Thursday, October 19, 2017

Mind Augmentation

In an Isaac Arthur video about Mind Augmentation there was a point about having a perfect memory which allows you to re-live memories from past and one of the downsides that come with it: imagine if every time you saw a blue sedan you will remember vividly the time you crashed your blue sedan and were stuck in it for 20 agonizing minutes til the firemen cut you free

I think the problem would be much larger than that, imagine you re-lived that 20 minutes of agony, where does this take place? Or rather when does this re-living take place?
-At the present time you are experiencing it, thus creating a memory of re-living a memory, and you'd be stuck in a vicious circle. And even if it didn't (if the mind didn't store new information while it's being accessed), you'd miss the present and always lived in the past, because everything remind you of something.
Present moment creates the past, so it should have the priority, though when it's shitty it's better to remember something better from the past. Maybe if the memories could only be accessed at will (which they currently aren't, you sometimes just find yourself thinking about something or you just happen to remember something.)

But there is a reason why the mind works like it does, why memories fade away, why it always stores the highlights and why it uses generalizations. To put it simply: you can't fit the entire world/universe inside of your head, that's why it is on the outside. Learning every single detail of the most mundane object would require a lifetime, the information is too vast (take a microscope to it and see) so it's just better to label it under something simple and to dismiss it as such if it's not important at the moment at hand.

I personally don't understand the need of humans to store information in separate places, I mean the information is stored on the object itself, the object itself is its information, there's no need to store a simplified copy of that information anywhere else. Let's say you took a photo of a chair, you now have stored/saved a very crude copy of that chair for some purpose, what use does this information serve when the chair ceases to exist? You have a reference to something that doesn't exist, what use is that? You can't sit on it. And manufacturing a replica out of it wouldn't be the same, there's bound to be some information loss, since a camera can't record the entire being of the chair perfectly. And even if it did, if the chair was that important why not embrace it as such rather than replicating it and embracing the replica? (EDIT: Photography as an art is a bit different: the object is the photo itself, though it's still about saving a moment for a certain perspective)

Another thing to consider is that the rarity and uniqueness of a thing is the exact thing that makes it valuable, having an overabundance of it will exhaust it from its value, it's like people want a world/life that didn't have to value. Maybe that's because of the pain of losing something valuable..

Like the laws of thermodynamics dictate: Everything has a price, even augmenting the mind. Having something more will cost something elsewhere. Maybe life wouldn't be as enjoyable as before, maybe the brain requires more energy to process things better(I know I get hungry when I'm solving problems and puzzles, so does the CPU of my computer), thus we might have a global food shortage because of it. = Having more requires more, kinda self-explanatory when you think of it.

But then again what else are we supposed to do?

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