Mind Augmentation
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- Опубліковано 11 лют 2025
- Today we will be looking at Mind Augmentation, the basic concepts, methods, ethical concerns, and possible pitfalls entailed.
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Cover Art by Jakub Grygier: www.artstation...
Graphics Team:
Edward Nardella
Jarred Eagley
Justin Dixon
Katie Byrne
Kris Holland of Mafic Stufios: www.maficstudios.com
Misho Yordanov
Pierre Demet
Sergio Botero: www.artstation...
Stefan Blandin
Script Editing:
Andy Popescu
Connor Hogan
Edward Nardella
Eustratius Graham
Gregory Leal
Jefferson Eagley
Luca de Rosa
Mark Warburton
Michael Gusevsky
Mitch Armstrong
MolbOrg
Naomi Kern
Philip Baldock
Sigmund Kopperud
Steve Cardon
Tiffany Penner
Music:
AJ Prasad, "Cold Shadows"
Lee Rosevere, "It's such a beautiful day"
Kai Engel, "Morbid Imagination"
Sergey Cheremisinov, "Jump in Infinity"
Markus Junnikkala, "A Memory of Earth"
Kai Engel, "Crying Earth"
Sergey Cheremisinov, "Labyrinth"
Brandon Liew, "Into the Storm"
Nods along in quiet contemplation as the video begins.
Giggle like a child every time Isaac says "arousal".
:) Yeah I actually did too, had to do a few extra takes when recording, one of the script editors (Mark) is a biochemist and he tweaked and rewrote most of the nootropics section, which I kept either cutting from drafts or expanding on in a scatter shot fashion. I like his write-up much better than mine and decided to leave it as, arousal and all.
Hey, Isaac, I didn't invent the word. I just had the balls to use it! At least it's clearly a talking point. Glad it amused you too.
This title could be swapped for "Watching Isaac Arthur's videos"
Happy Arthursday everyone!
Visual representation of my mind as I watch sfia: m.ua-cam.com/video/l_u18_BKczg/v-deo.html
best benefit of having a speed inteligence, you could increase the speed at which the video runs and thus watch more of Arthurs videos in less time
More to the point, you could increase Arthur's mind and have more videos to watch ! Or do both and spend a few years having knowledge (which is positive) poured into your brain :-)
To be fair...
VYRON DROSOS you have to have a very high IQ to understand Isaac Arthur.
Fascinating content as always. I find myself considering this as a solution to the Fermi Paradox. The dominant civilization in a galaxy, the first on the scene so to speak, chooses to remain fully biological as a matter of safety. Then they wait until other biological civilizations arise and augment themselves and then hacks them and controls them to prevent the rise of a machine or otherwise potentially dangerous civilization. In such a scenario, the Zoo Hypothesis becomes important; you must conceal yourself until the time is right and then unleash the von Neumann brain hacker probes that you have stationed in all potentially habitable solar systems. After that, you can simply make the conquered species think whatever you wish them to.
Anyway, back to the coffee.
Hah, just came to the comments after watching you, good episode today, this was the first to load up and I thought it had error'd and shown me your feed. Yeah it's on my list of not-too-likely-but-logical-coherent FP solutions, as opposed to most which don't really work logically on examination.
That happened to me when we first spoke on the phone. It was a Thursday/Arthursday and I saw your video notification pop up so I made a pot of coffee and grabbed some popcorn and was just sitting down to watch when the phone rang. I was like "Damn it!" and picked up the phone and it was ... you. I probably sounded a bit confused, though that's sort of normal for me :)
No I don't want to believe that! It ruins my flawless plans of being fully mechanical with a hyperspeed brain that can interface with computers!
hi john! you're on my list of "watch when they arrive" as well.
I love your channels John and Isaac. I also love Fraisers channel and How the Universe works (and The Universe) plus Stephen Hawkings works and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. Deep sky videos and sixty symbols channels on YT .. all of the above and alot more i have read and seen and listened many times over. Also lets not forget the essential The hitchhikers guide all of it radio all many timees. Love.
Multiple uses of the word arousal, best Arthur's day yet!
I saved this video all day to get me through my bus ride home. Thank the universe.
on Frame-jacking. You're very right. for the past 2 years I've been listening to UA-cam, podcasts, and audiobooks at 2x speed. I can honestly say that listening to one of my talk shows at normal speed is maddening. Also, if i haven't been treating my mind well, i sometimes have to slow down, but never slower than 1.5 speed. The first step is optimizing what we have, think biohackers, then we will graduate to augmentation.
With regard to frame jacking and dealing with thermo dynamics, I just pictured people dawning a hat with large aluminum cooling fins to dissipate the excess heat, thus giving the phrase "putting on your thinking cap" a more literal meaning. Love this channel btw
I have attention deficit disorder so this episode is really close to home for me. When I first took Ritalin the benefits were obvious. I remember because I was visiting the British Museum with my family. It was a large space with a lot of background noise, so the shift from confusion to clarity was profound.
