My personal side-blog.

Nov. 8, 2015 at 3:08pm with 203 notes

Reblogged from orteil42

death finitude physics ai futurism despair?

hi ! i’m orteil and i’m one year closer to death and/or eventual glorious mind upload

This is a misunderstanding of either time, or of the physics relevant to mind uploading, or of the nature of experience/death.

Regardless of whether your mind is eventually uploaded, you will still someday die, and so each year is still a year closer to your eventual death. (This is not to say that you will not live forever, just that you will not live forever in this world, unless there is a fundamental change to the nature of this world)

The bekenstein bound says that a spherical region of space can only have up to a certain amount of entropy, and so it can only have up to a limited number of possible states (proportional to the surface area of the region).

So, if one’s mind is uploaded to a computer, there would be a finite number of possible states that that computer could be in. (this number increases very quickly with the radius of the computer, but at every radius of the computer, this number is finite).

If there is a function from the computer’s physical state to the states of the person’s mind, then there must be a limited number of states that the person’s mind can take, while they are stored (”uploaded”) to the computer.

For the machine to not run out of possible states, it would have to expand without bound. Very slowly perhaps, but still without bound.

From the perspective of the mind, there cannot be any difference between being in a state for the first time, or being in it again some future time.

And so, the length of all the mind’s experiences while it is uploaded to the machine must be finite! Perhaps it might be very very long, (and perhaps even disconnected), but in the end the totality of the mind’s experiences must be finite.

Provided that the machine does not grow without bound,

eventually, one dies.

No machine built by man can prevent death in the end.

Do not put faith in the machines of mankind that they might allow you to be without death, as they cannot do so.

As long as this world is as it is, your life in it must be finite.

For there to be any hope of living forever, it must be from outside of this world.

P.S. : If you think that this problem can be solved by the computer expanding without end, keep in mind that there are increasing travel times within the computer, due to the speed of light, and that there are other physical limits on computation, which would likely add further constraints, which would probably increase the rate at which the computer would have to expand.

P.P.S:

In any case, happy birthday!