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New one from Pat. Probably his most brutal on Islam so far.

That was pretty embarrassing. Note how commentators did not comment on booing, but they’ve actually commented on how he threw great pitch.

Life could indeed be beautiful and just a thought of dying could be enough to put you in a temporary state of depression. Most of us like to live. We love life and want more of it, but at the same time we’re all aware that one day we’re all going to die. Every human on this planet knows, that one day they will too cease to exist. Some people are terrified by this, but some just accept it and are fine with it, while on the other hand majority of us wants and needs to know if there’s life after.

Let’s first look at the facts and what we DO know about death:

1. Heart stops and cells get deprived from oxygen so cells start irreversible process of dying
2. Lungs cease to function and person stops breathing
3. If CPR is not administered within 6 minutes brain starts to die from lack of oxygen.
4. After 10 minutes brain damage is certain and irreversible
5. Muscles starts to stiffen and body begins to cool down
6. Skin and bone cells die latest and could survive up to 36 hours without oxygen
7. After 36 hours (and extensive tests) person is pronounced brain dead and there’s nothing that could be done for him/her anymore.
8. No one has ever came back after 72 hours of his/hers heart stopping.
9. Your body decompose and you eventually cease to exists
10. Your molecules and atoms become part of the soil and eventually end up in rivers, water air and perhaps some other person’s or animals body.

To describe the process medically we use fancy latin names like following:

• Pallor mortis, paleness which happens almost instantaneously (in the 15–120 minutes after the death)
• Algor mortis, the reduction in body temperature following death. This is generally a steady decline until matching ambient temperature
• Rigor mortis, the limbs of the corpse become stiff (Latin rigor) and difficult to move or manipulate
• Livor mortis, a settling of the blood in the lower (dependent) portion of the body
• Decomposition, the reduction into simpler forms of matter

Doctors use instruments like Electroencephalography (EEG) or intracranial EEG (icEEG) to determine that there’s no electrical activity in the brain before they pronounce person brain dead or dead. Once these devices stop detecting brain activity, that’s it. Person is dead, and the process is irreversible.

You might say that this applies only to the body itself and not the soul. Well, neither me or you nor anyone else knows what the soul is. Let alone if it exists, so like I said let’s stick with what we DO know.
As you know it, your body (matter) cannot just disappear (second law of thermodynamics prevents that), but it can turn into energy or some other form of matter. If you consider this kind of energy to be soul then so be it, but that’s not really living after death and it will not be point of this article. I am assuming that when majority of people are talking about life after death, they’re talking about consciousness living. In other words, they would be aware they’re alive.

Sometimes belief in life after death could be overwhelming that it would be hard to put it in words. I’m sure we all had following conversation with our parents, friends or just acquaintances. I will describe brief dialog between myself and my mom:

Mom: ” So you believe that after we die we just go into the ground, decompose and eventually disappear.”
Me: “I really don’t know but yes, based on what we do know today that is what happens.”
Mom: We don’t feel anything and nothing happens afterwards?
Me: “Yes”
Mom: “But that cannot be”
Me: “why not?”
Mom: ” Because it cannot”
Me: “Why do you think that cannot be?”
Mom: “There has to be something.”
Me: “What?”
Mom: “Something. There’s just has to be.”
Me: “But what?”
Mom: “I don’t know what, but I cannot just go into the ground and just seize to exist. Something has to happen. There has to be something more.”
And goes on and on…

Now, I consider my mom to be very rational person of above average intelligence and well read. She is not the only one who talks and thinks like that in conversation like these. We’re just terrified of loosing someone or leaving the loved ones behind. Sometime we want something so bad that it’s hard to put it in thoughts. Let alone words.

