From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Apr 05 2001 - 01:08:45 MDT
Chris Cooper wrote:
>
> >Ok James, so what exactly is your ideal future scenario? If you insist on
> >having some mystery left in the Universe I'm sure the Sysop will oblige
> >you by modifying your memories and dumping you permanently into a simulated
> >reality of medieval Europe. If you request such a thing of course.
>
> Who says that isn't what has already happened?
If you prove it, I might be interested. Otherwise, the dominant
probability - in goal system terms, dominant source of differential
desirability - is the world taken at face value.
> It might be more fun for some
> post-Singularity citizens to go outside the confines of the Sysop and experience
> what the rest of the universe has to offer, even if the trade off is expiring in
> some far-off cosmic event.
This (and the rest of the post) show a misunderstanding of the nature of a
Sysop. Sysops are not there to protect you from yourself - not against
your own wishes, at any rate; that's not what a Sysop is for. You can die
if you ask to. You can go watch some far-off cosmic event in your ship
and request that the ship explode and kill you if zapped by a nova, or
whatever. The reason the ship is composed of Sysop matter is to prevent
you from setting up your own "hell polis" in the middle of nowhere. You
can still instruct the Sysop matter to act like a rickety Model T and then
try to land on a neutron star and die, if that's your taste. (At least,
this is the standard assumption in discussions of the Sysop Scenario.)
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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