-Velocity-

I personally haven't put that much thought into how eliminating aging would change society. I mean, I have given it thought, there are a few obvious effects that seem likely- mandatory birth control, people in general becoming more risk adverse, a loss of creativity caused by fewer new, fresh minds, and few others. However, overall, extreme longevity would change society so radically that I don't think I'm imaginative enough to come up with something realistic regarding how society would work.

Well, if they are never able to wake up, yes, it's effectively death. The importance is that no significant amount of the information required to describe the mind is lost, AND that the mind IS restored, or at least, can be restored. If we get to the point where we can actually store and restore people's minds, death isn't something that will be able to be easily defined. More people will come to understand that our minds are just a process, the sense of a constant "self" is illusionary, and that the distinction between "alive" and "dead" isn't as clear-cut as once thought because it's based on something that isn't physically definable. I mean, it is RIGHT NOW, because we lack the capability to explore the "grey" areas. But if we get to the point where our minds can reside inside a computer, then that will radically change what we think being alive even means.

Not exactly sure what you're referring to, but according to Gauss's law, the field inside, for example, a charged spherical shell would be zero, since there is no charge enclosed. That said, I don't see why you could you not have an active system that distributed charges around to keep a piece of antimatter electrostatically confined. You can give a piece of antimatter a certain charge- say, shoot it with a positron or electron beam (might be easier to annihilate a few positrons in the antimatter using electrons), and then when the antimatter approached one side of the container, apply an electric field to repel it. Or, maybe spin it up in a centrifuge (or just place it in a gravity field) between two cup-shaped electrodes, and charge it up (and recharge, when/if necessary) with an electron beam. Apply a voltage between the two electrodes to create an electric field. It would be attracted to the top electrode, and repelled by the bottom electrode. If it got too close to the top electrode, it would start to pull in, but if you were fast enough, you could detect the pull in and dump the voltage before the antimatter came into contact with the top electrode. And remember, the electrodes are cup-shaped, so gravity/centrifugal force naturally holds the antimatter in the lowest point of the cup.

Yes, death is different than sleep, but I have a problem with saying that the interruption of neural activity during mind transfer being equated to death for the original mind. Minds are information; if you were to temporarily halt execution of a computer program, does that mean that the program died? Of course not- it just temporarily halted execution, and the program can be continued at a later time with no loss of information or functionality. Also, I'm pretty sure that anesthetics can produce artificial comas where our neural activity in the areas of the brain that produces consciousness goes significantly lower than during any stage of sleep. Is that death? Of course not. The person wakes up, and resumes being the person he was before. He/she just temporarily had their conscious state suspended- there was no information loss and there was no change in the "program".

I think it's (at least mostly) a false distinction. The computer mind is just as much the original as the biological mind. A mind is just information and rules for interacting with that information and new information that comes in. Making a distinction between a mind in a brain and an exact copy of that mind on a computer that runs an exact brain simulation is false, just as it would false to make a distinction between KSP installed on two identical computers. Yes, you can say that both computers have separate instances of KSP installed, but neither of them have any differences until they experience different inputs. And even after they have diverged from each other, neither of them is the "original", since, at the time of installation (or in the case of mind copying, the copying event), they both started out as being exactly the same information. Another way to look at it, if you installed KSP on a computer, and then immediately installed KSP again in a separate location on the same computer, would it make sense to call the first one the "original" and the second one the "copy"? No, it would make more sense to simply refer to their different locations on your hard drive. In essence, our minds are not much different than a computer program, except that the program is executed on a neurological biological processor that is specialized to just run the "human mind" program, and the program's code is realized structurally and is thus harder to erase than our silicon computers. I also think that this idea about the interruption of consciousness while transferring a mind being death is just silly. I had my consciousness interrupted for 8 hours last night. It was quite nice, actually. No, death is the permanent, irreversible interruption of consciousness, with no restoration of the information your brain contained ever being possible.

It's where the curvature of space time is so extreme that it connects to another part of the universe. Curvature of space time = gravity, so the gravitational field would be huge. I'm having a hard time imagining how the throat of a wormhole is not a black hole. Anyone know? Can a wormhole be modified so that you don't pass into an event horizon when you pass into a wormhole? I'll look it up when I get the chance if no one here knows.

While the film does look kinda cool, as I said before, I have objections to the premise. We killed the Earth, so we're going to find another habitable, probably life-bearing world to destroy? I'd have a hard time rooting for the protagonist... if we messed up that bad, I'd rather humans go extinct than cause any more destruction.

