= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Dr_Manhattan comments on Theists are wrong; is theism? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (533)
When I abandoned religion, a friend of mine did the same at about the same time. We spoke recently and it turned out that he self-labeled as agnostic, me - "atheist". We discussed this a bit and I said something to the extent that "I do not see a shred of justice in the world that would indicated a working of a personal god; if there is something like a god that runs the universe amorally, we may as well call it physics and get on with it".
It seems that you want to draw the additional distinction of "agenty" things vs. dumb gears, but as long as they only "care" about persons as atmos, vs. moral agents, who cares? It admittedly tickles curiosity, but will hardly change the program...
What makes you think an agenty, simulator-type god wouldn't care about persons as moral agents?
An agenty simulator type god that actually did care about persons as moral agents would have created a very different universe than this one (assuming they were competent).
Well if it were chiefly concerned with us having a lot of fun, or not experiencing pain or fulfilling more of our preferences then yes. But maybe the simulator is trying to evolve companions. Or maybe it is chiefly concerned with answering counter-factual questions and so we have to suffer for it to get the right answers... but that doesn't mean the simulator doesn't care about us at all. Maybe it saves us when we die and are no longer needed for the simulation. Or maybe the simulator just has weird values and this is their version of a eutopia.
"Companions, the creator seeketh, and not corpses--and not herds or believers either. Fellow-creators the creator seeketh--those who grave new values on new tables."
I find that the SA leads us to believe just the opposite.
Future posthumans will be descended in one form or another from people alive today. Some of them may be uploads of people who actually were alive today, some of them may have been raised up and new biological humans and uploads, or even just loosely based on human minds through reading and absorbing our culture.
If these future posthumans share much of the same range of values that we have, many of them will be interested in the concept of resurrecting the dead - recreating likely simulations of deceased, lost humans from their history - whether personal or general.
There was already a thread on this. The general consensus seems to be that it isn't practical, if possible.
Hmm from my reading of the thread it doesn't look like much of a consensus.
I may want to revive this - the arguments against practicality don't seem convincing from an engineering perspective.
From a high quality upload's scanned mind one should get a great deal of information about the upload's closest friends, relatives, etc. The data from any one such upload many not be overwhelming, but you'd start with a large population of such uploads. People who were well known and loved would be easier cases, but you could also supplement the data in many cases with low-quality scans from poorly preserved bodies.
This should give one prior generation. Going back another previous generation would get murkier, but is still quite possible, especially with all the accessory historical records.
The farther back you go, the less 'accurate' the uploads become, but the less and less important this 'accuracy' becomes.
For example, assuming I become a posthuman, I will be interested in bring back my grandfather. There a huge space of possible minds that could match my limited knowledge and beliefs about this person I never met. Each of them would fully be my grandfather from my subjective perspective and would fully be my grandfather from their subjective perspective.
There is no objective standard frame of reference from which to evaluate absolute claims of personal identity. It is relative.
But if you simulate anything other than the actual brain states of the people in question, then they won't behave in exactly the same way. No matter how many other people's knowledge of me you integrate, for example, you won't have the data to predict what I'll eat for breakfast tomorrow with any accuracy (because I almost invariably eat breakfast alone.) Tiny differences like this will quickly propagate to create much larger ones between the simulation and the reality. Jump forward a few generations and you have zero population overlap between the new generation of the simulation and the next generation that was born in reality. If you're attempting historical recreation, this would be a pretty useless way to go about it.
If you wanted to create a simulation that was an approximation of a particular historical period at one point, but quickly divorced from it as it ran forward, that would be much more plausible, but why would you want to? Everything I can think of that could be accomplished in such a way could more easily be accomplished by doing something else.
Sure, but that's not relevant towards the goal. There are no 'actual' or exact brain states that canonically define people.
If you created a simulation of an alternate 1950 and ran it forward, it would almost certainly diverge, but this is no different than alternate branches of the multiverse. Running the alternate forward to say 2050 may generate a very different reality, but that may not matter much - as long as it also generates a bunch of variants of people we like.
This brings to mind a book by Heinlein about a man who starts jumping around between branches - "Job: a comedy of Justice".
Anyway, my knowledge of my grandfather is vague. But I imagine posthumans could probably nail down his DNA and eventually recreate a very plausible 1890 (around when he was born). We could also nail down a huge set of converging probability estimates from the historical record to figure out where he was when, what he was likely to have read, and so on.
Creating an initial population of minds is probably much trickier. Is there any way to create a fully trained neural net other than by actually training it? I suspect that it's impossible in principle. It's certainly the case in practice today.
In fact, there may be no simple shortcut without going way way back into earlier prehistory, but this is not a fundamental obstacle, as this simulation could presumably be a large public project.
Yes the approach of just creating some initial branch from scratch and then running it forward is extremely naive. If you'd like I could think of ten vastly more sophisticated algorithms that could shape the branch's forward evolution to converge with the main future worldline before breakfast.
The first thing that pops to mind: The historical data that we have forms a very sparse sampling, but we could use it to guide the system's forward simulation, with the historical data acting as constraints and attractors. In these worlds, fate would be quite real. I think this gives you the general idea, but it relates to bidirectional path tracing.
Such as?
We can get to that if you can establish that there's any good reason to do it in the first place.
Your justifications for running such simulations have so far seem to hinge on things we could learn from them (or simply creating them for their own sake, it appears that you're jumping between the two,) but if we know enough about the past to meaningfully create the simulations, then there's not much we stand to learn from making them. Yes, history could have branched in different ways depending on different events that could have occurred, we already know that. If you try to calculate all the possibilities as they branch off, you'll quickly run out of computing power no matter how advanced your civilization is. If you want to do calculations of the most likely outcomes of a certain event, you don't have to create a simulation so advanced that it appears to be a real universe from the inside to do that.
Excellent!
The two are intertwined - we can learn a great deal from our history and ancestors while simultaneous valuing it for other reasons than the learning.
Thinking is just a particular form of approximate simulation. Simulation is a very precise form of thinking.
Right now all we know about our history is the result of taking a small collection of books and artifacts and then thinking alot about them.
Why do we write books about Roman History and debate what really happened? Why do we make television shows or movies out of it?
Consider this just the evolution of what we already do today, for much of the same reasons, but amplified by astronomical powers of increased intelligence/computation generating thought/simulation.
This is what we call a naive algorithm, the kind you don't publish.
Calculations of the likely outcomes of certain events are the mental equivalents of thermostat operations - they are the types of things you do and think about when you lack hyperintelligence.
Eventually you want a nice canonical history. Not a book, not a movie, but the complete data set and recreation. As it is computed it exists, eventually perhaps you merge it back into the main worldline, perhaps not, and once done and completed you achieve closure.
Put another way, there is a limit where you can know absolutely every conceivable thing there is to know about your history, and this necessitates lots of massively super-detailed thinking about it - aka simulation.
Not wouldn't, doesn't. And I think it doesn't due to lack of evidence.