Below are the 17 most recent journal entries recorded in Mercy's LiveJournal:

Monday, March 14th, 2005
9:52 pm	HmmSoc is hosting a talk sometime this week with a secular humanist speaker who will apparently be defending dualism. This promises to be interesting. I've been trying to read up on dualist arguments a bit in preparation for the talk, but all I can find are a few seriously mystical babblings and several arguments which appear to be of the "if I use long enough words for a long time, you'll think I made a point" variety. (There should be a Latin term for that sort of argument. I need to work on my Latin, if only so I can make supposedly witty remarks about that sort of thing.) On the topic of seriously mystical babblings, I'm wasting an increasingly large amount of time reading Gnostic texts (good introduction and links, as usual, on Wikipedia, if you're interested). I particularly like verse 2 of the Sayings Gospel of Thomas (Patterson-Meyer translation): "Jesus said, 'Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all. And after they have reigned they will rest.'" 4 days 'til the end of term and the beginning of the revision period... Current Mood: busy Current Music: Radiohead - Creep (Acoustic) (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 5th, 2005
4:13 pm	I have just encountered this, which poses an interesting extension to the Smolin theory of baby universe evolution... an anthropic one. It rings irritatingly of mysticism but is quite fun, and very transhumanist, nonetheless... I think I'm taking too many breaks from this mock exam. I wonder why... Current Mood: entertained Current Music: Sarah McLachlan - Angel (Dusted Remix) (Comment on this)
12:20 pm	Further comment on yesterday's entry: I suppose the human mistake could be in assuming that "nothing" rather than "something" is the default state of things, an assumption that we base in the strict causality of our universe, where anything we can study has an origin. Even if we do start from "nothing", I cannot help but wonder if the situation is analogous to the apparently non-causal formation of virtual particles in quantum vacuum. It could even be an entropic process - after all, a true "blank slate" is highly orderly, and perhaps a form of meta-thermodynamics requires any such non-existence to decay entropically into a universe. I can almost feel a future me snickering at this probably untestable speculation, so I shall stop writing now ;) Apparently "Logic of Events" by Charles Pierce discusses the question, so perhaps I'll read that when I have a moment... In other news: I want one of these. It's a pity that Bidwells don't allow pets... Now to get back to this mock exam... Current Mood: busy Current Music: Sarah McLachlan - Fallen (Comment on this)
Friday, March 4th, 2005
4:03 pm	While reading through the transcript of one of the CiS-St. Edmunds lectures, I came across an interesting assertion by Dr. Ernest Lucas. Since that assertion got me thinking - and subsequently propelled me to decide to attend the remaining lectures in the series - I thought I'd share it with you, and my reaction. "For example, in a passage that is often quoted from his book A Brief History of Time, Prof. Stephen Hawking suggests that because his version of the 'big bang' cosmology removes any dateable 'beginning' it leaves no room for a Creator God. He seems to think that the doctrine of 'creation out of nothing' requires that there be a point in time that can be identified as the moment of creation. ... Since time is part of the created order, God could well have created time with the character that it has in Hawking’s cosmology, which does not allow the identification of a dateable 'beginning'. Therefore it is by no means the case that the absence of such a beginning 'leaves no room for a Creator God'. "This example illustrates the limits beyond which science cannot take us. By its very nature science deals with what theologians call 'secondary causes', that is, with interactions within nature. It cannot deal with 'primary causes', that is, the ultimate origin and purpose of nature. An inflationary big-bang cosmology may claim to explain the origin of our universe in terms of a fluctuation in the energy field that physicists refer to as a quantum vacuum. That, however, is still an answer in terms of secondary causes, not primary causes. We are left wondering why there should such a thing as a quantum vacuum, and why it should have the properties which mean that a fluctuation in it can produce an inflationary big-bang." (I'll put aside, for now, the argument that it is meaningless to ask questions in terms of "before" and "after" as regards the genesis of a time-space continuum since those words are inherently based in a conception of linear time - mostly because this argument really only evades the problem, since there still remains the question of "why something, rather than