The error is that there is no good reason for superintelligence to simulate ancestors. Humans kind of do that, though at an extremely coarse grain, and only because we are not smart enough. Or simply lack integrity. I think we will grow out of that, no one likes to be dumb and feckless.
Bad ideas in practical philosophy, Nick Bostrom edition
BTW, go read some Wittgenstein and Jaynes. Sheesh, this sh*t was discussed decades ago.
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Philosophy is a refuge for lazy ambition.
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Most topics in philosophy have been discussed for centuries, which doesn’t mean there is anything gained by reading it. My view firmly held is that there is no ‘wisdom of the ages’. If it’s valuable or useful enough someone in the field will have read it, updated it, refreshed it, refined it, improved it. If they haven’t, forget it, it’s worthless.
As Henry Ford said: History is more or less bunk. The only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.
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Well, I don’t buy the simulation hypothesis either, but just for the fun of arguing:
- we attempt to simulate nematodes too
- why should one assume we are “the ancestors” and not N-th incarnation of an artificial evolutionary experiment?
- one would make poor assumptions about the motives driving a superior intelligence actions.
Think about what a cat would assume about what are human motives - and it might not be totally wrong simply because we share similar biology/genetics?
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Only until we have a predictive model, and only because we have a lot of nematodes around, and it ultimately supposed to help medicine and agriculture. And no one in his right mind would want to simulate all nematodes in the word all the time.
That’s exactly what “simulation hypothesis” does.
PS. sorry, I should not be feeding this stupid thread.
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If anyone is interested in things like the simulation hypothesis, I recommend Isaac Arthur and PBS spacetime on youtube. The former is mostly futurism (plausible sci-fi, basically), and the latter explains physics concepts very well. They’re pretty fun.
Superintelligence at the apex, perhaps. But what about the many iterations before It?
No, I guess not. But resignation to one’s condition dissipates a lot of stress.
gnothi seauton
Why not? For some on here it is akin to Freud’s ‘talking cure’.
Should I feed this time-vampire thread?
Sure, why not!
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Planck Constant is the voxel/pixel size of the simulation.
When you sleep and wake up, who or what really wakes up ? If you could replicate yourself 100% and there are 2 of you in the morning, who is who ?
The one real thought experiment is take current progress and roll it forward say 25 years and repreat this process of small incremental changes and see where you get to. This prevents creating magic in one unhinged leap of faith and grounds the prediction with a path to get there.
Say year 50-75 you add in compact pinch fusion reactors to autonomous robotics (you can think terminator or not). This then removes a critical energy constraint we are just starting to slide further into, accelerated by current events. This only accelerates “physical” progress as robot builds robot that builds what ? A large computer ? An army ?
75-100 Compute resources are no longer a constraint for human physical reality. Gaming is fully imersive and indistinguishable from real life (simulation is only around the bounds of the gamers perception).
some time later…
200-225 we can migrate the physical brain into a computer, molecule scan by molecule scan. Are we then a simulation or a new species when we wake up in the morning ?
Since this is a fun throw-away thread, I vote new species, and I’m okay with that. 
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