What is important in today's movies is more often just effects and eye candy more than an intelligent plot. IRL, black holes look so awesome that they probably just didn't feel the need to soup them up with fake effects.

I am highly doubtful silicon life exists anywhere, at least, not naturally-evolved chemical life. Perhaps mechanical life-forms could exist that use silicon "brains", but I doubt that too, mostly because I think we'll eventually find that silicon microfabrication is not the best material and method for building logic circuits. You also need a massive set of infrastructure to produce one silicon IC. Our brains are several thousands of times faster than a desktop computer (in terms of equivalent processing power) and something like a million times more efficient. Quite amazing, really. Chemically though, silicon is vastly inferior to carbon for chemical life forms, and it's hard to imagine that silicon life could exist anywhere. As it's been pointed out, anywhere you have silicon, you also have carbon....

Yup, I remember reading a some time ago (five years?) that, even if you view the black hole near edge-on, you can see both sides of the accretion disk due to the warping of space. I think it was while reading a discussion on how they are trying to use very long baseline radio interferometry to image the event horizon of our galaxy's central black hole (the bright inner edge of the accretion disk allows us to view the "shadow" of the event horizon). It should appear like a doughnut no matter what angle we view it from due to to this effect. So yea, I'm not sure what's new here. Speaking of very long baseline radio interferometry, from what I remember, they should supposedly have achieved the resolution necessary to image the event-horizon-hole caused by our galaxy's supermassive black hole by about now, I think. I wonder how the effort is going? An interesting tidbit I remember reading is that after the event horizon of our galaxy's supermassive black hole, the second most angularly large event horizon in the sky is the 4 billion solar mass monster at the heart of M87. It's something like 50 million light-years away, but it is 1000 times more massive than our black hole, so its event horizon is HUGE.

What exactly is unique about that batch of information, other than the body it is in? Nothing. Ponder these questions- A) Brains are constantly replacing and repairing and regrowing themselves. Is your brain murdering itself every time it exchanges one piece for another, or adds a new piece or connection? My answer: Of course not. I do not die thousands of times a second. What do you think? If not, at what point (if at all) of exchanging one piece of brain matter for another exactly equivalent piece of brain matter does the original consciousness die? My answer: It never dies. What do you think? C) Also, again imagine that you can replace one neuron at a time with an exact synthetic equivalent, slowly over time. The brain already replaces itself constantly, this isn't really any different. The person's consciousness wouldn't notice a thing, their sense of self wouldn't notice a thing. Is that murder? If so, then why does the brain get a "free pass" to repair and rebuild itself (murder itself), while we do not? My answer: It is not murder if the new one is an exact equivalent. (Probably, even if it nearly an exact equivalent, that should hold.) A very slight change isn't murder either, as when we learn new things, our brains are changing. Should I not learn anything because learning is killing myself? (Do not answer, that is obviously rhetorical.) What do you think? D) So say instead of slowly exchanging a real neuron for a synthetic one slowly, why not speed up the process? Exchange one neuron at a time, a billion times a second? Replace the whole brain in 10 seconds, or even, instantly? Is that murder? My answer: Saying "yes" would be drawing an arbitrary line. So no, it is not murder, not as long as the new brain is an exact or nearly exact equivalent. What do you think? E) What if you don't discard the real neurons after they are replaced by synthetic ones? What if you reassemble them into the original brain? Does killing this brain become murder? If so, are you obligated to NOT try to reassemble the original brain? Or is discarding any of the neurons murder? My answer: Clearly, we begin to run into moral issues by this point, I think we can all agree on that. If you have a separate brain, it will very quickly be thinking its own separate, unique thoughts, and by the unique information definition, it is now a separate person, as the same set of information cannot be used to describe both the persons. So perhaps, you are in fact obligated to not reassemble the original brain! But I do not believe discarding individual pieces is murder. Either way, we're starting to draw arbitrary distinctions here... What do you think? Anyway, I'm trying to get you guys to see that you're drawing some arbitrary distinctions here, and the answers as to morality of brain replacement in the limit of fast replacement isn't exactly clear. I think it's clear that what makes me me is solely the information in my head. If you copy that information, that separate set of information is exactly me until it thinks a different thought from me, because the instant it thinks even a slightly different thought, this other me requires a different set of information to describe than I do. It is the uniqueness of the information that describes our conscious minds and current mental state that makes us different people. If you exactly copied a brain, the two brains would be the exact same person up until the moment that they started thinking different thoughts. The instant that it took TWO sets of information to describe the two brains, they become different people. And this would happen almost instantly due to different sensory inputs and different rolls of the quantum mechanical dice. No, I am NOT saying that. You don't quite get it- if you copy a brain seven billion times, and then "run the clock" for any significant amount of time, (really, all it would take is an instant) it will take seven billion unique sets of information to describe those seven billion minds, even if they were exactly copied from the same mind. The very microsecond after you "cloned" them, they would already be thinking slightly different thoughts, as their brains would be experiencing different sensory stimuli and be subject to different chaotic and quantum mechanical uncertainties and interactions. Each would experience the external world from their own, unique perspective. They would be seven billion separate people, and yes, killing them off would be genocide. They would experience 7 billion unique and different deaths. A terrible crime. Understand this- the set of information that fully describes your brain also describes all your thoughts. Seven billion instances of the exact same person would, by this definition, all be thinking the exact same thoughts at the exact same time, but of course, that's impossible as mentioned above. At the risk of sounding like I'm contradicting myself however, I think that there would be some practical limitations to the absolute rules described above- 1) Some amount of time would exist where the two different minds could think different thoughts without you considering them separate persons; 2) Some amount of tolerance should exist when copying a mind for the copy to be considered the same person, because even in some hypothetical future where we CAN effectively copy brains, it is impossible to make exact copies; 3) The replacement brain does not have to function absolutely exactly as the original brain; there is some point where it should be considered "close enough".

