Could you elaborate why we have to make choices before space colonisation if we want to survive beyond the end of the last stars? Until now, my opinion is that we can can “start solving heat death” a billion years in the future while we have to solve AI alignment in the next 50 − 1000 years.
Another thought of mine is that it is probably impossible to resurrect the dead by computing how the state of each neuron of a deceased person was at the time of her/his death. I think, you need to measure the state of each particle in the present with a very high precision and/or the computational requirements for a backward simulation are much too high. Unfortunately, I cannot provide a detailed mathematical argument. This would be an interesting research project; even if the only outcome is that a small group of people should change their cause area.
If we start space colonisation, we may not be able to change goal-system of the spaceships that we will send to stars, as they will move away with near-light speed. So we need to specify what we will do with the universe before starting the space colonisation: either we will spend all resources to build as many simulations with happy minds as possible – or we will reorganise matter in the ways with will help to survive the end of the universe, e.g. building Tipler’s Omega point or building worm hole into another universe.
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Very high precision of brain details is not needed for resurrection as we every second forget our mind state. So only a core of long-term memory is sufficient to preserve what I call “information identity”, which is necessary conditions for a person to regard himself as the same person, say, next day. But the whole problem of identity is not solved yet, and it would be a strong EA cause to solve it: we want to help people in the ways which will not destroy their personal identity, if that identity really matters.
Thank you for your answers. With better brain preservation and a more detailed understanding of the mind it may be possible to resurrect recently deceased persons. I am more skeptical about the possibility to resurrect a peasant from the middle ages by simulating the universe backwards, but of course these are different issues.
If we simulate all possible universes, we can do it. It is enormous computational task, but it can be done via acausal cooperation between different branches of multiverse, where each of them simulate only one history.
It is not clear if a simulation of you in a patch of spacetime that is not causally connected to our part of the universe is the same as you. If you care only about the total amount of happy experiences, this would not matter, but if you care about personal identity, it becomes a non-trivial problem.
You probably assume that the multiverse is infinite. If this is the case, you can simply assume that for every copy of you that lives for N years another copy of you that lives for N+1 years appears somewhere by chance. In that case there would be no need to perform any action.
I am not against your ideas, but I am afraid that there are many conceptual and physical problems that have to solved before. What is even worse is that there is no universally accepted method how to resolve this issues. So a lot of further research is necessary.
1.The identity problems is known to be difficult, but here I assume that continuity of consciousness is not needed for it. Only informational identity is enough.
2. The difference between quantum—or big world- immortality is that we can select which minds to create and exclude N+1 moments which are damages or suffering.
Let us assume that a typical large but finite volume contains n happy simulations of you and n⋅10−100 suffering copies of you, maybe Boltzmann brains or simulations made by a malevolent agent. If the universe is infinite, you have infinitely many happy and infinitely suffering copies of you and it is hard how to interpret this result.
I think that there is way to calculate relative probabilities even in infinite case and it will converge to 1:1⋅10−100. For example, there is an article “The watchers of multiverse” which suggest a plausible way to do so.
Could you elaborate why we have to make choices before space colonisation if we want to survive beyond the end of the last stars? Until now, my opinion is that we can can “start solving heat death” a billion years in the future while we have to solve AI alignment in the next 50 − 1000 years.
Another thought of mine is that it is probably impossible to resurrect the dead by computing how the state of each neuron of a deceased person was at the time of her/his death. I think, you need to measure the state of each particle in the present with a very high precision and/or the computational requirements for a backward simulation are much too high. Unfortunately, I cannot provide a detailed mathematical argument. This would be an interesting research project; even if the only outcome is that a small group of people should change their cause area.
If we start space colonisation, we may not be able to change goal-system of the spaceships that we will send to stars, as they will move away with near-light speed. So we need to specify what we will do with the universe before starting the space colonisation: either we will spend all resources to build as many simulations with happy minds as possible – or we will reorganise matter in the ways with will help to survive the end of the universe, e.g. building Tipler’s Omega point or building worm hole into another universe.
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Very high precision of brain details is not needed for resurrection as we every second forget our mind state. So only a core of long-term memory is sufficient to preserve what I call “information identity”, which is necessary conditions for a person to regard himself as the same person, say, next day. But the whole problem of identity is not solved yet, and it would be a strong EA cause to solve it: we want to help people in the ways which will not destroy their personal identity, if that identity really matters.
Thank you for your answers. With better brain preservation and a more detailed understanding of the mind it may be possible to resurrect recently deceased persons. I am more skeptical about the possibility to resurrect a peasant from the middle ages by simulating the universe backwards, but of course these are different issues.
If we simulate all possible universes, we can do it. It is enormous computational task, but it can be done via acausal cooperation between different branches of multiverse, where each of them simulate only one history.
I see two problems with your proposal:
It is not clear if a simulation of you in a patch of spacetime that is not causally connected to our part of the universe is the same as you. If you care only about the total amount of happy experiences, this would not matter, but if you care about personal identity, it becomes a non-trivial problem.
You probably assume that the multiverse is infinite. If this is the case, you can simply assume that for every copy of you that lives for N years another copy of you that lives for N+1 years appears somewhere by chance. In that case there would be no need to perform any action.
I am not against your ideas, but I am afraid that there are many conceptual and physical problems that have to solved before. What is even worse is that there is no universally accepted method how to resolve this issues. So a lot of further research is necessary.
1.The identity problems is known to be difficult, but here I assume that continuity of consciousness is not needed for it. Only informational identity is enough.
2. The difference between quantum—or big world- immortality is that we can select which minds to create and exclude N+1 moments which are damages or suffering.
Let us assume that a typical large but finite volume contains n happy simulations of you and n⋅10−100 suffering copies of you, maybe Boltzmann brains or simulations made by a malevolent agent. If the universe is infinite, you have infinitely many happy and infinitely suffering copies of you and it is hard how to interpret this result.
I think that there is way to calculate relative probabilities even in infinite case and it will converge to 1:1⋅10−100. For example, there is an article “The watchers of multiverse” which suggest a plausible way to do so.
Thank you for the link to the paper. I find Alexander Vilenkins theoretical work very interesting.