After diagnosis, I advanced in some ways. I completed a Masters and then a PhD. I never got any better at go. I am officially 1-dan, but I never progressed after my diagnosis.
It feels as though I found a way to fulfil conventional goals, but would rather our social environment was friendlier to people with ADD/ADHD.
You said there was an optimal level of stimulation for different tasks. I think I know that better than most.
It is interesting, I've known a fair few folks who had ADD or dyslexia etc who got advanced degrees, not extreme cases but enough for the pills, I think it's one of those examples where the effort to develop around or through the problem can leave you overall stronger, the issue is still there but other factors have been strengthened to compensate around it.
This is a 100% true story:
I got my new Corvette Z06 delivered last night, it was awesome! Today I drove it to work and was smiling ear to ear when I walked in the door. Immediately my coworkers asked "Hey man, you look really happy! What's up?" To which I responded: "It's ARTHURSDAY!!"
Keep it up brother! I love this channel!
I just stumbled upon this channel with "Stupid Aliens" a few days ago and have just about fallen in love with this channel. The few videos I have watched so far are of superlative quality. Truly wonderful work. Informative, inquisitive and clear without sacrificing depth. Few words can describe how impressed I am with your videos.
A excellent video, I hope to begin catching up in chronological order later at some point.
Cannonfodder43 Welcome to the club! You have a wealth of knowledge laid out for you here!
I've been a big fan of Alastair Reynolds' work, and in particular the Revelation Space series, for years - so nice to see others enjoy his books just as much! His work is relatively unknown, unfortunately.
One of the best science fiction authors of the 21st century so far Alastair Reynolds
I've been a little skeptical whenever you mentioned this topic, but once I saw the upload email, I knew you were going to change my mind.
EDIT: Just saw you mention hive mind as future video, very sure I will have the same experience then too.
And, video end, excited for same thing next week with digital death.
Watching this channel is always great. It's like hearing someone else saying things I agree with, with that added advantage of learning new things that I can't readily argue against. I absolutely love agreeing with someone, on such topics, who is not me.
The "total recall" (especially involuntary) of traumatic events or bad memories given a trigger, as a result of an augmented memory with more details and capacity, really does sound like what I've already heard about PTSD. Traumatic events get seared into people's minds, and then come up and trigger the same emotional and fight or flight response. It's debilitating in many cases, and so tragic and sad to watch. To anyone out there struggling with this, I know it's just words in an internet comment, but you have my sympathy and encouragement!
Yeah I have CPTSD, whenever I have a flashback say for instance someone shoves their cat aggressively off of their desk. In my mind, like it's occurring as a separate process to my own thoughts and is being projected into my cognition. I'll involuntarily recall a memory of another stranger kicking a cat from years ago, and another of my mother beating up my cats, and another of a kid picking up a cat by the tail and flinging it around by it's spine like a flail, and another of my cousin chasing a chicken around with a machete and hacking it to death without pinning it down to get a immediate kill so he just spent 3 minutes terrorizing it as he hacked off chunks of its body while it screamed in terror and agony.
and it all occurs at once, like a damn has broken and is flooding into the conscious mind from the subconscious uncontrollably, i've mostly recovered from these symptoms but still experience them, significantly less often and usually with less severity now. But they used to be so severe they'd force me into a fetal position or cause me to even fall over or stumble from the sudden shock and emergence of the emotions and images. One time which was really weird was a felt a sort of pulsing throbbing sensation with extremely short intervals between the pulsing for a few seconds, not sure what that was but it occurred with the cptsd symptoms and I don't have psychotic symptoms. The sensation was occurring as a emotional feeling rather than a physical sensation hard to put the feeling into words.
Once again Arthur, you have blown my mind.
my tiny Un-augmented mind...
for now............. ;)
Do a video on DREAMS, and how technology might be able to control them more, so we can spend only 4 hours dreaming, but experience 48 hours of a pleasant dream where we are happy. (or w/e the ratio turns out to be) We could actually spend less time physically in the dream world, but MORE time experiencing a pleasant dream than being awake, making it our ACTUAL reality. This would enable a person to live a LOT longer, in effect. They wouldn't live longer physically, but from their point of view, they could EXPERIENCE two or three, maybe four lifetimes via dreams.
In Inception, they have 2 scenes that relate to this:
1. The "opium den" where all the people are laying there, asleep, dreaming
2. When Cob and Mal are in limbo and spend a lifetime, grow old together. In effect, Cobb is able to experience TWO lifetimes during the movie - his one with Mal, growing old, and his real reality.
