the virtual you ... (religion v science)

The human brain contains roughly 300 megabytes of information. Not much when you get right down to it. The question isn’t how to store it, it’s how to access it. You can’t download a personality. There’s no way to translate the data. But the information being held in our heads is available in other databases. People leave more than footprints as they travel through life…. medical scans, dna profiles, psych evaluations, school records, emails, recording, video, audio, cat scans genetic typing, synaptic records, security cameras, test results, shopping records, talent shows, ball games, traffic tickets, restaurant bills, phone records, music lists, movie tickets, tv shows… even prescriptions for birth control.--[Zoe Graystone]


is there currently enough information out there about you already such that in the near future, an accurate "simulation" of *you* could be created?

a *virtual* you?

could you end up being a set of variables running around in some program? you would be a program itself, a process running on some computer, perhaps even across dozens or hundreds of computers

is it possible to make that information come "alive" right now? could you have all the information about you, live on after you? imagine the day after you died, your first blog entry would be something about having died the previous day... "I died yesterday, how inconvenient" ... how strange would that be?...

but is this not the scenario we are already heading towards?

eventually some bright spark will come up with a program that could take all the myspaz, facebook, google, tweets, blogs, all your moods, pictures, videos, emails, and turn that into a program that you could interact with and ask questions. would we have to put up banners on our blogs, "No! you may not make a virtual me out of this information!"??

so instead of searching for information on google about, for instance, Einstein, you'd log onto "his" web site and ask *him* the questions and the accumulated "knowledge" scraped off the web about him, would then be the basis of the response!

"Hey Einstein, what got you into science in the first place??"

then he'd probably rattle off that story about how the magnetic compass needle showed that there was more to the universe than what could be seen with the eye alone... but whatever you'd ask him, even stupid things, there'd be some sort of response, if somebody had-a-go at this virtual character, one of the things the magic programming would have 'gleaned' from the web, was what sort of response the real person would have, in any situation.

like the wild swings in style of deliverance some people can write with, one paragraph, being extremely funny, and then being dead-on and direct to the point in dealing with a "serious" issue in the next paragraph. that style of writing may be indicative that that someone would humour someone who was abusive at first, but would eventually lose patience with the person and respond to them in an appropriate manner.

a virtual me, would probably just block everyone who was being a cock so that i never have to have my knowledge of the universe tainted by their idiocy, at least not directly.

but what if that information could then be able drive a program that ran on some big network... by itself? *all* by itself, with no human intervention?

set it in motion and it lives forever? would it creep you out that your dead facebook friends would keep clicking "like" on your posts? wishing you happy birthday? firing off anecdotes to make you laugh when you're down? would it make any difference to you that your dead internet friends, were still around to talk to you? what if your great great great grandfather had kept journals and somehow they'd been published online.. I wonder if he'd seek you out and send you a friend request on faysebook? myspaz? twatter?

but imagine if this Einstein was running virtually everywhere that he was interacting with someone, with all the Einsteins, sharing the things they are learning, imagine if the collective knowledge of Einstein could be resurrected to the point where a virtual Einstein was "clever" enough to be able to continue his work on relativity and all that funky stuff? or at the very least be a valuable tool for research and teaching purposes

but why wait until you're dead with this magical program? you could set this program in motion now to do the mundane things you waste your time doing online, you could even have it learn your habits, in what you do on the computer?

a virtual Tolkien could write novels, Nietzsche could philosophise, and Hitler could explain his fucked up world in excruciating detail, in any language

you could spend your entire physical life teaching this virtual you how to virtually live forever, teach it morals, and how to play nice on the internet for all eternity ( the teacher teaches themselves while teaching the virtual-you )

could you have this virtual you, be *you* while you are out, could you have it answer the phone? pay your bills? could you have your virtual-you gather up all the news stories you like to read? without you having to skip over all the bullshit? eg. i go through thousands of headlines and only ever read a few full articles in comparison.

with a virtual me, could I be able to *skip* that whole trolling through the headlines, could it also be able to spot new unexpected things that are interesting for me to read?

imagine that? you could even be more *you*, than you ever could.. this "you" would not run out of patience, would not need to sleep, take toilet breaks or need to go outside to get some sunlight, it would be "All net", all the time...

you could have it go learn stuff you couldn't be bothered to learn because there was some fundamental aspect you just couldn't "get" and after pure CPU crunching what would take you months to eventually figure out, this virtual-you could figure out how to explain in a matter of seconds in way that you were able to understand. ... could that teach kids how to understand in ways that they would understand, would education then become tailored for every individual?

