From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu May 30 2002 - 12:08:07 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> Trying to look at the situation objectively, say from the
> point of view of some vast and cool savants a million years
> from now, that Rafal S. lived but then died in the 20th and
> 21st centuries will be much the same as it would have if he
> had lived then died in the 11th century. Their perspective,
> I believe, is correct. Therefore, it seems logical to
> conclude that your non-existence in the 12th century is
> as lamentable as your non-existence might be in the 22nd.
It's the "termination" event, and the non-fulfillment of potential, that I
find disturbing. I might not mind skipping over a century somewhere a
million years from now, unless it was an unusually exciting century or I
fell out of sync with civilization during that time, but the termination of
Eliezer, and hence the permanent leveling of Eliezer at a single maximum of
fulfilled potential, both strike me as undesirable events. Furthermore,
once Eliezer exists, it is possible for Eliezer to have a wish for future
growth; frustrating this wish, once it exists, is undesirable.
Hence the war on Death. It isn't just about improving reality to a static
optimum; the desirability metric has to be understood with respect to
reality as a 4D crystal. (Or something more complex; but *at least* this
complex.) The event of death might not disturb the attainment of a static
optimum, but it would result in a suboptimal 3+1D spacetime crystal. Our
own intuitive metrics of desirability do not seem to permit static optimums;
it's difficult to imagine any frozen state of the universe that we would
regard as desirable, or even that we would regard as being more or less
desirable than any other eternally frozen state of the universe.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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