Programmed Ignorance, Uploading & Speed Limits

Chris Hind (chind@juno.com)
Wed, 18 Dec 1996 20:17:25 -0800

The age old meme "Ignorance is Bliss" or "What you don't know can't hurt
you" are quite obviously blatantly incorrect but also finding a logical
structure for everything takes from the environment and experience. When we
upload we will have control over our brains and have the ability to
basically 'dumb ourselves up' for a particular experience. To state an
example, How would we experience a new universe someone created if we knew
that it wasn't real and we could manipulate it anyway we want? Sitting on a
jagged cliff overlooking an endless sea with the breeze blowing across your
face wouldn't seem so realistic if you knew you could simply flip the whole
experience off like a switch. Perhaps to experience new realms we will have
to dumb ourselves up so we don't pick out petty little details and think
about the situation logically. Also there may be an uploading speed limit
agreed upon by the mass population for dealing with other uploaded
individuals because how could two people communicate if they were running
at different processing speeds? People could communicate at a middle
processing speed in which they would collaborate with their fellow workers,
make appointments, etc and they could run at whatever speed they wished as
spare time. Also won't this system turn into a bunch of uploaded haves and
have nots? The elite would have the highest processing speed and the poor
would have low processing speeds. It would be very nearly impossible to
contact someone with a higher speed than you which means that the poor
would have a more difficult time climbing to the top and have to steal
timeslices. (Am I going a little too far?)