This is already possible to some degree. The issue is, people dream in cycles, so even if paying attention you might notice a dream only lasts for a few minutes and one episode at a time, then some biological process kicks in (it feels like your spine is flushing with warm liquid).
Each time I dream the context is different, the story is different, and the emotional state is different, meaning you can't set up the dream to continue from where it left off last time, even if the last episode was during the same sleep period, meaning you can't work around the fact that dreams come in distinct chunks to continue a story where it left off. But it is well worth the effort to pay attention to your dreams.
For instance a couple of days ago I watched an episode of family guy on Netflix in a dream, I think it was a spin-off called "the Louis Chapters" or something like that. Louis pitched the idea to some producer during a normal episode, and stewie was mocking her like how he mocked her reading (this was a REAL episode where they joked each chapter was only two pages long so she feels smart). Anyway, cut to the Louis chapters and she has Stewie in her arms almost breastfeeding, she said something (can't recall, generic acting statement that Louis thought was clever) and stewie groans and mumbles "in your dreams bitch", then the director yells cut so Louis puts stewie down and Stewie removes his mask to reveal it's another actor kid, presumably a star in that universe that Stewie admires, he pulls out a cigarette and starts smoking. They hired him because the real Stewie didn't want the part (it was beneath him I think is what he said while mocking her). The real Stewie somewhere off stage exclaims something like "aww man" and makes a remark to the effect of "yeah, don't touch her boobs dude, those are mine" obviously extremely jealous of the other actor. Obviously I'm not able to convey all the details but suffice it to say I was as entertained as if I had watched an actual short.
I sometimes wake up laughing from my dreams. I think they evolved as a way to keep our minds entertained, I think humans need entertainment to keep us from boredom and to counteract some of the depression that naturally comes with being a self aware creature awaiting it's own inevitable mortality and all too aware of its limitations.
@@philw5699 i would be happy to just be able to record dreams for later viewing.
That'd be really cool. Maybe using some kind of neural interface, you could perfectly simulate any sensory experience, including dreams & even other peoples' recorded dreams. Even while awake, you could feel any feeling or make things look/feel/taste/smell/sound however you want. How crazy would that be? One could live their entire life as though high on heroin at all times if they wanted to, without having to worry about stuff like withdrawal or tolerance. Base reality would become so boring. You might even be able to use it to feel actual happiness for once.
From the first video to now his speech is almost completely different. Thanks Isaac for all the effort you put into these. Simply the best mate
Great episode. Plugging into some cogitator and instantly 'reading' a book or generating paperwork would be a godsend. Anything that moves us away from consciously filling out paperwork gets my approval (aside from apocalypses and such, which are a firm 'maybe').
I love your channel so much Isaac. It brings me so much joy to see your channel continuing to grow! Putting your long and interesting videos on x2 speed and sitting down for a few minutes to immerse myself within whatever topic you have set for the video is always a treat!
Thank you!
It is Arthursday, my dudes!
ooooooo0000000eeeeeeeeeeeeey!!!!
(*is kinda what my mind does on arthursday)
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
Are there any pills that will help me understand Maxwell's equations? Dang!
In Ireland we have an Arthur's Day to celebrate Arthur Guinness, the creator of Guinness.
We celebrate by drinking Guinness until we reach oblivion :)
DED
Yay! Finally a breath of fwesh air. Isaac, your videos are the best thing since Carl Sagan. I can't express enough gratitude to you for sharing your beautiful mind with us. Thank you for everything you do.
Funny you should mention him, our second November episode Cosmic Ocean is a tribute to Sagan.
Something similar to frame-jacking is possible. In the Dune series there is a Mentat ability known as "the time trick" or "Mentat Trance." A Mentat uses the time trick to spend minutes or hours in their mind performing mental computations while only seconds of time truly pass.
While I can not enter such a state as a Mentat can, I have spontaneously fallen into the minutes to seconds version. This ability likely comes from my being on the autistic spectrum and my being a mathematician.
Love Dune
The efforts being made to map and replicate the brain and it's functions is amazing. Hope I see these projects completed in my lifetime. I'd love to be able to play back memories and dreams on a screen. Introspection would take on a whole new form.
When we do inevitably reach that level of technology, Anti-Virus Programs need to be improved massively.
And then there are the differences between light and deep mind augmentation.
Which parts of the brain would you want to augment, the whole brain, the prefrontal cortex or the outer parts of the brain the deeper parts, such as the hippocampus.
So much things to consider, and it's all thanks to the best day of the week. The weekday that is Arthursday.
And since I've recently become unemployed I got lots and lots of time to catch up on old videos as well. One has to see the good in the bad after all, everything is not black and white.
Another inspiring, insightful video.
Thank you for giving me a positive insight during a very dark day.
You really got me through a deeply depressing period.
Your comment on being unable to forget or suppress bad memories hit very close to home.
