Re: A billion years later...

From: Alden Jurling (nakomus@cnsp.com)
Date: Sat Dec 08 2001 - 23:30:37 MST


Are you proposing that there ARE no absolute limits on reality? Or just
suggesting that all the limits we define now will turn out to be false?
Yes, we may be able to cheat our way around some 'laws', but even the
cheats would have rules. Prehaps I'm missing something in what your saying?
At 01:01 AM 12/9/01 -0500, you wrote:
> I have to agree with this scenario...it is true that limits we put
> on ourselves seem to fade away with time...sociological, cultural and
> ethnic limits, technological limits...limits on productivity, on
> happiness, on intelligence, limits like death. Consistently we have seen
> this limits crushed by the unstoppable rush of the future and
> hyperexponential growth.
> Like <http://www.sysopmind.com/workarounds.html>Eliezer, I suggest
> that the only limits we have our the ones in our minds (as usual), and
> the "ultimate" or "absolute" "limits on reality" are not very absolute at
> all.
> <http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimConEx.98.html>Perhaps
> even it is our brains (or bodies) which creates them in the first
> place. It would be inconsistent for the asymptote-approaching
> hyperexponential curve of progress to suddenly screech to a halt at any
> limit less than perfection...the speed of light is relatively slow to the
> potentially infinite "velocity" within a virtual reality. I find the
> idea of an infinite-dimensional, law-free, transcendent world jailed
> within a 3+1D substrate hard to reconcile with the Singularitarian vision
> of realizing more human-viewpoint-tangible achievements like overcoming
> poverty or suffering.
> Throughout the history of the universe, information processing has
> been accelerating and compactifying itself, becoming more and more
> efficent, using less and less resources to accomplish the same
> developments (generally to create its
> successor). <www.singularitywatch.htm>John Smart is a proponent of this
> view. The currently leading Singularity/Sysop view seems to be that a
> Singularity will occur on the Earth or Solar Sytem scale, with a
> "shockwave" (perhaps of Von Nuemann probes?) traveling outward at the
> speed of light with the intention of colonizing the entire universe. At
> this rate, it would take billions of years to colonize the entire
> universe after the initial Singularity, a gigantic length of
> time...especially for transcendently accelerated minds. I find this
> unlikely. A more likely scenario seems to be for a Transcendent AI to
> develop and master ontotechnology a very short quantity of t! ime after
> mastering the "lower" technologies such as nanotech or conversion of
> matter to energy. Think what would happen if you could put time machines
> and wormholes everywhere in the universe. You transcend time and
> space. The entire universe could be swallowed in an instant. The True
> State of Reality would be realized.
> The trend of concrescence is another trend which is rapidly
> accelerating nowadays...cultures and races merge...along with their
> respective beliefs and ideologies...schools of thought engage in a
> dynamic balance until a unification or conclusive outcome is acheived and
> progress is made. Einstein discovered that space and time were the same
> thing, as were matter and energy. Imagine a civilization occupied by
> consituents with technology so advanced that change between matter and
> energy or time and space is as simple as "changing" the shape of a fluid
> by pouring it into a differently shaped container. Their distinction
> between "time" and "space" would be obsolete in the same manner that
> distinctions between different races are becoming more and more obsolete
> today. In a virtual reality, mass, acceleration, velocity, energy, etc
> will no longer be distinct values. I hypothesize that a single value,
> "computational c! apacity", will dictate the properties of the
> "universe", some of its various forms being "dimension", "mass",
> "velocity", "space-time", "matter-energy", and so on...including ones we
> couldn't even guess of now...
> In the spirit of Eliezer's "Comments on Vinge's Singularity"; "the
> objections fail to consider that we can cheat." Everything falls in the
> face of intelligence, including what we now consider the "Ultimate
> Unbreakable Limits". Rather than Sysop Scenarios or Unix
> Scenarios...perhaps we should be considering "Ontotechnological Infinity
> Scenarios", or the like...I apologize for the length of this message...
>
>
>Michael Anissimov
>
>San Francisco

-Alden Jurling



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