[ExI] Fwd: Space governance

[Anton Sherwood]

On 2020-9-27 00:10, Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat wrote:
> I'm envisaging a situation where your mind is running in a substrate 
> that only occupies a few cubic millimetres, and needs substantially 
> less energy than a human brain (this is not a superintelligent mind, 
> just human-equivalent). Whether or not you also control robotic
> bodies (which could be any size), you'll still have access to virtual
> worlds, so you'd be able to live in both the 'physical world' and
> whatever virtual worlds you choose, in whatever combinations you
> choose (e.g. various flavours of augmented reality, etc.

We're on the same page, but: if we make a bar-chart of people according 
to how they divide their time between the virtual and the physical, I 
imagine it as lower in the middle and I guess you imagine the opposite.

> You could really blur the distinction between 'virtual' and 'real'
> until it was pretty much meaningless. [....])

Somehow that gives me the creeps.  Can the uncanny valley effect be 
triggered by imagining an abstraction??

> That awful film "Valerian and the city of a thousand planets" gives a
> partial glimpse of what I mean).

Too bad I won't see it, then :/

> I expect this to be true of all uploads, whether they stay on earth
> or not.

In Egan's «Diaspora» there is a sharp division between the fleshers, 
living on Earth as moderately enhanced mammals; the "polis citizens", 
software on big computers buried in permafrost; and the "gleisner 
robots", who are mobile and live on the Moon and beyond.
A former gleisner, who immigrated to the polis that is the principal 
setting, shows a polis native something interesting in sixteen 
dimensions.  The native asks, "How did a gleisner conceive of this?" 
The immigrant replies, "Why do you think I immigrated?"

A polis can be anywhere, but they are all on Earth (with backups 
scattered about the System).  Presumably they enjoy proximity for speed 
of communication; and on Earth they have protection against solar 
weather, I guess.

> Anton, would you please set your replies up so they don't CC me as 
> well as posting to the list? I don't need both. Thanks.

Ah, old habit.  I'm on a couple of other lists -- one of which was, for 
a bunch of years, the most voluminous of my collective penpals -- that 
(a) do not set Reply-To and (b) do not send to addresses listed 
explicitly in the headers, so the redundancy is harmless.

-- 
*\\*  Anton Sherwood  *\\*  www.bendwavy.org