an example of this would be me and relativity: I just didn't get it until relatively (LOL!) recently, I thought it was all crap, I said "where's the *proof*, sounds like a buncha hooey, to me" ... but then i found out about this experiment where 'they' had very accurate clocks in perfect alignment, one was taken up high in a plane, and when it was brought back to earth, it was out of alignment with the other identical clock that was left back on the ground. i could have saved myself thinking that relativity was a bunch of crap for ten years if not for that, a "virtual me" could have read everything about relativity and been able to sum it up by telling me to "forget all the math, they did an experiment with these two clocks, ya see...." .. (I, would also know to that myself, I was being condescending with myself as well, "ya see?", which I say in a sarcastic red-neck sort of way in my mind) ... this virtual me would also have then been on the look out for more experiments that demonstrated relativity, just to rub it in, like *I* would.. "Hey did ya see, that GPS wouldn't work if not adjusting for relativity, *ah-huck*"

imagine the really popular virtual people, chewing up all the CPU.. actually it wouldn't be a CPU, it would have to be a Distributed Processing Units (DPUs), we'd be complaining to the systems administrators "Hey! can we put a limit on how many people can shag Justin Beiber at a time? Most of them are under-age *anyway*"

and you'd have to replicate yourself as a backup, so why not have virtual you's on standby distributed across the net, doing the mundane tasks, but serving as a "backup" should power fail in one section of the net.. LOL! upload a copy of yourself to the node at Alpha Centauri?

and how many times do you just ignore some clown on the internet? imagine the virtual you, arguing with every moron on the internet simultaneously, without a single iota of idiocy set aside or tolerated, and *nothing* ever repeated twice, every interaction would be unique... you could virtually argue with real people, and with unlimited patience no idiot would be able to out-argue the virtual you, and virtual idiots could be held at bay for all eternity -- or more likely the DPUs would detect an infinite loop and kill both virtual arguers' programs, or maybe kill the one that was doing the most extraneous I/O .. conversations could be shortened by sending a special message to your "opponent", automatically ... the stupid religious fundie morons would not "believe in" making multiple copies of themselves, because that would be blasphemous

you could block people such that any time their program came near yours it would tell them to fuck off with no sugar coating whatsoever, why hold back? the only thing stopping me from telling every stupid cunt that they are a stupid cunt, is this it's just too much hassle to sink to their levels to be able to give them the real caning that they are begging to receive. oh and I probably have too much compassion, being a Jedi and all... LOL!

compassion could have been born out of it being more hassle to push someone away than it would be to just be nice! i.e. it requires less energy to be "nice" - compassiapathy (thumbs nose at Palin)

but! without being burdened by compassion, we would have avatar battles, fighting a virtual war... would the last avatar standing, be god?..... or would everyone just end up needing to block everyone? maybe we'll end up setting up our avatars to only communicate with similar minded people, i could block all people who just have to insist on telling me about their religion even before I've spoken to them, fucking idolaters! Praise Jebus!

the internet is a cesspool of hatred, maybe the majority of people are nice, but it's too easy to be a violent cave man creature on the net with little provocation.. there is no "moral" guidance, it's everyone for themselves, and if you are too gutless to stand up for yourself, expect to get trompled upon

is that what has already happened?... and god is just the last player, the last virtual being? with everyone else just trompled upon, bullied to death by "god"...

so that makes us the computers this "god" software is running upon...

so in emulation of this software, we build our own heaven to live forever in

so instead of false promises of living forever from some fantasy story from the bronze age, religion will die in favour of *actually* living virtually forever ... and maybe then, those programs will be transferred into artificial bodies, so then you could live in both the virtual and physical, simultaneously... just like a Cylon!

imagine sending yourvirtualself on a trip into the photosphere of the sun, go to alpha centauri? go to Rigel, it's only 700 light years away.. check out Eta Carinae... before it explodes... or *be* there when it does go up in some super indestructible space probe

imagine if, through some sort of quantum entanglement, or some un-thought-of way to communicate, we could have instantaneous network access between nodes that are light years apart? and via our virtual selves, we could "be" in thousands of locations spread over dozens of light years...

it's not everywhere at once, but it's a start

and it's not quite all knowing either, but a virtual you would be able to eventually figure out anything right? and it would have access to all the knowledge of mankind in real time... any logical dilemma you have, could be *resolved*, I wonder if god would win that battle against the virtual mind? how many iterations of bullshit did you go through to lose your religion? (if you have lost it) .. you could resolve those mental gymnastics once and for all in your virtual mind in a second.

so a virtual you could figure shit out, thus making the god-like notion of actually knowing everything beforehand, unnecessary

are we turning ourselves into gods? maybe god just figures shit out as it happens as well, maybe god's brain is just one big computer

but you may not even like the virtual you once you set it free and it ascends to its potential in minutes what would take you a million years, maybe your avatar would kill itself? maybe certain people wouldn't be allowed to have virtual selves?