From: Nick Bostrom (nick@nickbostrom.com)
Date: Wed Mar 14 2001 - 17:36:25 MST
Robin Hanson wrote:
>Nick Bostrom wrote:
>>>Nick is right that "the naive transhumanist dogma that we
>>>or our descendants will become posthumans who'll run
>>>ancestor-simulations is false."
>>
>>Actually, there should be the qualification "unless we are
>>currently living in a simulation" in there.
>
>I'm willing to believe that the chances are very small
>that any one simulation will be continued all the way
>until our simulated world began large simulations of
>its own.
If that's true, then our only hope is that the strong convergence
hypothesis is true. The evolutionary courses of virtually all posthuman
civilizations must converge onto a track where they'll never run a large
number of ancestor-simulations; or else we're doomed. ("Doomed" meaning
that we don't reach the posthuman stage. This could mean extinction,
getting stuck a pre-singularity technology levels, or getting to live
indefinitely in a relatively low-complexity afterlife-simulation when our
main simulation is terminated.)
Nick Bostrom
Department of Philosophy
Yale University
Homepage: http://www.nickbostrom.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:06:22 MST