Most of the things we do today are predictable developments of what previous generations did, and this statement holds across time.
As wedrifid says, in the light of hindsight bias. Instead of looking at the past and seeing how reliably it seems to lead to the present, try looking at people who actually tried to predict the future. “Future prediction based on extrapolation of system evolution” has reliably failed to make predictions about the direction of human society that were both accurate and meaningful.
For a quick primitive example, perhaps future posthumans want to understand in more detail why the roman empire collapsed. A bunch of historian/designers reach some rough consensus on a model (built on pieces of earlier models) to build an earth at that time and populate it with inhabitants (creating minds may involve using stand in actors for an initial generation of parents).
Running this model forward may reveal that the lead had little effect, that previous models of some roman military formations don’t actually work, that a crop harvest in 32BC may have been more important than previously thought .. and so on.
Or you could very easily find them removing the lead from their pipes and wine, and changing their military formations. If you don’t already know what their crop harvest in 32BC was like, you can practically guarantee that it won’t be the same in the simulation. This is exactly the kind of use that, as I pointed out earlier, if you had enough information to actually pull it off, you wouldn’t need to.
If you don’t already know what their crop harvest in 32BC was like, you can practically guarantee that it won’t be the same in the simulation. This is exactly the kind of use that, as I pointed out earlier, if you had enough information to actually pull it off, you wouldn’t need to.
I’ll just reiterate my response then:
Any information about a physical system at time T reveals information about that system at all other times—places constraints on it’s configuraiton. Physics is a set of functions that describe the exact relations between system states across time steps, ie the temporal evolution of the system.
We developed physics in order to simulate physical systems and predict and understand their behavior.
This seems then to be a matter of details—how much simulation is required to produce how much knowledge from how much initial information about the system.
For example, with infinite computing power I could iterate through all simulations of earth’s history that are consistent with current observational knowledge.
This algorithm computes the probabilities of every fact about the system—the probability of a good crop harvest in 32BC in Egypt is just the fraction of the simulated multiverse for which this property is true.
This algorithm is in fact equivalent to the search procedure in the AIXI universal intelligence algorithm.
As wedrifid says, in the light of hindsight bias. Instead of looking at the past and seeing how reliably it seems to lead to the present, try looking at people who actually tried to predict the future. “Future prediction based on extrapolation of system evolution” has reliably failed to make predictions about the direction of human society that were both accurate and meaningful.
Or you could very easily find them removing the lead from their pipes and wine, and changing their military formations. If you don’t already know what their crop harvest in 32BC was like, you can practically guarantee that it won’t be the same in the simulation. This is exactly the kind of use that, as I pointed out earlier, if you had enough information to actually pull it off, you wouldn’t need to.
I’ll just reiterate my response then:
Any information about a physical system at time T reveals information about that system at all other times—places constraints on it’s configuraiton. Physics is a set of functions that describe the exact relations between system states across time steps, ie the temporal evolution of the system.
We developed physics in order to simulate physical systems and predict and understand their behavior.
This seems then to be a matter of details—how much simulation is required to produce how much knowledge from how much initial information about the system.
For example, with infinite computing power I could iterate through all simulations of earth’s history that are consistent with current observational knowledge.
This algorithm computes the probabilities of every fact about the system—the probability of a good crop harvest in 32BC in Egypt is just the fraction of the simulated multiverse for which this property is true.
This algorithm is in fact equivalent to the search procedure in the AIXI universal intelligence algorithm.