[extropy-chat] damien's psi book

[Adrian Tymes]

--- spike <spike66 at comcast.net> wrote:
> If we can, even in theory, exist as uploads, then 
> someone somewhere and somewhen in the universe has 
> already done so, for the big bang was a long time
> ago, 
> the universe is ancient, but humanity, which appears
> 
> within centuries or possibly just decades of 
> uploading, is recent.

Here's one place where the chain breaks down.  See
Drake's equation, and the debates surrounding it,
for reasons why we very well could be the first
technologically advanced civilization in the universe.

> Step 6:  If someone somewhere and somewhen created
> a machine capable of simulating sentience, then the
> natural thing to do would be to wander about the
> universe looking for perishable sentience to upload
> before it expires.

Here's another.  There is no obvious, compelling
reason to do this.  A species could certainly do it,
but said species could as well be looking to enhance
its own civilizations by adding each new race's
cultural (or biological and technological, as in a
certain famous example) distinctiveness to its own.
Instead of uploading into simulations, said species
would upload newcomers into galactic or universal
civilization.  Or, again, it could simply pursue its
own agenda safely away from any place life could
exist; maybe it would monitor for and lock away any
potential threats on life-bearing worlds, or maybe it
wouldn't even bother.

> Step 7:  If we exist in a simulation as uploads,
> that sim must be running on some meta-mechanical
> device
> of some unimaginable sort, one that cannot, in
> principle,
> produce *perfectly* random stochastic processes. 
> Even
> meta-mechanical devices are mechanical devices
> still.

This assumes you know the physics of the world
running the sim.  Maybe they can have perfectly
randomness, and the mechanical non-randomness is an
artifact of the sim?