From: John K Clark (jonkc@att.net)
Date: Sun May 05 2002 - 22:30:38 MDT
Adrian Tymes <wingcat@pacbell.net> Wrote:
>The discussion was how you would know if you woke up from cryo in a
>simulation or in the same (level of) reality you went to sleep in.
When you are revived from cryo and look around at the world you won't be
able to prove it but I think you'll be able to make an educated guess about
what is really going on, and although it doesn't really matter you will
conclude that it must be a simulation. If the post singularity beings are
willing to take the trouble to revive you they will do it just for the hell
of it because it's very cheap, there is nothing of value you could give them
except perhaps nostalgia. They may be nice guys but there are limits, they
wouldn't want to waste valuable recourses, like lots of carbon atoms, on
something as trivial as you or me. Even more important they'd probably be
very squeamish about letting something as primitive as ourselves mess around
at that level of reality, the level of circuit boards and nano machines, it
would be like letting a monkey run around in a operating room during
neurosurgery.
>the natural instinct (all logic aside) is to suspect they will
>always be lacking some detail.
Lack of detail is the result of a paucity of computational recourses but in
this case you effectively have a computer that is infinitely fast, and I do
not use the word "infinitely" just to mean very fast. If the computer starts
to get overwhelmed by data all it has to do is put the emulation of you on
hold for a nanosecond or a second or a day or a year or a millennium or
however long it takes to make the computation and then restart you. From
your point of view it was instantaneous.
>you might not consciously notice until years later,
>"Hey, why does no one ever win the lottery?
As the computer is emulating not only the environment but you as well it
knows exactly what you are thinking, thus as soon as your level of
skepticism reaches a certain threshold guess what happens, why somebody
wins the lottery of course.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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