haig2 comments on Beyond the Reach of God - Less Wrong

66 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 October 2008 03:42PM

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Comment author: haig2 06 October 2008 11:29:00AM 0 points [-]

On the existential question of our pointless existence in a pointless universe, my perspective tends to oscillate between two extremes:

1.) In the more pessimistic (and currently the only rationally defensible) case, I view my mind and existence as just a pattern of information processing on top of messy organic wetware and that is all 'I' will ever be. Uploading is not immortality, it's just duplicating that specific mind pattern at that specific time instance. An epsilon unit of time after the 'upload' event that mind pattern is no longer 'me' and will quickly diverge as it acquires new experiences. An alternative would be a destructive copy, where the original copy of me (ie. me that is typing this right now) is destroyed after or at the instance of upload. Or I might gradually replace each synapse of my brain one by one with a simulator wirelessly transmitting the dynamics to the upload computer until all of 'me' is in there and the shell of my former self is just discarded. Either way, 'I' is destroyed eventually--maybe uploading is a fancier form of preserving ones thoughts for posterity as creating culture and forming relationships is pre-singularity, but it does not change the fact that the original meatspace brain is going to eventually be destroyed, no matter what.

The second case, what I might refer to as an optimistic appeal to ignorance, is to believe that though the universe appears pointless according to our current evidence, there may be some data point in the future that reveals something more that we are ignorant to at the moment. Though our current map reveals a neutral territory, the map might be incomplete. One speculative position taken directly from physics is the idea that I am a Boltzmann Brain. If such an idea can be taken seriously (and it is) than surely there are other theoretically defensible positions where my consciousness persists in some timeless form one way or another. (Even Bostrom's simulation argument gives another avenue of possibility)

I guess my two positions can be simplified into:
1.) What we see is all there is and that's pretty fucked up, even in the best case scenario of a positive singularity.

2.) We haven't seen the whole picture yet, so just sit back, relax, and as long as you have your towel handy, don't panic.