From: pdugan (pdugan@vt.edu)
Date: Sat Dec 24 2005 - 17:36:39 MST
>===== Original Message From Phillip Huggan <cdnprodigy@yahoo.com> =====
>The multiverse can be described as a Type VII civilization then. Creating
potential hell-scenarios is evil, regardless of how interesting they are.
This is also the main point against the simulation argument. If you want to
temporarily leave your memories behind for a few decades of living in an inert
simulation (where all the inflicted evils aren't real, like a sort of
holodeck) because you are bored, fine. But if you want to create singularity
takeoff from a laboratory in Munich in a 2030 world where Hitler did not allow
the Dunkirk evacuation and where he never attempted Barbarossa... you should
have gotten coal for X-mas instead of that shiny new ontotech-multiverse toy.
Evil does not need to exist for diversity to be.
I think your use of the word "evil" is problematic, and that the process of
genetic evolution could be judged as very evil, being dependant on predation
and other horrors selecting against members of the environment. Most common
ideas of good would make provisions for the weak and try to avert disaster at
any cost, but this isn't the way nature has operated. Now, post-singularity
things don't need to follow the same patterns as the past, but this doesn't
mean that a transcendant civilization would nessecarily comply with the "good"
in either a religious or humanistic, U.N. intervention sense of the word.
Since there is so much in the natural world that could be judged as evil, its
reasonable to deduce that there are either no transcendant civilizations or
that transcendant civilizations aren't interested in miminalizing evil
throughout the multiverse, out of respect for heterogeneaity, the default flow
of causality, or some other reasoning we don't yet understand.
Patrick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:54 MDT