i mean, i plainly disagree. it seems a failure of imagination that octopus, algae mats, raptors, ant colonies, bees, elephants, etc couldn’t, with a little teleological oomph, build a universe-colonizing technology. so this narrative does not help me locate myself as a human, rather than as any of those.
(“The human form in particular is especially suitable for technological evolution”—i feel that, were i for example an octopus, i could easily make a similar argument about why any high technology would be contingent on intelligent creatures with tentacles. so again, this does not help me locate myself as human.)
overall, it seems to me that if the teleological mushrooms are most interested in simulating powerful artificial minds, and can spookily determine certain events, they could easily find a faster route to “the good stuff”! so i’m still left wondering: why is there something?
And, well, maybe you are only important insofar as your experience is required to compute something that’ll have a causal effect on a more important distant descendant of yours.
right, but my point is that, for all i know, we are not yet close to a singularity. small details of subjective experience many hundreds or thousands of years prior could be “remembered” in the sense that the simulated instant depends on them. so this metaphysics does not help me locate myself temporally near the singularity, either.
it just asserts (as in Fn. 3) that the specific details of its history are such that the outcome on the distant descendant ends up being xyz.
perhaps this point is critical to our disagreement. i don’t expect that there’s a meaningful difference (from the perspective of one of the simulation’s denizens) between reifying a moment for which my current subjective experience is a logical necessity, and reifying the moments in which the subjective experience is more traditionally thought to be taking place.
in other words, the glider experiences all the time between its start and end, even if the metamind moves ahead in leaps and bounds.
i mean, i plainly disagree. it seems a failure of imagination that octopus, algae mats, raptors, ant colonies, bees, elephants, etc couldn’t, with a little teleological oomph, build a universe-colonizing technology. so this narrative does not help me locate myself as a human, rather than as any of those.
(“The human form in particular is especially suitable for technological evolution”—i feel that, were i for example an octopus, i could easily make a similar argument about why any high technology would be contingent on intelligent creatures with tentacles. so again, this does not help me locate myself as human.)
overall, it seems to me that if the teleological mushrooms are most interested in simulating powerful artificial minds, and can spookily determine certain events, they could easily find a faster route to “the good stuff”! so i’m still left wondering: why is there something?
right, but my point is that, for all i know, we are not yet close to a singularity. small details of subjective experience many hundreds or thousands of years prior could be “remembered” in the sense that the simulated instant depends on them. so this metaphysics does not help me locate myself temporally near the singularity, either.
perhaps this point is critical to our disagreement. i don’t expect that there’s a meaningful difference (from the perspective of one of the simulation’s denizens) between reifying a moment for which my current subjective experience is a logical necessity, and reifying the moments in which the subjective experience is more traditionally thought to be taking place.
in other words, the glider experiences all the time between its start and end, even if the metamind moves ahead in leaps and bounds.