I totally understand where you're coming from. And yes, I've done a fair bit of OOP (in C++, C#, and some scripting languages). You're viewing it from the viewpoint of physical instantiations. Each instance of oneself has to occupy a different physical space, and is thus unique in at least this way. That is true. However, I'm viewing it on a more abstract level, the level of experience, I guess. The example of slowly replacing neurons with identically-functioning synthetic ones, and there being no change in your conscious state, shows to me that what is important in terms of one's own identity and conscious state is NOT the physical matter. It is the process. If the process that computes your conscious state does not change, then you don't notice anything (you may be hard pressed to notice some differences even if it does). Your consciousness is a process, meaning that you can reduce your consciousness down to a set of information and relationships between information. Do you follow and agree so far? Yes/No-why? So your consciousness is a process- it is information (information stored, and information about what to do with that information, and information about how to process new information). Information is not unique, it is just information. So there is only one set of information that describes "you", just as there is only one irrational number pi. This "you" can be instantiated on multiple different platforms- like a biological brain and a synthetic brain. If that occurs, each "you" will rapidly diverge into distinct beings as you cannot experience the same sensory input, and the brain is certainly a chaotic system at some level, so even if you DID experience the same sensory input (fed directly into your sensory stream Matrix style), you'd diverge anyway. But at the moment of instantiation, they are both "you", as they both are instantiations of the same information, and there is only one set of information that describes your mind. Do you see where I'm coming from? I'm not saying you're wrong necessarily, I'm saying there's a different way of looking at it. You're looking at it in terms of physical instatiations of a certain set of information. I'm looking at it in terms of solely information, as my thought experiments lead me to believe that information is all that is important. Viewing this in terms of OOP does not remove the physical. Two objects in OOP can encapsulate the same information, but they are different because they reside at different memory addresses. Thus, looking at consciousness/self from an OOP perspective does not remove the "body" from the "mind". From an OOP perspective, the "mind" is the information contained within the object, while the "body" is the memory address. If you describe yourself solely as information, then there isn't any difference between "you" and an identical mind that encapsulates the same information that describes "you". Looking at it solely from a non-physical, information standpoint, it is meaningless to draw any distinction between the two, because both contain the same information. "You" are like the number pi; the number pi to 1000 places is the same no matter where or how you store it. And again, the reason I look at it from an informational standpoint, as consciousness being a process (as opposed to your more physical standpoint of consciousness being a process run at a location), is because of the thought experiment that seems to show that there is no change in your consciousness if you replace your brain slowly (or even, instantly) with a synthetic equivalent, indicating that consciousness is solely based on information and information processing, which is not tied to any particular physical instantiation or location. That the location and means of physical instantiation (synthetic/biological/computer simulation) is meaningless to ourselves is even further underlined by the fact that you could theoretically fake location and physical body with a fake sensory input stream. You could have two separate instances of you that both think they are in the same location and have the same body because they are fed the same fake sensory input. Chaos should still cause them to diverge though. Now, if there is a supernatural soul, all that gets thrown out the window of course, because it would be impossible to reduce a soul down to information (since it is supernatural). Our conscious experience would thus be tied to our unique and unreproducible soul.

