LifeQuest Intro

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Postscript

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Postscript

We hope you have enjoyed these stories. They recently acquired a home in a virtual reality (Second Life, at www.secondlife.com), in a district named Extropia. Look for LifePact Center there (see pages 272-275). LifeQuest has an extensive display area on the eighth floor of the LifePact building. A special edition of The Box is running on the viewers there, available nowhere else. For any who wish to take this story home and read it elsewhere in Second Life, the viewers which run The Box are free samples.

More LifeQuest stories are taking shape and will be published via Create Space and Kindle, after a preview period in Second Life at LifePact Center. The next volume will contain a novel, BioQuagmire, in which the characters try to sort out reanimation preferences of those still frozen, and talk about some of the LifeQuest stories in trying to better understand what those suspendees might have preferred. (The stories concerned will be included as appendices.)

Using fiction-within-fiction this way may not be new, but in this case it helps us imagine how those living centuries from now might read the fiction we write today, to foresee what adjustment problems we might experience upon reanimation and help us to adapt more readily to whatever the situation may actually be. BioQuagmire also explores what happens when the suspendees are reanimated and how they might react to a world marked not only by great technological advances but by severe challenges from natural as well as manmade disasters, threatening not just the Earth but the Solar System as a whole. We think you’ll enjoy it.

In a virtual reality such as Second Life, you may feel either as if you are in a make-believe world that is only a symbolic representation of what the world might be like decades from now, or you may feel that you have reached the beaches of a new continent, in a different dimension, where a new civilization is already taking shape. It’s all a matter of point of view. We think the second of these two points of view has more validity than the first. Why? Because of work that has been unfolding so rapidly that it recently shifted our whole outlook on the reanimation dilemma. Let us explain.

A major issue for cryonics since its beginning has been the question of who will care enough to do the challenging R&D required to reanimate suspendees, and then follow through to bring them back. It was hoped that people of some future age might be motivated to do so, if for no reason other than to receive trust funds set aside for that purpose. This, however, seemed to be based mostly on vague assumptions.

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Also, there was a sense of having all one’s eggs in one fragile basket. It depended not only on having a stable fiduciary representative, reliably watching out over one for centuries, but it also depended on securing a high quality entry procedure where many sorts of circumstances and contingencies could get in the way. As a result, growth of interest and development have been extremely slow.

A new horizon has now opened. Recently it has become more and more evident that within just a few decades, we may have companions in cyberspace, highly motivated and legally empowered to act as “patient advocates” for us. In 2006, detailed articles in two journals by highly credentialed investigators began to explore the legal and psychological issues that would result from near-term emergence of self-conscious forms of intelligence in computational hardware. The same journals also contain extensive summaries of ongoing research in defense and industrial development programs that are hastening such entities attaining a full state of self awareness, with human-like cognitive powers.

The most fascinating aspect of these studies is that life extension and the use of cryonics with respect to it are integral topics in many of the papers. The linking of individual humans with emergent cyberbeings is a recurrent theme. Beyond this, systems for immediately starting the uploading of personality profile data and other memory related items (photos, videos, audio recordings, etc.) are already on-line, accessible without payment of fees as part of research to see how close ties of human personalities and companion cyberbeings can be established.

When you read BioQuagmire, you will find a plot in which centuries pass during which biopeople are depending on other biopeople to maintain storage of cryonic suspendees, before a culture of cyberbeings forms and takes on the roles of protectors, along with uploading and ultimately migration into the galaxy to join other intelligent species. We had just completed the final draft of this novel when we found that the timeline had been dramatically moved up, beyond anything we earlier could have felt comfortable offering even as fiction.

With all of that said, the journals referred to above are those of The Terasem Movement, Inc. Before reading the brief discussion that concludes this postscript, we recommend the reader have a look at them. The URL for the past issues is:

(http://www.terasemjournals.org/pastissues.html)

To continue, with papers in the Terasem Journals as a background, it seems quite likely that direct brain uploading will be preceded by the emergence of self-conscious cybernetic forms that are information-based rather than brain-circuit based.

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As Lawrence J. Cauller, PhD points in his paper, What it Might “Feel” Like to be Connected to Devices That Will Expand or Enhance Human Function With Cyber Abilities (Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness, V-2, N-1, 1^st Qtr 2007), the human cerebral cortex includes in excess of 20 billion neurons (each with ~5,000 inputs and outputs), over one hundred thousand miles of fibers (i.e. 1 cm * 20 billion neurons), and more than 100 trillion connections.

That’s just the cerebral cortex. Below it are the mammalian and reptilian brains as well as a giant system of neurochemical and hormonal drivers, governed not just by the genome with two billion base pairs, but by all the “programming” of epigenetic imprinting set in place by causal events starting at the union of sperm and ovum, impacted by the mother’s biochemistry and then by all of the events from birth onward, including growth, maturation, aging, etc. Yet as complex as this is, the story is far from finished!

All of this biological activity has its roots in “blind watchmaker” phenomena that Richard Dawkins elaborates so well in his many books. Beyond the idea that this applies just to individual natural selection, the social or group dynamics of it is powerfully explored in Howard Bloom’s The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain. Similar mechanisms of competitive, aggressive, natural selection oriented behavior may be ubiquitous throughout the universe. Advanced galactic civilizations may have devoted hundreds of millennia to unraveling and adjusting for these tendencies in their own societies.

