From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Thu May 02 2002 - 01:46:37 MDT
On Wed, 1 May 2002, Dossy wrote:
> offer of either waking people back into the "real world" or selling
Are you really expecting a Matt Groening solution, with patients being
dejared, defrosted, nano'ed up, and let loose to walk the streets of
Futuropolis?
There's no dichotomy between "real world" and simulation. As an upload,
you're no more trapped in the box than you're now trapped in the bony
confines of your cranium (assuming, you're not one of those "locked rigid"
sad cases). Secondly, it's the "real world" (at least the world as you
know it) that is being transformed by the same technologies which made you
come back from the dewar. There might be very well no streets left to
walk, at least no streets fit for a human body. There might be no air, no
gravity -- because there is no planetary surface. Either because you're
somewhere in a circumsolar orbit, or because there is no planetary surface
left, period.
The convergence of biology and machine creates an environment deadly to
classical biological life. There might be habitat bubbles (but who's going
to pay for the collosal waste of several tons of perfectly usable matter
for the time it takes a flesh person to form a briefest thought?), but you
can't talk to your hosts, because they're too fast for you. Slowing down
is possible, but this assumes 1) you're that interesting to go through the
trouble, very like an ant farm 2) hey, sorry, can't spare the time. gotta
run, see you!
> your body to a firm that will wake you into a simulator that can
> be used to harness your mental computing capability into a huge
> wet supercomputer. What happens if that person decides the latter,
Dossy, reality is not the Matrix. The atoms of your brain could do lots
more crunch if restructured as a block of molecular circuits. Biology is
far too slow, and not all-purpose anyway.
> perhaps in exchange for some sum of money?
>
> A little less absurd: What if they never find a way to make
> waking cryo-sleeping people safe. However, they do find a way
> to bring the sleeping person into a simulation of reality, which
> is deemed "just as good as the real thing" except there's no way
> for people in the "simulated world" to affect the "real world"
> in any physical way. The person responsible for you is faced
Why on earth?
> with two choices: let you stay sleeping, or wake you into the
> simulation. Suppose they chose the latter option. How would
> you feel? Would you care?
You seem to be extremely fond of these absurd construed scenarios.
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