Possibility Space vs. Extinction (was Re: Genetically Smartifying other Mammals)

From: Thomas Buckner (tcbevolver@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Feb 03 2006 - 22:09:53 MST


--- Phillip Huggan <cdnprodigy@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Yes, that Lamarckian fitness peak in the
> presence of advanced engineering technologies
> will surely result in the extinction of all
> intelligences.

Opening up possibility space would mean not
extinction but inclusion of all intelligences,
uploaded or simulated, in an intelligence which
includes all possible states of those
intelligences as part of a larger whole. As Nick
Bostrom says, "at least one of the following
propositions is true: (1) the human species is
very likely to go extinct before reaching a
“posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization
is extremely unlikely to run a significant number
of simulations of their evolutionary history (or
variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly
living in a computer simulation."

If an intelligence explores possibility space
beginning with our light cone, it would logically
exhaust simulations of that familiar environment
before moving on to others, for ours is the most
complexity-friendly universe (let's call that a
CFU) we know. Such a simulating intelligence may
find that ours is one of the simplest CFU's
available, or even that there is no theory which
can give rise to CFU's much more optimized than
the one we know.

By CFU I mean fine-tuned universe constants, the
ones that give us stars and atoms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe
Because what the constats are really all about,
ahtropically speaking, is that they create an
arena for complex interactions and complex
patterns (up to and including life and mind)
where a poorly tuned universe, for these
purposes, collapses or empties out or has too few
ways for entities to interact, produces only
non-complexity-friendly vacuums or physical
singularites or only one kind of matter, and so
on.

To reiterate: an expanding intelligence which
emerges in a CFU, seeking to explore possibility
space (complexity) would have reason to conserve
or simulate its native CFU, with as much
complexity as possible, which means including all
existing intelligences. Even the humble: as Dr.
Kinsey noted, even the gall wasps are all
different.

Tom Buckner

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