[ExI] simulation as an improvement over reality

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 01:56:52PM +0000, BillK wrote:

> If everything becomes inspectable and malleable, then all bets are off.

But that's just the side effect of your most likely route
to extreme life extension. You are declared dead today, 
are cryopreserved, scanned some 50 to 80 years hence and
reinstantiated as a numerical construct in some system 
somewhere, along with a nice rendering engine
for artificial reality and ability to control servos
at the physical layer.

As soon as you've turned into a bucket of bits evolving
in discrete steps, your state evolution can be halted,
inspected, changed. 

> Anyone's guess is good. We're in science-fiction territory now.
> After the Singularity.

Don't look right now, but you're soaking in it.
 
> But extrapolating from what we know now, and assuming no magic science
> where we gain super powers and become anything that we wish to be,

We already have the "super powers" to tweak neural emulations
to our heart's content. As soon as you're actually running
simulations of behaving higher animals you better consider
ethical implications of your experiments.

> then *old* entities will not think like 25 year olds.

You can think and behave exactly like an exhuberant 25 year
old. If it's what you wish...
 
> (If everything becomes malleable, then the bad guys will make
> plentiful use of it, that you can be sure of. Unless a benevolent

Technology is a capability amplifier. Any capability amplifier.

> government uses it first to ensure that anything they define as a
> 'bad' guy gets altered for the common good).

Been there. Done that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy
(I used to work near a stereotactic frame with a rather sordid
history, as it was from the salvage of a prison hospital).