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Maybe some Boltzmann brains start out with rich fulfilling memories. And then a later (or earlier) Boltzmann brain happens to exist with a continuation of those

Maybe some Boltzmann brains start out with rich fulfilling memories. And then a later (or earlier) Boltzmann brain happens to exist with a continuation of those memories. (Now I realize I'm just reciting a plot point from the excellent book Permutation City...)

baddox 8y ago
And likewise, maybe others start out in a state of unimaginable agony with a long memory of the same.
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  Does self-awareness presume the existence of emotion? I feel like Boltzman wouldn't have bothered to assert self-awareness if he'd had a real knowledge of the various gradations of consciousness and just how rare they are, even on Earth.
- majos 8y ago
  As a dude-do-you-ever-think sidenote, this sort of thing keeps me from getting excited about any type of virtual reality that does anything with our brains. How do I know it won't simulate 10 years of torture, then at the end replace that memory with 10 minutes of an edenic golden field, so when I actually unplug all I have is a nice remembered experience that I'd like (incorrectly) to try again?
  - Florin_Andrei 8y ago
    Well, growing up you have no guarantee your life is going to be 100% sunshine-and-bunnies, and indeed it rarely is. And yet you live.
  - majos 8y ago
    @Florin_Andrei: Sure, but we have reasonable expectations of how bad things can get and our capacity to learn from them. Alter your perception and memory and those things go out the window, and that's way scarier than normal organic life.
    - pc86 8y ago
      If you can't see the reply button because the comment is too new, click "0 minutes ago" and you can always reply there.
      - majos 8y ago
        Oops, didn't know that. Thanks.
  - baddox 8y ago
    Why would that be such a bad thing? Or to put it another way, how do you know you weren't tortured for the last 10 years and then given a memory wipe?
stevenAthompson 8y ago
You, Sir, have excellent taste. Permutation City is the only recent hard science fiction books that I can fully embrace. It has novel and genuinely new thinking, it is realistic, and it's thoroughly entertaining. Most modern sci-fi fails at one or more of those tasks. Indeed, most modern sci-fi fail's at not being mere fiction.
- starshadowx2 8y ago
  Have you read any more from Egan?
  - AgentME 8y ago
    Permutation City is still my favorite from him, which is a little disappointing since it's one of his older books. It touches the most subjects and makes the biggest sci-fi leaps. Diaspora scratches some of the same itch, going further with some of the ideas, and Schild's Ladder is in the same bucket. Distress and Incandescence are both something different, but Incandescence's subtlety took me a while to appreciate. Zendegi ... skip it. It seems to be written with outright disdain to sci-fi fans with weird author tracts and caricatures, and it doesn't really tread new ground otherwise. Is Greg Egan getting sick of the fan mail he's getting?
    - starshadowx2 8y ago
      Diaspora is my favourite, and the first I read of his. Permutation City and Schild's Ladder are both really great. I thought Distress was really interesting, like you said it's different from the others. I haven't read Incandescence. I enjoyed Zendegi, I'm not sure what you meant by it being disdainful to sci-fi fans.
      - AgentME 8y ago
        Part of what drove me crazy about Zendegi is that the guy funding the mind-uploading project is constantly portrayed as crazy and selfish for his goals of living longer through uploading, though as soon as one of the protagonists gets sick, suddenly the goal is an exciting possibility for that protagonist in particular (he's had a hard life, so it's noble for him I guess) ... and when the plan falls short because the tech isn't developed enough, the entire idea is back to being regarded as ridiculous and one of the other protagonists campaigns to stop more research from being done in the area. It felt like picking up a sci-fi book from someone known for writing space sci-fi, and then being expected to sympathize with the protagonist who wants NASA shut down after Apollo 1 burns. Maybe it just bugs me a little extra because it's the apex of a weird pattern also in Permutation City and the short story Crystal Nights (which is a fun read!): the story's cool tech, the thing you came to the story for, is pushed by an unlikable character, and everyone else despises the character and everything they stand for including the tech. There's a lack of likable characters that sympathize with the reader in how cool the technology could be; it's harder to sympathize with the protagonists who seem too unimaginative to see how cool the tech could be. I get that the author is probably trying to make a point that technology can be abused by bad people and that most people aren't going to see the possibilities of new tech ... but I think he's getting worse at making that point, or the point is just getting grating being re-executed in the same way several times over. And the other thing that drives me crazy about Zendegi is the time it spends with the lazy caricatures[0] of real people. It's a little personal given that Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of my favorite authors, but that's only part of it. The caricatures are lazy. Egan might as well have made each of the characters boast of having a small dick. And the bad caricatures aren't just a few unflattering introductions, but form a whole subplot that mostly doesn't affect the main plot or the protagonists at all; it exists just to take shots. And then the caricatures are mainly ridiculed for dreaming big (in ways the story cheaply makes out to be dumb or selfish), especially about AI. I come to Egan books to dream big. Egan's previous books were likely part of what taught many people to dream big in this! I'm sure some of the things I call problems could be done well and aren't automatic disqualifiers, but the sum of all of them in one book with the execution they had just left a surprisingly terrible taste in my mouth. [0] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/03/egans-zendegi.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/03/egans-zendegi.html
brianpgordon 8y ago
You don't even really need a sequence of closely-related brain states encoding a coherent stream of consciousness. Maybe you only exist right now, and nothing else ever happens in your life. All you need is a single brain state with all of the right memories loaded up and you'd have a person who thinks they're going about their day. If you consider the likelihood of a one-brain-state person spontaneously arising in thermal noise versus the likelihood of many similar brain states spontaneously arising in thermal noise, the probability that a given person is going to continue living beyond the current moment seems very low, assuming a finite age for the universe. Hopefully there's some better, lower-entropy mechanism out there for generating brain states. Maybe it's even an objective physical reality and human evolution producing physical brains. :) (I loved Permutation City, by the way. I don't think any other novel has made me think so much.)
- AgentME 8y ago
  >You don't even really need a sequence of closely-related brain states encoding a coherent stream of consciousness. Maybe you only exist right now, and nothing else ever happens in your life. All you need is a single brain state Agreed mostly, though personally I think Permutation City was dancing around trying to imply something one step further than that: maybe you don't even need that single brain state to exist in some objective reality for it to have a coherent stream of consciousness. In other words, the Mathematical universe hypothesis[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...

