I like this post, but Armok: Please spell-check. The mistakes (lack of apostrophes, 10 to 10^12 instead of 10*10^12, etc.) are distracting.
With that out of the way:
Stop the Info Loss
I want an eidetic memory, and the ability to delete or prevent the deletion of specific memories at will. That means remembering every instant of my life, except the boring ones I’d throw out to save hard drive space. I’d do this by making a backup of my experiences of the last day/week every day/week, storing them with descriptions of what I did and downloading info from the backups whenever I wanted to access it.
This may of course be due to a lack of imagination of my part, but I don’t think this would lead to a dangerous FOOM as long as the backups were inactive. Even if one “got away,” they’d be copies of me and no more likely to do anything I’d regret than I would. The effective result—a photographic memory—would be within human mind design space, so I doubt there’d be problems there.
Ok. This is good enough to serve as an example for others of what to do now.
After visualizing doing this, there is one thing making this inconvenient to use… While I now HAVE the information, the only way to access it is to fire up the old backup temporarily and communicate with it. The fast and intuitively accessible part of the memories keeps degrading and has to be laboriously updated from old backups. Likewise, deleting a memory will also delete all memories that happened after that point.
It’s still a clear improvement from the old human way, and other future changes enabling merging minds or transfer of memories between them will remove these inconveniences.
A better way to archive this might be to, or more likely as a compliment to it, using similar techniques that have been used with implanted electrodes to get low level images from animal brains, to record your inner eye and voice to video, then using voice recognition to make a transcript for the voice part, and having that searchable to find the right point in the video feed if you remember a phrase you thought at approximately the same time.
Likewise, deleting a memory will also delete all memories that happened after that point.
The way I was visualizing it, it would only delete that day.
A better way to archive this might be to, or more likely as a compliment to it, using similar techniques that have been used with implanted electrodes to get low level images from animal brains, to record your inner eye and voice to video, then using voice recognition to make a transcript for the voice part, and having that searchable to find the right point in the video feed if you remember a phrase you thought at approximately the same time.
Good suggestion. I didn’t think this would be possible without “decompiling” myself first, but it might.
techniques that have been used with implanted electrodes to get low level images from animal brains,
They did that? That’s really cool, can I have a link?
Um, how could it just delete that day? The only way to delete memories with this system is the delete the entire copy of the brain containing them, and all brains descended from the one experiencing the thing you want to forget would contain it.
It depends on what you mean by “decompiling” I guess, but it’s a very very limited decompile that has already been done IRL to animals using much cruder means.
And really that is about as much info as I can remember on that, and you can google it as well as I can. Most likely someone else reading this will know about it and hopefully they’ll link it.
.
Um, how could it just delete that day? The only way to delete memories with this system is the delete the entire copy of the brain containing them, and all brains descended from the one experiencing the thing you want to forget would contain it.
I’m not talking about things I particularly want to forget, just about deleting brains that don’t have any novel interesting info. But keeping an archive by making backups is an unwieldly and annoying way of doing it, and the way you suggested a few posts up is better. I was actually visualizing something like that before you said I had to have a plausible way of doing it. I only came up with the backup thing because I didn’t think I’d be able to just archive my inner eye/voice.
Still, there IS good reasons to have entire brain backups to. For things that aren’t just audio and sound for example. I’m pretty sure you couldn’t do anything equivalent for smell. likewise, skills can rust from lack of use and that to is worth preserving. My approach would probably be to have the audio and video backup streaming constantly, have archival backups every few subjective months, and have subjective-hourly backups that you can revert to if the last hour was completely boring AND non-educational AND you didn’t practice any skill you need to get better at. Or when you encounter a basilisk or wireheading risk or somehting else lik that you’d like gone from your mind.
I’d label the revert button “CAN HAS UNSEE” :p
My approach would probably be to have the audio and video backup streaming constantly, have archival backups every few subjective months, and have subjective-hourly backups that you can revert to if the last hour was completely boring AND non-educational AND you didn’t practice any skill you need to get better at.
Interesting potential akrasia-blocker: set this up to automatically revert me if I spend a whole hour doing one of a list of activities tagged “procrastinating”. This could have annoying effects and wouldn’t stop me from spending 50 minutes of the hour goofing off, but it might be useful.
Um, If you can do this stuff there’s a much easier way to do this: Just have a copy of you (probably running at a lower speed) supervising the other copies. Then, if a copy is wasting time, SUSPEND that simulation: After all it’s somehting you want to do sometime, akrasia is only a problem if time is limited or it has other negative effects.
Personally, I probably wouldn’t even need to do this, I can’t think of anything that’d actually be akrasia in a situation like that with near unlimited time and the ability to bring back an ancient copy from storage if to much unhealthy things done accumulate. I’d just READ all of tvtropes and wikipedia and youtube and then I’d be DONE. And the slow humans couldn’t make new content fast enough for it to take a significant portion of my time.
