2nd Online Workshop on ASIM

ASIM July 10, 2010 Workshop

Second Online Workshop on Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds

July 10, 2010, Teleplace TeleXLR8, 18:00-22:00CET, 12:00-16:00EST, 09:00-13:00PST

To be held in Teleplace (http://www.teleplace.com/), contact giulio (AT) gmail.com

Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds (ASIM) 2010-2 is the second in a series of workshops organized by the ASIM community. Some workshops, including this first one, will be held online through the Teleplace virtual meeting software (http://www.teleplace.com/). Others, such as ASIM-2010 in San Francisco,  will be held in physical venues, often as satellite meetings at other events catering to compatible interest groups. As the title suggests, both the community and the associated workshop are strongly objective-oriented and organization-oriented rather than technology specific. This choice is a reflection of the interests of many in the community, who prioritize achieving and advancing the possibilities for substrate independent intelligent minds over the development of a particular technology track for its own sake. Candidate technologies, in this case, must best serve the objective. Candidates include technologies that are relevant to whole brain emulation, neuroprostheses, brain augmentation, cognitive simulation and artificial general intelligence.

Topics of this second workshop are:

• 1. Discussion of 1st conclusions regarding defining criteria of ASIM, representative of our organization. This is based on results that emerged during the first workshop on June 5th.

  2. Outlining two experimental projects. One functional and one structural project are suggested. Aims, organization, milestones, PR purposes, etc. will be formulated.

  3. Discussion of themes and aims of the ASIM-2010 workshop in San Francisco on August 16&17. Lists of possibile speakers and invitees.

  4. Presentation of carboncopies.org and discussion of its upcoming incorporation as a 501(c)(3); primary aims.

  5. Forum on collaboration between carboncopies.org and brainpreservation.org. Addendum: Bringing structure to proliferating ASIM organizations, sites and projects.

  6. Forum on how to work with / around other organizations with overlapping interests (e.g. Alcor).

  7. Presentation of new candidates to join our action-oriented ASIM community.

This meeting is composed of a set of discussion forums, as listed in the program below.

PROGRAM

State and Progress of the Foundation and its Members

Randal Koene

Once more, I will address the objectives for which our group and the organizations that it spawns exists, the fundamental realizations and choices that those represent. I will reiterate some of the important realizations from our last workshop and relate those to new developments. I hope to spend a little bit of time discussing the strategy behind the organizational structures, and the appropriate labels for those outlines. Finally, I would like to encourage feedback about sensible ways to grow our group so that we can better meet the needs of near-term developments.

The what, why and how of carboncopies: Present and future projects and aims

Suzanne Gildert

I will present an overview of the plan for the carboncopies organisation and outline how to start pushing the concept forward. We would like to appear attractive to donors in order to continue building the brand of 'Realistic routes towards substrate independent minds' as a sensible and above all scientific approach to 'uploading'. I will provide a summary of what has been undertaken so far and how people can help in the future. I will also discuss how carboncopies fits into the ASIM-SF workshop and how we can benefit from being a satellite to the Singularity Summit. Discussion and debate from others is welcome throughout, as this will be a brainstorm session in addition to a presentation.

ASIM: Experimental Framework

Peter Passaro

I'll give a brief outline of a general experimental framework for producing emulations of neural dynamics for whole brains, and then try to engage everyone in a discussion about how to fill in the details and where priorities lie. This includes four research streams: functional data capture, structural data capture, an integrated analysis toolkit, and a large scale simulation platform. Highlighting near term research capabilities, I'll go over two projects that could be executed in a five to year time frame and produce significant movement towards the goal of ASIM.

The Foundation, the network and collaboration

Giulio Prisco

I will present a sketch of a draft of an outline of an organizational plan. The Foundation is a network of persons interested and actively involved in WBE/SIM. Some Foundation volunteers are mainly interested in roadmapping and the big picture, whereas others are very active in advancing a specific candidate technology. This community needs, of course, both things. The Foundation should, in my opinion, focus on roadmapping and meta-research: research on advances and probable evolution of the candidate approaches proposed by individual projects. It should build a network of experts and interested citizens to cover all promising approaches. Some communities and organizations dedicated to personal preservation which could and should be involved in the network are: the Brain Preservation Foundation; the BCI community; the cryonics community (Alcor, CI, Kriorus); the Terasem foundation and its projects CyBeRev and Lifenaut; the synthetic biology community; the Big Brain project. Since all these partners are run by persons with big egos (which is not a bad thing), the Foundation should also take a diplomatic path-smoothing role. The Foundation should also take an outreach and PR role, offering public information on all related projects.

Post-workshop write-up: ASIM2010-2 Second Online Workshop on Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds