[ExI] Simulations, was bodies

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Wed Mar 17 15:30:46 UTC 2010


I hope nobody gets the idea that I am an *advocate* of uploading into
simulated worlds.

My thoughts on the subject are as ambiguous as the story ending for
"the clinic seed."

Zaba is a 12 year old girl, badly injured and repaired by Saskulan.
Saskulan is an AI that runs a clinic for a remote village (tata) in
Africa.

******************

Zaba often talked to Suskulan.  She eventually acquired a top-level
understanding of all of human knowledge and had access to the details
through simulated memory.  Suskulan warned her that she might have a
difficult time in the physical world if she got out of communication
because her mind had expanded well beyond what could be supported in a
brain.

"Why would I want to go back to being stupid?" she responded, but,
after thinking about it, she warmed up her body and moved her
consciousness back into her original brain.  Her boyfriend was deep in
a game and would not come along.  (She had a boyfriend because the
older man her parents expected to marry her to had lost interest after
asking for and being given half a dozen simulated concubines.)

Zaba was one of the few Suskulan permitted to be in the physical state
in his underground extensions.  He was not concerned about the safety
of his racks of freezing cold patients, supported as they were in a
web of nanomachines.  He just didn’t want those who did not want to
know how they went in and out of the spirit world to be concerned
about the underlying physical details.

She rode up the elevator and left the clinic and the spirit world for
a day.  Walking beyond the reach of the local net was a disconcerting
experience at first but even without the net, Zaba's mind was
impressive.  She remembered what Suskulan had said about staying awake
and learning while being healed and how it would change her and the
people of the tata.

It certainly had!

For better or for worse?

For better in that nobody died of fevers, nasty parasites, or
malnutrition since Suskulan had come into their lives.  People didn't
even die of old age with a clinic to regress age for them and they
aged in the spirit world only to the extent they wanted.

For worse in that she could not have children unless she left the
clinic for their gestation.  Zaba had read the design notes that led
up to the creation of the clinics and their spirits and had long
understood the mathematics behind Suskulan's limits.  In the long run,
births and deaths had to match.  If you wanted no deaths, then there
could be no births.

Since fetal development was arrested while in the clinic, (but not
post-birth growth) a number of families stuck it out until a child was
born, then moved back into the more attractive spirit world tata to
raise the child.

Zaba visited with the few remaining families in person, then returned
to the clinic and the spirit world.  She was not inclined to leave it
again.

****************




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