nothing?".) I fail to grasp why positing the existence of a creator god solves the question of primary causes; it seems that it simply pushes them back a step, to the question of what created the creator god itself. This view is in fact so woefully inadequate that I worry about the frequency at which I see it expressed. The gleeful reply that "God has always existed" holds no more water than "the quantum vacuum has always existed". If we accept some timeless precursor state from which the universe as we know it came into being, I still see no reason to assume - and no convincing evidence - that precursor state should be assumed to be sentient! Another quote from Dr. Lucas: "... Prof. Davies expresses the intuition that many people have had down the centuries that an intelligent mind behind a universe in which intelligent life has appeared is a satisfying, and reasonable, primary cause..." I suggest that anyone who attempts to use human intuition as a justification has clearly not encountered the Monty Hall problem, or any of the other similar scenarios where intuition is glaringly and embarrassingly wrong. On a more meaningful note, the existence of observation selection effects, as explained by Nick Bostrom among others, makes any argument that begins with "humans exist therefore..." meaningless. Such arguments as applied to cosmology are also statistically feeble since they are limited to a single sample, i.e. our universe. If we accept the possibility of "baby universes" forming from a sufficiently catastrophic event in a "parent" continuum, and also that the laws of physics applying to those baby universes are not constrained to be identical to those of the parent, we still encounter the problem above; even if we posit an ur-parent whose laws of physics are compatible with eternal existence, the question "why something, rather than nothing?" as applied to that parent still remains. I am inclined to wonder if present-day humans are for some reason inherently incapable of understanding the answer to that fundamental question, or (equally relevantly), incapable of understanding why it is a meaningless question (if it is). Perhaps posthumans will one day sit back and laugh over the fact that we were ever concerned by such issues? Current Mood: amused Current Music: Nine Inch Nails & David Bowie - Warszawa (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 20th, 2005
4:54 pm	Mum just left. She's been visiting me on the weekends to help me not feel so lonely while Laura is trapped in Canada, for which I'm really grateful. We went out and ate at the Saffron Brasserie, which is a really quite good Indian restaurant in a slightly grotty corner of Cambridge, and as usual I wussed out and had minimally spiced King Prawn Malaya. Afterwards - when it stopped raining - we came home and I cooked a dessert from the BBC "Good Food No Fuss" cookbook, which I've been itching to try for ages - peppered pears in red wine syrup. Despite not looking quite as impressive as the photo, it was really quite good. Now I just have to work out what to do with the remaining 200ml of red wine syrup, given that the recipe made 250ml and I only ended up using about 50ml of it... My biochemistry supervisor apparently thinks it's funny to set supervision work 24 hours before the supervision, so I shall not be going to LaserQuest tonight. Instead I shall shrill with glee over the nuances of metabolite localisation. What joy! What splendour! I can't be too angry at him though, since he's invited me to the Rice Exchange dinner in College on Wednesday, which is free and allegedly quite good. Off to work... (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 19th, 2005
10:46 pm	So I have been reflecting on the difference between "transhuman" and "posthuman". I recently finished Bruce Sterling's 'Schismatrix' (you should have read this, by the way, and if you haven't you should correct that right now) which someone described as "a spectacular tour through a posthuman future". I would have described it as a spectacular tour through a transhuman future with one possible cameo appearance by a posthuman. You may ask what the difference is. Perhaps because I had a very tolerant upbringing, I tend to mentally read "human" as synonymous to "person", so in order to be "posthuman" a being has to stop being a person. (If you accept a strict biological definition of human - not that producing one is particularly easy - then any enhancement technology makes you posthuman, not transhuman, as you are "no longer human".) How does an entity stop being a person? One obvious possibility is that the entity dies, but that's definitely not the idea here. We could try for a specific definition of personhood. Because that is usually fraught with errors and hidden assumptions, I tend to use a back-definition: a person is something worthy of human rights. It seems very difficult, however, to imagine