Justin Lloyd's Thinkering

Somebody needs to think about this stuff...

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Societal singularities

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Having just read von Neumann’s obituary by Stanislaw Ulam he talks about the idea of a singularity. Something we cannot see beyond. Something where everything converges to an infinitesimally small point in time and space and we have no idea what lays on the other side of it.

There’s a lot of singularities that have happened throughout human history.

Concept of the afterlife.

Speech and the verbal transmission of ideas.

The written word.

Cities as places of relative safety.

Libraries as data warehouses.

The modern concept of childhood.

Telecommunications (information transmission) especially computer-to-computer perhaps in some global, planet spanning, packet-switched network that would allow all microcomputers to instantaneously communicate with each other.

Cheap microcomputers that leads to ever decreasing costs and ever increasing performance that will eventually lead us to strong AI that rivals near-human like intelligence somewhere around 2050 (hope I am alive.)

The very essence of a singularity is that we cannot see what lays on the other side of the singularity.

The changes that the singularity will bring are so profound and so utterly revolutionary to society that until we pass through the singularity we cannot understand what the world, what society and what our lives will look like.

I think there will be at least a half-dozen more singularities in my lifetime – changes so profound that we cannot even conjecture what the world will be like.

And we won’t even realise it is happening to us. It will only be when we look back will we realise the quiet revolution we have wrought.

The universal simulation

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Assume the universe is a big computer simulation.

A really good simulation.

If whoever created the simulation is mindful enough to prevent the intelligent and self-aware inhabitants of the simulation from realizing or even conjecturing that the universe is a simulation, then they cannot be sure that the intelligent inhabitants of the simulation are incapable of reasoning whether they live in a simulation. i.e. you cannot be sure that your simulation doesn’t realise it is a simulation.

This is a variation on the halting problem.

The universe (the one we live in) is the classic halting problem of computability.

Think about it.

A binary world

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The world is binary and holds two values, both of which are false.

There are only two types of people in the world.

Those that say all religions are false.

And those that say all other religions are false.

Gutenberg press-ganged

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Pre-Gutenberg the scarce resource was knowledge in the form of books.

Post-Gutenberg the scarce resource is the attention needed to acquire that knowledge.

Assistance device

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“Ohmigod you really can’t see shit without these!” declared my friend to another who wears thick bottle rimmed glasses.

“No shit. Do you take a cripple’s wheelchair and roll around in declaring ‘Ohmigod, you really can’t walk for shit without this!’?” I asked.

Simulated self-awareness

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Assume the universe is a big computer simulation.

Assume that any intelligent, self-aware inhabitants of the simulation are capable, at some point, of creating a simulation of the universe populated by intelligent, self-aware inhabitants.

So where in the chain of simulations do you stop?

Going in either direction?

This is the “turtles all the way down” argument.

Existential being

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The existential problem of being is that we are not sure if we are who think we are.

I think I will make it a life goal to “know me.”

To understand not just who I am, and what I am capable of, but to also understand why I am who I am and why I do what I do.

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