[ExI] The Great Silence again

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 2:50 PM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 9:28 PM, Richard Loosemore  wrote:
>> For this (main) reason.  If we had the power to speed up our consciousness
>> to such an extent that one day RealTime became a million days VirtualTime,
>> we would run the risk of becoming bored if we simply spent all that VT as a
>> continuous consciousness.  Much more likely, we would choose to establish a
>> system of periodic rebirths, involving the archival storage of the current
>> set of life experiences and the beginning of a new life in which we could
>> experience everything as if for the first time.
>
>
> We've discussed the problem that very long lifetimes might lead to
> boredom before and most on the list appeared to be horrified at the
> thought.

Include me in those who believe that the "long life = boring life" outcome
is unsustainable - and that higher intelligence necessarily includes the
realization, which has been successfully implemented by many seniors
using merely the wetware available to them today, that finding new things
to do is part and parcel of having a longer life.

Put another way: if you allow yourself to become perpetually bored, you
die much faster, and therefore are subsequently irrelevant to those who
did not get bored and die.

As to the "faster thought = less willing to deal with the real world", I don't
see that.  Desired features and ways of doing things expand to fill the
available capacity.  Such has it ever been, especially with software. I see
no reason why uploaded intelligence would be any different.

Instead of 70 million times faster meaning one experiences 70 million
days for each outside world day, I find it more likely that one will do more
with each day but still experience one day.  You can see the first glimmers
of this  today, for people who use smartphones to augment their cognition.
(Trivial example: when going to an Indian place with coworkers for lunch
last week, none of us recognized half the items on the menu.  We were
on course to spend tens of minutes speculating - one or two person-hours
total - until I took two minutes to google them all.)

Some physical processes take time - and if one has good reason to
believe that one will live for thousands of years, that tends to develop
more, not less, patience for things like space voyages.

Moreover, uploads will likely be better able to operate drone equipment,
even over light speed lags of seconds or minutes.  That argues for
sending remote controlled but unintelligent drones to bring things closer
to Earth - and makes exploitation of things at lunar distances much
easier.  Further, you can simply launch these drones and then get back
to whatever else you're doing until the drones are in position.

Think of it this way: say you had a project where you could work on it for
a month or two, send it off, and know that in 10 years you would harvest
$1 billion.  The mere fact that you wouldn't be doing anything with it for 10
years doesn't make it seem not worth doing, right?  Same deal for these
uploads, only they can extend this time horizon to 100, 1000, or more
years.