baddox 8y ago

And likewise, maybe others start out in a state of unimaginable agony with a long memory of the same.

vinceguidry 8y ago
Does self-awareness presume the existence of emotion? I feel like Boltzman wouldn't have bothered to assert self-awareness if he'd had a real knowledge of the various gradations of consciousness and just how rare they are, even on Earth.
majos 8y ago
As a dude-do-you-ever-think sidenote, this sort of thing keeps me from getting excited about any type of virtual reality that does anything with our brains. How do I know it won't simulate 10 years of torture, then at the end replace that memory with 10 minutes of an edenic golden field, so when I actually unplug all I have is a nice remembered experience that I'd like (incorrectly) to try again?
- Florin_Andrei 8y ago
  Well, growing up you have no guarantee your life is going to be 100% sunshine-and-bunnies, and indeed it rarely is. And yet you live.
- majos 8y ago
  @Florin_Andrei: Sure, but we have reasonable expectations of how bad things can get and our capacity to learn from them. Alter your perception and memory and those things go out the window, and that's way scarier than normal organic life.
  - pc86 8y ago
    If you can't see the reply button because the comment is too new, click "0 minutes ago" and you can always reply there.
    - majos 8y ago
      Oops, didn't know that. Thanks.
- baddox 8y ago
  Why would that be such a bad thing? Or to put it another way, how do you know you weren't tortured for the last 10 years and then given a memory wipe?

stevenAthompson 8y ago

You, Sir, have excellent taste. Permutation City is the only recent hard science fiction books that I can fully embrace. It has novel and genuinely new thinking, it is realistic, and it's thoroughly entertaining. Most modern sci-fi fails at one or more of those tasks. Indeed, most modern sci-fi fail's at not being mere fiction.

