Phil_Goetz comments on Beyond the Reach of God - Less Wrong

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

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

Comments (270)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Phil_Goetz 07 October 2008 10:18:00PM 0 points [-]

Tim - I'm asking the question whether competition, and its concomitant unpleasantness (losing, conflict, and the undermining of CEV's viability), can be eliminated from the world. Under a wide variety of assumptions, we can characterize all activities, or at least all mental activities, as computational. We also hope that these computations will be done in a way such that consciousness is still present.

My argument is that optimization is done best by an architecture that uses competition. The computations engaged in this competition are the major possible loci for consciousness. You can't escape this by saying that you will simulate the competition, because this simulation is itself a computation. Either it is also part of a possible locus of consciousness, or you have eliminated most of the possible loci of consciousness, and produced an active but largely "dead" (unconscious) universe.