[extropy-chat] Timeshifting

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Charlie Stross <charlie at antipope.org> wrote:
> 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.

That might be possible.  It'd certainly be a far more
accurate representation than something based solely
off external records (possibly including DNA) left
after your demise.  Practical problems:
1. The amount of memory required would far exceed what
a portable computer could carry.  Solvable by dumping
to a remote terminal every so often; at the moment,
this would have to be nearly constantly.  (Current
supercomputers might have a problem storing 20-30
years' worth of memory...but probably not in 20-30
years.  Upgrade to add capacity as you go on.)
2. If you have this sort of monitoring anyway (which
would be detectable, at least upon close observation:
you can't expect a camera to take pictures if it's
hidden in your pocket), it's not that much more
intrusive to monitor the brain directly, for an even
better approximation.  (Granted, it takes tech not yet
developed to do that...but, again, this may be doable
within 20-30 years, and the objective is for a
snapshot some 20-30 years hence.)

> 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).

So, Doomsday is the death of death?

> Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument 
> (http://www.simulation-argument.com/) suggests that
> we are living in an 
> ancestor simulation.

If and only if posthumans are likely to run very
many ancestor simulations, an argument for which I
find little foundation.  The "ancestor simluations" we
run today (Virtual Rome, et al) suggest the limits of
the information that would be obtainable by the
archaeologists who would run such, and they are of
much lower quality than fully-fleshed-out human lives.
It is true that significantly more is recorded about
daily lives today in forms likely to survive for
centuries, however, it is still not to the point that
a recreation of the level of detail we experience
could be created.  And if this were an ancestor
simulation, would it not logically include a
faithful reproduction of the level of detail
recorded?  (This is assuming, granted, that human
motivations do not change that much - which means that
the only reason to run ancestor simulations would be
for historical interest by archaeologists, which
implies a requirement of the highest accuracy
possible: archaeology is a science like any other.)

> 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.e., ancestor simulations wouldn't be worthwhile if
you could just ask the still-living person?  Maybe.

But, again, depending on how you define "ancestor
simluations", we may be already running them today.

> If you bolt all this together and articulate it, you
> find:
> 
> * We are probably/we appear to be living close to a
> singularity

Shown by others.

> * After this singularity, the boundary conditions of
> human existence 
> change radically

Ditto.

> * Ancestor simulation is one of these changes

Not proven.

> * We are probably living in an ancestor simulation

Definitely not proven.

> * 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

False on its face.  There is a demonstrated biological
reason why our most recent memories are clearest.  If
this were an ancestor simulation, our memories would
include upgrading that which we used to record our
existences, along with associated discontinuities of
memory fidelity.  And yet even those who have never
seriously recorded their existence, nor who have had
those who record their existence (government records,
et al) significantly upgrade their technology, have
this degradation of memory.