Future Hi: Politics of Uploading, Simulations, and Singularities

February 11, 2004

Politics of Uploading, Simulations, and Singularities

Concerning Uploading, and assuming that the overall model of brain complexity can be duplicated on non-biological and presumably more compact and faster substrates, then:

"Will we save ourselves, or will we even be allowed to?"

This is the most important question we can ask about uploading I think. First of all, will we be allowed to upload? And if so, if we are allowed, will we control the entirety of our upload, or will it be under the control of either a human agency, AI, or both? And if it us under the control of another agency, will they process a perfect copy, or will they modify “us” for their purposes rather than ours. Will our copy actually be a bastard child offspring totally re-configured and programmed to do their bidding?

Finally, if the answer is no to all of these questions, and we instead are given complete control over our own upload, the simplicity of it means that our upload would do our bidding because it would be us. This may differ for some people, but I highly suspect anyone willing to upload themselves would also have the strong goal of wanting their uploaded selves to figure out a way to upload their human copy too, so they can experience the upload paradise as well and not have to live out the rest of their lives trapped within biological limits. In either case, it would seem the compassionate thing to do. So assuming this scenario is the most likely, it would be wise to have enough compassion for yourself, BEFORE getting uploaded.

This ties in nicely with the Utopian or Oblivion concept, an idea that presupposes that all entities that even survive a singularity are all compassionate and loving, otherwise they never would have made it to the singularity in the first place. Of course at this point people really start to worry, that if that’s true, then humanity with all its hatred and violence is doomed. This could happen, if indeed we are living at the base reality of real biology, rather than as a simulation, which is infinitely more likely.

Interesting speculations, which of course I have thought about often in my thoughts since I proposed the sans-ceiling hypothesis on the extropian list 6 years ago. Nick Szabo has done a paper demonstrating that we are most probably running in a simulation. And it's my guess, that if that's true the chances are the entities running it are compassionate, and wouldn't simulate a conscious being with deep desires for immortality or an afterlife unless it planned on delivering. :-)

But the question still remains about the continuity of consciousness if we screw up. Do they re-boot the whole simulation or allow us to continue like we are? My guess is they will allow us to continue by not allowing us to blow ourselves up. If we blow ourselves up, the whole thing is wasted, and they/we have to start over again. By allowing us to continue with only the minimal amont of intervention necessary they eventually get new beings equal to themselves, but who evolved under very different circumstances.

Why would they do this, besides just being compassionate? Probably because they’re lonely, and they need someone to talk to. They look at us as novelty, and can’t wait for our own singularity birth to occur. We are their mind children. And they in a funny way are ours. In a very real sense they are ourselves in the future giving birth to us in their future.

Posted by paul at February 11, 2004 01:10 AM

Comments

paul, you rock my world:-) what a great post! for if we are ever capable of uploading our brains, then someone else has already done it to us. and despite that some punters claim that life cannot exist without a physical body, or that it'd be pathetic, i'm confident most of us would go for it. why? eternal life, as you say. transhumanist thinking at its best!!!!

a minor aside is that the paper you link to is BS. any student in philosophy wpould have a field day decostructing its main thesis (if A, B, or C...etc), but whatever....

Posted by: George Dafermos at February 11, 2004 10:49 AM

George,

I hesitated to link to Nicks article for the same reason, as he constructs and/or explains his logic very poorly... I had to re-read it three times before I understood what he was TRYING to say. Having took the time to read his more lengthy paper, which I will correct the link as I'm writing this, he is correct that the chances of us being in a simulation are much greater than not being in one.

Posted by: Paul Hughes at February 11, 2004 09:11 PM

hi futurists.

though i agree that it's probable that we're living in a simulation (on grounds more or less along the lines of nick's reasoning), i don't think it follows that we won't blow ourselves up.

first of all, part of running simulations is to see what works and what doesn't. if you've read anything along the lines of wolfram's "a new kind of science" (and related literature), you'll know that the very reason you run a simulation is because you can't predict what will follow from a given set of initial coniditions. running simulations of humanity (or its close analogs) is educational (and thus useful to those running the simulations) because it shows how things might have been different, and what would have caused the differences. simulations culminating in global catastrophe cannot be ruled out a priori.

secondly, i find your assumptions about the 'compassion' of transhuman intelligence to be somewhat myopic (if you'll pardon my bluntness). i think buckminster's "compassion or oblivion" prediction is illuminating, but ultimately flawed: there's no need for compassion when cooperation will suffice. there is nothing to keep the collective intelligence from degrading the lives of human individuals if there's no way for a given individual to wield any great amount of destructive power. that's not to say that the average human life will be worthless, but there's no reason to think transhumans won't be wholly expendible (let alone their simulations).

after all, do you mourn the death of your individual neurons? does it even make sense to do so? self-organized cell death is in fact an integral component of the learning process. sure, the fact that we are individually conscious may seem to pose a disanalogy, but who's to say that the collective intelligence will respect our mere human consciousness? or even if it does, who's to say it won't subordinate our interests to the greater interests of the collective (i.e. itself)? i find this model of transhuman ethical consciousness much more plausible than the anthropocentric model you posit, though perhaps i'm wrong.

anyhow, my apologies for turning a reply into a rant. interesting website.

cheers.

Posted by: .maak. at February 25, 2004 06:19 AM