X-Message-Number: 11286
From: 
Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 14:36:49 EST
Subject: lightning/slow

Dr. Daniel Crevier commented (#11279) on a possible explanation of the Fermi
Paradox (Where are the ETs?) in terms of future evolution to electronic
intelligences, with resulting vast increases in subjective time of
communication and transport in the "real" world. 

A few remarks:

(1) The mention of "Darwinian evolution" seems irrelevant or misleading, for
at least two reasons. (a) Our individual criteria of success include survival,
but not necessarily proliferation. (b) The super-machines, by Crevier's own
account, might be completely uninterested in the biological world or even the
entire "real" universe, hence generally would not compete with biologicals. 

(2) The whole speculation is based on the premise that non-biologicals can be
people, with subjective lives. This is far from proven. (Yes, unfeeling
systems might still be intelligent and goal-directed, but their "fitness" to
survive might be in question, for reasons I have previously mentioned but omit
here to save space.)

(3) The Crevier posting involves two different scenarios--one in which
lightning-fast thinkers live in slow bodies and a slow world, and one in which
the environment is simulated. (The thinkers themselves presumably could either
be independent physical systems or else simulations in a computer.) The former
scenario has serious difficulties, as he shows; the latter even more, just one
example being the necessity of simulating a large environment including other
people. If these other people are real, with subjective lives, who confers or
assumes the right to create them and maintain them? And what prevents a
cascade of subsimulations, with all that implies? 

Such suggestions do have the virtue of stimulating thought, which occasionally
is even otherwise useful as well as amusing. I do plan to read the Crevier
book.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org 

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