waves that we experience is a clear example of how space and time, and mass and energy are interchangable.

And we oscillate not just about some event in space and time. But about 'real' things too. Like sports, music, love, science and philosophy.

But what else to do in this life?

Imagining Reality

Why do we think that the real worlds and the imaginary worlds are different? Just because the real world seems to obey a certain set of laws? Just because we are so used to bondage, that the world in which there seem to be more restricitons seems to be more real than the one that doesn't?

If we can appreciate the laws of physics, why can't we appreciate the lawlessness of our imagination? Why do we have to concentrate on living in the real world so much that we forget that there is a whole new world out there to live in. A world where there is no limits on what you think, say or do? Just because we seem to have an illusion to be able to make a difference in the real world, why should we spend our whole life trying to do that?

While we may have an illusion to have control over our thoughts, it is, in turn, our thoughts which control us. Everything that flows through our brains is nothing but a controlled dance of the many subatomic particles which make it. Why do we seem to be so engrossed in our lives that we forget that we are nothing but unliving matter flowing in the universe like any other rock. We are nothing special that we have the audacity to call ourselves living.

If we truly can't verify the reality of this world, then why even bother trying to make a difference? Do we truly believe that making a difference will lead us to some kind of happiness which is nothing but something that we feel due to the same impulses which flow through our brains due to some uncontrollable events.

Then let us continue to live in our imagination, as seriously as we live in the real world. There is no difference that we can make which will help the universe in any way more than how it is supposed to unfold. Then just get rid of all these laws which we think physics has anything to do with. Instead let's be free, as much as the illusion of control lets us be.

There is freedom trapped inside you. We just need to let it free.

Cloud Computing

Ai baadal le ja mujhe
Iss gehre saagar se
Nahi behna ab mujhe
In unchi lehron mein

Ai sooraj utha le
Mujhe apni god mein
Le ja paas uss baadal ke 
Kho jaun main jis mein

Boond mein kaid sabhi
De mujhe yeh dua
Ban jaun main nami
Bahun banke dhuan

Ro de chahe phir se
Iss des ya uss samandar
Iss baarish ya uss barf mein
Iss toofan ya uss bavandar

Behna hai dharam mera
Jhaag ho ya kohra
Chahe jaise ho karam mera
Mera baadal vo raha

Listen to the song here.

The recipe of teleportation

Ingredients:

1 mind mapping technique.

7 billion attitude changes towards what we think a person really is. To realize that a person is not his face or body. Or sex or colour or religion. A person is his thoughts.

(The former should be easier to find.)

Directions:

Say, you want to teleport to your friend in France.

You ask her if she has a friend who wants to check out what a cool place your country is, say for an hour.

She mostly would (who wouldn't want to visit another country for free?).

You set up the mind mapping equipment and transport your self (which is nothing but the composition of your neurons) to your the teleportee's body.

And for an hour, you are in France, with your friend. And she with you, all of you.

Universal Music

This is for the musicians:

In a song, there is a structure. A tempo, a beat. A scale. This forms the base, the root of the song. If you deviate from the scale, or if you miss the beat, you don't follow the rules of the song; you don't follow the laws of the universe. You have to follow the rules to maintain the aesthetics of the song, you need to follow the laws to maintain the spontaneity of the universe.

What you do within these rules is what makes the difference. It is what makes the million songs in Major scale in 4 by 4 different. There are laws, but you move freely within them.

However, this free movement is only in space. In scale. Not in time, the tempo. The tempo is what guides you and what you can't disobey. While you can even enter restricted regions of the note cycle out of the chosen scale, you can't disregard the tempo.

The tempo is time. The scale is space.

And as old songs live, new ones are born. And none die. A property of recursion.

There are variations, nonetheless.

And infinite possibilities.

Every song is a universe.