HUMOR: Uploading Purity Test

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Mon, 28 Jun 1999 00:02:41 -0500

The Uploading Purity Test
v1.0 by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
60 questions, 64 points

Have you ever run your mind on non-neural substrate?
...non-biological substrate?
...non-matter substrate?
...non-physical substrate?

Have you ever created a duplicate of yourself?
...more than 10 duplicates?
...more than 1000 duplicates?
...more than 1e12 duplicates?
...more than 1e80 duplicates?

Have you lived for more than a subjective century?
...more than a eon?
...longer than the age of the Universe?
...so long it has to be expressed in Knuth notation?
...forever? (Worth 2 points)

Have you ever gotten bored enough to take up a pointless mortal hobby?
...to track the position of all the atoms in the galaxy?
...to extrapolate a Universe where Donald Duck is God?
...to contemplate all the positive integers?
...Did you finish?

Have you ever carked yourself into a Turing machine?
...a creature in Conway's Game of Life?
...a classical AI?
...a pre-Singularity planetary economy?
...back into a mortal human? (Worth 2 points.)

Have you ever entered a fictional construct?
...Did you remove your memories of an external existence?
...Did you spend the whole time wishing you were a transhuman?
...Were you annoyed with yourself when you woke up?

Have you altered your mental algorithms to incorporate quantum computing?
...closed timelike loops?

Have you ever entered a simulated environment?
...with different physical laws?
...with different mathematical laws?
...with different rules of logic? (Worth 2 points.)
...Did you alter yourself to feel at home?
...Did it work?
...Did you refuse to go back?

Have you ever participated in a group mind?
...Did they like you?
...Do you still have their memories?
...Are you still participating?
...Have you forgotten which one you were when you started?
...Does that question not have an objective answer?

Are you in contact with a version of yourself that has become smarter than you are?
...that has become a superintelligence?
...that has become a Power?
...that has become God?

Have you completely lost your mortal priorities?
...your personality?
...your memories?
...your individuality?

Have you ever created an object of stellar scale?
...an object of galactic scale?
...your own Universe?
...this Universe?
...Did you create all of reality to begin with?

Do you fully understand the First Cause?
...the nature of consciousness?
...the meaning of life?
...the behavior of your own algorithms? (worth 2 points)
...the 1999 U.S. tax code?

-- 
           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