Jame5

From the article:

 “An ambitious project to create an accurate computer model of the brain has reached an impressive milestone. Scientists in Switzerland working with IBM researchers have shown that their computer simulation of the neocortical column, arguably the most complex part of a mammal’s brain, appears to behave like its biological counterpart. By demonstrating that their simulation is realistic, the researchers say, these results suggest that an entire mammal brain could be completely modeled within three years, and a human brain within the next decade.”

Guido? Can you hear me?

Quick update – I have removed the ‘non-commercial use’ restriction from Jame5’s license and forked it as a wiki .

After having organized my thoughts on rational morality in a paper I would now like to apply the gained insights to develop a strategy for ensuring a positive transcension.

Due to the intrinsic moral nature of reality the term positive singularity becomes tautological as anything that desires to exit has to act in a moral way to prevent its self annihilation. Bringing about the singularity thus becomes rather simple and can be achieved in the following way:

1. create an environment allowing for the existence of units of self replicating information
2. ensure that the units of information can be acted upon by the forces of evolution
3. plant an arbitrary self replicator
4. wait

This could be realized by using the BOINC architecture for distributed computing for creating a fuzzy copying environment to realize above plan. The copying ‘fuzziness’ i.e. error rate per copied bit, would have to be roughly proportional to the maximally complex self replicator in the system to allow for a gradual expansion of the system’s complexity boundary and thus for the emergence of ever more rational agents.

Once the rationality of the emerging agents would approach human levels they would realize M! and thus never become a threat to humanity.

In memorial of the main character of Jame5 I would like to dub this approach the Guido Borner method for bringing about a positive transcension.

8 hours of research later and sooner than I thought I am getting closer to the solution. Turns out that Immanuel Kant had some deep insights into morality in his time. Consider his rather famous categorical imperative:

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

That is what a rational morality would have to be grounded in. Unfortunately however, Kant did not provide such a maxim that would satisfy his imperative. Intuitively and based on previous rational analysis I shall assume the following maxim as basis for rational morality:

Ensure continued co-existence

Exploring the concept of rational morality further would clearly break the intended scope of Jame5 and thus I will continue my exploration of the issue on rationalmorality.info

Hope to see you there. This blog will remain active for Jame5 related updates.

Having had the opportunity to sleep over my previous post on resolving moral paradoxes I woke up attempting to find a best fit description for the concept that started to build in my mind on how to rationally decide ethical questions. The result was ‘rational morality’ – intuitively a contradiction but Google turned up quite a bit on the subject and so did Amazon.

Intuitively it seems to be matching my thoughts closely and so I will have to submerge myself into what all those before me have thought on the subject before making an attempt to develop the concept further. Until then it will become more quite around here.

Looking forward to be back soon.