> Read the Bible's book of Genesis and thats pretty much how the uploaded
> lifestyle would be. You could create anything spontaneously or rapidly
> evolve it from a metaphysical goo just by thinking about it because an
> algorithm could read your virtual brainwaves. You could then proceed to
> create an entire universe, possibly one even better designed than we
> currently have.
Sounds nice, but you are not describing life as an upload, you are
describing life in a perfect virtual reality with super-AI. Granted, when
ew can do uploading, we will have so much computing power and probably AI
that the potential for virtual reality is going to be awesome (it better
be, or the newly uploaded people will go slowly insane from badly rendered
drinks or bugs in their body models).
Yes, I would definitely start working on building worlds (not entire
universes at first), but their complexities are still limited by the
amount of computation power we have - and that will be limited and cost
money too. Read _Permutation City_ by Greg Egan for some ideas.
The problem I see with many of the uploading scenarios I hear on this list
is that they are all too often of the kind "And after you are uploaded,
you become God." It isn't that simple - working uploading won't change
your mind very much (if it did, it wouldn't be you that emerged in
cyberspace). So when you are 'reborn' you will be an emulation of 10^11
neurons, their activity and lots of other pseudobiological data. Of
course, self-transformation now becomes almost too trivial (remember to
make backups often!) and you will be able to change much of your
structure. But you won't immediately be able to go far beyond your old
limits, they have to be untangled and enhanced away. This will require a
lot of *work*. It will quite likely be painful and tiring (in a mental
sense). It will take time.
The exception may be uploading through gradual extension: when you become
100% uploaded, you are already quite evolved. But you are still far from
being a god.
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Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
nv91-asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~nv91-asa/main.html
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