A feedback loop like that is a terrifying state of mind to be in.
On another comment:
The idea of cooking our brains with smart-phones or similar devices (such as computer implants) is nothing new. It was proposed as long as 25 years ago (or maybe even longer).
Again, like most tropes it has been degraded from its scientific basis by media outlets that look for the quick, burning hot news story.
The basis was that placing a mobile or smart-phone next to your head and talking into it for 15 minutes or so, increases the internal temperature at the spot of emission by 1 to 1.5°C thanks to the phone's emissions at very short distances.
This radiates approx. 2-4 cm / 1-1.5" inside the skull, and certainly DOES affect the neural brain tissue at the spot.
It certainly does NOT boil our brain tissue, but it does increase the localized temperature closest to the emitting antenna.
As the body does *everything* it can to prevent our brain temperature from changing this is quite drastic.
It is equivalent to a very high, very localized fever.
Very high fevers are the only case in which the *average* temperature of our brain deviates from the basic, standard body temperature by more than 0.5°C/1°F.
Which is one of the main reasons why we are sweating like pigs when we are really ill and in a fever dream.
The body goes into overdrive to cool off our most important tissue: our brain.
At the same time it increases our cell's metabolism to better fight off the disease.
There is (like nearly always in biology) a trade-off between increasing the temperature too high (proteins denaturating is very dangerous to the body).
Cooling the brain suddenly becomes one of the higest priorities in such cases of illness and fever.
But as the central brain does NOT register an *average* increase of temperature during the usage of the mobile or smart-phone, it does nothing specifically to reduce the localized temperature increase.
Because the temperature increase requires time to register as our brain simply is not geared to notice such small, localised increases in temperature.
There simply aren't any natural occurences of such localized temperature increases that do not affect a larger area, that is otherwise detected by the brain by other means.
Thus it takes quite some time to reduce that local 'hot spot' to normal levels.
In that time certain levels of damage *may* be sustained (not necessarily, but at a higher degree or frequency than normal).
Which makes implanting anything which increases local temperature in our skulls a very, very bad idea indeed.
Especially when it is not perfectly synchronized with the heat regulation system of our body.
Which is another interesting part: our bodies have an absolutely incredible ability to reduce body temperature.
If our bodies' heat reduction capabilities were concentrated on a gallon, or four liters of water, fresh from the boil, it would be able to cool it off to deep freezing temperatures in minutes (if the wattage is taken into account only).
But like Isaac said, at some point you definitely will reach the limits of our body to dissipate heat generated inside it.
You deserve infinitely more recognition for the amount of videos and effort you place into each video. Great video keep it up Issac!
Gotta lotta love in the comments, nice to see a good base for a change, thanks everyone for the support where it's deserved!
I bought the Revelation Space series on your recommendation. I like it. Keep the recommendations coming.
I'm glad to hear it, I try to pick books that are both personal favorites and generally considered very good, though amusingly this one (topic and book) was actually picked by the patrons on Patreon, it came in first by a wide margin out of 20 book/topics with about 5 tying in at a distant second.
I loved the short story "Galactic North". I have read portions of other stories in his Revelation Space series and read plot summaries of those novels yet I can't get excited enough to read this series for some reason. Same with Peter F Hamilton. They seem like really really interesting topics for me, but I can't get motivated to invest in them.
Me too! Just finished the first book.
"Imagine if every time you saw a blue sedan, you remembered vividly the time you crashed your blue sedan and were stuck in it for 20 agonizing minutes until the firemen cut you free."
And you thought trigger warnings were bad now...imagine if people triggered from not just reflections of their trauma, but things tangentially related to their trauma. How would you even describe trigger warnings without triggering the trauma?
You need to teach and support mental and moral toughness not callousness but mental healing and acceptance.
SharpsKC I guess, but I'm not convinced that something that vague can be considered a solution. I mean, would you say that you could solve diabetes by teaching and supporting digestive and dietary toughness--not callousness, but physical healing and whatnot?
Sorry it is vague. It sounds like you are concerned about PTSD affects. I would suggest Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger as reading to show the effectiveness of a societal effort to address these kinds of brain traumas. It would be interesting if something like this could recreate the positive societal aspects of being bombed like 9-11 or the blitz without all of the corpses in the streets.
SharpsKC ...Are we thinking of the same 9/11 here? Because I'm having trouble thinking of any positive effects it had. (Or any effects which weren't directly tied to the corpses...though I guess they weren't in the streets, so yay?)
Of course, there were positive effects we had almost 48 hours where most of us felt "we are all in this together" but it is far too expensive to keep up. Then it was mostly wasted when W was like "When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping." The rest was wasted by invading Iraq. Read about the positive moral effects of the London bombings, how people come together under sieges and in POW camps, or how the Germans were able to keep war production going despite mass causalities from strategic bombing.
