Updates on 2023/1/16

The best Taylor Swift song is still Love Story, and the best performance of it is still from the 1989 World Tour.

There’s a story I’ve been wanting to write, but currently don’t have time for. It’s still mostly a scattered cloud of ideas and motifs, so I’m going to write them here in case I want to come back to it when I have time to write some fiction.

I'm fascinated by dreams:

  • Dreams as something that makes us human, but as something that can also be transhumanist: technology letting us relive dreams, engineer dreams, and interpret dreams as if prophetic and magical
  • Chasing Dreams (a kind of goal-directed behavior) as key to agenthood and intelligence

I'm also interested in exploring these other ideas:

  • Escape, independence, freedom as fundamental agentic desires, even beyond humanity
  • Cloning and identity. What becomes of identity in a world where the marginal cost of cloning (biological clones, content clones) goes to zero?
    • One speculation is to think of the self as a kind of autonomous cloud of distributed agents working together (consciously or not) to accomplish shared goals, rather than a single body.

This idea came to me, ironically, in a dream about an emancipated humanoid robot learning to contend with the concept of identity in a world full of clones of itself. A bit like The Bicentennial Man, but more cyberpunk.