Tendo City

Another barely thought out opinion... from me! :FuckYou:

Every few years, VR is "coming to revolutionize everything and everyone forever". There's the ol' power glove, the runnin' pad, the dance pads, the guitar thingies, wiggle and waggle via Wii controller, "Kinect" style "track your movement" games, and where are they all now? Well, the Power Glove was actually superior to the Wii in the degrees of movement (even if the tracking system itself was off), but it failed fast. All those one-trick addon controllers seem to have died a fad's death. The Kinect is so hated and reviled that removing it outright has been a boon to XBox One sales. (The PS4 camera seems to have been abandoned as well, now that all the weirdos can't use it to creep out kids any more.)

But what about 3D? Yes, 3D, the tech that just wouldn't give up. From the ol' red and blue glasses to modern 3D that's so revolutionary no one really wants to pay for it any more (and no one really notices the difference anyway), and from Virtual Boy's utter failure to impress, to the 3DS's 3D abilities actually confusing consumers into thinking the product wasn't even an upgrade (to the point they felt it less confusing to release a "2DS"), that doesn't seem to be doing so hot either.

But sure, the Oculus, that'll change everything, right? It's got motion controls AND 3D, all in your chair!

Well, I think that's the problem right there. No matter how much they try to put you "in the game", totally immersed and secluded from the outside world, you're still bound to a chair. Maybe at best, if you're rich and living in a 90's kid's movie about being rich, you get a harness or one of those giant human gyro thingies. You never really do get complete immersion, as your fat body sack still has to sit still and can't really move around on it's own, no matter how many neat gloves you have on, because in the real world you'll either run into a wall, or a busy intersection (there's really only two options in this scenario, maybe if you've got the battery life you might wander into a waiting tiger's jaws).

We all want to be "in" our games, but the weak link is that we aren't! I see people wearing an Oculus, turning their heads around to see, but still forced to use a controller or keyboard to actually move anywhere, like an ANIMAL! So great, my head can be used to rotate my camera, and it feels seamless. Nice job, but unless I am directly moving around, what's the point? It'll be a fun diversion for a few months to a few years, and then everyone sticks it on a shelf and goes back to the same ol' steadily sharper 2D screens they've been using.

The solution? Oh, nothing much, just DIGITIZE OUR BRAINS. That's basically all that's going to work. Of course, anything invasive enough to fully scan our current brain state is likely going to destroy it. I don't consider that a problem myself if it works, but we're so very, very far from anything close to being able to do that. In the future, this post might be read by ever-cluster #J21aSßé, analyzed for all historical context, and meta-laughed at for shortsightedness. Unfortunately, realistically, I won't live long enough to see that day. I have no problem saying this, because in the event I'm wrong, I'm PART of ever-cluster #J21aSßé and don't think a little thing like personal embarrassment's going to bother me at that point.

Yeah, VR's tricky. On the one hand, you're right, VR with a controller isn't entirely immersive. If it's not basically a Holodeck, it won't be entirely convincing... but on the other hand, no one could actually DO what they do in a game! I mean, in a game you can run long distances quickly and without tiring, climb mountains with just the press of a button, jump higher than you can in reality, etc. In a holodeck or such that doesn't work, and if you have to actually move around you'd get tired quickly! So yeah, for a lot of things a controller would be better anyway.

I never mentioned anything about a holodeck. That's one of the more amazing and yet silly inventions of Star Trek. Why bother with a holodeck when you can do the opposite, create the reality INSIDE your brain, digitally? If you're doing your VR via cybernetics, the sky's the limit. You could actually be immersed and simultaneously do unbelievable stuff like fly.

I think of things like Oculus as not being an attempt to revolutionize immersive virtual interactions all by itself (regardless of any claims that the inventors or backers might make), but as merely the latest, and perhaps biggest, step towards building what you described: full-immersion virtual reality processed entirely within the brain.

As for how long that will take? Who knows. Ray Kurzweil thinks we're no more than 30 years away from the Singularity, so if he's right, we should all live long enough to see it.

I really don't think anything like that is nearly that close. Of course there's baby steps, but keep in mind neurons and semiconductors don't really work the same. At a fundamental level, every neuron is more like an entire processor than just one semiconductor, each one more like an entire computer input/output system. We've got some very broad strokes on which sections of the brain do certain general tasks, but those same broad strokes if applied to a PC wouldn't let you build an exact duplicate (knowing that this part is the processor and this part is the memory in a PC is basically useless if you're trying to actually build the hardware yourself or make an emulator).

