[ExI] Silence in the sky-but why?

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 11:18:20PM +0200, Anders Sandberg wrote:

> Well, we might be lucky and life is amazingly unlikely. A more

This appears the default scenario. I don't see why people see it
as problematic. Just because it looks like anthropocentrism/geocentrism
in new guise? That's not a sufficient reason.

> worrying possibility is strong convergence: all civs somehow become
> quiet and do not litter the universe; as I have argued this is
> deeply problematic - why are there no defectors? The possibility of

The statistical argument alone should kill that one, yes.

> the earliest big expanders just setting up some rules implementing
> this, with police nanoprobes in every system, is downright paranoid

You can't do it in an out of control world. We're living in an
out of control world. You can't recall the spam, once sent.

> but seems much more consistent - and might actually be pretty
> benign, if a tad too close to a religious view (God as a script set
> by ancient aliens running on a distributed police replicator
> system...) The simulation argument might be the really nice one: we
> are living inside the posthumans' simulation, and they just left out
> aliens.

If this is a simulation, then the real universe doesn't look anything
we're living in. I find the simulation/zoo arguments extremely unconvincing.