[extropy-chat] damien's psi book

[spike]

> Samantha Atkins
> Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] damien's psi book
> 
> First congratulations on the biggest grand construction in support of a
> hypothesis that I have encountered in some time.   This was a truly
> surprising way to pull this result out of the sim notion.

It surprised me too.  My example of the excess 1s over 9s
in the leading digits of primes was a bad example however,
for in reading some of the responses, I saw that several
thought I was suggesting something other than what I
meant.  I was not saying I knew how to beat the lottery.
I was using that as an example of a type of meta-knowledge.
What I should have made clear was that oddball results in 
quantum mechanics may suggest a meta-sim.  Your mileage
may vary with this argument.

Even if we go with the notion that we exist in some
sort of meta-sim, it still fails to explain the one
observation that has puzzled me to no end: that the
cosmos are not buzzing with signals.  How could that
be?  Surely we are not the first tech-capable species
to evolve.  Could we *really* be the very first ones
to come along?  That notion is just too mind-boggling.
So where are the others?

> 
> The idea that a post Singularity civilization would act this way is a
> weak link.  That we greatly esteem that quantity (and quality) of
> sentience that is our own does not say that they would do so.   Being
> awash in much greater intelligence and likely able to easily create
> autonomous intelligences of any desired capacity for any desired
> purpose, it is not clear to me why biological alien evolved
> intelligences would be much more than a mere momentary curiosity easily
> satisfied without seamlessly uploading the entire lot.

In all these kinds of arguments we are stuck with a
maddening problem: we know of only one sentient
tech-capable species.  We have nothing with which to 
compare ourselves.  If I were capable of doing so,
I would wander about the galaxy looking for interesting
species to upload and run sims.  Granted it is pure 
speculation that another advanced species would do so.

Star Trek TNG has the character Q, who behaves a lot
like the way I can imagine he would, given his power.
He likes to take species and put them in situations,
to experiment.  I see uploading as the best way to
experiment.  If we could make a virtual universe that
could be populated with virtual intelligence, well
of course we would do it.  I must assume that
other species would act likewise, and that somewhere
somewhen, they have, and that is how we got here.

Any evidence of supernatural phenomena then becomes
evidence of the existence of a meta-sim.

spike