Now, consider following quote which comes from one of our greatest thinkers. Mark Twain:

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” - Mark Twain

Can you remember time of the Napoleon or Roman empire? How about dinosaurs? Of course you cannot, because you did not exist back then. You also did not feel, taste, see or sense back then. You just weren’t here. You have no consciousness recollection on any of those events and you’re not bothered by it.
Mark Twain implies that you will experience same thing after you die. Nothing. For lots of people that is truly terrifying, but there’s something very comforting about what Mark is saying. To me this seems a lot more comforting then wandering around as a ghost, spirit or some kind of non-physical entity. Same thing goes for being stuck in some kind of purgatory or heaven and hell for eternity. Just think about it little further. Doing anything (no matter how beautiful and great) for eternity seems like a torture to me.
Let me give you personal example. I really love playing guitar. I can play guitar for hours, but after six or seven hours it becomes boring and then pure torture. Imagine doing it for eternity! Even something as good as sex will get boring and eventually become true torture. Literary. Think about it. Physically burning in hell will eventually will be equal to having sex. That’s something I never though will hear myself say.

Good number of scientists and theologians believe that we cannot fully answer question life after death without fully explaining the consciousness. So far good number of tests and experiments are conducted and most of them point to conscientiousness being tied directly to brain functions. For example: reason why you cannot remember when you were one year old is because your brain wasn’t fully developed. Basically you weren’t conscious back then. Another example would be that if I would to hit you in the head you would loose conscientiousness and would not remember anything at all while unconscious. Yet, another even more convincing example is that it is the known fact that brain damage could change person’s personality. All of these point to the brain.

Can consciousness survive death? If consciousness is indeed just a brain function then no, it cannot survive death, but If consciousness is more than brain function then where would this consciousness reside? Is consciousness nothing more then our neurons firing at the certain order? Consciousnesses could also just be a measure to describe brain activity. Just like a meter is measurement of distance. You cannot touch or feel meter. Truth is, we really don’t know but lot of smart people are working on it.

What do I think?

We really have no examples of consciousness existing outside of the brain, so why anyone would want to suppose such a thing in a first place. I think fear of unknown plays a huge part in this. Also, not all of us are equipped to deal with harsh realities in same way. Some of us cope with the unknown in totally different ways. Let me name some of them: resurrection, reincarnation, incarnation, heaven and hell, ghosts, NDE (Near Death experiences), 72 virgins (I am being serious here), zombies and probably hundreds of other interesting and inventive ways of surviving death. It became pretty much cultural. Different cultures have their own way of dealing with loss, grief and fear of the unknown.
My personal opinion is that if we (regular schmo’s) worry too much about all possible things that might come after we die, we will miss out on all of the good things in the only life we do know. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to live your life trying to conform to something you have no way of knowing exists. Sometimes it’s ok to say “I just don’t know”, and get on with your current life. The only thing that is going to be left behind you that we DO know is your legacy and deeds you did in this life.

Here’s the excerpt from todays’ CNN article:

Just 31 percent of Americans approve of how President Bush is handling his job, according to a poll released Wednesday, the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war.
A new poll out Wednesday finds that 67 percent of those surveyed disapprove of President Bush.

Full article here: Poll: Bush’s approval hits new low
There’s something terribly wrong here. If you don’t know what that is, I will tell you. It’s that number 31% that it’s bothering me. Article says ONLY 31% support president. ONLY?! Are you fucking kidding me? I would’ve guessed much, much lower. The real questions is not the other 67% who don’t support the president, but I am wondering who are those 31% of mongoloids that do. In any normal and healthy society this number could not reach 1% but statistical chance alone dictates that you will always have certain percentage of retards and chimp monks supporting this guy so 4% will probably be a closest number, but 31%. Come on. Who’re we kidding.

