[ExI] The Great Silence again

[Richard Loosemore]

BillK wrote:
> 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.  I am more inclined towards accepting the possibility.
> 
> But your suggestion seems unlikely to me. Certainly future uploaded
> civs could create as many new intelligences as they wish, but the same
> point applies as travelling out to space. If they start anew or leave
> Earth, they are cutting themselves off from the Matrix of the
> trillions of intelligences in the computronium world.
> And this would feel like suicide to them.
> 
> These are uploaded transhuman civs, remember, Not apes with a few
> superpowers.  ;)

Not necessarily.  I suspect that a large community of people would go to 
the stars together.

In fact, what if, when every large expedition starts, almost everyone on 
Earth decides to do a split, sending a version of themselves along with 
the ship, to experience time contemporaneously with the other 
travellers, while one version of themselves stays behind to be a virtual 
homebody?

Then, when the expedition returns home, there can be a mass 
recombination of the stay-at-home and traveller personalities.

There are just so many possible variations on these themes, that I doubt 
that all of them make no sense to any of those future 
non-ape-with-superpower creatures. :-)

>> Moreover, people would not necessarily want to experience all of their
>> lifetimes at VT speed, but would sometimes want to come back down to normal
>> speed.  And in fact, the lifetimes could, of course, be interleaved, so that
>> several lives were being experienced at once, all at different speeds, but
>> in packets.
> 
> VT speed will be *normal* speed.  The outside world is effectively
> frozen to a standstill.
> Why would they want to enter stasis?

Why would it be stasis?  Admitedly, a lot of people would have to do it 
together if they wanted company, or the same technique as above would be 
used, with a split and rejoining later.

> 
>> And (finally) one aspect of this would be the possibility to set up
>> interstellar trips in which the consciousness was suspended for the
>> duration.  Or, where many different lives were led during the trip, but all
>> within computronium VWorlds.  That way, a community could go to the stars,
>> arrive there with the subjective experience of having only just left, and
>> then explore the remote worlds before going on to the next star.
> 
> 
> So a whole community would have to choose to leave the Matrix and to
> dull the pain go to sleep for virtually trillions of years to wake up
> in a desert place with no Matrix?
> Future transhuman civs will find it unthinkable - even impossible - to
> leave the Matrix.

Why?  I can already think of leaving it.  If I can, why would it be so 
impossible for them?  I suspect they will feel limited if they find 
themselves stuck in a situation like that.


Richard Loosemore