From: Petter Wingren-Rasmussen (petterwr@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Nov 26 2008 - 04:29:13 MST
On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 10:26 PM, Matt Mahoney <matmahoney@yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- On Tue, 11/25/08, Stuart Armstrong <dragondreaming@googlemail.com>
> wrote:
>
> For life forms in the range from bacteria to insects, everything they know
> is encoded in their DNA and *is* inherited. The invention of culture and
> written language makes humans more like them, except that we accumulate
> information much faster than one bit per population doubling.
>
> My earlier point was not to place too much emphasis on the distinction
> between immortality and reproduction. We only get hung up on preservation of
> identity because of our biologically programmed fear of death.
I agree completely with you this far.
> For the purposes of forecasting the singularity, it makes little difference
> where our knowledge resides.
In my opinion it makes a huge difference. Since the knowledge can reside
within one entity indefinitely it has no inherent need to communicate with
others.
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