Month: May 2016

I can’t find the article now but it suggested to me that perhaps the best way of explaining the Universe was by thinking of particles less as very small specks of stuff.. but more like pixels. I think it was in reference to the idea that our Universe is possibly just a projection from a 2D “hologram” of all the information on the event horizon of a blackhole. Yeah, once you start looking into what the physicists are saying it starts getting a little crazy. But, think of it this way: If you are in a virtual world.. and you are interacting with AI characters.. what’s in their mind? If you look past their pixelly eyeballs and into their “Brains” what would you find? Nothing. Well, nothing unless the programmer decided to waste memory and storage by programming in brains or circuits or something. Why would they bother? So, how exactly is this “person” thinking? From your point of view they don’t have a brain but the are carrying out actions and making decisions. Where is that thinking taking place and how is it transmitted to them instantaneously? We of course know that it’s software and they are just a visual representation of code being executed somewhere else. We of course are a combination of hardware and software so the idea of someone being somewhere, but having all our thinking done somewhere else is a bit strange. This will change though as virtual reality make presence less of an issue. When a hologram you or virtual you can be at meetings this will become quite normal. And of course, perhaps our physical bodies may eventually be packed away for safe keeping or done away with altogether since it’s very susceptible to accidents and disease.

Here’s another interesting thought: You are walking along in the virtual woods with your virtual friends. Yes, let’s say the other characters are actually being controlled by your friends. Now, imagine an AI character in that game starts asking questions about the nature of reality. How did we get here? Who created us? But their reality is quite a bit different then yours. You tell them you aren’t “real”, but are actually controlled by a being outside of your Universe and with the flip of a switch they could end your Universe.  You’ll live on, but they will not.. well.. not until your homework is done.. then their Universe will spring back to existence without them ever realizing anything was a miss.

One last thought: Let’s say one day you wake up and someone told you that you are “dead”. You died, but before you died your entire being was encoded and uploaded. You are officially software living in a “virtual” world with other physically deceased people. Your “living” relatives come and join you “virtually” in essentially the same way we play video games.. by created a digitized version of our self and putting it in the virtual world. I would imagine a broad range of emotions would roll through the complex functions that make up your software. (I wonder if they would slow the software down to make you more realistic?)

I don’t even need to think up crazy stuff like this myself: Huawei Prepares for Robot Overlords and Communication with the Dead

“He described a future where children could use apps like WeChat to interact with dead grandparents, thanks to the ability to download human consciousness into computers. All of these technologies would require huge amounts of data storage, which in turn could generate business for Huawei, he added.”