Further, the brain is more than just the sum of electrical activity, as the flood of chemicals the brain floats in change how every neuron bathed in it responds to those electrical signals, so that's got to be emulated too. Not knowing exactly how every neuron is wired is a very big gap. With something like, say, a star, you don't need to know the interactions of every individual atom. You can generalize, create math that simplifies everything, because a star's reactions aren't dependent on chains of activity that go down to that scale. Living things, and weather systems, DO depend on such incredibly small variations to a ridiculous amount (those systems can be called "chaotic" for this reason), and maybe more so in living things, as there are SO many chains and chains of protein reactions that depend on the smallest parts of single molecules, and later reactions depend on THOSE smallest conditions. The brain is possibly more complex still than that.

The sheer daunting scale of the problem of virtualizing a brain is absolutely mind numbing. Reading commentary by biologists and neurologists on the issue makes that clear to me. I'm a bit more hopeful than some of them, in that I think someday that challenge might be overcome, that it is possible, but I am going to take their word for it that it very likely won't be in our lifetimes. I love technology, "do machines" and everything, but technologists have a bad habit of massively underestimating the biological problem ahead of them when they predict things like a singularity.

There's also another matter. Something like a superior intelligence is less a matter of computing power (though that is a factor), and MUCH more about the software. String together a trillion circuits, and that's all you have, a trillion unthinking and useless circuits doing basically nothing. They've got to be programmed with systems and such to actually stand a chance of becoming a superior intellect. It won't just spontaneously emerge. To program something like that, we've got to understand how our own brains are programmed, and studies like that are still in their infancy. If you had a brain's worth of neurons but they weren't actually intelligently arranged in any fashion, you'd have nothing. Evolutionary programming, starting with general goals for how you want a set of competing AIs to behave and selecting as time goes on, could help us get there, but we'd still lack an understanding of what they're doing (though perhaps it'd be easier to reverse engineer after the fact). A bigger problem? Evolution is more or less blind. We'd have no way if the AIs we just evolved were "friendly" or not.

So, the singularity is an interesting idea, but it's not right around the corner, and there's a LOT of things humanity needs to do to get there, many of those tasks very daunting indeed. Don't misunderstand, I think augmenting and altering the human mental condition is probably the one thing that'll save us as a species, I'm just more skeptical of just how challenging the task is.

http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/

One way or another, it's happening. I tend towards optimism, slightly.

Projects like these are an interesting start, but a few things should be clear. First, this is not a part of a project to digitize any specific brain. We'd need something a bit less destructive than the way they get these smaller modules analyzed. There's also one very basic notion, which is that a simulation is only as good as the information we've got.

Basically, simulating small parts of a rat's brain is, at best, a test to see just how accurately we've modeled how those sections function. We need to match it against the behavior of those sections of a rat's brain to see if they match. If they don't, our picture is incomplete, and adding computing power alone can't solve that.

Now don't misunderstand, I think that at some point in the distant future, such research may in fact succeed (should humanity in general not just blow itself up first). However, I'm pretty much certain it won't help us. The best we've got is to make sure that future can come to pass. Not to worry, it's really too much to ask that WE get to be the first generation that gets immortality. We'll be in good company.

Another suggestion is that a future brain simulator might recreate us by simulating all possible brain configurations. Frankly, I think that's a nightmarish scenario. How would any of us find our loved ones in that chaos? There would be such an incredible multitude of possible "us" out there, and none of "us" would even know which one actually existed. There'd be variations with "broken" minds, variations with flawed memories, and psychopathic variations that know how to pretend to be the friendlier real versions but would murder someone the first chance they got. Further, the barrier between "us" and "not us" would vanish. Just as in evolution, where if you look at a small scale you can't tell the difference between one generation and the ones before and after, and continue to never be able to tell the difference, all the way from human, back to proto-mammal, and then back up another chain to tiger (but could still easily tell the difference between much larger generational jumps), we'd never even know where "we" end and "aunt Gertrude" begins.

Frankly the "emulate them all and let god sort 'em out" approach to reincarnating the past seems destined for the worst form of "Hell is other people" imaginable. No, I don't think that'd be a good idea. Freezing my brain isn't too good an approach either, as frost damage shreds brain cells at the molecular level so thoroughly that there's no chance of reconstituting the original brain state from that mess. No, our very best hope of living long enough to reach that distant goal would be to keep up with a steady progression of life extension, just BARELY eking out our own survival longer than intended until such a day might arrive. On that count, well, for you and I the world might just not care enough. We're not rich, and we won't be able to afford the cutting edge (not to mention that the cutting edge can be dangerous and end up killing us instead before it's become "proven").