From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Tue Dec 24 2002 - 14:51:15 MST
Brian Atkins wrote:
> Ok, but I find this argument unconvincing since a) building and
> launching the initial VNP should be relatively easy to do for such
> post-S minds b) we both expect (AFAIK) there to be a wide variety of
> post-S minds such that it is very unlikely that not a single one of them
> in any post-S civ decides to launch a VNP. One possibility I suppose is
> that the automatic outcome of any Singularity is _always_ that a single
> mind or "ruleset" takes control of that local space and _always_ decides
> to disallow VNPs or any other form of "civ making itself known to the
> rest of the galaxy". It does seem unlikely though that every single
> successful Singularity process has the same exact outputs.
My hypothesis is more along the lines of: Once a system becomes clever
enough, it essentially projects itself out of this measly little universe we
find ourselves in. If this is the case then all this talk about "local
space" is not relevant.
I don't expect the laws of physics or our current conception of "what the
universe is" to hold up very well post-Singularity.
We are definitely doing what the Brazilians call "spreading around the
mayonnaise" here though. I.e., we can talk and speculate all we want, but
none of us really knows what we're talking about here ;) As opposed to the
various pre-Singularity technology themes discussed on this list (e.g.
nanotech, AGI, etc.), on which we may be wrong, but at least we *do* know
what we're talking about...
-- Ben G
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:41 MDT