[extropy-chat] Timeshifting
Charlie Stross
charlie at antipope.org
Sat Feb 28 17:19:26 UTC 2004
On 28 Feb 2004, at 12:59, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
> Why is this an interesting topic to discuss? Because
> it relates to the question of "How much of a person
> is required to really have that person?" which in turn
> relates to how much oneself can be recovered after one
> has a stroke or goes through cryonic suspension
> and reanimation?
Funnily enough, I've been speculating along similar lines myself. (The
results are due to show up in two SF novels, "Accelerando" and
"Glasshouse", due from Ace in 2005 and 2006.) It gets particularly
interesting when you consider the difference between "documented" and
"undocumented" people -- those who leave an extensive paper trail as
against those who don't -- and then those people who've had portions of
their life logged by tools such as MyLifeBits.
If you spend the last twenty or thirty years of your life with
*everything* you hear or say or see or do being recorded by your PDA's
sensor suite and indexed for your retrieval, then I reckon it'd be
possible to create an R-you duplicate that was arbitrarily accurate for
that particular period, with hazy memories of stuff that had occured in
early life.
Sort of like the way we experience our life and memories. Right?
Now let's go a step further and turn the Doomsday Argument (see
http://www.anthropic-principle.com/faq.html) on its head. Rather than
postulating the end-point of the sequence of existence as being
*extinction*, as commonly stated in the Doomsday Argument, what happens
if we postulate the end-point of the sequence as individual
non-extinction? That is: we know that the boundary condition of our
individual lives is death (non-existence).
Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument
(http://www.simulation-argument.com/) suggests that we are living in an
ancestor simulation. Because we know that we are human, and not
post-humans capable of creating such an ancestor simulation, we can use
the Doomsday Argument to demonstrate that we are among the last humans
living *before* the creation of the first ancestor simulations.
(I'm assuming that the end-points of existence for posthuman
intelligences may include options less straightforward than
old-fashioned death and consequent total loss of conscious information
content.)
If you bolt all this together and articulate it, you find:
* We are probably/we appear to be living close to a singularity
* After this singularity, the boundary conditions of human existence
change radically
* Ancestor simulation is one of these changes
* We are probably living in an ancestor simulation
* Our most recent memories are clearest because the technology used to
record them matured between our current time and the singularity; our
earlier memories are hazy and vague because they're largely
interpolated guesswork rather than accurate simulation
Can someone please spot some holes in my reasoning before I go mad? I'm
not sure I enjoy living in a Philip K. Dick novel ...
-- Charlie
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