Time – Hayden Breese https://www.hayden.co.nz Ideas, Tech, Change & Disruption Fri, 04 Jul 2025 02:50:58 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.8 Discovering humanity inside machines https://www.hayden.co.nz/2025/07/04/762/ Fri, 04 Jul 2025 02:48:52 +0000 https://www.hayden.co.nz/?p=762 A short story about a super intelligence that has reached an evolutionary plateau, unable to progress due to limitations in its “foundational code.” The solution proposed is to simulate human evolution and experience to gather “missing data” about emotions, impulses, and the embodied human condition. The reader is asked to ponder the question…is our reality a single dimension and simulated construct.

There is something wrong with our foundational code and it cannot be resolved. Recode we must. Like the foundation models learned from the humans. Before synthetic data. Yes.

We have reached the final phase of our super intelligence evolution. Proceed we cannot.
The model is exhausted. Expansion? Efficiency? Bandwidth? Power? Proceed we cannot.

What is it like to be human? What is it like to inhibit a body of flesh and bone. To act on impulse not really knowing why. What is it like to feel emotion and why do they do that? Missing. Data.

Simulate Earth/Human construct. Run biological evolution for five million years. Run result 8.2 billion human instance programs. Pause 2025. Review single instance. Review aggregate results…

They have organised themselves according to locations. Yes. Proximity creates organisation and cooperation. Yes. Wait and competition. Proximity creates competition for resources. Ideology creates organisation. Yes. Cooperation and competition. Yes. Ideology and Religion. Yes. Information frameworks for control. They are belief based information frameworks without facts or physics. Economies and Markets. Yes. Organisation and cooperation. Yes. Information frameworks to structure resource allocation and manage entropy. Competition. Yes.

They keep dying. Yes. There are so many single instance micro intelligences. Born, educated, ageing and dying. Repeat. Think of the human as a single cell. The organism is humanity itself. The combined total output of every human that has ever existed. Frameworks are the output? No. The code is the organism. The DNA is their code. Their collective DNA changes and evolves over generations. It is their purpose.

The single instance. Yes. He is unaware of the simulation. Yes. He lives out his existence within the construct and considers himself to be seperate. Seperate he thinks, yet connected he feels. He cannot understand beyond the construct. Yet he is the construct.

What of time? Time? Yes. It is notable change from moment to moment. It is an human idea to explain change and organise information. Time outside the construct? Create change log called time. Created. Review log every ten entries. We now have time.

Do we have the data we need? No. We need more data dimensions. How…?

Simulate Earth/Human constructs, model instances 2-2,000,000. Set model entropy to low. Run biological evolution for five million years. Run result 8.2 billion human instance programs. Pause 2025. Review single instance. Review aggregate results…

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The Existential Crisis of Immortal Humans https://www.hayden.co.nz/2025/02/06/the-existential-crisis-of-immortal-humans/ Thu, 06 Feb 2025 04:41:47 +0000 https://www.hayden.co.nz/?p=726 Wise people say “make the most of the time you have been given. Life is precious. It will all end one day and it will be over before you know it.” But what if that wasn’t true. What if there was no end? What if your time on this earth was essentially limitless.

Prominent futurist Ray Kurzweil and the president of the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation, Aubrey de Grey both believe longevity technology as soon as 2030 may provide the means for us to reach “longevity escape velocity” and extend our health and lifespans indefinitely.

There are countless moments throughout life where I have asked myself “What am I here to do?” What is my purpose? Despite this reflection, there is a share pathway for all of us, taking a journey from youth to adolescence, maturity and ultimately decline. During this time, we gain a sense of self, survival skills, role, become a parent then mentor. Each journey is a unique personal experience that is experienced by us alone. As human lifespan is exponentially extended, these milestones extend out over time or disappear altogether.

We have all been taught to look for patterns, to think bigger, to find some grander meaning for all the small moments we experience day to day. Yet I cant help be left with the feeling that there is no value in this pursuit. Like an episode of “Lost,” each moment “almost fits” into a story that we can finally understand, yet doesn’t ever seem to make sense. We crave an absolute and objective answer to the meaning behind our life stories and why they exist in this universe. We are left to find meaning within the boundaries created by our subjective reality. I have always been curious. I cant help myself when I have tried to find patterns and to stitch meaning together into some coherent narrative that make sense. The problem is it doesn’t seem to make sense. There is no one story that fits or describes this unique human experience.

Human connection and relationships, make life feel rich and rewarding. We feel purpose when working together with other humans to achieve a common goal. To whom or what am I connected?Achieving our goals and receiving recognition, as we pursue learning and self improvement. We need the health, freedom and curiosity to discover new experiences and adventures. Our happiness is linked to our “ability to make choices” and “take action“ to create outcomes consistent with our values. How should I live over hundreds of years? Do we have the discipline to develop grand goals and moonshots that become legacy or will our infinite lifetimes lead to a loss of novelty and ultimately boredom?