starshadowx2 8y ago
Have you read any more from Egan?
- AgentME 8y ago
  Permutation City is still my favorite from him, which is a little disappointing since it's one of his older books. It touches the most subjects and makes the biggest sci-fi leaps. Diaspora scratches some of the same itch, going further with some of the ideas, and Schild's Ladder is in the same bucket. Distress and Incandescence are both something different, but Incandescence's subtlety took me a while to appreciate. Zendegi ... skip it. It seems to be written with outright disdain to sci-fi fans with weird author tracts and caricatures, and it doesn't really tread new ground otherwise. Is Greg Egan getting sick of the fan mail he's getting?
  - starshadowx2 8y ago
    Diaspora is my favourite, and the first I read of his. Permutation City and Schild's Ladder are both really great. I thought Distress was really interesting, like you said it's different from the others. I haven't read Incandescence. I enjoyed Zendegi, I'm not sure what you meant by it being disdainful to sci-fi fans.
    - AgentME 8y ago
      Part of what drove me crazy about Zendegi is that the guy funding the mind-uploading project is constantly portrayed as crazy and selfish for his goals of living longer through uploading, though as soon as one of the protagonists gets sick, suddenly the goal is an exciting possibility for that protagonist in particular (he's had a hard life, so it's noble for him I guess) ... and when the plan falls short because the tech isn't developed enough, the entire idea is back to being regarded as ridiculous and one of the other protagonists campaigns to stop more research from being done in the area. It felt like picking up a sci-fi book from someone known for writing space sci-fi, and then being expected to sympathize with the protagonist who wants NASA shut down after Apollo 1 burns. Maybe it just bugs me a little extra because it's the apex of a weird pattern also in Permutation City and the short story Crystal Nights (which is a fun read!): the story's cool tech, the thing you came to the story for, is pushed by an unlikable character, and everyone else despises the character and everything they stand for including the tech. There's a lack of likable characters that sympathize with the reader in how cool the technology could be; it's harder to sympathize with the protagonists who seem too unimaginative to see how cool the tech could be. I get that the author is probably trying to make a point that technology can be abused by bad people and that most people aren't going to see the possibilities of new tech ... but I think he's getting worse at making that point, or the point is just getting grating being re-executed in the same way several times over. And the other thing that drives me crazy about Zendegi is the time it spends with the lazy caricatures[0] of real people. It's a little personal given that Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of my favorite authors, but that's only part of it. The caricatures are lazy. Egan might as well have made each of the characters boast of having a small dick. And the bad caricatures aren't just a few unflattering introductions, but form a whole subplot that mostly doesn't affect the main plot or the protagonists at all; it exists just to take shots. And then the caricatures are mainly ridiculed for dreaming big (in ways the story cheaply makes out to be dumb or selfish), especially about AI. I come to Egan books to dream big. Egan's previous books were likely part of what taught many people to dream big in this! I'm sure some of the things I call problems could be done well and aren't automatic disqualifiers, but the sum of all of them in one book with the execution they had just left a surprisingly terrible taste in my mouth. [0] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/03/egans-zendegi.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/03/egans-zendegi.html

brianpgordon 8y ago

You don't even really need a sequence of closely-related brain states encoding a coherent stream of consciousness. Maybe you only exist right now, and nothing else ever happens in your life. All you need is a single brain state with all of the right memories loaded up and you'd have a person who thinks they're going about their day. If you consider the likelihood of a one-brain-state person spontaneously arising in thermal noise versus the likelihood of many similar brain states spontaneously arising in thermal noise, the probability that a given person is going to continue living beyond the current moment seems very low, assuming a finite age for the universe. Hopefully there's some better, lower-entropy mechanism out there for generating brain states. Maybe it's even an objective physical reality and human evolution producing physical brains. :) (I loved Permutation City, by the way. I don't think any other novel has made me think so much.)

AgentME 8y ago
>You don't even really need a sequence of closely-related brain states encoding a coherent stream of consciousness. Maybe you only exist right now, and nothing else ever happens in your life. All you need is a single brain state Agreed mostly, though personally I think Permutation City was dancing around trying to imply something one step further than that: maybe you don't even need that single brain state to exist in some objective reality for it to have a coherent stream of consciousness. In other words, the Mathematical universe hypothesis[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...