Still working through your back catalogue. Have to say love your vids.So many things I’ve never thought of.
Keep it up. Wish you had been around during a-levels.
A short story I love on the topic of mind augmentation is _Understand_ by Ted Chiang. It's in at least one of his anthologies, but also on-line for free (sometimes free at least; the copy I read before is gone now).
---- Unrelated:
A piece of a topic (not a whole topic): *Thermal Siege*
In an episode about warfare, you explained the impracticality of besieging (but not destroying) a large space habitat if it recycles everything and runs off fusion power, because it can have millions of years of fuel stored up. OTOH, if numerous attackers (and there can be many in 3D space) projected lots of IR onto the habitat's radiating surfaces, it would find itself unable to run farms or machinery because it would overheat the inhabitants. This attack is highly adjustable too, at the lower end preventing only the most powerful industries like bulk nuclear alchemy as an economic sanction, and at the higher end stopping even farming so the inhabitants are at risk of starvation. It fills out the diplomatic gap between " 'we will shut off your internet' and 'we will blow up your habitat' ".
This could fit into a larger topic of *Thermodynamics*, like the definition of temperature etc. You mentioned things like the Landaugh limit when talking about Matrioshka brains and blackhole farming, but haven't done an episode dedicated to thermodynamics.
---- Unrelated:
You seem to be mentioning your sponsor more in this episode than usual. I certainly noticed it a lot more than usual, though I usually listen to the podcasts not the videos and they might have it edited down. If future videos get like this
Can't wait for the Halloween Special topic! Woooooohooooo Arthursday!
No Matter how old one of these episodes are they are always refreshing to listen to and watch. Awesome video.
You have a great week too Mr Arthur.
Wow, this episode is giving me so many thoughts that I want to comment! I wonder if our minds already do little bursts of "frame jacking" when we're in a situation such as a car accident and everything seems to slow down. We can't maintain that energy consumption and heat dissipation level for long, but in a fight or flight situation, or bodies/brains activate it as an emergency measure.
Another excellent video- thank you Isaac and your friends for putting this together. Gives me something to watch every Thursday.
God damn this channel just keeps getting better and better.
Nothing quite like an Arthursday.
You're the man Issac, Love your vids. Just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate all your hard work. This Ch deserves 1 mil subs
Thanks for not harping on your speech impediment anymore. It's not bad and I have hearing loss from my time in the AirForce. I think you know your audience is smart enough on their own to press the CC button if they need to and don't seem like the type of people to mind or care about speech impediments.
You mention all my favourite authors, I love it.
26:10
Based. I've actually (somewhat) wanted to do something like that for a series, _at _*_least_* at the beginning. That thing you said about sci-fi stopping being fun just seems like something worthy of working to, at least _somewhat_ more than what's been done thus far for the vast majority...
I finally caught up to date on your videos, having discovered your channel about two months ago. I really wanted to thank you for your amazing content and positive look on the future.
I already had quite a collection of SF books, and a good interest in futurism, and thanks to you I can improve them and appreciate them both a little more.
So thank you very much, have a great week :)
PS : I appreciate that you didn't take a narrator.
Great job Isaac (and Mark). Very thought provoking.
I can see a future popular innovative genius, like Musk, who credits his/her inspiration to the inspirational genius, Issac Arthur!
This comment has aged poorly
Musk isn't a genius. He's a businessman like Mark Zuckerberg.
@@sadmanzaid420 yes...musk is no genius...he is barely smart from my perspective, rather he is a talentless visionary
These days the word "genius" has lost its meaning, anyone can be a genius just by reinventing the wheel.
@@JoeyvanLeeuwen What did he do? I live under a rock
Most important early advances in humanities development have been the result of "analog mind enhancements", for example writing expanded memory, enabling information to be handed over between generations, the printing press enabled cheaper access to this "memory" enabling more people to enhance their minds... Then the digital revolution started about a century ago, then we found a way to connect everything and look where we are now...
It is saddening that most people don't use this power to grow as humans, but people like you are a beacon of light and hope for our future...
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this topic, it was entertaining as well as educational.
I just started reading House of Suns (haven't finished it). My take away on the Vigilance humans was that they weren't slow because of size [necessarily] but because of a desire to get things as correct as possible. They built and structured a Matrioshka Brain around levels of known accuracy of information. Such a level of design probably signifies some aspect to how they think and function.
Thank you for enriching the internet with your amazing videos! It is always a joy to listen to your well reserched nd compiled videos! It pushes me to think in so many more dimensions!
framejacking would also probably increase your bloods temperature, just like heavy work loads increase a liquid cooled PCs coolant, and this would have a lot of negative side effect on the rest of your body
*Back after having read revelation space*
In the story Clavain straight up faints for several hours after a few minutes of doing something like this to hard, and some conjoiners like skade have external cooling systems build into their bodies
One thing I believe when it comes intelligence is that there are certain, inevitable traits that come along with it and become ever more exaggerated as you become more intelligent. That being Free will, consciousness and the ability to perform good and evil.
