[ExI] Von Neumann probes for what?

[Mike Dougherty]

On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 6:24 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> I think a probe infrastructure could be something that just looks like added
> value to a civilization. It launches the probes, they spread and set up
> waystations that can receive instructions and mindstates, as well as send
> back observations. If they want to use the system they can. The key limiters
> are whether the cost of the initial probe is high relative to the
> civilization GDP and whether the time horizons of *every* entity within it
> are so short there is no value in getting a fraction of the galaxy in the
> far future.

Has anyone considered the possibility that a civilization capable of
effectively deploying these probes might already have a level of
technology advanced such that there only needs to be one monitoring
station in each universe?  Something to the effect of a single
existential bit in each of a multitude of "real" (to us) universes
that are used only to track that each simulation is still running.
Maybe the interesting results only manifest after the exhaustion of
each universe and a post-mortem examination of the solution state
represented by the end of life?  (aside from debugging, do we intently
watch each step of a protein folding experiment?)

Ok, so maybe we don't agree on the universe-as-a-sim viewpoint.  I
imagine there is still some possibility that our concept of how the
universe works is necessarily limited; from an outside-this-box
workshop there might be other parameters we simply can't observe.