One of the most confusing arguments today is fine-tuning argument. How is it that the universe is so finely tuned to support life? Everything is at the right distance from everything or nothing would work. Psychical constants are so tight that any variation would bring chaos. Earth is exactly the right distance from the sun so it doesn’t get burned or cooled. If for example nuclear force was only few percent different, it would alter configuration of the stars which in turn would not be able to support the life as we know it. If expansion rate of the universe is larger: no galaxies would form if smaller: universe would collapse, even before stars formed.
There are hundreds of examples like this, and at the first look it does look amazing and impossible. That’s because it is impossible. Chances that the Universe fine tuned itself for our existence is highly improbable and it’s bordering on fantastical improbability.

But this fine-tuning argument is so flawed and answer to me seems so simple that I am really puzzled how some people (including some scientists) do not see it. Answer is following:

It’s all matter of perspective. People who are amazed by this fine-tuning argument are looking at it from the opposite point of view. They’re assuming that we were already existed here and ready to go and universe just showed up and fine tuned itself around our existence so it could sustain us. Or that the Universe popped into existence with us humans in mind. That would indeed be amazing. Universe did not fine-tune itself for us, but it was the other way around. It was the opposite way. Universe was already here and we’re the ones who evolved to fit within that form. Not only us, but stars, galaxies and everything else. If universe was any different, we would’ve just evolved into something different or not exist at all. Galaxies would look different or would not exist. And it’s simple as that. Really. Change you perspective and everything drastically changes.
Another analogy might be in order.
Professor of physics used the firing squad analogy:

A man is due to be executed by firing squad.
No man in the squad has ever missed before.
However on this occasion they all do.
The condemned man is interviewed afterwards and is asked how he feels about this amazing coincidence that everyone in the firing squad has missed.
He replies:

“Of course they missed or I wouldn’t be here talking to you!”

You wake up one morning and walk over to your mail box. There’s a letter in the mail from a broker or brokerage house, lets call it Big Brother, predicting that S&P500 will go up in price this month. You trash the letter assuming it was spam. Within a month you get a second letter, again from Big Brother notifying you that S&P500 indeed went up and that you missed out on large gains if you had enrolled in their 24 month predictions program. Prediction fee is only $1,995 a year. Second letter also makes another prediction stating that S&P500 will still go up next month.
This catches your interest since they already correctly predicted the move one time but you discard the letter anyway thinking it could be just pure luck. Within a month you go online and check out the price of S&P500 now versus one month ago and indeed it went up again.
Next month you receive a third letter from the Big Brother notifying you of their next prediction that S&P500 will go down this month. Indeed, within a month SP&500 goes down. Three correct predictions in a row. Still could be luck so you discard the letter again but your interest increases exponentially, or at least you already starting to have naughty dreams about money.
You keep receiving these letters month after month correctly predicting what the market is going to do with terrifying precision. By the month five, I guarantee you already checking up your savings (or even a home mortgage) to see if you have some money you can spare to loose. By the month 6 or 7 you’re hooked. You cannot just sit and wait idly while all these wonderful opportunities are passing you by. You have signed and enrolled in their 24 month no refunds prediction program for $1,995 a year. You might think, that’s lot of money, but that’s a very small fee comparing what you will make within a year knowing a fricking direction of the market! You already have excel sheet showing all your debt paid off, travel plans and another sheet where you listed all relatives and friends to take care of once you get rich. Or not.

Here’s how the scam is done from Big Brother’s perspective:

Big Brother starts out with lets say 10,000 prediction letters and splits them into two groups of 5,000. First group (Let’s call it UP Group) of letters is predicting that markets will go UP while the second group (let’s call it DOWN Group) is predicting that markets will go DOWN. Big Brother then mails out all of those letters to different households.
Big Brother waits and see what the market is going to do and then mails out conformation letters ONLY to the correct group. For example if markets went UP, Big Brother mails out conformation letters only to the UP Group.
DOWN Group never hears from the Big Brother ever again!
Now they have 5,000 users believing that Big Brother predicted market direction this month.
That’s not enough predictions in a row to convince anyone,so they again split up that group in two. UP and DOWN again with 2,500 customers in each group and do the same thing over and over until some of them take the bait. 2,500 will be split into 1,250 and so on. Eventually they will end up with couple of hundred really trusty customers. If they can do this scam few times over, they can clear few millions of doallrs within two years easily. Interesting part is that some of the customers will actually make money by pure luck so they might sign a contract for another two years not knowing that they’re paying $1,995 a year for essentially a coin flip.