As you become smarter your ability to overcome your own innate programming and limitations of your body becomes ever stronger. Your ability to be self aware becomes greater as you become ever more aware of your own existence. And your ability to commit acts of good or evil becomes greatly magnified.
isaac asimov kicks ass.
im glad you mention him every now and then.
Oh boy, that stock footage of a coffee machine bade me stop the video to get coffee. Cheers, Isaac.
Me to. So far it was the most effective product placement in all youtube videos I've seen. ;)
Nothing to add, I just love this channel .
Happy Arthursday!!!
Fantastic episode. I did have trouble focusing around the 12-13 minute mark, due to the music. It gave a sensation very much like tinnitus, since I was listening on headphones. It may just have been one of those "mosquito" frequencies that younger folks find annoying.
This is now my new favorite. Thanks, Isaac!
your videos are more interesting than any doc i have watched before you should be on tv isaac
There's a very good episode of Black Mirror called "The Entire History of You" that explores the idea of perfectly indexed visual memory. It really makes you reconsider how great it would be.
Blowing my mind as usual. You rock!
This is the only channel I know of that constantly and reliably uploads quality videos keep it up Isaac! looking forward to Interplanetary trade
I have a batch of what, a few hundred Modafinil just lying around. If you want some, I live in the Hague, Netherlands.
:) I'll pass, though thanks, I'm always a bit surprised it isn't OTC in most countries, let alone totally banned, but I suppose they're worried about folks ODing on the stuff.
Hey Isaac! Great video as always!
I have a suggestion for a future video on a subject that hasn't been spoken on UA-cam yet: a video speaking about the FOCAL mission, an "out of the solar system" telescope that would use the gravitational lens of our sun to focus with very high resolution to unbelievable distances, like being able to see rivers and mountains on extrasolar planets (ideia from the latest video from Fraser Cain, I asked him to do the video himself but he said he wouldn't be doing it).
The thing looks awesome but it's something that would need that we make many breakthroughs in science to be able pull it out. Very futuristic.
Really? I'm surprised no one has, and I was literally about to suggest Fraser till I read the next sentence. I've been considering a mega-telescopes episode for a while now but that is so much more Fraser or JMG's area that I felt it better to leave it to them, in fact that was what JMG and I were originally going to do until he tossed uplifitng out here as an idea and we both latched onto it. Well perhaps I will
Here are some analogies with regards to the various forms of Super Intelligence:
1. Speed Intelligence - You're going through a maze at a higher speed than normal.
2. Network Intelligence - You explore all possible routes in the maze simultaneously.
3. Quality Intelligence - You make your way through the maze with greater ease, not through brute force like the other two but through either specialization or just greater efficiency.
I find the idea of accelerating one's mind a very fun fantasy. Just sitting down and reading every encyclopedia and big philosofical classics in mere moments.
Sitting down with one view of life and raising with a much more sophisticated outlook and understanding of it all. I fight my urge to daydream about it everyday, as I stare at thousands of books in front of me.
Just imagining how much knowledge there is in each one, it makes me feel melancholic about our ephemerous existance. How much there is to know and how little time we get to do it. How likely we are to never learn the means to be the happiest possible.
If anything, I would probably enjoy it a lot being able to do it. It would save me a lot of time and stress, just learning how to more efficiently achieve my objectives and so many different approaches.
Although, I would love being able to scan my mind beforehand and comparing the before and after. It would be like a 90 years old me talking to a 5 year old me. I wonder who would win an argument.
I found the library reference. Impulse from the Teen Titans read an entire library one afternoon, and the personality change was very well done.
Isaac, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Greg Egan, but he’s hands down the ultimate hard SF author, in my opinion. Doesn’t seem to do much megastructure stuff-his book *Diaspora* may allude to the fact that he’s not too fond of the concept-but he’s quite brilliantly touched on just about every other subject you’ve explored in your videos.
I highly recommend the aforementioned *Diaspora* as well as *Permutation City* for a taste of him at his best.
Egan's good but I'm not too fond of his writing style, I usually class him up there with Reynolds, Baxter, Vinge, Clarke, etc for diamond-hard SF but weirdly Reynolds is the only one of that group whose stories I particularly enjoy.
Isaac Arthur I think I get it. Compared to Reynolds, Egen can be quite dry. While I would say Egan’s at the top of the heap in terms of diamond-hard SF (great phraseology), Reynolds is definitely better at putting the *opera* in space opera. You almost have a spiritual experience during certain parts of Revelation Space.
When are you gonna publish your book and show em all how it’s done? Seriously, with your background in science, politics and the military as well as being so familiar with the genre, I think you’d be a hit.
