Tulpa.info - metaphysics

I wonder though if transfer to a machine wouldn't suffer from the teleporter problem.

Also at our current rate of advancement clinical immortality will not likely happen in our lifetime, but I'm holding out hope for a singularity event personally.

12:57 AM

crosses fingers Don't be malicious pls google.

And with it happening piecemeal "we" may not notice.

Hoping you're never going to die isn't a good bet to make, just looking at the odds and humanity's track record

Quite, but as I mentioned, there's no good alternative.

Well, and general immortality would raise a ton of new problems that we don't seem to making any progress towards being able to resolve.

...accepting the inevitably of death and factoring it into your philosophy? Desperately holding out for a singularity event in technology is very un-stoic compared to all the stoic principles I've heard you mention

12:59 AM

If there's no good alternative, you better change your mind and find one

If we accept the inevitability of death clinical immortality will never happen.

1:00 AM

I don't believe in a no-win scenario!

If we don't, it may still not happen.

Entropy only rules in a closed system. So we make our system open!

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1:02 AM

The same is true for the universe. We would need to rely on generating a new one or travelling to a nascent universe. But that's so far beyond our science it doesn't really bear thinking about at the moment.

1:02 AM

Immortality first. Conquering the heat death later.

Conquering heat death is a bridge too far even for myself.

Truly? You would accept your final death 10^100 years from now?

1:03 AM

'Cause I still wouldn't. Presuming I have not significantly altered in my opinion between then and now for whatever reason.

1:04 AM

But I can't really say anything about hypothetical future selves.

I find the odds of humanity surviving that long to be vanishingly small. And besides, even I would eventually tire of immortality, I suspect.

1:04 AM

Especially if we're aided with cybernetically perfect memory.

People say that, but do we have any real evidence to believe we would tire or not be able to handle it?

1:05 AM

Also I highly suspect we would do well to have an imperfect memory system for the sake of not being incredibly bored. Or otherwise removing our capacity for boredom itself.

Do we have any evidence of immortal humans getting tired of their predicament?

Zen

Also I highly suspect we would do well to have an imperfect memory system for the sake of not being incredibly bored. Or otherwise removing our capacity for boredom itself.

We do agree there.

A little bit for Marissa too

1:05 AM

And removing boredom is an interesting concept...

1:06 AM

"Justice"?

@Unfastened Belts (edited)

1:06 AM

Guess who lol

Removing boredom would be great. We could do some seriously cosmic level stuff if we stopped being such immediate-response short-sighted beings.

This is true...

moves to a nearby planet and spends a couple thousand years seeding life

The translation I'm more familiar with goes "Severally on the occasion of everything that thou doest, pause and ask thyself, if death is a dreadful thing because it deprives thee of this."

1:07 AM

Aw she's offline

There are people who don't have their status set to permanently offline?

Well I was scrolled way up, nevermind me

Love those quotes @JGC!! And @Zen thankfully the end of suffering supposedly takes care of fear of death and boredom. ;P (Though, and here I am voicing an original thought, the end of fear of death does not have to mean a lack of motivation to conquer mortality)

Indeed to be clear, I don't think that the fear of death is not conquerable. I also think that from a purely efficiency standpoint we would probably resolve death anyway, because it represents a consistent loss of knowledge and utility for our species. But... When I think of my negative emotions. I want them to be tuned to things that are genuinely bad. And I don't want to not experience them. I cannot think of something more worthy of my hatred than death. (edited)

1:52 AM

Other than perhaps entropy itself, of course.

1:53 AM

I very much see suffering both in your sense and the general sense to be behaviour which is very fixating, which in this case I simply don't possess in relation to this response to death. So at the moment its only function is to give me a cathartic outlet for negative emotion. Which is fine. (edited)

Sounds alright haha

1:55 AM

I agree re: fixating behaviours or, to be more specific, thought patterns

1:56 AM

What I hate more than any circumstance is suffering, but I know that that hatred has to be the first one to go (edited)

1:56 AM

Very hard for me to accept unacceptance

I might be weird but I genuinely do see most of my negative emotions as either pleasant in some sense or at the very least positive indicators of something which is happening to me which I must address. So I really don't oppose them generally at all.

1:58 AM

But debatably that's not suffering by your definition of course, but it prevents me from fixating to much on them as a result because I know they're good for me, paradoxically.

I wonder if fear of death would be a good candidate for willful inconsistency.

Sounds very similar in motivation to "unfriendly AI is a real and near-term problem", lol

I'm not sure what you mean by that? Is it cognitively dissonant to fear death?

I was partially kidding, but otoh, it almost sounds like that's what you're doing. That or intentional compartmentalization. One second.

2:04 AM

@Zen This is probably about the 10th time I've posted this here. It might be up your alley (or not!), if you haven't seen it already.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4DBBQkEQvNEWafkek/dark-arts-of-rationality

Also Zen as far as conquering mortality and heat death, you should try to collaborate with @Breloomancer who intends to live for tens of thousands of years if I remember correctly

That's it?

2:13 AM

rookie numbers.

