jacob_cannell comments on Subjective Relativity, Time Dilation and Divergence - Less Wrong

14 Post author: jacob_cannell 11 February 2011 07:50AM

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Comment author: PlaidX 11 February 2011 10:06:29AM * 15 points [-]

I love this article, but I disagree with the conclusion. You're essentially saying that a post-singularity world would be too impatient to explore the stars. I grant you that thinking a million times faster would make someone very impatient, but living a million times longer seems likely to counterbalance that.

Back in the days of cristopher columbus, what stopped people from sailing off and finding new continents wasn't laziness or impatience, it was ignorance and a high likelihood of dying at sea. If you knew you could build a rocket and fly it to mars or alpha centauri, and that it was 100% guaranteed to get there, and you'd have the mass and energy of an entire planet at your disposal once you did, (a wealth beyond imagining in this post-singularity world), I really doubt that any amount of transit time, or the minuscule resources necessary to make the rocket, would stand in anyone's way for long.

ESPECIALLY given the increased diversity. Every acre on earth has the matter and energy to go into space, and if every one of those 126 billion acres has its own essentially isolated culture, I'd be very surprised if not a single one ever did, even onto the end of the earth.

Honestly I'd be surprised if they didn't do it by tuesday. I'd expect a subjectively 10 billion year old civilization to be capable of some fairly long-term thinking.

Comment author: ewbrownv 11 February 2011 09:32:23PM 1 point [-]

Agreed. Another detail that is often overlooked is that an electronic intelligence doesn't have to run at maximum possible speed all the time. If an AI or upload wants to travel to alpha centauri it can easily slow its subjective time down by whatever factor is needed to make the trip time seem acceptible.

Comment author: jacob_cannell comment score below threshold [+] (37 children)

Comment author: CarlShulman 11 February 2011 10:55:01PM * 5 points [-]

At 1,000,000x speedups plus quality improvements, Moores Law should peter out shortly in solar years. Then we get to Malthusian competition.

The logic of a Hansonian race to burn the cosmic commons is that there is a strong incentive in competitive scenarios to be first to get out to the stars: if you colonize before others do you will have much more in the way of resources when technological limits are reach. If you colonize too slowly you may have somewhat more resources to build your initial spacecraft, but face competitors with insuperable leads.

Comment author: endoself 12 February 2011 01:22:04AM * 0 points [-]

Actually, you could create more subjective-observer moments if you don't burn the commons, because negentropy (max entropy - current entropy) scales quadratically with mass/energy, so cooperation would dominate.

Comment author: jacob_cannell comment score below threshold [+] (34 children)

Comment author: endoself 12 February 2011 01:19:47AM * 1 point [-]

According to current inflationary theory, all of matter and space arose from a quantum vacuum fluctuation. Ultimately these unimaginably far far future civilizations could engineer space-time and create new universes, wormholes, and or matter/energy from nothing.

With the speed of light limit, they wouldn't reach these any faster than they'd reach other parts of the already-existing universe. Also, usable matter from nothing is unlikely.

Why should exponential acceleration ever peter out? It's the overall mega-pattern over all of history to date.

Why should sigmoid growth ever stop? It's the overall mega-pattern over all of history to date.

Comment author: jacob_cannell 12 February 2011 03:52:52AM * 0 points [-]

Why should sigmoid growth ever stop? It's the overall mega-pattern over all of history to date.

Sigmoid doesn't fit the rate of change observed in the historical record.

The functions that fit those data points have an infinity at 0 and a later infinity some time later - it looks like a U shape.

Similar results occur in economic data models. See SIAI's "economic implications of software minds".

I''l quote:

We find that even rather mild hypotheses allowing production of H cause economic output to reach infinity in finite time, provided such production increases H with no upper bound. As argued in [2], such blowup is not to be taken literally, but rather means that the model predicts a transition to some other regime . .

The simplest best fit models for the data have infinities in finite time. That doesn't necessarily mean the infinity is 'real', but nor does it mean that a sigmoid or some other model has anything whatsoever to do with the data.

Comment author: Desrtopa 12 February 2011 07:21:17AM * 1 point [-]

Sigmoid doesn't fit the rate of change observed in the historical record.

Yep, the greater the distance in the past, the less stuff we've taken notice of. It's almost as if our historical records decrease in resolution the further back in time you go.

Comment author: jacob_cannell 12 February 2011 09:03:32AM 0 points [-]

It has nothing to do with resolution. Were there organic molecules in the first moment of the big bang? Planets? Ecosystems? Multicellular organisms? Civilizations?