I’m really intrigued by your second claim. I often “waste time” creatively; I suspect I would do a lot more of that as a high-speed upload. The relative lack of human-generated content is neither here nor there.
Of course, as with all akrasia discussions, a lot depends on what qualifies as a waste of time. If it is worthwhile to do what I feel like doing when I feel like doing it, then I do worthwhile things constantly, and I don’t have akrasia… though I might have a problem with judging myself inappropriately, if I believe what I’m doing isn’t worthwhile.
I sort of like the idea of multiple copies of me competing for timeshare, but I’d expect it to not work out very well, as some of me would sooner or later start trying to game my own evaluation metric in order to get more time than the rest of me, which over time is an unfortunate trend.
Maybe the confusion is this: it is rare for time to be completely wasted: Reading TVtropes has many benefits and anything creative is obviously a good thing. “wasted” time is really just time that could have been spent even better. An upload like this would value it’s time a LOT less, the opportunity cost goes down immensely, and suddenly what was before waste is now proper training and study.
On a more serious note, if I split into copies for that sort of reason, I’d prefer to merge and re-split occasionally or share memories across copies. Then all the mes would have all the fun, instead of each me having some.
I sort of like the idea of multiple copies of me competing for timeshare, but I’d expect it to not work out very well, as some of me would sooner or later start trying to game my own evaluation metric in order to get more time than the rest of me, which over time is an unfortunate trend.
Depending on how much computing power I had, just letting some designated TVTropes/Wikipedia/YouTube personalities run at a slower rate, and merging them back in when I’m done (or rotating copies between fun and work so someone’s always working) could be an option.
Maybe the confusion is this: it is rare for time to be completely wasted: Reading TVtropes has many benefits and anything creative is obviously a good thing.
This is an interesting point. As an upload, I wouldn’t have many obligations to others that I couldn’t do quickly and easily. That would leave me essentially doing whatever I felt like, with little or none of the urgency of current life. If I wanted to read TVTropes, I could with no consequences. If I wanted to read the literature in particle physics, I could do that with no consequences.
Only problem is how do you “merge” two copies of your brain so that the resultant have the memories of both? I’d guess it’s somewhat implementation dependant and pretty hard. Hard enough that we can’t assume it can be done without explaining how for the purposes of a thread like this.
Hard enough that we can’t assume it can be done without explaining how for the purposes of a thread like this.
Meta-comment: Your stance on this, that technologies should be known to be workable before their effects are discussed, is different from the LW zeitgeist (citation when I can find it). I say this without stating a preference for either. I just wonder what it says about how you think about the future or things in general.
I don’t take that stance, in general. However, this thread is just just random idle scifi discussion, and details the way is is done in this case seems relevant to the end result.
Again you forgot a title in bold. And you’re supposed to say a safe route to archiving stuff not just what the goal of the change is.
(As for the spelling stuff, I’ve never been able to do it under any known circumstance. Anything the automated spell checker misses I’ve simply given up on by now.)
I like this post, but Armok: Please spell-check. The mistakes (lack of apostrophes, 10 to 10^12 instead of 10*10^12, etc.) are distracting.
With that out of the way:
Stop the Info Loss
I want an eidetic memory, and the ability to delete or prevent the deletion of specific memories at will. That means remembering every instant of my life, except the boring ones I’d throw out to save hard drive space. I’d do this by making a backup of my experiences of the last day/week every day/week, storing them with descriptions of what I did and downloading info from the backups whenever I wanted to access it.
This may of course be due to a lack of imagination of my part, but I don’t think this would lead to a dangerous FOOM as long as the backups were inactive. Even if one “got away,” they’d be copies of me and no more likely to do anything I’d regret than I would. The effective result—a photographic memory—would be within human mind design space, so I doubt there’d be problems there.
Ok. This is good enough to serve as an example for others of what to do now.
After visualizing doing this, there is one thing making this inconvenient to use… While I now HAVE the information, the only way to access it is to fire up the old backup temporarily and communicate with it. The fast and intuitively accessible part of the memories keeps degrading and has to be laboriously updated from old backups. Likewise, deleting a memory will also delete all memories that happened after that point. It’s still a clear improvement from the old human way, and other future changes enabling merging minds or transfer of memories between them will remove these inconveniences.
A better way to archive this might be to, or more likely as a compliment to it, using similar techniques that have been used with implanted electrodes to get low level images from animal brains, to record your inner eye and voice to video, then using voice recognition to make a transcript for the voice part, and having that searchable to find the right point in the video feed if you remember a phrase you thought at approximately the same time.
The way I was visualizing it, it would only delete that day.
Good suggestion. I didn’t think this would be possible without “decompiling” myself first, but it might.
They did that? That’s really cool, can I have a link?
Um, how could it just delete that day? The only way to delete memories with this system is the delete the entire copy of the brain containing them, and all brains descended from the one experiencing the thing you want to forget would contain it.
