Thanks for doing this! I had heard that this particular story had an interesting depiction of Utopia, but hadn’t gotten around to reading the story, and I think I got most of the “interesting utopia ideas” from your version just fine. I agree that this is a more serious portrait than most have attempted and interesting to read, particularly chapters 4, 5, and 6.
Discussion (Spoilers, esp. for Ch. 6, and also for Friendship is Optimal)
It kind of disturbs me, yet doesn’t surprise me, that the most compelling vision of utopia for me involves frequent exit into memory-edited simulation—”deep dives” as Ch. 6 calls them. Perhaps that’s a particular character trait not everyone shares, but I tend to think it’d be pretty popular, in the way that video games and movies and books are pretty popular.
The obvious implication we all know is, well, what if my current life is a simulation? It gets more suspicious the closer we appear to be to ASI. Then again, I’m also inherently suspicious of any idea that sounds too much like a replacement for the promised afterlife of religion, if perhaps partly because I think it’s beneath my dignity to desire such a (potentially) comforting thought. (Also I don’t think everyone else is p-zombies/`spians, so we ought to treat our world as real and our life as immediate—though that has little effect on the truth-value of the simulation hypothesis.)
But anyway, Deep Dives are to me an implicit admission that Utopia can never be enough on its own without significant mind/memory-editing—the mere knowledge of Utopia sucks out meaning. The depiction of the Heavens in the story is also worryingly incomplete in two respects:
The time period depicted is much too soon after the instantiation of utopia. It hasn’t even been a full human lifetime. The real challenge of a Utopia is making your trillionth year worthwhile, and this one isn’t even touching your hundredth. (The best depiction I know of that is in Friendship is Optimal, and even then it’s not a full depiction.)
Most everyone depicted is getting sucked up into the Upper Heavens at a, relative to eternity, extraordinarily fast pace. This implies the Lower and even Middle Heavens are transitory states at best, and pretty soon almost everyone is stuck in the High Heavens, which notably are not depicted whatsoever, and implied to be beyond mortal comprehension somewhat. So what vision of Utopia did we really even get?
I wonder if they still do Deep Dives in High Heaven. You’d think it’d be beneath them.
Thanks for doing this! I had heard that this particular story had an interesting depiction of Utopia, but hadn’t gotten around to reading the story, and I think I got most of the “interesting utopia ideas” from your version just fine. I agree that this is a more serious portrait than most have attempted and interesting to read, particularly chapters 4, 5, and 6.
Discussion (Spoilers, esp. for Ch. 6, and also for Friendship is Optimal)
It kind of disturbs me, yet doesn’t surprise me, that the most compelling vision of utopia for me involves frequent exit into memory-edited simulation—”deep dives” as Ch. 6 calls them. Perhaps that’s a particular character trait not everyone shares, but I tend to think it’d be pretty popular, in the way that video games and movies and books are pretty popular.
The obvious implication we all know is, well, what if my current life is a simulation? It gets more suspicious the closer we appear to be to ASI. Then again, I’m also inherently suspicious of any idea that sounds too much like a replacement for the promised afterlife of religion, if perhaps partly because I think it’s beneath my dignity to desire such a (potentially) comforting thought. (Also I don’t think everyone else is p-zombies/`spians, so we ought to treat our world as real and our life as immediate—though that has little effect on the truth-value of the simulation hypothesis.)
But anyway, Deep Dives are to me an implicit admission that Utopia can never be enough on its own without significant mind/memory-editing—the mere knowledge of Utopia sucks out meaning. The depiction of the Heavens in the story is also worryingly incomplete in two respects:
The time period depicted is much too soon after the instantiation of utopia. It hasn’t even been a full human lifetime. The real challenge of a Utopia is making your trillionth year worthwhile, and this one isn’t even touching your hundredth. (The best depiction I know of that is in Friendship is Optimal, and even then it’s not a full depiction.)
Most everyone depicted is getting sucked up into the Upper Heavens at a, relative to eternity, extraordinarily fast pace. This implies the Lower and even Middle Heavens are transitory states at best, and pretty soon almost everyone is stuck in the High Heavens, which notably are not depicted whatsoever, and implied to be beyond mortal comprehension somewhat. So what vision of Utopia did we really even get?
I wonder if they still do Deep Dives in High Heaven. You’d think it’d be beneath them.