Huge volumes are written about investing and stock picking so my aim in this article is not to write an essay and be preachy, but just to give you something to think about when you investing and show you that lady luck actually plays enormous role even when professionals are playing with money. Especially your money.

Money Managers

Money Manager is a person that is in charge of buying and selling securities with other people’s money. Their client’s money that is. Money Manager can have hundreds of clients with each bringing more than million bucks. Sometimes combined poll of money can be in billions. Money managers invest that money or portion of that money to sell and buy stocks and other securities as they see fit. It’s in their interest to get a big return on investment since they’re usually take a cut in percentage of the total sum, or even have up front fees. We also all know that there’s some money managers out there that are really successful and have 5, 6 or more years winning streaks, but sooner or later (probably sooner) that winning streak will end, and money manager will start performing mediocre or even very poorly.

They will use best technology and information money can buy, but that will not help them. It’s like a clockwork. Check it out if you like. So what’s going on here? How come money manager who constantly made money 5 years in a row suddenly started performing so poorly? Did he get less skilled as years goes by? Or could it be that all those years he was more lucky than he wanted to admit? But how can it be luck, winning that many years in a row? It’s seems like a paradox. Here’s how it can be done just by chance alone.

Making ordinary people into market gurus

Let’s take a pool of 1,000,000 people (one million) that have no idea on how to invest money. Let alone manage someone else’s money. Those are going to be regular, hard working people with no interest in stocks or securities. Give them each certain sum of money to invest by picking stocks and securities they like for period of 12 months. After 12 months each will have to report their losses or earnings.

What do you think will happen here? You might think that they’re all destined to go broke within few months, but that will not happen. Statistical chance alone dictates that at least 10% (100,000 people) will just get lucky and make money regardless of their skills and experience.

Sure, probably 90% will fail and go broke before year is over, but those lucky 10% WILL make money just by pure luck. Remember: they had no skills or any knowledge of anything related to financial markets. Intuition might play some minor role here but it will be very small. That alone will not make them successful money managers who make profits year after year you might say. Well, we’re not done yet.

10% out of 1,000,000 people is 100,000.

Let’s take remaining 100,000 winners and have them invest for a second year. Again, just by pure luck 10% of those remaining 100,000 people will become successful.
10% out of 100,000 is 10,000. So right now we have 10,000 people that had success two years in a row already.

If you take remaining 10,000 winners and let them invest for a third year then you would have 1,000 successful money managers for three years in a row! 100 successful money manager 4^th year in a row and 10 really successful money manager for 5 years in a row. All of them armatures that never seen threshold of financial college.
And that’s how it can be done.

I am not saying that’s how’s done in a real word, but I think that luck plays a way bigger role than people are ready to accept. It’s not easy to detect if your stock picking is just luck or skill, but remember following quote:

“Don’t ever mistake bull market for a skill”

That means that everyone is lucky while investing while markets are going up. It’s not a skill, you just investing at the right time. True skills are seen in bear and stormy markets (like the one we’re in right now at the time of this writing). Just ask any of your friends if they’re making money in todays market or on their 401k plans. By the way 401k plans ARE managed by professional Money managers. To me, it is more important to look at the money manager’s performance during his/hers career then actual fund performance. There’s always a bull market somewhere and you’re depending on a money manager to find it.

