Omega presents you with the following two choices:
1) You will live for at least 100 years from now, in your 20 year old body, perfect physical condition etc and you may live on later as long as you manage.
2) You will definitely die in this universe within 10 years, but you get a box with 10^^^10 bytes of memory/instructions capacitance. The computer can be programmed in any programming language you’d like (also with libraries to deal with huge numbers, etc.).
Although the computer has a limit on the number of operations, it will take zero time (in your universe) to run and display the result of any computation not exceeding the limits.
Even better: it also includes a function f(s:MindBogglinglyHugeInt). If you call it, it will
create a simulation of this universe with a version of you inside that is modified to guaranteed (modified?) to live there as long as you want him (within the resource limitations of 10^^^10 operations). On the screen, a chat window appears and you can talk real time to him (i.e. you) as much as you want starting at s seconds in future.
Would you choose A) or B)?
Would your choice differ, if you don’t have the f function to simulate your other self?
B, and it seems like a mind-bogglingly obvious choice (though I would want to see a demonstration of the computer first, and put in some safeguards to prevent burning through too much of m computation at any given time (i.e. only allow it 10^^(10^^10-1) operations for any instruction I give it to keep an infinite loop from making it worthless). My choice wouldn’t differ, even if I didn’t have function f, because that’s basically a “map the genome, simulate cells directly from physics (and thus solve the protein folding problem), solve any problem where the limit is computation, and generally eliminate all suffering and solve every human problem” machine. If I wanted to, I could also run every turing machine with 10^10 or fewer states for 10^^(10^^10-1) cycles, though I’m not sure whether I’d want to.
We expect people to lay down their lives immediately to save even 10 others. Why wouldn’t we do so to save literally every other human on the planet and give them basically unlimited life?
I have a different but related dilemma.
Omega presents you with the following two choices:
1) You will live for at least 100 years from now, in your 20 year old body, perfect physical condition etc and you may live on later as long as you manage.
2) You will definitely die in this universe within 10 years, but you get a box with 10^^^10 bytes of memory/instructions capacitance. The computer can be programmed in any programming language you’d like (also with libraries to deal with huge numbers, etc.). Although the computer has a limit on the number of operations, it will take zero time (in your universe) to run and display the result of any computation not exceeding the limits.
Even better: it also includes a function f(s:MindBogglinglyHugeInt). If you call it, it will create a simulation of this universe with a version of you inside that is modified to guaranteed (modified?) to live there as long as you want him (within the resource limitations of 10^^^10 operations). On the screen, a chat window appears and you can talk real time to him (i.e. you) as much as you want starting at s seconds in future.
Would you choose A) or B)?
Would your choice differ, if you don’t have the f function to simulate your other self?
B, and it seems like a mind-bogglingly obvious choice (though I would want to see a demonstration of the computer first, and put in some safeguards to prevent burning through too much of m computation at any given time (i.e. only allow it 10^^(10^^10-1) operations for any instruction I give it to keep an infinite loop from making it worthless). My choice wouldn’t differ, even if I didn’t have function f, because that’s basically a “map the genome, simulate cells directly from physics (and thus solve the protein folding problem), solve any problem where the limit is computation, and generally eliminate all suffering and solve every human problem” machine. If I wanted to, I could also run every turing machine with 10^10 or fewer states for 10^^(10^^10-1) cycles, though I’m not sure whether I’d want to.
We expect people to lay down their lives immediately to save even 10 others. Why wouldn’t we do so to save literally every other human on the planet and give them basically unlimited life?