how an increase in mental sophistication can lead to a reduction in individual rights, so this simply leads to the conclusion that nothing is posthuman. While this is an instructive ethical observation, it doesn't really help us with our original avenue of enquiry. How else can we define personhood? I don't think any transhumanist would be particularly inclined to agree with the dictionary definitions, which mostly rotate around a physical body, or return to the nearly synonymous "human". Wikipedia, as usual, is slightly more useful; it goes into some depth regarding the debate over what qualifies as personhood, which it suggests mainly revolves around cognitive abilities, actual or potential. (It always cheers me up when I discover that something I have difficulty defining is also something the philosophical community at large has difficulty defining.) It's quite popular in transhumanist literature to invoke the concept of beings "so much more intelligent" than humans that their decision-making processes are beyond our ability to understand and evaluate. I personally am extremely wary of this meme because it smacks painfully of mysticism and the idea of "questions that cannot be answered", and (Gödel notwithstanding) I strongly suspect that any meaningful question has an answer. It's certainly conceivable, even probable, that qualitatively superior intelligence can exist; but I don't think that means its behaviour is inherently unpredictable. Though it would likely be unpredictable in real-time, mind you. Perhaps, however, it does provide us with an interim answer to the question of what is posthuman; the entity in question has to no longer be recognisable to an unenhanced human as an intelligence. Anything less than that is still a brother in arms, to me. Current Mood: puzzled (Comment on this)
Monday, December 6th, 2004
3:06 pm	Yesterday we had some family over for Christmas lunch. We did a three-course meal with red pepper & tomato soup, turkey and trimmings, and then a choice of ginger chocolate mousse or raspberry rose pavlova. I love cooking complicated meals. It was pretty good fun actually, and as usual our incredibly generous siblings showered us with household presents... mechanical can opener... spice racks... smoothie maker... we love them. I think next year I'd like to do a Divali meal and celebration. Current Mood: pleased Current Music: David Usher - Too Close to the Sun (Comment on this)
Friday, December 3rd, 2004
3:05 pm	Trans comment: Aubrey made the BBC News website. That was faster than I expected... :D Current Mood: optimistic Current Music: Alanis Morissette - Knees of my Bees (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 1st, 2004
12:29 am	I feel fantastically techie. I'm currently sitting on a computer case, surrounded by a tangle of wires, looking across my legs at a monitor, while the actual PC whose monitor I'm looking at is sitting some distance away under a table, and everything is working together. Beautiful. It looks more confusing than it sounds. I'm such a geek. (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 28th, 2004
8:03 pm	Trans comment: The ExtroBritannia event was pretty cool. It was somewhat more informal than expected, due to the lack of a projector, but Aubrey coped well. I think people underestimate the importance of simply spending time around sane people (e.g. those who realise that aging is really not a very good thing, and we should be doing something about it, sooner rather than later) for restoring one's flagging morale. (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 27th, 2004
9:37 pm	Trans comment: I'm going to an ExtroBritannia event tomorrow. Aubrey and I talked about what other improvements to the human condition, other than the obvious anti-senescent ones, we'd like to see. I think having reflected on this a bit more, my favourite remains respirocytes, but I'd place the ability to do nerve-electronic interfacing well enough to read and write the entire sensorium as a close second. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004
5:06 pm	Maple status: Level 23. I made a mistake this morning when I defamed a scriptkiddy on Pig Beach... of course, being a scriptkiddy, he had a bunch of other characters to bring on to defame me out of spite. Oh my poor tattered fame... (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 16th, 2004
1:33 pm	I walked out of a Developmental Biology practical today. Why? This will sound ridiculous coming from me, but I don't feel willing to kill things (even fly larvae) for no reason other than to illustrate a point. It would be entirely different if they were being killed for research, but when the point can be made just as well from a textbook... no. Maple comment: Look, it's me. Still level 22. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 15th, 2004