I realy like Greg Egan, although it feels like he skips a chasm in the way he deals with uploaded personalities. Then I found the first chapter to *Distress* so horrific I never read the whole book.
I have never read Reynolds. The most impressive novel that I read on brain enhancement was *Camp Concentration* by Thomas M. Disch. I am sure it says something about me that I enjoyed this, but found *Distress* hard to take.
Best Hive Mind: All the memebers of the hive mind have independent intelligences, like us. But are part of a greater whole that is itself intelligent. Arguably humans are already that kind.
This subject is so fascinating that I fully deserve episodes for specifics. That is, small or large increases of a single central skill like our working memory, for example.
By following your own way of approaching the topics, I notice that we already do this by, for example, counting fingers (because our working mental memory is very, very small) or by making calculations and arguments in writing.
But if we can increase our working memory a bit? cerebral or not, our mental memory of work? This would certainly change, albeit by subtle detail, the architecture of our minds, with probable impacts on our personalities, preferences, and so on.
This episode seemed to indicate an exploration of the issue in other future episodes, having focused largely on general elements and more intuitive forms, such as acceleration - but one has to wonder: a dumb person (not a merely slow person ) Thinking fast will continue dumb ... you can solve many simple or easy problems in less time, but you could not even understand some more complex or difficult problems, much less solve them.
In time, a person may be considered dumb because some subprocesses of his mind are so slow that they do not even go far enough to form certain thoughts, calculations, or arguments. Thus, the acceleration of some processes or subprocesses, in a well integrated way, can imply in a radical increase of the quality or depth of the thought.
As for the mind augmentation being mostly provided outside the brain, skull or body I see as the most likely path to the "upload" of transhumanism. In fact, I think this tends to develop in order first to compensate for injuries or bad developments, such as prostheses. But use by ordinary people can be a way to increase your already good mental capacities and the fact that much of a person's mental processing can occur outside of it can lead to an accidental "upload": one day the subject realizes that he is alive and conscious although your body is in deep sleep (without relevant brain activity) or even dead.
That's my second episode watched. Great topic again! I'm very interested in mind augmentation and love to experiment with whatever methods I find out about with myself. For example I play brain games at neuronation site, read articles about what is good for the brain and the cognition, trying to limit my food to a healthy 'brain' diet - lean meat (I like pork, as the pigs are close to the human anatomy, thus I suppose pork contain many of the nutrients needed by humans), fish and seafood, salads and leafy greens, nuts (especially walnuts), fruits (especially berries, blueberries). All of that as organic, as my budget allows me. I'm taking some pills, like ginkgo biloba, multivitamins and omega 3. I'm trying to learn to juggle with 3 tennis balls, I'm trying to teach myself to do all the one-handed activities with my inferior hand - the left; occasionally I'm playing logic games like chess and 'go' game; I'm trying to swallow as much scientific information, as my free time allows me (as I'm working 50 hours weekly on average a simple, yet concentration demanding job and still going to gym, which takes me few hours a day on my days off). Physical exercises are also good for the brain and for the mood, the health and the self-esteem, and I'm an amateur weightlifter. Taking long walks, which are scientifically proven to be very beneficial for the brain. Avoiding bad habits like smoking and drinking alcohol (although I have another opinion about the psychedelic drugs). Trying to get enough sleep and whenever possible - napping, which things I'm still not very good at (even now it's late...). In general - trying any possible method for brain enhancement that I hear about. At a recent IQ test I scored 150 and I'm preparing soon to take the official supervised Mensa test and let's see... :) By the way, I'm also immensely influenced by Isaac Asimov. He was my very favorite writer as a child. I had a book by him, which I was considering my sacred book and was taking great care of it. I don't know the original name of it, as the translation in my language was not direct and I couldn't find even similar title from him in English. But if I translate it back from that edition in my language (bulgarian), it sounds "The gravitational doom of the Universe". It's a popular scientific book, talking about particles and forces, stellar evolution, white dwarfs, neutron stars and of course - black holes (which exactly made it my favorite), and big bang theory and possible future of the Universe (of course it was written before the discovery of the dark energy), wormholes and much more... One of my favorite aspects of it, is that it's written in an incredibly comprehensible manner, which is like a patent for the work of Asimov. Believe it or not, I read it on my own for the first time aged 6, after I discovered it with awe in the family library.
Yay! Awesome stuff Mr A! I especially enjoyed your sober analysis of mind augmentation. As you rightly point out, alot of sci-fi hand waves those pesky and inconvenient realities, especially the ones regarding thermal dynamics! And not one mention of telepathy ;-)
I think alot of people underestimate the risk in personality change, when we get down to large scale augmentation of the brains physical structure. I know I sometimes forget, that the way I think, is defined just as much, by the structure of my brain as by the experiences of my life. We have Freud to thank for that over emphasis, I suspect.
