The Singularity is Far: A Neuroscientist's View

boingboing ^ | 7/14/11 | David J. Linden

[CanaGuy]

I can't begin to tell you how abhorrent these suggestions are to me. Think about it people, for one tiny second.......

....Government-loving nanobots in the water supply, or corporate nanobots in our milk & cookies, or religious nanobots from a water cooler in a cathedral, or terrorist nanobots ingested by simply driving through a dust cloud on your bicycle. Terrific, folks, can't wait.

These scientific endeavors involving "brain nanobots" should be outlawed, before they become the worst nightmare for mankind of all time.

[hfr]

Good point.

And it is perversely interesting that in Orwell's 1984, it was a face that was stomped upon ...

[decimon]

Thanks.

I think some people have gotten ahead of themselves on this as some people have gotten ahead of themselves on human space travel. The actual effects on human physiology are simply not known.

[LibWhacker]

Won’t be so bad. No one will ever yearn for freedom again because the instant they do, the bots will go into transformer blender mode inside their skulls and that’ll be the end of them. You’ll be happy all the time, except for that one instant when you weren’t.

YOur coworkers will feel real bad for you, “Do you remember that CanaGuy? Poor guy dropped dead today.” WHAT? What happened? “Don’t know. He just suddenly sat bolt upright in his chair, gasped and fell over. Then this bloody goo began oozing out of his eyes and ears and that was that.” Wow, just like that LibWhacker dude last year. A damned shame.

[tired&retired]

I too am inherently skeptical. This left brained logical tax law professor/CPA had his entire identity based upon logic and it threw me a curve ball that changed my life twenty years ago when this ability just started happening. In fact, it freaked me out so much that I walked out the door to my office, I owned the firm and the building, and didn't return for two years.

I returned to college and picked up a degree in psychology and went on to study cognitive neuroscience in order to get a logical understanding of what I was experiencing. Ironically, my wife is an MD psychiatrist, trained in all the conventional methods at one of the top university medical schools in the country where she is now on the faculty. I've often joked that she can just have me committed, rather than divorce as everyone would think I am nuts!

I was never a religious person as that was outside my logical foundation. Much of my research in cognitive neuroscience has helped me to understand religious teachings as having a logical scientific foundation. Thus it has now become a part of my life.

I purposely have not published as a full understanding of the methodology allows a person to manipulate others like puppets. I could never live with myself if I taught others something that they used to harm people. I do however demonstrate it in front of groups and used it to teach the anatomy and physiology of the human soul. It really is quite simple and logical.

We as a society are about to enter a major mid-life crisis which is going to result in a lot of egos being diminished. There is a saying that has a lot of truth in it.. “When you are full of yourself, you have no room for God.” Let's just say that a lot of people will be searching for answers real soon. It doesn’t take anyone with any prophetic ability to see where our country and the world are heading.

Your comment “ this research will be motivated by the drive for power and wealth, as always.” Sad to say is true. That however is not my motivation. That is why I have not published. It's not about me and my ego needing to prove anything. I teach only to help people to help themselves and not surrender their authority to me or anyone else.

[tired&retired]

“I think he means that he simply moves his hand through the space surrounding the blindfolded, ear-plugged subject.”

That is pretty much true. As I walk up to a person, beginning about fifteen feet away from them, I start to feel their stored memories. Due to the fields spinning, they act like a centrifuge and cause the earliest memories to be stored in the outer perimeter. As I walk toward the person, I am walking the timeline of their life. It's the same field that near death experiencers talk about and call the life review. AAs their conscious awareness is no longer restricted to the physical body, it expands outward through these same fields and they are aware of everything that happened in their lives. Some call this “judgment day” but it is not really a judgment per se.

These stored memories are also the same things you see when you look into a person's eyes and see walls. When I touch these memories, people often say they can feel my hand inside their body. I use this technique to show people how hate, anger, fear, shame, and guilt shackle the soul and forgiveness sets it free.

So far, I have purposely kept a low profile as I don't want all the media attention. I really value my privacy. Anyone can do what I do. I am no one special. All it takes is a little different kind of awareness. Kind of like a blind person uses to hear better.

[aruanan]

So if you want to go into virtual reality the nanobots shut down the signals coming from your real senses and replace them with the signals that your brain would be receiving if you were actually in the virtual environment.

Wow, perfect way to get terrorists to enable pilots to fly their planes into the ground or into anything else: the pilot and copilots in their locked cockpit see and experience themselves coming in for a landing at JFK at the same time they are actually flying the plane into the New York Stock Exchange, completely oblivious to the frantic pounding of the flight attendants on the cockpit door.

[aruanan]

A Lake of Data, A Puddle of Knowledge

This is certainly true. As I walked through the University of Chicago's Crerar Library (a science and medical library), I realized that lying in all those books were probably all sorts of bits and pieces of clues which, if assembled in just the right way, could lead to monumental discoveries. But I also realized that the only place that would happen would be inside the mind of a human being that understood the separate data and possessed sufficient genius to put them together in novel and unexpected ways. There is no computer that will do that. If the books were all digitized, they could be searched effectively, but that would still be at the instigation of a human being with an idea about how to solve some sort of problem and where to look to find answers. For this kind of search, a gerbil has greater intellectual power than any computer.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

It’s hard to predict anything, especially the future.

—Yogi Berra

[LibWhacker]

Kind of reminds me of this.

[SunkenCiv]

I didn’t check the Ray Kurzweil keyword, seems like he’s one of those extreme longevity guys.

[Windflier]

"Kurzweil also assumes that the human mind resides entirely in the brain (or at least in the nervous system): There is no immortal soul, collective energy, or other nonbiological component that encodes our individual mental selves. At this point in his argument I'm still on board."

I'm sorry, but that is precisely where I step off Kurzweil's train.

We are far more than a collection of cells, neurons, and synapses. Scientists will never unlock the mystery of the human mind until they realize that meat does not think or dream. Only spirit does that.

[tired&retired]

“We are far more than a collection of cells, neurons, and synapses. Scientists will never unlock the mystery of the human mind until they realize that meat does not think or dream. Only spirit does that.”

BINGO!

[Windflier]

I happen to also know that thought and memory exists and functions outside the body.

What you said about being able to perceive the thoughts and memories of others in the space immediately outside their heads, is correct. I’ve observed this too, and no, it doesn’t take any special ability. Anyone can do it.

[tired&retired]

“Anyone can do it.”

I agree with you. They generally appear to about fifteen feet from a person in a very organized pattern. Not just around the head.