I should have said "history", not historical record. The change in pattern complexity over time is real. It's rather ridiculous to suggest that the change is just a sampling artifact, and all that stuff was really there all along.

Comment author: Desrtopa 12 February 2011 03:58:11PM * 1 point [-]

No, it wasn't. But while civilizations may seem important to us, it's not as if they're a major step forward in the complexity of the universe from any perspective except ours. A calendar which lists "Rupestral painting in Europe" along with "Big Bang" and "Milky Way formed" is not an unbiased documentation of the complexification of the universe.

Technology may currently be experiencing exponential growth, but trying to extrapolate this as part of a universal trend is frankly ridiculous.

continue this thread »

Comment author: endoself 12 February 2011 04:49:38PM * 0 points [-]

an infinity at 0

Wait, are you saying that there was an infinite rate of technological improvement at time zero? That does not fit with an exponential/geometric growth rate. A sigmoid is indistinguishable from an exponential function until some specific time, so looking at only "historical mega-patterns" provides no Bayesian evidence either way. Current knowledge of the laws of physics, however, favours approximately sigmoid growth, and the is no reason for the laws of physics have to have exceptions just to allow technological expansion.

Comment author: jacob_cannell 12 February 2011 07:03:57PM -2 points [-]

Wait, are you saying that there was an infinite rate of technological improvement at time zero?

The change I am talking about is at the highest level - simply change in pattern complexity. The initial symmetry breaking and appearance of the fundamental forces is a fundamental change and upwards increase in complexity, as are all the other historical events in the cosmic calendar. The appearance of electrons is just as real of a change, and is of the same category, as the appearance of life, brains, or typewriters.

Patterns may require minds to recognize them, but that doesn't make them any less real. Minds recognize them because they are complex statistical correlations in space-time structure. Ultimately they are the only thing which is real.

If you look at the very first changes they are happening on the plank scale 10^-43 seconds after 0, and the initial region around 0 is an actual Singularity. After that the time between events increases exponentially .. . corresponding to a sharp slowdown in the rate of change as the universe expands.

Eventually you get to this midpoint, and then in some local pockets the trend reverses and changes begin accelerating again.

The shape of the rate of pattern-change or historical events is thus a U shape, it starts out with an infinity at 0, a vertical asymptote, bottoms out in the middle, and now is climbing back up towards another vertical asymptote where changes again happen at the plank scale - and then beyond that we get another singularity.

It's not an exponential or a sigmoid - those aren't nearly steep enough.

The time between events near the big bang is 1 / t. The time between local events on earth is following that pattern in reverse, something like 1 / (B-t), where B is some arbitrary constant.

and the overall pattern seems to be something like: (1/(A+t)) + (1/(B-t)), where A is just 0 and is the initial Big Bang Singularity, and B is a local future time singularity.

Comment author: endoself 13 February 2011 05:57:56AM 3 points [-]

You seem to really like a certain concept, without knowing quite what that concept is. I would call this an affective death spiral. I will call this concept awesomeness. You think of awesomeness as a number, a function of time, that roughly corresponds to the rate of occurrence of "significant events".

The main problem with this is that awesomeness isn't fundamental. It must emerge somehow out of the laws of physics. This means that it can break down in certain circumstances. No matter how awesome I think Newtonian mechanics is, it's going to stop working at high speeds rather than going to infinity. You can only really be confident in a law holding in a certain region if you've observed it working in that region or you know how it emerges from deeper laws, even approximately. However, awesomeness emerges in a very messy way. Surely it doesn't always follow the equations you propose; if humans extinguished themselves with nuclear weapons or nanotechnology tomorrow, awesomeness would go down to almost zero. An overall pattern like this can easily break down.

If you look at the very first changes they are happening on the plank scale 10^-43 seconds after 0, and the initial region around 0 is an actual Singularity.

This is very death-spirally. A few related variables go to infinity, and only in models that admit to having no idea what's going on there. There aren't any infinities in the Hawking-Hartle wavefunction, AFAIK. You just jumped on the word singularity.

The time between events near the big bang is 1 / t. The time between local events on earth is following that pattern in reverse, something like 1 / (B-t), where B is some arbitrary constant.

By your own logic, awesomeness will therefore become negative after the singularity.

Patterns may require minds to recognize them, but that doesn't make them any less real. Minds recognize them because they are complex statistical correlations in space-time structure. Ultimately they are the only thing which is real.

Awesomeness is a highly complex combination of a ridiculous number of variables. It is an abstraction.

continue this thread »

jacob_cannell comments on Subjective Relativity, Time Dilation and Divergence - Less Wrong

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