From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat May 24 2003 - 17:05:35 MDT
Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> On Sat, 24 May 2003, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>
>>Let it be noted for the record that, when at Spike's house for the
>>post-Gathering Gathering, I criticized Bradbury's MBrain plans on the
>>grounds that they "allowed the sun to stay on".
>
> Eliezer, since I don't recall this conversation, I must assume that it
> took place after I had left Spike's for Seattle -- which is fine
> though it is unfortunate since we didn't get a chance to interact head to
> head on this.
Either I've got false memories or you've got a gap. I recall discussing
this with you, albeit briefly. Humans being what they are, we'll never
know. Probably the blue people changed it. You remember the blue people,
right?
> Yes of course. And while I would clearly like to see the resources
> go into reversible computational devices and perhaps the greater
> production of extropic vs. entropic information -- I *do* not know
> what the net-present-value of extropic vs. entropic information is.
>
> Classical economic theories would suggest that a penny of extropic
> information now may be worth much more than a pound of entropic
> information later.
>
> The question I would ask is how one might know that the
> total (extropic) information content of any web arena is
> greater this saturday than next saturday. If one cannot
> know that then everthing from allocating ones time to
> pricing tickets seems up for grabs.
Clearly what the world needs is a more sophisticated Fun Theory. On the
discount-rate issue, I'm not quite sure the classical economists have it
right; a good decision theory should IMHO be timeless, but may timelessly
take into account properties of the 4D process that is a sentient being,
rather than insisting that the utility function be applied only to 3D
slices of reality. So it's not necessarily how much total fun you have,
but the progress of fun over time, and whether you can manage to have more
and more fun. So in that sense, all you may need today is a penny of fun,
and tomorrow you'll have a pound of fun, and the important thing is that
you're having more fun. So on that basis it may be quite a while before
we *have* to disassemble the stars... yet it is worth remembering that
they're wasting a heck of a lot of irreplaceable low-entropy-state meanwhile.
As for how to shut a star down... even human physicists get *really
creative* when they're given time to think about something. The way they
make Bose-Einstein condensates, that trick they recently demonstrated with
shifting light to arbitrary frequencies using shock waves in photonic
crystals... some creative fellow will think about stellar dynamics for
around 10 milliseconds and work out a way to send a set of shock waves
through the star that build up in *just* the right way to disassemble the
star in a nice, controlled way, ejecting globs of matter, until it goes
out. Or, like, whatever. You wouldn't want to do this with Sol, maybe,
for sentimental reasons. But the rest of the galaxy? Heck, why not? You
could put little flashlights in the appropriate places, and the
Pedestrians would never know the difference. If anyone complains about
the romance, you could attach little sentiences to the flashlights so that
the stars actually *care* about the way you look at them, and are
flattered by the attention. That beats a distant nonsapient ball of
burning gas any day, right? You could even change the boring old
Newtonian orbits of the "planet" flashlights such that the new
trajectories reflect the SI's predictions of future political events in a
way that can be decoded by astrologers... okay, shutting up now.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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