InsaneJournal

Fermi and firmware - Singular thoughts
The Fermi Paradox is getting a fair bit of blogtime on the sites my RSS feed pulls in - for instance, there's a discussion on Jamais Cascio's blog (which Stross has a funny comment on about panspermia).

Anyway... one of the main points discussed is whether or not the Singularity would have an effect on the so-called Great Filter. (Simply put - if post-Singularity civilisations simply give up on exploring or talking to outer space and spend all their time wanking in the Matrix instead, which is why we don't see any signs of advanced alien races.)

This of course led to some discussion about AI - and this splendid piece by one Jacob Davies:

...the human brain already contains one Turing-compliant AI. That's you. It also contains a virtual-reality suite capable of simulating anything you can imagine. That's your mind. At present, it's simulating (as best it can) the world around you, but it's capable of a lot more than that, as dreaming or hallucinations can demonstrate. It can even do both at once, as with daydreaming. Similarly your AI suite is capable of quite-accurately modelling other personalities, which is what it does when you think about what your mother would like for her birthday or whether your boss is about to fire you for reading blogs at work.

In fact, as experience with computers will tell you, there doesn't seem much innate reason why this exceptionally flexible system is limited to running one personality and one model of reality. There are obvious and significant differences between brains and computers, but for capacity I think this kind of analogy is fair: computers usually have a lot of wasted capacity, and if they can do one thing, they can usually do that thing ten times at once, or a thousand. At the very least, they can do it twice, each at half the speed.

Not to mention, there are long periods when your brain is doing virtually nothing, just ticking over. So why don't we have access to a controllable VR suite? (The closest is perhaps lucid dreaming.) Why are we not able to imagine other personalities to converse with? (Except a small section of the population, for whom this phenomenon seems to cause extreme distress.) Why can we only remember 7 things? Why do some people lack the empathy required not to hurt other people? Why are some people smarter than other people when their minds are so similar? Why are other animals not able to communicate with us, or even with each other at more than a very basic level? Why do our brains start out so apparently blank, when other animals can function at birth?

To me these are mysteries of just the same kind as the Fermi paradox. What you would expect - given our existence and experience - seems not to be the case.

Noted mostly 'cos I think it's cool - which is why most of us blog stuff, I guess.