LONG GOD DAMNED ENTRY

Ok, so, finally a longer post, now that I'm not feeling like a total wastoid, allthefreakintime.
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First off, I want to react to the cloning debate. At the start, I was totally for cloning. Call me a futurist, but I think trying to tiptoe our way into the future is silly. We need to steer into the future and get ready for it, because our wealthy celebrities are our guinea pigs. All this stuff is going to happen, and it's going to happen to us, or our kids, or our grandkids. Come on now.

After listening to others and actually (with gritted teeth) taking the other side of the argument, I thought of some interesting, if not slightly humorous, arguments against cloning. One thing I thought of that I never brought up, is how a clone would be legally related to the "parent." An unmodified genetic copy is "grown" just like a normal baby, in a womb for 9 months. It's born a regular kid, but just happens to be your identical twin with a different birthday. Is this... your child? The mother's child? Do you share it with her? What about the original egg: if it's not from the birth mother, does the other mother have a say? What if you don't want to share with the child that they are a clone, or give the child your contact information? I figure it'd have to work something like sperm donation: you get paid less for your 50% contribution of genetic code, so long as you remain anonymous. And for good reason! If your genetic stock is running around 10-20 years from now, playing soccer and doing well in all their math classes, they just may want to know who their genetic daddy was that gave them their devastatingly handsome good looks. *cough* Just sayin'

Having a beard is fun, though. I shave a lot less and feel like a sexy lumberjack. I want to finally get into modeling this fall. We'll see!

A lot of people, I think, look at these possibilities with fear. It's unnatural! Make a law! Rahhh.

I disagree! This is just where things are going, and we need to embrace it; put the past behind us. However well we succeed at rationalizing the past, thinking it's this idyllic place of newspaper boys and ice cream trucks and honest hard working families, we need to spend that mental energy on that possible, becoming-reality, and see what awesome opportunities lie ahead for our species. It will be "better," in scare-quotes because of our myriad of standards.
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As I related in an earlier entry, I have a few topics I want to touch on. The big one is self reference. I'm not talking about referencing myself in my blog, or referencing myself referencing myself talking about referencing myself talking about it in my blog. Actually, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

I brought up the topic of a program's code affecting itself in class, but I don't think anyone really latched onto it. It's immensely important to the debate. People kept coming back to a program only being as smart as it's programmer. My website is only as smart as the code I wrote for it.

Notice the word "wrote" there, past tense. It's within the language of javascript (a simple and easy language to learn for the inner workings of websites) for me to write my code affect the code I wrote. Obviously, if I write the code to affect the self-referencing code it is using to reference itself, odds are VERY good the code will destroy it's own ability to reference itself from there on out. The code will hence forth be stuck, unable to reference itself to affect it's self referencing ablity.

So, back to the idea that code is only as smart as it's programmer. If code can't reference, and thus change, itself, then yeah, the code's not going to do anything creepy and clever. But if there is a situation where the code can try out alternatives and test the bits of code against eachother and pick the best code against a given standard or even fine tune the standard the code is selected by, then you end up with a runaway process where the code quite literally can get smarter, wildly independent of the programmer. This is how Deep Blue worked, roughly.

Deep Blue, among many other game-playing computers cannot possibly have all the game's permutations in it's "head." There are simply too many too hold, too many to sift through. If Deep Blue had to go through every possible move in every possible game from the current state of the game, we'd be here until the earth gets eaten by the sun, at that point a swelling red giant.

Obviously Deep Blue, et others, need a sorting process, and, ideally, a learning process, to learn to keep the good bits and discard the wholly bad bits entirely. This self referencing of a program's own code can branch out exponentially, affecting itself affecting itself which affects how it affects itself ad infinitum. As mentioned earlier, this can end badly if the program affects the way it affects itself, but assuming the program's self affecting ability can be affected in the direction of self affectibility, we end up with a fast runaway process producing, and consisting of, infinite intelligence. AHH!
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And now I come to self-replication! This one has been going on for billions of years, and it's a slice or two of the 3-part pie that makes up evolution-by-natural-selection, the 3 slices being heredity, variation, and replication. Something, whatever it is (a gene or a meme) makes a bunch of copies of itself, every so often making a copying error, and the better copies will have a better chance of making copies of themselves...

Whatever increases the likelyhood of the gene/meme making more copies of itself, and therefor, eventually, improvements on itself, whether or not this improvement is affected by the gene/meme's phenotype (but especially if it is), will increase the frequency of the gene/meme's existance.

So let's extrapolate. If a carefully programmed natural selection process is the basis of a robot's code, then we can just assume that their mind will evolve just as beautifully as a bird's wings or a tiger's body. Let's hope we can meld with these super-robots, or let our minds apprehend the cyber-cybernetics to grow into super-human-robot-things.
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Holy crap, this is nearly a 4 page paper double-spaced.
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OH multiple dimensions. A system branches into a new dimension when it references itself.
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I find I have a lot more to write about when I don't have a deadline. Weird!