From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 01:41:02 MDT
> -----Original Message-----
> From: spike66@attbi.com [mailto:spike66@attbi.com]
> Sent: Thursday, 22 May 2003 4:14 PM
> To: extropians@extropy.org
> Subject: RE: PHYSICS: our increasingly strange universe
>
>
>
> > > > --- Emlyn O'regan <oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au wrote:
> > >
> > > > > It's depressing how buggy the universe is.
> > >
> > > Depressing? It's elating. Explains the meaning of
> > > human existence: we are evolving to debug this place.
> > >
> > > spike
> > >
> >
> > If the meaning of life is that we are maintenance
> programmers for a bug
> > ridden, feature bloated universe, I'm going to be very annoyed...
> >
> > Emlyn
>
> No, Emlyn this is way overly pessimistic. We are here to
> eventually transcend and do the final debugging. Thats
> what the singularity is all about. Exciting stuff. Its
> a great time to be alive. The meaning of life for all
> previous generations was to survive to breed, so that
> eventually the result would be us.
>
> spike
>
In my more pessimistic moments I always feel that this universe is worth
being angry about. Look at the fate of those who went before us;
ignominious, really. Implicitly, we assume that we wont share that fate, but
that's not at all certain.
The very fact that we have scarcity is crazy. Why isn't our environment
directly manipulable; eg: why is there matter? Humans are having to go to
absolutely extreme lengths to make matter behave like software (not there
yet), when it could have been that way from the beginning.
Existence just seems so bloody banal. It's a bad hollywood script that
originating from what was once someone's good idea; you can still sense the
spark of brilliance in there somewhere, but the implementation of reality
seems hopelessly unimaginative and shitty. It's been thought up by the kinds
of people that think we'll have traffic jams of flying cars in extreme urban
future cities. Stupid.
Not to say that these aren't interesting times, and that we can't add a few
layers of implementation to create a much more satisfactory virtual universe
running in the real one. But standing back, it really does look like we are
making the best of an appalling job.
Emlyn
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