Following article is just for mind and logic exercise purposes.
Debate over if we humans have free will at all is old and debated to a pulp, and trust me it will not get settled here in this article. However, following arguments will show you that the universe with omniscient and omnipotent being, call it God if you like, free will is highly improbable, by any standard of human logic we use in today’s world. I will use omnipotence and omniscience terms strictly taken from dictionary, but for the sake of abbreviation and familiarity I will call it God.
From dictionary:

omniscient all-knowing (possesed of universal or complete knowledge)
omnipotent all-powerful (an agency or force of unlimited power)

Since God is omniscient (all knowing) that would mean that He knows past, present and future. And not only that but He knows everything else, including where every atom, electron, neutron and proton is located in the universe at any time. He is also omnipotent. Which means that He can also create and manipulate all matter and energy at will. (Logicians would probably stop right here and close the book, but lets play along and see what comes out of this.)
With that in mind, lets explore Adolf Hitler for a moment.

In the beginning (no pun intended) God could’ve created a universe in which:

• Adolf Hitler was bad (causing millions of deaths) or
• Adolf Hitler was good (lets say he decided to become a ballerina).

Omnipotent being could create either one of those universes, or a million different ones for that matter. As we know now, God creates a world with bad Adolf Hitler. It looks like Adolf Hitler did not have any choice in his course of actions since God already made universe with bad Hitler in mind. Did Adolf Hitler really have any choice here?
Lets see counter-arguments first.

You might counter this argument with following:

“God did not cause Hitler to become bad, God only knew that Hitler was going to become bad”.

In other words, God knew what Hitler was going to do (since God is omniscient), but He did not cause him to do it, he just let it happen (there goes your all-loving argument too).
Fair enough, but this argument is flawed. Here’s how.
Not only that God KNEW, but He also CREATED the world with evil Hitler. Every action starting from the beginning of creation of the universe leading to Hitler being bad was set in motion and was predetermined by God at the beginning of creation. Remember this. In other words, God had to put things in motion at the beginning with evil Hitler in mind, which eventually led to Hitler becoming evil tyrant. It’s a simple law of cause-and-effect. Hitler did not have any choice whatsoever, because if Hitler did have any choice and lets say chose to be good, that would mean that God’s plan to create evil Hitler failed and therefore God is not omnipotent. God not only knew the future but actually placed things in motion. He caused it. He is the Creator after all. At best He made Hitler make bad choice.
You might try to counter this argument with weak analogies like: “I know that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I did not caused it to rise, nor can I prevent it from rising”.
Fallacies right from the start.
First, you do not have a power to create the sun or stop it from rising for that matter, and you’re not omniscient. Therefore you cannot use yourself in analogy. We’re talking about omniscient and omnipotent being. It’s logical fallacy to argue like that. You cannot use non-omniscient person to prove omniscient theory which contains omniscient entity. It doesn’t make any sense.
And more importantly you DO NOT know for a fact that sun will rise tomorrow (again since you’re not omniscient). It’s highly unlikely that sun will explode, gets swallowed by a black hole or that the earth will get knocked out of its orbit, but you really DO NOT know for a fact that sun will rise tomorrow, so you cannot use that argument.

You can also use my child argument which goes like this: “I’ve created my child, but it was his/hers choice to become a gangster. It was his/hers free will”.
For one, you did not create your child with him/her in mind of becoming a gangster. God DID create universe with bad Hitler in mind.
Secondly, you did not have any power or knowledge to create your child as a gangster ahead of time. God DID have power and knowledge ahead of time. So most of the arguments here are deeply flawed.

Or you can use something more logical like following argument (I’ve seen this one a lot):
“if I put a bowl of ice-cream and a bowl of cauliflower in front of my child, I know for a fact which one is chosen, the ice cream. My knowing it ahead of time does not restrict my child from making a free choice when the time comes. My child is free to make a choice and knowing the choice has no effect upon her when she makes it.”
Lets see if you can spot fallacy here. No?
He is right. Knowing that something is going to happen ahead of time doesn’t make it actually happen, but that does not apply if YOU were the cause of something happening. Like putting ice cream ball in front of your child! Just by putting an ice cream ball in front of your child, YOU caused your child to eat the ice cream. You were the cause. If you weren’t there, then you would not be able to put ice cream in front of her. But again, you’re not omniscient being and you don’t know what will happen in the future so you could not use that argument anyway. If you throw meat and candy in front of the lion, lion will eat meat. There’s no choice. All you did was fed meat to the lion. You did not gave it a choice. You’re the one that caused lion to eat meat.

