From: Zero Powers (zero_powers@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Jul 28 2001 - 00:20:17 MDT
>From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
>Zero Powers wrote:
> >
> > So I guess I'm not really reaching for forever. But a couple
> > thousand eons or so would sure be nice.
>
>At a hundred-million-to-one subjective speedup, a billion years will
>occupy approximately five minutes. I don't know if we'll all want to
>flash into that kind of accelerated time the instant the Singularity
>wavefront hits - I guess it depends on whether the physical time is
>valuable - but I do expect that we'll be running at that kind of speed
>eventually...
Not sure I follow. Are you saying that because we'll be able to
think/compute much faster, that time will (or seem to) speed up? Wouldn't
it be just the opposite? If the uploaded "you" could think a thousand
thoughts per second, compared to the meat-based "you" which is limited to,
say, a thousand thoughts per minute, wouldn't it seem that you had lived a
full minute in the space of a single second? If so, a real minute would
seem, to you, to drag on for a whole hour. And as your ability to compute
sped up, wouldn't time for you continue to seem to slow down?
In fact isn't that part of the Omega Point theory? That at some point our
computational speed will approach the infinite, making it possible to
experience nearly infinite thoughts/computations within the finite time
before the heat death or Big Crunch?
>Also, any human mind would disintegrate long, long before you'd even begun
>to get started on a billion years.
Why? Because meat-based things decompose with age? Or do you suspect that
there is something inherent in the design/function of the human brain that
makes it incapable of greatly extended functionality? Would you feel
differently if strong nano made possible the continuous monitor and repair
of neurological structure at the molecular level?
>A couple of millennia and I suspect
>you will, of necessity, have changed to the point where you can see time
>stretching into infinity.
Unless I'm missing something, to me this seems contradictory to your earlier
statement that time will seem to contract.
-Zero
Life is good. Refuse to die.
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