These are two extracts from my personal diary whilst I was travelling towards Manaus (Brazil) on a 4 day boat. I didnt have much to do other than think and write so I started thinking about the future of humanity.
I always put the song I am listening to or that is in my head when I am writing so it helps me to remember it in the future. I really recommend it to anyone that writes a diary!
26.05.19 Boat to Manaus day #2
Vacaciones (Wisin)
How goes it?
Actually had a really nice first full day on the boat its been very relaxing. Spent about 4 hours drawing the map from work people which is going to take ****ing ages! Been chatting to Kirk, an English guy who is really good to chat with as hes very smart, loves debating and doesn’t just agree with everything I say.
We were debating about time travel which I had been thinking about recently and decided I thought it wasn’t possible to go back in time – firstly as people would have already travelled back here, and secondly if you travelled back you wouldn’t be able to return to the point you had come from as you would have travelled to a parallel universe or reality.
Anyway, he put forward the idea that if you could take a snapshot of exactly how all the atoms are arranged and then you could have a computer rearrange them to how they were at X point in time you could theoretically go back to that time.
I explained that you wouldn´t really be time travelling though and that was more like a simulation – he disagreed. If you were to change the atoms like that though what would happen to your consciousness?
That would somehow have to be stored on a computer & reprogrammed into you. Would that still make you the same person? We still have no idea what consciousness is and how it works. We don’t know what happens when you die and what causes us to have it.
I proposed to him the idea that we wouldn’t need to actually time travel as we could have it all simulated. Once the atoms and their placements are stored like snapshots permanently on computers you could send someone into a simulation of the world with these exact atoms.
If the conditions were set right then that person could live in that world. I.E go to point X in time and basically live as an Avatar in that world. All of the other atoms would exist and then continue to move in whatever way they were interacted with and any alternative path could be followed. The thing that would be lacking would be the consciousness of others.
However, with big data going the way it is the Google / FB will have enough data to make realistic avatars of everyone that is on Social Media. Even people that aren´t on Social media will still have their traits and habits recorded by Google based on their spending, as well as texts to and from other people who are connected, medical history etc.
We are not that far away from having all of our data owned and so it is not unfathomable to think that every aspect of our life will be stored as data somewhere.
People could literally live in virtual alternative realities as Avatars. This is just the first stage.
If parallel universes actually exist – and I think that they do – then using the atoms snapshot theory you could transport yourself to another moment, have yourself programmed in, and then have your consciousness transported across.
If you were able to just copy your atoms and consciousness into another screenshot then your original self wouldn´t have to die and could continue in the original reality whilst your new self and new reality would continue along together.
You would be two people with two realities. For this to work you would need to somehow fire out these atoms into some part of space, so that a new universe was created.
Argh this is so ****ing complicated
27.05.19 Boat to Manaus day #3
La Guitarra (Los Autenticos Decadentes)
Chatted again to Kirk this morning about our future and what will become of the future humans. I explained to him the problem in transferring consciousness & my simulation theory.
We then started talking about how in the, (not so distant), future we will have absolutely no need for bodies as they are just vessels for our brains. At some point our brains and consciousness will have no use for bodies and as we become more and more part of the, “cloud”, then our consciousness and thoughts will just become online.
We would all be linked to the same system and so there would be absolutely no individualism left, and we would be a collective entity. Arguably nowadays there is no real individuality.
We are completely dependent on technology and infrastructure and the individual is completely irrelevant. A not so distant world could involve robots/cyborgs doing everything manual then our collective brain processing everything and controlling it all.
Kirk made a good point that our brains actually work very slow and so if we can discover how to replicate or copy consciousness and then transfer it to a man made brain then you could have technology such as fibre optic which is sending signals at the speed of light and so our “computing” power would just become insanely powerful and quick.
It would be just an increasingly quick learning brain and our normal problems with science could theoretically be solved in seconds if we use the logic that our calculations will be proportionately quicker to the speed increase of the neurons. Crazy ****ing stuff.
Also crazy that the nerds that thought the Star Trek and things like that have already thought of this stuff probably. Before tech revolution even begun.
We were thinking about when you sit there and try to remember something and you are struggling and eventually it comes to you. What is actually happening here? Is your brain firing neurons trying to recall the memory? Is there something blocking it? Imagine if there were no time delay though.
There would be no, “working out”, time. You would just instantly arrive at the conclusion. We would be able to read things instantly and probably arrive at every conclusion instantly. So long as the brains had the power to process all this info – which they presumably would, then you would become your own supercomputer. I want to write this into blog I think – get some people think about what might happen.
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