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42. Yes, guys, it was me all around. Funny that it took you so long to find out. I kickstarted this big simulation as a weekend hack and let it evolve for

42. Yes, guys, it was me all around. Funny that it took you so long to find out. I kickstarted this big simulation as a weekend hack and let it evolve for a month, so I could come and play as Warren Beatty. Can we now, as a universe, move on? * * * This is not science; it's religion, philosophy, or abuse of language. You could never prove anything about this kind of stuff either way, and IMHO throwing around probabilistic estimates is 'not even wrong'. The scientist quoted in the article admits such estimates are only 'hunches', so I guess only the reporter is to blame for placing this stuff under a 'Science' header. Now, I'm not protesting that we talk this. It's fascinating stuff. It's funny to recognize in this thread some of the same crazy ideas that would get people shuffling away from me at parties, like 'what if our whole known universe is but an atom inside other universe, which in turn [...]?' Re: worlds simulated inside worlds, aka the Matrix, aka Plato's cavern- when I did work on a MMOG we had this conversation once or twice that if we gave our non-player characters ability to learn and communicate for an arbitrary length of time, eventually they'd come up with theories like "Every object in the universe has an unique ID, which is a 64-bit integer". And they'd wake up after a downtime and comment things like "gee, finally capacitor recharging is fixed!", and then stop and wonder about the deep meaning of that. Re: internet and cybernetic consciousness: when I first learned about the internet, one of my first thoughts is that the interconnected computers would create a new consciousness, or an ecosystem of competing consciousnesses. Not that it would be pursued, but that it would happen spontaneously, just like life evolved out of the primordial soup. Then I thought that something similar would happen as a result of connecting so many people. Now, it's been always like that to some extent (cultures, memes, ideologies, etc. can be thought of as supraindividual consciousnesses), but the instant communication would make it more ostensible and powerful. Just like oxidation and explosion are instances of combustion, yet the difference in speed makes it counterintuitive for us to recognize any sameness between them. Fast-forward to 2007: for about a year, the global hivemind has been thinking intensely about cats with captions. Who knows what deep intentions hide behind this?

stacknuker77 19y ago
Hey! how did YOU know we came from primordial soup? Did that pesky Q from the Q continuum whisk you away through time for a day of sludge spying....thanks for believing in something you can't prove or even defend and just assuming its true. You people and your crazy closed minded religions.
- euccastro 19y ago
  I have it all in the evolution logs. Sorry for the spoiler; I thought by this time you had all figured this out.
euccastro 19y ago
Another of these ramblings that act as repellents in parties: Some people are reported to have survived with only one hemisphere of the brain. It's not a huge stretch to imagine that you could transplant into yourself all needed duplicates or artificial replacements for vital organs, then split yourself in two so both halves survive, with one of the brain hemispheres each. Then, there are two new independent yous there, neither of them being quite like the old you, neither of them feeling the other you as yourself anymore, but both of them independently feeling themselves as you. Stop and imagine this situation. How do you think you'd feel? How do you feel now, thinking about it? Now let's leap a bit from the medical to the philosophical: let's abstract the fact that parts of the brain are specialized. Assume that we could do other partitions but left-right, or suppose that brains will rewire to make up for lost functionality. Imagine it's actually true that 90% of our mental power usually goes to waste, and that we could lose half of the brain and somehow mostly make up for it. Or imagine that it's possible to make a perfect copy of yourself, as proposed elsewhere in this thread. The result is the same: there is another you out there, virtually identical, with the same past, but which you don't feel as you anymore. How do you feel about that other you?
- jey 19y ago
  You could skip the split-your-brain-in-two step and skip straight to a mind upload. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading Interesting thought experiment nonetheless.

stacknuker77 19y ago

Hey! how did YOU know we came from primordial soup? Did that pesky Q from the Q continuum whisk you away through time for a day of sludge spying....thanks for believing in something you can't prove or even defend and just assuming its true. You people and your crazy closed minded religions.

euccastro 19y ago
I have it all in the evolution logs. Sorry for the spoiler; I thought by this time you had all figured this out.

euccastro 19y ago

Another of these ramblings that act as repellents in parties: Some people are reported to have survived with only one hemisphere of the brain. It's not a huge stretch to imagine that you could transplant into yourself all needed duplicates or artificial replacements for vital organs, then split yourself in two so both halves survive, with one of the brain hemispheres each. Then, there are two new independent yous there, neither of them being quite like the old you, neither of them feeling the other you as yourself anymore, but both of them independently feeling themselves as you. Stop and imagine this situation. How do you think you'd feel? How do you feel now, thinking about it? Now let's leap a bit from the medical to the philosophical: let's abstract the fact that parts of the brain are specialized. Assume that we could do other partitions but left-right, or suppose that brains will rewire to make up for lost functionality. Imagine it's actually true that 90% of our mental power usually goes to waste, and that we could lose half of the brain and somehow mostly make up for it. Or imagine that it's possible to make a perfect copy of yourself, as proposed elsewhere in this thread. The result is the same: there is another you out there, virtually identical, with the same past, but which you don't feel as you anymore. How do you feel about that other you?

jey 19y ago
You could skip the split-your-brain-in-two step and skip straight to a mind upload. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading Interesting thought experiment nonetheless.