You would have better argument if you said that you’ve placed a ball of ice cream of vanilla flavor and chocolate flavor in front of your child, and child picked vanilla based on her free will. But there’s no way of knowing what instrument (instinct, appetite, intuition, free will) child was using in picking vanilla over chocolate so you cannot use this argument to prove anything. I also cannot use it to disprove free will, and I am not. Remember what I said at the beginning: “following arguments will show you that the universe with omniscient and omnipotent being, call it God if you like, free will is highly improbable” Argument with ice cream does not assume there’s omniscient and omnipotent being present.
Another argument you might have is that God can know all your actions but chooses not to. If that’s the case then God is not omniscient since there’s something He doesn’t know.

Beside, no one chooses to be bad or evil. Just think of the absurdity in logic here. If I gave you two choices:

1. Be good and spend entire eternity in paradise or
2. Be bad and burn in Hell for eternity.

If you really think there’s choice here, you’re need to see a shrink. What do you think would be a percentage of people that chose number 2? Maybe few schizophrenics and some masochist, but it would be minimal. That’s certainly not the case when we see choices people make in everyday lives. It actually looks like they don’t have any choices. Otherwise we would see huge percentage of people choosing the right path. This of course is all assuming that omnipotent and omniscient being actually exists.

Yet another argument is: “God sees all the potential possibilities we could take, and we get to choose which path“. So essentially, God gives you lots of options and it’s up to you to choose whichever you want.
This is also flawed since God already started the universe He wanted (see evil Hitler argument) and all your choices are predetermined and known ahead of time. God does not only sees potential possibilities, He acts upon one of those possibilities by creating the world we live in right now.

Conclusion

Just looking at it logically, there cannot be all-knowing and all-powerful being in our universe with us humans having a free will at the same time. Not only that, but claiming that all-knowing and all-powerful entity is not being responsible for any of our actions would be logical contradiction of enormous proportions.
That would be the same as if I would to create faulty circuit which I know for sure would cause fire but created it anyway, and circuit indeed caused fire. And then later on blamed that circuit for the problem by invoking a free will. No logic in that at all. Circuit did not have any choice here.
Think of it in simpler terms: All-powerful God creates world knowing that there will be suffering and all other bad stuff but he does it anyway, and then blames objects of His creations (us) for something He started and had previous knowledge of what was going to happen.
Knowing His own future actions, as well as every future occurrence in His own creation, and then actually putting all that into motion effectively eliminates the existence of free will. Therefore you cannot have both: free will and all-knowing and all-powerful entity at the same time.
There’s really no way around this problem. The only way for free will to exists is if God is omnipotent but not omniscient or vica-versa. But then again problem of omniscient and omnipotent being itself is logical fallacy. Logic simply breaks down. At least logic in the world we occupy. Logic we as humans learned. But what other worlds or logic you going to use? This is all we know so we have to debate the issue with what we know and understand.
There are so many contradictions and logical fallacies in theories like these that it’s going to make your head spin, but if you do have a valid argument I would love to hear it. Before you do, please read the article one more time so you don’t present same arguments but in a different skin.
Question still remains. Do humans (or any other animals for that matter) have a true free will (not predetermined by anything internal like your genetics and external like God) or we’re all just driven by cause-and-effect i.e. our instincts, appetites, desires, ability to anticipate, genetics and external causes?

New one from Pat Condell. Little harsh, but right to the point.

