There is a huge amount of computation going on in this story and as far as I can tell not even a single experiment. The end hints that there might be some learning from the protagonists experince, at least it is telling it story many times. But I would expect a lot more experimenting, for example with different probe designs and with how much posthumans like different possible negotiated results.
I can see in the story that it make sense not to experiment with posthumans reactions to scenarios, since it might take a long time to send them to the fronter and since it might be possible to simulate them well (its not clear to me if the posthumans are biological). I just wonder if this extreme focus on computation over experiments is a delibrate choice by the author or if it was a blind spot of the author.
A mix of deliberate and blind spot. I’m assuming that almost everything related to physical engineering and technological problems has been worked out, and so the stuff remaining is mostly questions about how (virtual) minds and civilizations play out (which are best understood via simulation) and questions about what other universes and other civilizations might look like.
But even if the probes aren’t running extensive experiments, they’re almost certainly learning something from each new experience of colonizing a solar system, and I should have incorporated that somehow.
I think we should stop talking about “virtual” minds. A mind is a mind, whatever its substrate.
In the same way, it’s also probable that a brain is a brain, artificial or no, you probably can’t efficiently generate human experience with general purpose compute hardware, you’d want something specialized, possibly even bespoke to the individual it’s allocated to.
There are virtual worlds (you don’t need anything remotely mountain-like to simulate a mountain), but there are not virtual people.
There is a huge amount of computation going on in this story and as far as I can tell not even a single experiment. The end hints that there might be some learning from the protagonists experince, at least it is telling it story many times. But I would expect a lot more experimenting, for example with different probe designs and with how much posthumans like different possible negotiated results.
I can see in the story that it make sense not to experiment with posthumans reactions to scenarios, since it might take a long time to send them to the fronter and since it might be possible to simulate them well (its not clear to me if the posthumans are biological). I just wonder if this extreme focus on computation over experiments is a delibrate choice by the author or if it was a blind spot of the author.
A mix of deliberate and blind spot. I’m assuming that almost everything related to physical engineering and technological problems has been worked out, and so the stuff remaining is mostly questions about how (virtual) minds and civilizations play out (which are best understood via simulation) and questions about what other universes and other civilizations might look like.
But even if the probes aren’t running extensive experiments, they’re almost certainly learning something from each new experience of colonizing a solar system, and I should have incorporated that somehow.
I think we should stop talking about “virtual” minds. A mind is a mind, whatever its substrate.
In the same way, it’s also probable that a brain is a brain, artificial or no, you probably can’t efficiently generate human experience with general purpose compute hardware, you’d want something specialized, possibly even bespoke to the individual it’s allocated to.
There are virtual worlds (you don’t need anything remotely mountain-like to simulate a mountain), but there are not virtual people.