It depends on what you mean by “decompiling” I guess, but it’s a very very limited decompile that has already been done IRL to animals using much cruder means.
And really that is about as much info as I can remember on that, and you can google it as well as I can. Most likely someone else reading this will know about it and hopefully they’ll link it.
I’m not talking about things I particularly want to forget, just about deleting brains that don’t have any novel interesting info. But keeping an archive by making backups is an unwieldly and annoying way of doing it, and the way you suggested a few posts up is better. I was actually visualizing something like that before you said I had to have a plausible way of doing it. I only came up with the backup thing because I didn’t think I’d be able to just archive my inner eye/voice.
ok, sounds like we pretty mush agree then.
Still, there IS good reasons to have entire brain backups to. For things that aren’t just audio and sound for example. I’m pretty sure you couldn’t do anything equivalent for smell. likewise, skills can rust from lack of use and that to is worth preserving. My approach would probably be to have the audio and video backup streaming constantly, have archival backups every few subjective months, and have subjective-hourly backups that you can revert to if the last hour was completely boring AND non-educational AND you didn’t practice any skill you need to get better at. Or when you encounter a basilisk or wireheading risk or somehting else lik that you’d like gone from your mind. I’d label the revert button “CAN HAS UNSEE” :p
Interesting potential akrasia-blocker: set this up to automatically revert me if I spend a whole hour doing one of a list of activities tagged “procrastinating”. This could have annoying effects and wouldn’t stop me from spending 50 minutes of the hour goofing off, but it might be useful.
Um, If you can do this stuff there’s a much easier way to do this: Just have a copy of you (probably running at a lower speed) supervising the other copies. Then, if a copy is wasting time, SUSPEND that simulation: After all it’s somehting you want to do sometime, akrasia is only a problem if time is limited or it has other negative effects.
Personally, I probably wouldn’t even need to do this, I can’t think of anything that’d actually be akrasia in a situation like that with near unlimited time and the ability to bring back an ancient copy from storage if to much unhealthy things done accumulate. I’d just READ all of tvtropes and wikipedia and youtube and then I’d be DONE. And the slow humans couldn’t make new content fast enough for it to take a significant portion of my time.
I’m really intrigued by your second claim. I often “waste time” creatively; I suspect I would do a lot more of that as a high-speed upload. The relative lack of human-generated content is neither here nor there.
Of course, as with all akrasia discussions, a lot depends on what qualifies as a waste of time. If it is worthwhile to do what I feel like doing when I feel like doing it, then I do worthwhile things constantly, and I don’t have akrasia… though I might have a problem with judging myself inappropriately, if I believe what I’m doing isn’t worthwhile.
I sort of like the idea of multiple copies of me competing for timeshare, but I’d expect it to not work out very well, as some of me would sooner or later start trying to game my own evaluation metric in order to get more time than the rest of me, which over time is an unfortunate trend.
Maybe the confusion is this: it is rare for time to be completely wasted: Reading TVtropes has many benefits and anything creative is obviously a good thing. “wasted” time is really just time that could have been spent even better. An upload like this would value it’s time a LOT less, the opportunity cost goes down immensely, and suddenly what was before waste is now proper training and study.
Uploading is sounding more and more appealing.
On a more serious note, if I split into copies for that sort of reason, I’d prefer to merge and re-split occasionally or share memories across copies. Then all the mes would have all the fun, instead of each me having some.
Depending on how much computing power I had, just letting some designated TVTropes/Wikipedia/YouTube personalities run at a slower rate, and merging them back in when I’m done (or rotating copies between fun and work so someone’s always working) could be an option.
This is an interesting point. As an upload, I wouldn’t have many obligations to others that I couldn’t do quickly and easily. That would leave me essentially doing whatever I felt like, with little or none of the urgency of current life. If I wanted to read TVTropes, I could with no consequences. If I wanted to read the literature in particle physics, I could do that with no consequences.
Yea.
Only problem is how do you “merge” two copies of your brain so that the resultant have the memories of both? I’d guess it’s somewhat implementation dependant and pretty hard. Hard enough that we can’t assume it can be done without explaining how for the purposes of a thread like this.
Meta-comment: Your stance on this, that technologies should be known to be workable before their effects are discussed, is different from the LW zeitgeist (citation when I can find it). I say this without stating a preference for either. I just wonder what it says about how you think about the future or things in general.
I don’t take that stance, in general. However, this thread is just just random idle scifi discussion, and details the way is is done in this case seems relevant to the end result.
Again you forgot a title in bold. And you’re supposed to say a safe route to archiving stuff not just what the goal of the change is.
(As for the spelling stuff, I’ve never been able to do it under any known circumstance. Anything the automated spell checker misses I’ve simply given up on by now.)
Thanks for reminding me. I fixed the title and added more details; I hope the “safe route” description is what you were after.