jacob_cannell comments on David Chalmers' "The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis" - Less Wrong

33 Post author: lukeprog 29 January 2011 02:52AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (202)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: jacob_cannell 29 January 2011 05:09:55AM *  0 points [-]

Any universal morality has to have long term fitness - ie it must somehow win at the end of time.

Otherwise, aliens may have a more universal morality.

EDIT: why the downvote?

Comment author: endoself 29 January 2011 05:33:22AM *  1 point [-]

This does not require as much optimization as it sounds. As Wei Dai points out, computing power is proportional to the square amount of mass obtained as long as that mass can be physically collected together, so a civilization collecting mass probably gets more observers than one spreading out and colonizing mass, depending on the specifics of cosmology. This kind of civilization is much easier to control centrally, so a wide range of values have the potential to dominate, depending on which ones happen to come into being.

Comment author: jacob_cannell 29 January 2011 11:28:49PM 2 points [-]

I'm not sure where he got the math that available energy is proportional to the square of the mass. Wouldn't this come from the mass-energy equivalence and thus be mc^2?

Wei Dai's conjecture about black holes being useful as improved entropy dumps is interesting. Black holes or similar dense entities also maximize speed potential and interconnect efficiency, but they are poor as information storage.

It's also possible that by the time a civilization reaches this point of development, it figures out how to do something more interesting such as create new physical universes. John Smart has some interesting speculation on that and how singularity civilizations may eventually compete/cooperate.

I still have issues wrapping my head around the time dilation.

Comment author: endoself 30 January 2011 05:07:30PM 3 points [-]

Energy is proportional to mass. Computing ability is proportional to (max entropy - current entropy), and max entropy is proportional to the square of mass. That was the whole point of his argument.