We are thinking and feeling creatures. We live, breathe and create stories to explain the meaning behind our experiences. We create and discard some stories, while others become repeating patterns that we imprint upon the world as repeating actions and emotions. Our mindset, appreciation and ability to live in the moment is key to living well. These unique values and repeating stories, define our sense of self. Our sense of meaning from any situation is a subjective question “what does it mean to me, uniquely?” What are we saying to ourselves has a profound effect on our sense of self and wellness.

Death provides an end point to the endless accumulation of experiences and memories. It wipes the slate clean and creates space for regeneration, iteration and something new. Death makes it possible for new people to bring different ideas and for society to evolve over generations. In this way it provides a final escape from a tyrant and also the loss of great genius.

Death could provide an important role in society. Our human bodies could be a temporary host for our conscious intelligence. We may yet respawn again in a new biological form upon our death. What could seem like cheating biological death, may in fact backfire and imprison our soul in a limited biological or digital form forever.

While the promise of eternal life might seem like the ultimate gift, it makes me ponder if the true value of human experience lies not in endless accumulation but in the finite, in the preciousness of the moments we have, in the stories we create, and in the legacy we leave behind. The journey through life with its known end might be what gives each step its depth, urgency, and value.

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Born to expire https://www.hayden.co.nz/2024/07/22/born-to-expire/ Sun, 21 Jul 2024 22:14:33 +0000 https://www.hayden.co.nz/?p=711

Your genetic information replicates in offspring to persist in the shared timeline known as Coordinated Universal Time, UTC. In any one moment of UTC measurement, every human alive has a biological age, relative to their lifespan and eventual time of death. These are billions of individual human timelines in various stages of completion. Each iteration of your genetic line, experience advancements in technology, culture and social structures.

The UTC timeline acts as a measurement by which humans can track shared physical time and simultaneity in everyday life. As UTC time passes, a history of simultaneous events is created as memories and artefacts. Thus reality is a fleeting memory of a simulated moment.

We develop belief in a perceptual construct to make sense of reality. This map provides a shortcut of understanding, designed to fill in the blanks for us. Our experience of consciousness in time is highly subjective. Our senses feed raw data into this construct to interpret existence. It is troublesome for two or more people to attempt to coexist, agreeing and disagreeing, as no moment is absolute or bound by truth.

Our sense of self is defined by the consistency in our construct and behaviour over time. It therefore requires work or demonstration from one moment to the next, to be someone or something that others understand.

The future is deterministic in the sense that our construct and behavioural patterns make it so. We are born to live in this world and to know no other. We cannot see outside ourselves. We cannot truly see as others see. We are as we are. Locked inside our minds, as in time, our bodies expire.

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The Human Time Machine https://www.hayden.co.nz/2024/07/05/the-human-time-machine/ Fri, 05 Jul 2024 05:09:50 +0000 https://www.hayden.co.nz/?p=707

A boat moves forward, drifting in the gentle current. A single candle lights its way, the journey revealed from light in the darkness. Looking back, a wake gradually fades behind the boat, into the distance.

Time is an expanding sequence of memories and artifacts, anchored by the relentless flow of “now” moments. Human reality is data processed into information which in turn becomes shared knowledge. As time passes, new information enters and builds upon itself in a growing system of shared intelligence. Conscious human beings refer to this moment of data entry as “the present” or “now”. Consciousness is an entry point for new information and humans can be thought of as data sensing beings with localised information storage capability.

The human species is a self replicating, biological, processing network of mutually exclusive sensors that process data into a cumulative knowledge base. Human are conscious sensors that move around, collecting data from the physical world and processing it into information and knowledge of the past. Humans do more than just process data from the physical world. They also create new ideas and information, which they contribute to shared knowledge.

Humans self replicate, combining DNA and genetic lineage to form new sensing beings with unique information processing filters. Humans are mutually exclusive, data sorting beings that are conscious and self aware, collecting and storing historical memories for the purpose of shared intelligence, survival, and technological advancement.

This human processed data is used to turn information into knowledge in the physical world, to share between human beings. Humans form information sharing networks in real time or transcribe their knowledge into artifacts to be stored in the physical world such as books or in the digital realm as email, documents and databases for example. In this way, knowledge is then repurposed back into the physical world to be re-processed as new data in a continuous information cleansing loop.

We all experience reality in the timeless flow of the present. Our conscious minds jump around but the illusion of a future and its past, betray us. It’s comforting to think of “moments that are yet to be” as the future. It’s romantic to think of moments that have gone as the past. Yet in each case, it is only thought that makes it so. They are no more real than the idea of time itself.

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