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I'm not really doing anything special, I am just acting under the assumption that I will be able to access age reversal technology before I die. really, I predict that age reversal will be easily accessible by 2040, assuming that research doesn't get majorly set back by the coming climate crisis

Okay but "Im not really doing anything special" hints at a plan B

well in case I do die I am also planning on getting my head frozen so that they can hopefully bring me back, so I guess that that is plan b. the odds that they would actually be able to bring back my head aren't very good though

Dont you have to be a millionaire for that too?

Lilith(Vixie/Lily) | 👻

@Zen This is probably about the 10th time I've posted this here. It might be up your alley (or not!), if you haven't seen it already.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4DBBQkEQvNEWafkek/dark-arts-of-rationality

Ah I see what you mean. And yes I think it certainly is, but I wouldn't personally want to do it because of the aforementioned reasons. I like the catharsis of the emotions involved; I want to be using my negative emotions for something that's objectively bad; and I value truth perhaps slightly more than comfort even if that weren't the case.

Unfastened Belts

Dont you have to be a millionaire for that too?

it's not that expensive I don't think. I haven't exactly looked into the prices though since I definitely don't have the money for it yet. the good thing about it is that you can pay with the money that you aren't using anymore because you're dead

Sweet mother of god this is good pasta. Another reason not to die: no longer being able to experience porcini mushrooms. On that note in response to the boredom concept: I think people underestimate how much new things you'd be able to experience with immortality. Provided you had access to more than just this planet, it's very likely you would die in the heat-death before you could actually catalogue the universe's full extent, even if we're being generous and saying you only catalogue the inhabited planetoids and areas of space.

2:21 AM

Of course then you have to worry about the long term entropy of your vessel as well as your self which is a pain.

Ooooh, food is a good selling point..

I don't buy that the heat death is actually going to happen

? Clarify.

2:22 AM

That's a bold statement.

people are smart, and given a few hundred billion years, they can definitely reverse entropy

2:24 AM

and there are probably smart aliens who will also be working on it

You know, it's a good thing that I'm not presented with actual vampirism being a true and only avenue for immortality or I would be making sure pretty quickly that I am prepared mentally to hunt humans for food, lol.

Oh you mean that it can be sidestepped. Quite possibly. I'd posit on dubious information that we'd either need to learn to create universes through the same mechanism through which they occur naturally or move to another one presuming such things exist, though. Reversing entropy in the broad sense though... That's time manipulation on a universal scale and would merely turn back the clock to what has already happened, which isn't particularly appetizing but would be okay. (edited)

2:27 AM

However to play the devil's advocate: If we truly are in the closed system. And the notion that creating energy is truly impossible holds up into the distant future. We're doomed no matter what we do.

I don't mean going back in time, I just mean making things become more different from each other without making them more similar to each other somewhere else, like in maxwell's demon

2:27 AM

reversing entropy doesn't add any more energy, it just puts energy back into a useful form

It takes action to move and alter energy. This is the basic principle of thermodynamics that opposes us.

2:29 AM

That action is inevitably, lost energy.

This is the convo Ive been waiting to watch for a while, glad I hooked you two up (edited)

also, right now the universe is exponentially expanding, but as far as I know there is no reason to believe that it will continue to do so. it could start closing in on us

How do you posit we capture heat across the entirety of space without the energy to do so? And wouldn't that energy be also lost?

energy cannot be created or destroyed

Zen

However to play the devil's advocate: If we truly are in the closed system. And the notion that creating energy is truly impossible holds up into the distant future. We're doomed no matter what we do.

Mmhmm...

Breloomancer

energy cannot be created or destroyed

It can however, become unusable.

Moving all heat everywhere to, say one location, to begin a new big bang, is the equivalent energy to the energy which put the heat there in the first place.

2:30 AM

For instance.

2:30 AM

We don't have that much energy, it's in the heat.

Scarlet

It can however, become unusable.

yeah, but I think that we'll figure out how to use the energy that we think is unusable right now

I feel like this is bordering on viewing science as magic.

However - there are a number of sidesteps I could envision.

2:32 AM

Dimensional shenanigans for instance. There's also dark energy, which is more energetic than all energy everywhere. (edited)

Can we get Carl Sagan on this channel

2:33 AM

If we can reverse entropy, we can get Carl Sagan on this channel!

we have an extremely primitive understanding of the universe right now, and a long long time to figure things out. computers would be thought to be magic if you showed it to someone from ancient greece. similarly, in the future there will be all sorts of stuff that seems like magic to us now

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Having a better understanding also means having a better understanding of what isn't possible.

Indeed, at the moment I'd say the heat death appears to be simply a problem no different than flight, but a more advanced species, or a transhuman species far beyond our current understanding, will be the ones to solve it. There's not really a great reason to think that anything is impossible until all avenues are explored - which we don't have the power to do at the moment.

also, right now there is no good reason to believe (as far as I know) that the universe will continue to exponentially expand as it has done in the past. maybe it will start shrinking. that would make things a lot easier (hopefully it wouldn't shrink enough to melt us all though) (edited)

That seems like a stretch. A big crunch is largely conjecture.

It feels like there is an alternate form of Russel's teapot that would apply to this conversation. (edited)

I don't think that the universe will shrink. we just don't know

Again, reversing all energy everywhere would require an equivalent energy inward. We actively don't know of such a thing so there's no reason to suspect it will.

what's russels teapot?