Matt Gingell wrote:
>
> This is an interesting line of speculation, but not one that I think is really
> worth worrying about. Given the amount of horror humanity’s gone through this
> century, if we are being simulated by an intelligence interested in minimizing
> suffering, then either it has fundamental reasons for not getting involved – it
> doesn’t want to damage the integrity of the simulation, for instance – or it’s
> motivations are sufficiently inscrutable to make discussion pointless. If we
> were going to raise a general morality violation, we would have done so by now –
> the sky would have turned dark blue and novas would have lined up to form a
> register dump and the vendors 800 number.
On the other hand, one has to wonder at forty thousand years of nontechnological history and fifteen billion years of simulation dangling uselessly, assuming all that was real, which my intuitions say they are. Oh, hell. Who am I to pretend that I have any idea what constitutes a "selection pressure" when it's acting on a recursive chain of gods, most of which are probably insane? I don't even know what the Anthropic Principle means any more; I'm not sure how to compute the relative probabilities.
> If pleasure were being maximized, we’d be disembodied strings of code floating
Oh, you mean the way that if Powers exist they should expand at
lightspeed, and if alien races exist they should expand pretty fast
anyway, and Earth's sun is hardly old, so therefore intelligent life is
impossible and we aren't here?
> in virtual tanks full of virtual opiates. If pain were being minimized, we
> wouldn’t be here. If an optimal compromise between the two had been found, there
> ’d be nothing in the universe but endless mirrors of Earth. The incredibly
> arbitrary nature of the universe at a macroscopic level makes me doubt there’s a
> God paying attention to us, synthetic or otherwise.
> ps. You used the word 'culture' with a capital C the other day. Was that an Iain
> Banks reference?
Hm. Where?
-- sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way