Yet who prohibits? Who prevents it from happening?
Eliezer seems absurdly optimistic to me. He is relying on some unseen entity to reach in and keep the laws of physics stable in our universe. We already see lots of evidence that they are not truly stable, for example we believe in both the electroweak transition and earlier transitions, of various natures depending on your school of physics. We /just saw/ in 1998 that unknown laws of physics can creep up and spring out by surprise, suddenly ‘taking over’ 74 percent of the Universe’s postulated energy supply.
Who is keeping the clockwork universe running? Or, why is the hardware and software (operating system etc) for the automata fishbowl so damned stable? Is it part of the Library of Babel? Well, that’s a good explanation, but the Bible’s universe is in there also and arguably a priori more probable than a computer system that runs many worlds quantum mechanics sims on a panuniversal scale, and never halts and/or catches fire. It is very hard to keep a perfectly stable web server going when demand keeps expanding, and that seems much simpler.
I don’t think it is rational to accept the stability of natural law without some reasonable model for either the origins of said law, or some timeless physics model that has stable physics with apparently consistent evolution as an emergent property, or it’s a gift from entities with powers far beyond ours, or some such.
If the worst that can happen is annihilation, you’re living in a fool’s paradise. Many people have /begged/ for true death and in the animal world things happen all the time that are truly horrifying to most human eyes. I will avoid going into sickening detail here, but let me refer you to H.P. Lovecraft and Charles Stross for some examples of how the universe might have been slightly less friendly.
Oh come off it. There has to be some way that the universe actually works, at bottom. That way of working must be logical/causal, as if it’s not, then everything happens and also nothing happens, including all logically contradictory things, more-or-less all the time. Since we don’t observe anything remotely like that degree of sheer chaos, there must be laws. We don’t always know the “absolute” laws, in fact we can only sometimes detect our ignorance (by having an experimental result we can’t consistently explain), but we can build up models of universal lawfulness that keep working up to information leakage from an Outside universe (which would itself have to have laws of its own).
There’s no point worrying about Yog-Sothoth when we’ve already got Azathoth and Clippy on our plates.
Eliezer seems absurdly optimistic to me. He is relying on some unseen entity to reach in and keep the laws of physics stable in our universe. We already see lots of evidence that they are not truly stable, for example we believe in both the electroweak transition and earlier transitions, of various natures depending on your school of physics. We /just saw/ in 1998 that unknown laws of physics can creep up and spring out by surprise, suddenly ‘taking over’ 74 percent of the Universe’s postulated energy supply.
Who is keeping the clockwork universe running? Or, why is the hardware and software (operating system etc) for the automata fishbowl so damned stable? Is it part of the Library of Babel? Well, that’s a good explanation, but the Bible’s universe is in there also and arguably a priori more probable than a computer system that runs many worlds quantum mechanics sims on a panuniversal scale, and never halts and/or catches fire. It is very hard to keep a perfectly stable web server going when demand keeps expanding, and that seems much simpler.
Look into the anthropic principle literature and search on ‘Lee Smolin’ or start somewhere like http://evodevouniverse.com/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection_(fecund_universes) for some reasoned speculation on how we might have wound up in such a big, rich, diverse universe from simpler origins.
I don’t think it is rational to accept the stability of natural law without some reasonable model for either the origins of said law, or some timeless physics model that has stable physics with apparently consistent evolution as an emergent property, or it’s a gift from entities with powers far beyond ours, or some such.
If the worst that can happen is annihilation, you’re living in a fool’s paradise. Many people have /begged/ for true death and in the animal world things happen all the time that are truly horrifying to most human eyes. I will avoid going into sickening detail here, but let me refer you to H.P. Lovecraft and Charles Stross for some examples of how the universe might have been slightly less friendly.
Oh come off it. There has to be some way that the universe actually works, at bottom. That way of working must be logical/causal, as if it’s not, then everything happens and also nothing happens, including all logically contradictory things, more-or-less all the time. Since we don’t observe anything remotely like that degree of sheer chaos, there must be laws. We don’t always know the “absolute” laws, in fact we can only sometimes detect our ignorance (by having an experimental result we can’t consistently explain), but we can build up models of universal lawfulness that keep working up to information leakage from an Outside universe (which would itself have to have laws of its own).
There’s no point worrying about Yog-Sothoth when we’ve already got Azathoth and Clippy on our plates.