Conversation

Fun metric: how long after you die does the world continue on a trajectory that would not have surprised you? The least-common denominator of that is a measure of how stable the world is at the time.
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If you died in 2009 world would be unsurprising to you till around 2016. But if you died in Jan 2020 like Kobe, you’d have gotten a month of ghostly unsurprise
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Changing what you think about the world is like the definition of being alive. You’re an epistemic zombie between serious updates
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To the extent we don’t reorient continuously we’re not paying attention and are already dead. The truly fully alive person would be intensely surprised by the very next moment after they die. I feel like I’m saying something very basic in an exceptionally weird way
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Aliveness is surprisability. If nothing can surprise you, you’re already dead. Your dead-mind surprisal horizon is how long a notional uploaded brain captured at death instant would be able to simulate your living being. The first radical surprise, upload crashes.
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This is actually like Hari Sheldon’s vault recordings. He’s prescient from the grave for centuries. But when the Mule appears, he’s suddenly not even wrong.
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* Seldon This is a clearer way to frame what I’m on about. If you made a series of Seldon recordings today, 1/month for the next 10 years, when would your recordings crash into not-even-wrongness?
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Hmm. I think I just came up with a nice scifi premise. A world where everyone leaves vault recordings for the future like hari seldon but as smart contracts that take action. Your projected self contract crashes the first time it tries to do something that isn’t meaningful
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Ok thought experiment: assume Seldon vault recordings can serve as upload points (ie you’re recording *future* save points by imagining yourself in a predicted future), and you died in your sleep but your brain was seamlessly replaced by the next recording, and extrapolated on…
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So effectively you’re replaced by your digital ghost but don’t know it. So long as your vault recordings make sense in the future your upload self continues to be propagated. You only notice when it crashes “oh shit I’ve actually been dead for 5 years”
Replying to
Seldon Ghostonics Corp: Create your Future You™ psychohistorical vault save points today! Only $9995 for 10y of recordings. Updates for $950! Use our preset futures for free!
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This is great. I’m a genius. The only way a Seldon ghost would be able to prove it was alive would be to think a truly fresh thought. But not thinking one wouldn’t prove it was a ghost. So it would keep wondering: I’d it dead or just in a rut?
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This might be the first new thought I’ve had this year. Which means I can update my aliveness to today since I didn’t crash thinking it.
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