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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”
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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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