From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Apr 30 2003 - 20:37:11 MDT
Paul writes
> Simon [wrote]
>
> > Advanced SI beings may desire "ignorance holidays"
> > in the same way that many adult human beings desire to
> > re-live their childhood -- perhaps to regain their
> > innocence, or to repeat the losing of their innocence,
> > or simply to enjoy a different level of fun.
But advanced SIs *determine* their desires. They
will implement such a desire only if it fits in
with their overall value system.
> Epistemologically speaking, I have often wondered if
> my entire life is my future SI-self re-living or
> living out fictional/factional variations of my
> earlier life.
An epistemological problem that hasn't been often
stressed IMO is the ambiguity of the pointer "this".
That is, when one speaks of *this life, *this experience,
or *this consciousness, we're used to knowing what
that means, and that it means one thing unambiguously.
But it's not unambiguous.
So I would say that there may be no important difference
between you experiencing your original first run on Earth
and your later re-experiencing of it.
As for "fictional variations", we are assured by the
MWI (and now by the infinite level-one universe) that
there is no such thing. Everything happens, and so
there is no such thing as fiction (as several people
have pointed out). So, again, "*this" points to all
the copies in all the universes who experience your
life.
> > you can never turn the subjective probability of a Hell
> > scenario happening to any given being into a zero.
> > Which means that somewhere out there are perfectly
> > innocent beings going through absolute Hells, much
> > worse than Dante could have ever envisaged, and this
> > is happening in a very real sense (there's even an
> > infinite ensemble of copies of you which will fall
> > into a Hell scenario in the next 10 seconds).
>
> Of course the opposite can also be said. Every single
> one of these hellish state-spaces will immediately
> jump into an extremely large number of extremely
> positive, possibly apotheosis states lasting
> indefinitely.
Yes. As I said in an earlier post, the only reason that
this doesn't seem to occur to us with quite the force
that the hell-branches do, is that we happen to know of
lots of ways to make contemporary people miserable, but
don't know very many ways to pleasure them.
Lee
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