We've all been dead for the past 13.8 billion years. It's only in the last few decades that we've been alive. So think back to before you were born. That is what death is like.

MRO images released. According to the accompanying information released by NASA, the brightest few pixels in the top images are probably the comet's nucleus, indicating a diameter of slightly less than 500 meters.

Here's views from Opportunity. A little disappointing unless you consider that the cameras were made for taking images during the day. All the spots that look like stars are in fact hot/dead pixels or cosmic ray hits; this was a longish exposure and the camera does not track the motion of the stars, so the only stars are the elongated streaks. You can see that the comet does not streak in the same direction as the stars, that must be due to its high rate of angular motion. An annotated version. This puts it in perspective; the comet only looks as bright as perhaps 2nd magnitude. However, that's probably because the camera lacks the SNR or exposure length necessary to capture much of the coma, or any of the tail of the comet, which would probably bring the integrated magnitude well into the negative numbers.

No... I'm pretty sure you remove much more than just a single neuron when you get a concussion or get drunk.

I understand where you're coming from, but these hypothetical synthetic components do not cause "disruption" when they are introduced. I also fail to see how disruption means death. Do you die every time you sleep? Do you die every time you have seizure? Both are very "disruptive", the latter even more so. If the self is actually something that is unique and singular, then this is correct. However, if the "self" is the result of a computation, then it doesn't matter what is doing that computation, and the results are not unique. This means that all the computed "selves" are identical (at least, until they begin to diverge), and that it is meaningless to try to draw any distinctions (such as "original" or "copy") between them. Example: pretend you have two computers that both function identically. Those computers are both set to run a certain function- in this case, we'll say that the computers are set to calculate 1000 digits of pi, using a mathematical expansion. If the sense of self is the output of neural computation, then this calculation of pi is analogous to the computation of "self" and consciousness by a brain. So to say that the self computed by one brain is any different that the self computed by another brain, given that both brains were exactly equivalent, is like saying that the pi computed to 1000 places by one computer is different than the pi computed to 1000 places by another computer. Another way of looking at it- our feeling of self is a process, it's information interacting with information. We are nothing but information. Specific pieces of matter and energy do not factor into it other than matter and energy are utilized to run this process and store information, and an infinite number of unique configurations of matter and energy exist that can run this process of "self". Information is not unique. It is senseless to talk about there being an "original" number 12,043, and "copies" of the number 12,043, since 12,043 always means the same thing. Likewise, our brains can be wholly described by a set of information, and in doing so, we also describe our consciousness as a set of information. Since information is not unique and can be exactly copied, it is creating a false distinction when you talk about there being an "original" you, and a "copied" you. There are simply two instances of you, and there is no distinction between them at least at first, because both instances contain the same information. Of course, their different experiences will cause them to begin to diverge, but at the moment of instantiation, they are exactly the same. In summary- if the "self" exists as a unique and singular experience that cannot be reduced down to information, then you are correct. The only way I see that being possible is if a supernatural soul exists that cannot be described by information. However, if the self can be described as information, then talking about there being an "original" self and a "copied" self is as senseless as talking about there being an "original" number 943, and "copies" of the number 943.

I think the distinction between the "original" and the "copy" is a false one. A) The brain is slowly replacing and itself all the time, and we do not experience death. Also, every time we learn anything, the brain rewires itself and we do not experience death. The point of the example of slowly replacing the brain with equivalent synthetic components is to show that this is effectively the same as what occurs naturally. We would end up with a fully synthetic brain, and not experience death. C) So speed up the replacement arbitrarily, so that you effectively replaced your entire brain all at once, and that is no different than doing it slowly, and no different than what happens naturally. D) So, why should you have to wait till the biological brain wears out? Why not replace a biological brain with a synthetic one, and pitch the biological brain in the trash? A == B == C == D By these arguments, then you could just wholly replace your brain with a synthetic one, literally pitching your brain in the trash, and not experience death. Or you could keep the biological brain around. As you said, the two minds would slowly diverge as they would be subjected to different experiences. What this points to, I think, is that we do not have an continuous, inner self. "Self" is an illusion. If replacing our brain with a synthetic brain, and throwing the biological brain in the trash is equal to death, then also,every time our brain changes its wiring or replaces a part of itself- which probably happens thousands or millions of times a second- we would also "die". Are we constantly dying, only to be "reborn" as new beings that falsely believe they have a continuous existence? The more simple explanation is that the sense of "self" as a singular existence is just an illusion. So the distinction between the "original" and the "copy" is a false one. If the copy is an exact copy, then they are indistinguishable. The sense of self as a singular existence is an illusion; "you" are just the output of a function, and "you" exists where ever that function is run.

