From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Sep 27 2001 - 21:44:30 MDT
I think my main objection to most of the proposals being batted around
here is that they seem to involve playing games with other people's
lives. Some other entity decides what your destiny is, and then you're
shoved around like a piece on a chessboard until you fulfill it. Is this
really what we want? Is this really an appropriate way for the Universe
to work? Is it the future we want to live in?
If I found out that my life was a simulation, either for purposes of
remodeling the real Eliezer on Old Old Earth, or for purposes of forcing
myself to improve myself over time, it would violate what *I* think is
valuable about the Universe. I cannot sympathize with any entity that
would choose to keep me locked up in a pre-Singularity world for such a
lousy reason. Ve is not operating within any moral frame of reference
that I recognize as valid.
Since I reject the idea that simple curiosity about ancestors is a just
reason for keeping me locked up in here, it follows that (in the event
this world is a simulation) either that isn't the reason for my existence,
or else it's a reason being employed by a nonFriendly controller... in
which case, why bother to imagine anything that innocuous?
Because of that decision on my part, I can be sure that one of these three
conditions hold:
1) I am living in a genuine physical world;
2) Unknown to me, my life serves a purpose I would recognize as important
enough to justify recreating the gratuitous unpleasantness of a
pre-Singularity world;
3) I am living inside a non-Friendly SI, or a "Friendly" SI created by a
species operating in a different moral frame of reference - the root
process doesn't care what I think.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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