Video involving Aubrey De Grey commenting on Google's calico effort

An interview with Aubrey De Grey about google's new effort calico and antiaging developments.  Antiaging science is becoming more mainstream and additional effort and funding will be provided towards the fight against aging.

Comment on possibility of technological resurrection

We don't know what happens to the mind after death. I believe in mathematical realism, and Ibelieve simulations do not necessary depend on specific implementation to exist. I believe they exist independently as abstract potential patterns( in some real number, maybe a transcendental like pi exist numerical sequences representing all the temporal states of a simulation, and these have existed outside of time eternally).

If you burn all the books of isaac asimov and all the copies of them, the actual patterns haven't been destroyed even if no local physical implementation of them exist. As has been often said even random monkeys typing with enough time will produce these works again along with all possible books past present and future.

Now I believe the brain is hardware that is simulating sensory perception and an accompanying observer. I believe this simulation or sequence of patterns is eternal and has always existed outside of time, it exists independent of the brain's existence. If the multiverse is true it is likely that infinite copies exist and are taking the exact same sequence of actions at the same time.

Now I do not believe this means that one is intrinsically immortal. There are sequence of things that have defined beginning middle and end even if they are timeless, eternal in nature.

What I do think is that death remains an open question, we just don't know what happens to the continuity of consciousness, does it just end there or does it continue somehow? For example take a particular simulation of an ai with perfect checkers play against another ai with perfect checkers play, the game iirc will end in a draw. Now if you destroy the computers on which this simulation is being run, you don't actually destroy that particular perfect play game it exists outside of time along with all imperfect plays in a combinatorial space.(the related data for perfect play is about 200GB iirc).

If I take a book of hamlet and burn it midway through, the ideas the play is not actually destroyed only my access to it. If I was a character in the play i would be none the wiser, the ideas , thoughts, words are immune to corruption. In the brain the conscious observer is the main protagonist of the simulation, a simulation that is independent of substrate, as patterns while implemented in matter are independent of the matter in which they've been implemented. In theory it is perfectly plausible that the mind keeps on going somehow(for example, maybe the multiuniverse is true and the exact mind simulation is being run in parallel an infinite number of times, when the hardware is destroyed in one of these worlds, the individual simply continues in the rest of the copies as the actual interaction is exact it is conceivable the individual exists simultaneously at the same time across all copies.).

But again I restate we don't know what happens, we're only consciously aware of what our memory allows us to be aware of. Yet we know from experiments, drugs, accidents, etc that in some cases one can have no recollection of times when one was conscious. Do we solely exist in one body at a time? Even if so given that our brain has zero memory access to anything that could occur outside the brain's sensory input and its internal processes, we just can't know if our memory can be considered to provide the limits of what we're actually conscious of. If time travel is possible, we could be in two bodies at a time, past and future or more if repeated travelling occurs, and yet despite our conscious existence being in multiple places at the same time we wouldn't be aware of it, while hypothetical this hints that it is conceivable. We could conceive of a ship of theseus thought experiment, were a man and his wife's brain and body are slowly replaced with each others. Eventually the man becomes the wife and the wife becomes the man, did the man stop being the man at any point? how about the wife? or was the man both man and wife always but not consciously aware of this because of memory separation?I'm reminded of this story

Comment and quotes on brain

it performs massively parallel computations extremely efficiently. For example, complex visual perception occurs within less than 100 ms, that is, 10 processing steps!link

A human can perform significant tasks in much less time than a second. For example, I could show you a photograph and ask you to determine if there is cat in the image. Your job would be to push a button if there is a cat, but not if you see a bear or a warthog or a turnip. This task is difficult or impossible for a computer to perform today, yet a human can do it reliably in half a second or less. But neurons are slow, so in that half a second, the information entering your brain can only traverse a chain one hundred neurons long. That is, the brain 'computes' solutions to problems like this in one hundred steps or fewer, regardless of how many total neurons might be involved. From the time light enters your eye to the time you press the button, a chain no longer than one hundred neurons could be involved. A digital computer attempting to solve the same problem would take billions of steps. One hundred computer instructions are barely enough to move a single character on the computer's display, let alone do something interesting.-Jeff Hawkings, On intelligence

Unlike traditional computer architectures which have extremely high clock rates and can perform deep loops in short order with billions of instructions per second serially, allowing for billions of steps to be taken in an algorithm. The brain has to do its processing with about 100 instructions per second serially. Given this slow speed, it requires a very different kind of algorithms that are massively parallel and can work within few steps. That is not all kinds of algorithms are viable or can be performed within a few dozen steps.

Documentary on Ray Kurzweil

A documentary on famous futurist Ray kurzweil, who has popularized the idea of the singularity and successfully predicted many technological developments.

Mobile graphics advances

New advances in mobile tech graphics by nvidia and epic. Ever more realistic graphics are going to allow for more immersive experiences in games.

Blue brain

 "I think we will understand how the brain is designed and works before we have finished building it."-Henry Markram

The brain is likely to be understood this century, paving the way for the ability of replicating its abilities in an artificial substrate.

telomere tech

A nice video regarding the promising science of telomerase inducers. The possibility of one day extending telomere length and possibly influencing health.