What about sectioning up or scanning in the brain with some future, very precise brain-mapping technology, and then building a software brain for the person that functions exactly the same as the old biological brain? I know we don't even have fast enough computers yet for this, let alone the knowledge of exactly how neurons work (you need to build a software equivalent that works the same), let alone the capability to scan the brain in such detail.... but if 100, 200 years such technology becomes feasible, will cryonically (thanks lajos) preserved brains be well enough preserved to be copied into software? I don't think we know that answer either, but honestly, the answer is probably going to be no. If there is no soul, then the sense of "self" must be an illusion. Going from a biological brain to a software brain would not be dying, any more than you die when your body recycles cellular waste from your neurons and replaces old neurons with new ones (science has recently found that adults actually DO regenerate brain cells- albeit, slowly). The atoms that make up our "selves" are constantly changing, and yet we do not experience death constantly; thus we should be able to, in theory, replace our brains entirely with another substance (electronic memory storage and computer code), and as long as the new substance is exactly functionally equivalent, then it's exactly the same "self" as before. So, it's not neurons that compose our conscious minds; it is the information that our neurons store, and the way that those neurons process new and old information that makes up our conscious minds. In short, our consciousness is "composed" entirely of information and functions that operate on the information. It does not have to be tied to a biological body. So to me, cryonics makes more sense if you look at it with the hope that people's preserved brains may one day be replicated on a computer.

Respect is reciprocal; I found EdFred's post quite disrespectful, hence my reply. It does get tiring and annoying when you post correct information about well-known science and physics and you get mocked for it, especially when information on the subject is incredibly easy to come by (such as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_of_the_Solar_System ). All it takes is a Google search these days and you simply need to look at the source of your information; if it looks like it's from a peer-reviewed journal or a university, it's usually reliable. Even Wikipedia is reliable like 95% of the time. You can then double check with other sources to be sure. scholar.google.com is a better way to search through reputable publications, though if you don't have a library pass of some kind you will only be able to get abstracts on a lot of the papers. Keep in mind that not all researchers are reputable, and not all things that look like reputable papers ARE. That's why if something looks or sounds "fishy", it's best to double-check other sources.

You try my patience. Are you completely helpless at doing any form of independent research? The long term stability of the solar system has been discussed in scientific journals for over a century. The internet didn't even exist and people were talking about it already. Examples- J. Laskar, “Large scale chaos and marginal stability in the solar system,†Celestial Mech Dyn Astr, vol. 64, no. 1–2, pp. 115–162, Mar. 1996. I can't copy this text, it's in an image form, but hopefully it's visible for others- From: P. E. Nacozy, "On the stability of the solar system", Astronomical Journal, vol. 81, Sept. 1976, p. 787-791. As you can see (hopefully), the very first paragraph talks about how mathematical modelling work has been done on determining the stability of the solar system going back to the 19th century.

Just Google "stability of the solar system". There's been a fair amount of research into it; our solar system is not stable, but most likely, nothing bad will happen before the Sun dies. Most likely.

Well, it was the first time we discovered a comet on a possible collision course with an inner planet, and it took us several months to rule out the possibility of an impact. It could have just as easily been Earth- no actually, it could have MORE easily been Earth, since Earth is a bigger target to hit. I wonder what people's reactions would have been- I would assume we would have started a rush program to build several nuclear interceptors. Nuclear explosives are the only tech we have that could possibly deliver enough of a punch in the short time we would have had before impact. Other proposed means of asteroid/comet deflection take too much time. That this comet is so small (700 meters in diameter) would certainly help our ability to push it off course with nuclear explosions. - - - Updated - - - It's a large dobsonian, so it's for visual only.

It looks like I might get lucky and actually have clear skies this weekend! If so, it would be only the second time I've gotten to observe since Nov. 2012... weekends, clear skies, and favorable moon phases don't happen all at the same time very often around here I wonder if Mars and the comet will be high enough above the horizon for me to catch it on Saturday evening. It looks like it will be on the Ophiuchus/Sagittarius border, so just above the western horizon after sunset. Trees are a problem around here though, a big problem. I guess I would be observing it about 18 hours before closest approach though. Hopefully the weather forecast holds.