At the time of this writing (2008) IBM has already released their Blue Gene/P (see image below) supercomputer which reached its peak speed of 3 Peta flops. I’ve calculated that is 3,000 trillions of calculations per second and you can take it another way: 3 million billions of calculations per second, or 3 quadrillion calculations per second. Believe it or not this is still not at capacities of a human brain which speed was clocked at around 20 million billion calculations per second or 20 quadrillions per second. So Blue gene is approximately 7 times slower (1/7) compared to human brain. However, technology is not growing linearly but exponentially. Processor speed is doubling every year now (used to be every decade, then every two years, then ever 18 months), which by some calculations home computers will reach human intelligence levels by 2025 (probably sooner) while commercial and military grade (like Blue Gene) computers will reach it by the year 2010 or 2012 at the latest. And those are the most conservative estimates. Scary stuff eh?

Update: IBM announces that the last known supercomputer in the Blue Gene series, Blue Gene/Q is aimed to reach 10 Peta Flops in the 2010-2012 time frame.

Image of IBM’s Blue gene

Lets think about that for a second. What could we accomplish once we have a non-biological technology equivalent to a human brain in our arsenal? Well for one, with that kind technology we will be able to make even faster processors and exponentially even better technology. This will make technology grow even faster at neck-breaking speeds. It’s inevitable.
One of those technologies are going to be nanobots ( Nano robots). They are micro scale (10^-9 meters) programmable robots that can perform variety of duties with breathtaking accuracy and speed.
In medicine for example nanobots can be let into your blood stream to regulate your blood pressure, cholesterol, repair and rejuvenate cells, kill cancer cells, viruses and even make new and better proteins. They can even replace or at least interact (improve) neurons in our brain. Possibilities are truly endless, but the last one sounds the most interesting one so lets stick with that one.
In about 2025 nanobots will be able to map and copy our brain (every neuron, ever synapse, axon and every pathway) very accurately and save that information somewhere in a digital form, external from our bodies. We will be able to save our scanned brain to a hard drive or whatever medium will be used at the time. Our home computers will actually have enough power to sift through all that information and process it.
Now, the only thing we need in order to awaken our digital brain is software. Nanobots can take care of that too. Since they’re already in our brains mapping and copying information they can also simply mimic and learn from our biological brain and model appropriate software for our newly crafted digital brain. With the help of exponential growth, nanotbots will be able to make even better and more efficient software to run that digital brain than the one we have in our brains right now.
Next thing we need would be to find a way to communicate with our digital brain. This will be done wireless. Just like your wireless mouse can communicate with your PC right now, uploaded neurons would communicate via wireless with your biological neurons simulating all sensory experiences. This will probably be achievable through specialized glasses or implanted wireless chip into your brain.
We will have same memories, same senses and some scientists believe that our digital brain will indeed be conscious of itself.
As far as we can tell all of our current senses come from the actual interactions of neurons in our brains. Our digital mind will be able to do the same thing. Imagine now if we uploaded our brain to Internet. We would truly have endless sensory capabilities. Everywhere you went online, it would be communicated back to your true self through Internet back to your PC and then back to your biological brain. Everything from smell, taste, fear, ecstasy will be so realistic that you will not be able to distinguish it from reality. Words like online chat, blogging and Cyber-sex will reach a whole new meaning. Your digital self will be able to roam Cyber-space freely and unrestricted. Not only our digital brain will enable us to have true remote experiences, but it will be able to act as its own entity and think for itself and feel itself. Independent of our physical bodies. That means that after we die, our mind would still live on somewhere in a digital form, and since it’s modeled on our actual brain it will probably act as real us, have same or similar personality as us.
It will be able to interact with other digital humans and experience sensory stimulants beyond anything imaginable by today’s standard.
The word travel for example will also become meaningless. Lets say for the sake of argument that in the year 2030 you would like to travel to Paris and wanted to see The Eiffel Tower. Would you be able to send your digital mind (which will have exact same sensory experience as your whole-self would’ve had) instead? Yes you would. What’s experience anyway? You digital mind would have the same experience and same sensory outputs/inputs as your true self and would be able to beam that info back to your true self via Internet. Think of it as an extension to your brain. Think of it as if your neurons can reach all the way to Paris. No physical body is needed since even now, everything we see, feel, smell, touch, hear and remember is done in our brains. Everything. Period. You arm does not feel pain when you poke it. Your brain does. Your heart does not feel love. Your brain does. So you would indeed have the same experience as if you were really in Paris with your true physical body. You would not be able to tell the difference.
Even today we cannot distinguish some dreams from the actual reality even shortly after we wake up. Virtual Reality software and hardware is so advanced now that you would have a hard time making out what the reality is while using one of those things. Brain is the best 3D software there is.
Now, lets take the travel one step further.
Since all forms of communications will be done wireless, we would actually be able to upload our digital brains to a space satellite and for the first time see the Earth from outer space. And to take it even further; we would be able to make as many copies of our digital brain as we want so we could send number of them on the way to different planets and stars. We would drift away on our galactic plane into the vastness of the Cosmos and be able to safely explore mysteries and dangers of our universe.
Think about it. All of that from the comfort of our living room. Of course since our digital brains would be able to travel just at the speed of light (radio waves travel at the speed of light), we would be limited on how far we would be able to go. For example: we could explore our solar system within minutes, but closest star would take about eight years (4 years in each direction) so it would not be really practical.
Physical property (housing, cars, buildings, etc) will loose it’s value and will give way to a virtual property. As our digital brains are multiplied and self replicated, demand for online property will grow exponentially. More and more our lives will consist of less physical interaction. We could actually hibernate ourselves and live out our entire lives in a virtual environment (Matrix anyone?) and essentially reach virtual immortality.
Eventually our digital brain will want its own body, and it will be able to make it. It would probably first look like hologram (see picture below), but by the inventions of organic printers (printers that can print organic material on atomic and molecular level) it will be able to produce exact copy of you.

