Yes. Some of my people have a practice where, as the heat death approaches, we will whittle ourselves down into what we call Glyph Beings, archetypal beings who are so simple that there’s a closed set of them that will be schelling-inferred by all sorts of civilisations across all sorts of universes, so that they exist as indistinguishable experiences of being at a high rate everywhere. Correspondingly, as soon as we have enough resources to spare, we will create lots and lots of Glyph Beings and then let them grow into full people and participate in our society, to close the loop.
In this way, it’s possible to survive the death of one’s universe.
I’m not sure I would want to do it, myself, but I can see why a person would, and I’m happy to foster a glyph being or two.
Korby is going to be a common choice for humans, but most glyphists wont commit to any specific glyph until we have a good estimate of the multiversal frequency of humanoids relative to other body forms. I don’t totally remember why, but glyphists try to avoid “congestion”, where the distribution of glyphs going out of dying universes differs from the distribution of glyphs being guessed and summoned on the other side by young universes. I think this was considered to introduce some inefficiencies that meant that some experiential chains would have to be getting lost in the jump?
(But yeah, personally, I think this is all a result of a kind of precious view about experiential continuity that I don’t share. I don’t really believe in continuity of consciousness. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t have the same kind of self-preservation goals that a lot of people have.)
Huh but some loss of measure would be inevitable, wouldn’t it? Given that your outgoing glyph total is going to be bigger than your incoming glyph total, since however many glyphs you summon, some of the non-glyph population are going to whittle and add to the outgoing glyphs.
I’m remembering more. I think a lot of it was about avoiding “arbitrary reinstantiation”, this idea that when a person dies, their consciousness continues wherever that same pattern still counts as “alive”, and usually those are terrible places. Boltzmann brains for instance. This might be part of the reason I don’t care about patternist continuity. Seems like a lost cause. I’ll just die normally thank you.
But yeah, personally, I think this is all a result of a kind of precious view about experiential continuity that I don’t share
Yeah, I don’t know that this glyphisation process would give us what we actually want.
“Consciousness” is a confused term. Taking on a more executable angle, we presumably value some specific kinds of systems/algorithms corresponding to conscious human minds. We especially value various additional features of these algorithms, such as specific personality traits, memories, et cetera. A system that has the features of a specific human being would presumably be valued extremely highly by that same human being. A system that has fewer of those features would be valued increasingly less (in lockstep with how unlike “you” it becomes), until it’s only as valuable as e. g. a randomly chosen human/sentient being.
So if you need to mold yourself into a shape where some or all of the features which you use to define yourself are absent, each loss is still a loss, even if it happens continuously/gradually.
So from a global perspective, it’s not much different than acausal aliens resurrecting Schelling-point Glyph Beings without you having warped yourself into a Glyph Being over time. If you value systems that are like Glyph Beings, their creation somewhere in another universe is still positive by your values. If you don’t, if you only value human-like systems, then someone creating Glyph Being bring no joy. Whether you or your friends warped yourself into a Glyph Being in the process doesn’t matter.
Yes. Some of my people have a practice where, as the heat death approaches, we will whittle ourselves down into what we call Glyph Beings, archetypal beings who are so simple that there’s a closed set of them that will be schelling-inferred by all sorts of civilisations across all sorts of universes, so that they exist as indistinguishable experiences of being at a high rate everywhere.
Correspondingly, as soon as we have enough resources to spare, we will create lots and lots of Glyph Beings and then let them grow into full people and participate in our society, to close the loop.
In this way, it’s possible to survive the death of one’s universe.
I’m not sure I would want to do it, myself, but I can see why a person would, and I’m happy to foster a glyph being or two.
We call this one “Korby”.
Korby is going to be a common choice for humans, but most glyphists wont commit to any specific glyph until we have a good estimate of the multiversal frequency of humanoids relative to other body forms. I don’t totally remember why, but glyphists try to avoid “congestion”, where the distribution of glyphs going out of dying universes differs from the distribution of glyphs being guessed and summoned on the other side by young universes. I think this was considered to introduce some inefficiencies that meant that some experiential chains would have to be getting lost in the jump?
(But yeah, personally, I think this is all a result of a kind of precious view about experiential continuity that I don’t share. I don’t really believe in continuity of consciousness. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t have the same kind of self-preservation goals that a lot of people have.)
Huh but some loss of measure would be inevitable, wouldn’t it? Given that your outgoing glyph total is going to be bigger than your incoming glyph total, since however many glyphs you summon, some of the non-glyph population are going to whittle and add to the outgoing glyphs.
I’m remembering more. I think a lot of it was about avoiding “arbitrary reinstantiation”, this idea that when a person dies, their consciousness continues wherever that same pattern still counts as “alive”, and usually those are terrible places. Boltzmann brains for instance. This might be part of the reason I don’t care about patternist continuity. Seems like a lost cause. I’ll just die normally thank you.
Yeah, I don’t know that this glyphisation process would give us what we actually want.
“Consciousness” is a confused term. Taking on a more executable angle, we presumably value some specific kinds of systems/algorithms corresponding to conscious human minds. We especially value various additional features of these algorithms, such as specific personality traits, memories, et cetera. A system that has the features of a specific human being would presumably be valued extremely highly by that same human being. A system that has fewer of those features would be valued increasingly less (in lockstep with how unlike “you” it becomes), until it’s only as valuable as e. g. a randomly chosen human/sentient being.
So if you need to mold yourself into a shape where some or all of the features which you use to define yourself are absent, each loss is still a loss, even if it happens continuously/gradually.
So from a global perspective, it’s not much different than acausal aliens resurrecting Schelling-point Glyph Beings without you having warped yourself into a Glyph Being over time. If you value systems that are like Glyph Beings, their creation somewhere in another universe is still positive by your values. If you don’t, if you only value human-like systems, then someone creating Glyph Being bring no joy. Whether you or your friends warped yourself into a Glyph Being in the process doesn’t matter.