X-Message-Number: 8170 From: "Sentience Nolastname" <> Subject: Simulations, Emulations and Cellular Automata Date: Sat, 03 May 1997 11:28:54 PDT Greetings. Please forgive me for not introducing myself. The current debate regarding simulations, self-circuits, etc. between Clark, Ettinger and Metzger is more important than you might think. Cryonics has been incredibly unsuccessful as a meme and one possible reason for that may be statements along the lines of, "Cryonics may be a long shot, but without it there is absolutely no chance." Most of the leaders and activists in cryonics have made statements like this from time to time. This makes cryonics a total life and death decision and forces the prospect to confront extremely uncomfortable issues of religion and identity. It is also an unscientific and religious position. The fact is, as all in the current discussion have conceded, we may be in a manufactured environment that is not the "real" world. This environment could be a cellular automata, in which case if the manufacturers have saved the rules and the initial state, then all of the history of this universe is backed up. "Ressurections" of the long "dead" are theoretically possible. Freeman Dyson, Hans Moravec and Frank Tipler have all endorsed the idea of possibly bringing back or recreating all who have ever lived. It does not matter how improbable you subjectively deem this to be. If you espouse the scientific method you have to admit that the odds are non-zero, just as they are for conventional religions and even the Easter Bunny. Which changes the "if you don't go with cryonics" part of the pitch to something less confrontational, less frightening and MORE accurate, such as: "Look, if you don't choose cryonics, you still might make it to an incredible future. Perhaps your religion is correct and you'll spend eternity in Heaven. Oh you're an atheist. Well several prominent scientists have speculated that our reality may actually be an experiment inside a computer on another level. If they're right, and the experimenters are nice, perhaps they "save" you when you die and you can be restarted again. I know it sounds crazy, but at least its some chance, though your chances would be better with cryonics". The above tack takes the pressure off and allows people to deal with the issue with less resistance, unless I'm wrong. A few years back, Brian Wowk wrote "The Death of Death in Cryonics". Unfortunately it was premature. The real death of death will come when we admit that we can never say if someone is dead because there is always a non-zero chance of revival. "Death" is a purely religious concept and we need to jettison it. Now, about some of the points in the debate: Ettinger says our self-awareness may depend on particular types of matter of the biological type. He might be right, though I also doubt it and he has not admitted that we can never know for sure if another, or ourselves or rocks have subjective experiences. But he does have a point that we might want to make sure we continue biologically, and not go for an uploading option. But it is not either/or. I would like to keep my cryopreserved brain intact, and not go through a destructive upload process. At some point perhaps a non-destructive upload can be made, and I can also be revived biologically as well. In the discussion of simulations Metzger brings in virtual memory as a fix to the computation overload problem, which doesn't make sense - it just puts off the problem. Clark has it right, it doesn't matter how slow things run, it all feels the same speed to you. Also, the computers at levels above yours can be constantly increasing their power and memory. Run out and buy and read Greg Egan's Permutation City for a great discussion of this stuff. I think Ettinger overestimates the difficulty of simulations within simulations because he is thinking of the computers within computers as needing to be programmed rather than as being the result of cellular automatic operations. About the odds of us being in a non-real world, Ettinger is right - and others have done this thought experiment before - the odds are zillions/1 that we are NOT in the one true reality. Which means we have to take it seriously. Which is tough. We can test this hypothesis with the following prediction: Measurements of fundamental constants will fluctuate at more than the best theoretical estimate of the error rate of the measurement device. Prediction 2: Advanced races may try to "pray" up to the "next level" by creating extravagant cosmological events such as the just discovered last week huge plume of antimatter emanating from the center of the Milky Way. They may also try to crash the system, or show some value to the next level by converting all matter into a computational matrix. Thank you for reading the above. Post Number One To Cryonet for new identity, Sentience Nolastname has been completed. --------------------------------------------------------- Get Your *Web-Based* Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com --------------------------------------------------------- Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8170