Tad Thomlinsonbergurson (TT): As the generally accepted inventor/primary innovator of Mind Maps, can you summarize or walk us through a little of your journey from from Buddhism to creating digital memory files?
Ned: I can be brief, but I don’t know if I can also be effective.
TT: I understand. And I do appreciate your time.
Ned: So, I was skimming the Tibetan Book of the Dead one afternoon.
TT: As one does.
Ned: Exactly. So, in Buddhism you can train to remember past lives. That’s part of it all, anyway. I’m not an expert. And ever since the Big Reveal, there are a good many of us wanting to take advantage of it all, to somehow be able to continue on in the next iteration where this one left off.
TT: You started with the mind mapping templates several years ago.
Ned: Right. At first, all I could think about was – let’s help people organize this iteration, make it consumable, understandable.
TT: Early critics argued you were on the road to wasting more life than anything else? If we spend a huge part of this iteration organizing data for the next and in the next we spend years adequately processing the last, then we may waste most of a lifetime preparing to live it in a way that we think builds upon the last.
Ned: Well, I knew right away we had to reduce the time needed to catch up to the value of this lifetime. Mind Maps were just the first step.
TT: People say it was a money grab.
Ned: I know what they said, but we forget so much as we move through it all. I wanted to get something out right away to get people started. And I needed the data.
TT: Again, people called that a money grab.
Ned: But that’s not true, either. I needed the data to learn how to do this better. And the understanding of the last iteration needs to happen much faster in the next iteration.
TT: That’s key, right?
Ned: If you spend your whole life learning what you did in the last, what’s the point?
At first, I though that his name was Pi (TT rather than charmapping the actual symbol), and then I realize it was intentional, to imply that he, as Ned, stretches out into infinity. I still think the Resurrection hook, or Afterlife Control Pill (even if not mentioned here) is a powerful one, so this should be cross-posted to the Imperative Age. And don’t get me started with virtual gene-splicing (why do unethically in “real” biological life, what you can do in multi-valent code in a synthetic one (or run iterations until you find a minimally viable alternative product) with no negative implications?!?), I would rather stay on topic.
I also believe that the simulation would be run in reverse, which maybe Ned is aware of – in order to reconstitute the “missing” (i.e., consciousnesses that were not mapped and stored technologically), amalgams from existing high-fidelity models would be constructed. They would then be “tested” against “reality” – i.e., the reality that is trying to instantiate the missing “Grandmother”; once that missing Grandmother model is complete to acceptable levels of realism, she can then interact with “other Grandmothers” to produce a generation back. Then another, broader, longer (but still fast!) calculations would take place. And again, fidelity of recreation from sparse “known” interactions would need to be determined based on whether or not the simulated outcomes matched the “original data they have on file.” (i.e., the Memory Maps we make now)
And backward, more calculations. Backward, More calculations. Maybe the logical stopping point is the first “consciousness” in a swath of Cro-Magnons. These calculations done by quantum computers still move pretty fast!
And what if these calculations have a “biological component.”
What if these simulations are run most efficiently in biological material.
Then, the likelihood we live in a simulation just went up.
By a lot.
We might not even be the highest-fidelity course of simulation up there, and woe is us.
Or not — we’re welcome to believe that we are the highest validity simulation, I mean /one/ of them HAS to be!
And even if not, we contributed, by proving that this fork was incorrect.
And that matters, too.
But will our minds still resurrect? Yes, probably the all of us’es combined from all of the chance simulations, so long as the primary simulation – Simulation 0, had not reached its completion by the time we died. We are one of the luckiest ones, being created on the brink of creating everlasting life.
For as long as “you” want it, anyway.
It’s never a good sign (of the commenter) when their contribution is longer than the original post!
But then again, that’s what we’re talking about here, isn’t it? ‘)