6:45 pm	Laura is obsessed with scarves after reading Dominic Deegan. I should get a Trinity scarf... Maple comment: 22nd level - hey, I went blue. And I have a black Pao bottom, which has gold detail and hence the total effect is quite similar to the blue-gold rogue target... (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 12th, 2004
11:34 pm	Still sick! *fumes* Laura is picking her Open University courses for next year. She's thinking of reading "Philosophy and the Human Situation" as well as one of the Psychology courses. The Philosophy course looks interesting though. I might have to steal her textbooks again. I did some sketching today. My foot, G W Bush, a nun from Sudan, a pronghorn antelope, some symbology, and a collection of stickmen in various states of motion. Some day, once I have sufficient talent to be able to look back on these early attempts with good humour as opposed to vague chagrin, I'll upload my sketch collection... Trans comment: Someone asked me why I'm working on life extension, rather than on the Singularity, since said event should render the former pursuit unnecessary. First I should note that I was very enthusiastic about the Singularity when I first encountered the idea. At the time I was intending to work in uploading research anyway, so there was a clear relation there; and yet I ended up abandoning it to work on life extension instead. Why? Aside from the irritation I feel at the level of cybermysticism and cultishness that already surrounds the Singularity meme, there's basically three reasons: 1. There isn't a plan or a clear estimate other than Eliezer's optimistic target date. I don't like risking my life on serendipity, and I'd rather be involved with a less glamorous but probably more reliable technology. 2. The idea of exponentiating intelligence relies on the assumption that intelligence builds linearly. I seriously doubt this is the case; it seems very improbable that, for (crude) example, it would not take more effort (hence, more designer time) to add 20 IQ points to someone with an IQ of 150 than it would take to add the same 20 points to someone with an IQ of 80. While this is only a feeling, it's a remarkably practical seeming one. I would in fact go so far as to suggest that the difficulty of the task probably scales faster than the capacity of the designer, and hence that increasingly more intelligent AIs will find it more difficult, not less difficult, to further enhance themselves. 3. Even if a flash point ("Singularity") is possible, it is quite possibly overly anthropocentric to assume that it's within useful (= my lifespan) reach of unenhanced human minds. Quite aside from these more or less rational points, I have a niggling feeling that a singular SysOp is not compatible with my desire for personal deimorphosis. Current Mood: artistic Current Music: Splender - I Think God Can Explain (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 11th, 2004
11:51 am	I still feel sick. >: Khantar status: I crafted that screenshot. A quick note on crafted screenshots; this wasn't generated by a program, it was created by me working by hand in Photoshop. It's intended more as a design aid than anything else. Nonetheless it looks something like how the end product will look. Think of it as a concept sketch. The enemy health bars are "fuzzy". The degree of fuzziness is dependent on your character's perception stat and your knowledge (lore) of the enemy type. The general maxim of "no numbers" still applies - however perceptive you are, you'll never know that the enemy has 31 hitpoints left out of 52 - but with good understanding of the enemy you can get a good idea of how much health it has left. There are no balance bars on this shot, I'll do another one with them later. Current Mood: exhausted Current Music: Alanis Morissette - 21 Things I Want in a Lover (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 10th, 2004
11:53 am	And with a flash of thunder the LJ was reborn. I am feeling horrible. Not only am I sick to my stomach, but whatever is inhabiting that cavity is also attacking my throat and I suspect the vapours are poisoning my brain (it certainly hurts...). And of course I'm missing lectures for the pleasure of feeling like crap. *sigh* I received a letter from the Inland Revenue today. Is it wrong to feel oddly grown up when the taxman first contacts you? Maple status: 19th level. Looking for new hunting grounds, due to a plague of lame wizards killing all the green mushrooms. Khantar status: I had a good dream about the combat UI. Might craft a screenshot today, if I feel up to it. More likely that I won't, though, since as previously noted, I feel crap. Trans comment: I would describe myself as a poet-scientist. Doesn't that sound like something out of David Zindell... I think that the ability to dream is the most valuable aspect of human consciousness. Current Mood: sick Current Music: Radiohead - Morning Bell (2 Comments |Comment on this)