Any attempt on our part to correct out these primeval influences may require fusion of (to again quote Lawrence J. Cauller, PhD) “the selves of both conscious entities (which become mutually transformed) into a completely new form of conscious being.” At this point it is helpful to quote more extensively from Dr. Cauller’s paper (What it Might “Feel” Like to be Connected to Devices That Will Expand or Enhance Human Function With Cyber Abilities, Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness, V-2, N-1, 1^st Qtr 2007):

“I believe the full potential of this NeuroInteractive reasoning can only be realized by the development of a massively parallel, minimally invasive interface between biological and artificial brains. There are no apparent obstacles to the impending development of the core technology necessary to construct artificial brains that reproduce the neural principles of brain organization and the essential mechanics of dynamical NeuroInteractivity responsible for the emergence of natural intelligence and higher functions of consciousness.

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“There is every reason to expect this technology will culminate in the birth of autonomous conscious beings that will share with us the burdens and joys of living. But the greatest potential of artificial brains based upon the same principles of NeuroInteractivity that support human consciousness, is the essential role they may play in the next stage of human evolution beyond the limits of biology. This vision depends upon the ultimate development of an interface between brains.

“The basic theme of our Micro Transponder concept illuminates the most likely path toward such an interface. While RFID technology may be the best solution today, the theme of ‘minimal is better’ keeps us on the look out for breakthroughs that may enable nano-solutions for the construction of molecular interface devices. Then you can imagine expanding the capacity of the brain by the interconnection of artificial and biological systems. Human capacity will not expand by simply mapping our functions onto an artificial brain.

“The evolution of human capacity must engage the same fundamental process of NeuroInteractivity responsible for all human development. The expansion of NeuroInteractivity across the interconnections between brains will kindle the self-organization of a shared experience for the construction of a common action-prediction foundation that fuses the selves of both conscious entities which become mutually transformed into a completely new form of conscious being. Another important ramification of this vision of human evolution is that artificial beings are far more durable than their biological counterparts. The personality of the biological entity can be imprinted upon the fused consciousness of the hybrid being and lives on indefinitely beyond the mortal life of the biological donor.”

Clearly, “imprinting” would be a pale substitute for maintaining the full complexity of the biological system which, up to the end of its “mortal life”, was the “biological donor”. Neurocircuitry uploading as conjectured in the stories Nothing is Impossible and The Box may not be possible hardware-wise at the time self-consciousness is achieved by information-based cyberbeings, but it may not be much further down the road, either.

Aid from Cyber-scientists may accelerate the process considerably, as Ben Goertzel, Ph.D, (CEO/CSO Novamente LLC) has predicted in his paper, The Role of AGI in Cybernetic Immortality (J. Geoethical Nanotechnology, Volume 2, Issue 1, 1st Quarter, 2007).

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Ray Kurzweil predicts that strong artificial intelligence (AGI vs. AI) will be available within the first half of the 21^st Century. If circumstances have us in cryonic biostasis for some extended period, what better ombudsman could we want than cyber-twins of ourselves, fully self-conscious individuals and legally empowered to look out for our frozen wetware (our cryopreserved biobrains/biobodies), as if these were their own frozen left and right cerebral hemispheres and other organs, maximizing our recovery by brain uploading when the technology is right, motivated by concerns that anything second rate would represent a compromise of their own personal identities. Of course, this is all just science fiction, right? Again, it’s a matter of your point of view.

Today, in Second Life, if you go to the entry lobby of LifePact Center in Extropia (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Extropia/192/209/26), you will be offered a brief notecard by the robogreeter there. The notecard, “Gateway to Endlessness”, contains the following message:

Gateway to Endlessness

A Gateway to Endlessness? We've heard of Getting out of the Box, and a short lifespan is certainly like “being in a box", but the trick is to find the door. Where's the door???

Humanity has been looking for a way to get out of the mortality-box since before the pyramids, but like space travel, science-based pursuit of endless lives had to wait for technology. The time has finally come.

This building is the new home of LifeQuest. These stories about cryonics, uploading, and nanotechnology have been floating around like "notes in a bottle" for over two decades. Now, they’ve washed up on the shores of Extropia.

LifeQuest stories are now available through Kindle and at Create Space (Amazon.com). They’re also on LifePact’s website (the URL’s are on the Eighth Floor slide shows).

More stories are on the way. These will mainly be about living in a combination of cyberspace and biospace, where "home" is both within VR and outside it.

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The Eighth Floor slide shows on big-screen viewers are free for the taking. Copy them, pop them out of inventory and enjoy them whenever you wish, give copies away, whatever.

Sooner than we think, many of us may "live in SL" or some place like it , as opposed to "outside". We may interact with the real-world via android avatars that are hard to tell from humans.

In a novel (BioQuagmire) that will soon preview here (in LifePact Center), real-world avatars for cyberpeople are called "androreps". This is a time 250 years from now; aging was conquered nearly 100 years earlier, yet people still die by the billions from such things as war and pandemics. Despite this, anti-aging cures have fueled an explosion of population that seems endless. Most of the world lives on the brink of true unsustainability and starvation.

BioQuagmire was written prior to recognizing the power we now see in the programs of Terasem-CyBeRev. It was out of date even before it was printed. However, we think anyone who's at all positive about this novel will be enthusiastic about what is really going on, through Terasem.

Boundless Life!

Visit us in Second Life, at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Extropia/192/209/26