This was a session at the August 2018 Resilient Communities Mini-Unconference.
Attendees
Discussion
Philosophy of Life as Knowledge
- At first the universe just knew how to exist, then chemistry, then with life, it finally found a way to persist knowledge
- The environment trims away knowledge (in DNA) that doesn't work
- Similarly in science, a model that is a better predictor (works better) will persist longer that one that doesn't
Panspermia
- Intelligence as fruiting body for life
- If we can't send ourselves to other stars, we can at least send microbes as Dr. Mautner proposes
Simulation Hypothesis
- Assumptions
- An intelligence can create models of a universe and has some reason to do so
- We're likely to be able to simulate, within these models, more intelligent minds than exist on Earth
- The simulated minds won't be able to tell that they're in a simulation
- Steve: This relates to my skepticism about uploading: Can consciousness arise within a computer simulation?
- Eric: John Searle argues that we have no idea if computing processes can map onto the consciousness process; I'm agnostic
- Shawn's similar argument about panspermia: if we can develop the ability to send life to newly forming star systems, and we find a reason to do it, and we send them to many such systems, we're probably the product of a similar project 5 billion years ago
- Eric: The existence of Dr. Mautner proves that someone can find the motivation to do this, making it very likely that someone has done it in the past
- Fermi Paradox argument
- Shawn: There's a very small chance that any given spore will succeed