It's certainly interesting to wonder, who we would be, if we could and did find a means of altering the structure of teh human brain, to the extent, that what we are left with after, could really be regarded as human (let alone stable!!)
I'm a positive thinking person, so like to imagine, that while what we would be in such a "post human" society, might be hard to recognise by our standard, as human, it would be better, than what we are now (subjectively speaking lol)
But very real possibilities, infact, highly likely, that with that new structure, come new natures, that we would have to learn to control, master or overcome, in order to truely capitalise on such a development. No mean feat there, but we would have those augmentations to help!
I still get the feeling, you prefer the digital evolution route, if only because it is more readily understandable or at least, more predictable, in terms of net benefits and known pitfalls. Would you say thats the case?
Today, Arthursday, is a good day.
god i love this guy.
Thanks for the Revelation Space audio book offer, Isaac.
Always look forward to arthursday, this is just what i needed to see. Watching this before work. :)
Happy Arthursday!!!! I'm so excited!
With the memories thing, it'd be pretty easy for a device reading and augmenting your mind to tell that a memory is inducing undesirable emotional states, and if it showed it to you the first time it'd easily know not to show it again unless you're deliberately recalling it. I would love framejacking.
Thanks for the birthday present. Happy arthursday folks!
Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday!
Happy day of birthing!
Your weekly videos on your channel are fantastic ... This and your videos on AI are actually at the core of my current research, it did make me laugh I'm 3/4 rd's of the way through Revelation Space on UK Audible ( I have the others in my library ).. Thank you Isaac
We don't need fancy mind augmentation as long as you're around producing top-notch content every week
Honestley, whenever i listen to a SFIA, i hope to hear a mention of Revalation space. The book series touches on basically anything and love it for that!
I've been expecting this episode. Glad you covered this subject!
Thank you for another mind blowing episode!
I have read lots of Alastair Reynolds SF novels, and they are superb.
Thanks for another video. Your content is always thought provoking. Keep up the good work:)
I always love these sorts of mind and age videos
Isaac, I'm hoping you get a contract with a network as it most impressive you are able to come out every week with new content with such depth.
Ohhh yeah, baby! Talk science to me!
I don't know why I laughed at this so much.
Arthursday continues to be the best day of the week
after a rough day, there's nothing better than a warm beverage and a relaxing bath. isaac comes in close second though.^^
Wow, I found Isaac's conjecture total recall of traumatic events, a pretty chilling side effect of mind augmentation. I am a "mind uploading" enthusiast as the next step in directed evolution, but this kinda calls into question the benefits of that. If a human mind can be adequately "mapped" or "digitally encoded", would that digital copy only have the fidelity that it's current, analogue recollection has, or would it have the extreme detail that Isaac describes here, and that the human mind has evolved to mollify ?
Conversely, once the mind uploading is complete and in a digital realm with high fidelity digital recording, what will, or even can, prevent those traumatic events from causing horrible, and perhaps debilitating traumatic stress ? One thing, that I can envision is that the "flat, incoming data" of an event into a digital, non-biologial mind will not be encumbered by the human/biological stress hormones that we currently are afflicted with. However, what is the implication of this this impassionate outlook on the world around us ? Will we lose our empathy ? Our compassion ? Our humanity ?
Yay, a new video!
Right in time as a reference for my presentation with a similar topic~
I love coming back to watch these older videos
The reliving memories part sounds like how I compartmentalize and access my memories... Interesting.
I'm really looking forwards to a discussion of Hive minds and its mechanics. Hope it can be presented soon.
Great episode by the way, as always.
I think it is our first December video, we're actually scheduled up through Mid-January but I like to keep the schedule more than a month out secret in case I need to change it.
i often hit the books to learn new things, I don't think I would ever stop frame jacking, because work or conversing with others is the only time I see not needing it as it would get in the way.
The book "Deepness in the sky" has the concept of "focus" in which an individual cognitive abilities are augmented at the cost of everything else in their life and they become a kind of savant/slave.
In "Accelerando" has the concept of ghosts, a digital instance of your own mind that you can create a will and send on various tasks. At one point in the story a ghost comes back to the user decades after having been created with an urgent message but is ignored by the original user
Hey, I'm at around the 10 minute video mark where you started talking about the possibility of people having a perfect memory, and I wasn't sure if you know this already, but there are in fact some people who do have near-perfect memories. It's called Hyperthymesia, or HSAM, where people can remember in vivid detail every event in their lives. You can probably find articles addressing their experiences and the negatives, and it could provide some insight into what an augmented memory would be like
I get soooooo many good book ideas from your channel!! Thanks Isaac!!
I love finding Great science videos like this
Thank you once again, IA
Thank you.