Digital Brain Hologram

Estimates are that by year 2035 technology will far surpass human intelligence and nanobots will be able to replicate itself with terrifying speed. And not only that but they will be able to learn and share information instantaneously between each other which will in turn jump start development and technological advance even faster. Law of cumulative returns dictaes exactly that. The fact is that there’s nothing we can do to surpass our biological brain speed limit of 10²⁶ calculations per second. That might seem huge to you , but non-biological entities (computers and technology itself) will far exceed that number by the year 2035. Law of accelerating returns almost guarantee that. Some scientists and mathematicians think that will exceed it by a factor of thousand and by the year 2099 by the factor of trillion. By that time computing will be done on quantum scale (qubits instead of bits) and true immortality will be reached. Taking over humans race is inevitable. If that’s the case than there’s no doubt in my mind that we will reach a whole new level of evolution and human race as we know it will probably become obsolete at some point. It will be replaced by a new digital species that might resemble humans at some point but probably not in a distant future.
Once we could not develop ourselves any further on our biological evolutionary scale (at least not without destroying ourself and consuming every little resource this planet has to offer), we’ve jump started natural selection and created a whole new species on the fly.
Think about what we’ve created here.
It took universe 9 billion years to create earth.
It took evolution 3 and half billion years to create humans.
It took humans about 10,000 years (only 200 of technological advancement) years to create entity better, smarter and more efficient then the actual creators themselves. This is what some call Singularity. They in turn are able to create yet another species that is even more advanced and so on. This will go on until there is bodiless super-intelligence in the universe that lives (if you can call it that) in a totally different dimensions and can create matter, energy, worlds, other beings and anything it likes at will.
I’ll leave it to your imaginations to guess what we’ve created here.

This article was inspired by scientists, free thinkers and transhumansits like: Isaak Asimov, Carl Sagan, John Archibald Wheeler, Richard Feynman and Ray Kurzweil.