If you DO feel in both places, this means the “soul” is simply data in a brain!

The idea that aliens, then, have decided to withdraw into some perfect virtual reality and leave this reality behind is flawed, because it’s predicated on the idea that these aliens are already perfect and perfectly alike. Perfectly selfless, such that they all want the same things for all people within this new reality. Perfectly trusting in their technology such that they don’t need to leave anybody outside to maintain it, or to ensure that no parameters are altered.

And if they were already perfect, and so advanced that they could construct such a thing, then why wouldn’t they just stay in RL?

Or in other words…any civilization sufficiently advanced enough to create a perfectly immersive ‘better’ reality than the one they currently inhabited wouldn’t need to bother.

Actually, all evidence points in the direction that it is. Dualism is popular, but not very scientific.

I’m reminded of the teleportation device that scans your body and transmits the information to a receiver any distance away, which then creates an exact duplicate in almost no time. The transmitter also contains a gun. If you don’t use the gun, it’s a duplication machine. If you do use the gun, it’s a transporter.

There is no reason to postulate that aliens get wrapped up in VR at all, only that they transition from physical brains to computational ones. This will dictate that such beings seek out the most computationally efficent enviornments which, one would expect, would also be the most energetic. As far as such aliens are concerned neutron stars and black holes will be where all the action is and a trip out to the slow cold regions we inhabit would take an unimaginably long subjective time for those who remained behind in the high energy regions.

Moreover if valid such aliens would have no incentive to explore the boring cold darkness. Any interesting civilization would also be found in the high energy regions.

Thanks for the heads up on Accelerando. It’s pleasantly filling up an otherwise really boring day at work.

As for the “real world is better!” stuff, this is ignorant nonsense. I lucid dream often, to the point where it’s a reasonable expectation for me to do so any given night. Lucid dreams – where you’re ‘awake’ during your dream and can control it – are pretty much indistinguishable from the sufficiently advanced VR described above. Real life does not compare; it is not even close. The fun stuff is not as fun, the cool stuff is not as cool, the amazing things are not as amazing. Even the tranquil places are not so perfectly peaceful, and the scary stuff is not as scary. I’d much rather take a nap than watch TV, personally.

I’m not a dualist, I’m a monist. I think your brain is you, and if you could model your brain with sufficient accuracy, your consciousness would be in that model.

“But how does the real, original me that’s in my body stop existing, except by death. That consciousness doesn’t get transferred, just duplicated. I’m not going to kill myself just because I’ve created a machine that thinks it used to be me. The only way we would give up our bodies is if there were literally a non-physical soul that could truly be transferred.”

I was asking myself the same question (in different terms) a little while ago, and it seemed like a nightmare to duplicate your consciousness, but then have to die so that the other version could live. Seems like a deal-breaker to me (or at least, a way for the copy to start a better life, but not for me).

But after a little more thought and research, I found ways that could allow one to be ‘transfered’ without the need for a consciousness to die.

The outline is: You connect a brain to a virtual world. You still have the biological brain, but you connect its sensory system to a virtual world. You then scan that brain and create a model of it in the virtual world. Then consciousness can then be switched from one substrate to the other (from biological to virtual model) without subjective discontinuity.

The virtual reality explanation as a whole is plausible and interesting, but this idea of ‘mind uploading’ is highly questionable. It seems predicated on an idea of some sort of ‘soul’ that can be transferred. I can imagine (very distant) technology that can totally replicate my brain in a machine, and that that machine might then be sentient and feel like it previously existed in my physical body (because it has all my memories etc.) But how does the real, original me that’s in my body stop existing, except by death. That consciousness doesn’t get transferred, just duplicated. I’m not going to kill myself just because I’ve created a machine that thinks it used to be me. The only way we would give up our bodies is if there were literally a non-physical soul that could truly be transferred. Do you really think science is going to find and figure out how to manipulate “the soul”?

But I think that it’s very hard to predict details without anthropomorphizing too much, or even predicting how much smarter beings would deal with any problems that would arise.

Maybe… virtual worlds as we imagine will become boring, and “players” or “admins” would react by putting more challenging elements: wars, property, pain leading to enlightenment, arts, great accomplishments.

Perhaps the only difference between our reality and their virtual worlds are some “transgressions” to physical laws, which would increase freedom to act.

And perhaps we were pretty bored and decided to create a world like this one, where you can fight and endure all you want…

I’m not talking about virtual reality as we can currently do it, with a little headset. I’m talking about what a sufficiently advanced civilization could do.

When you are doing sports in the physical world, you are in a kind of virtual reality. You are your brain, sitting in a dark place. All that you know about the world is coming from your nervous system, which sends a bunch of electro-chemical signals. That’s not the real world, that just a model of it built by your brain.

A sufficiently advanced virtual world would be truly indistinguishable from the physical world, if that’s what it wanted to reproduce. Or it could be a better world, where more is possible, without suffering, with deeper inter-personal connections, no need to work at jobs that you don’t like, with more arts, no disease and aging-related death, etc (or whatever else it is that an alien race would value and cherish).

Or whatever. My point is not to describe what this would be, because nobody knows yet how to make this or how it would be (there’s not just one kind of virtual world anyway – there’s a limitless number of possible ones). I’m talking about the possibility that advanced civilizations upload their minds and live in a world that they built for themselves, which could explain why they don’t colonize the galaxy much.

I will keep my rebuke short, but it’s quite simple: anyone who’s ever done *any sport* more than superficially can attest to just how much more deep and satisfying the real world is.
I say sport, because that is within the reach of any human. But there are countless other endeavors which are equally satisfying and can never ever have any equivalent in a virtual world (be it craftsmanship, a trade skill, dance or music).

The sooner you realize that your virtual worlds are “much more pleasant” because you have abandoned your real world, the sooner you will learn what happiness is.

NB. this is coming from a veteran programmer of 15 years.

There’s also the question of maintenance and the helplessness that comes about with uploading yourself into a machine. Either way, they would have to create a machine that interfaced with the outside world – for their own safety, it would have to be powerful enough to deflect any cosmic cataclysms, and out of curiosity, it would have to be able to observe (or travel through) the universe in ways that are probably more powerful than they could have achieved as organic beings.

As far as not being swamped with radiowaves, it hasn’t been that long. These things take time to travel, and if we assume that our civilization is progressing at an “average” rate (I mean, planets formed at roughly the same time in the grand scheme of things), then even ancient civilizations would need to have invented powerful signaling technology thousands, even millions of years prior to us.

I think a more likely reason that we cannot see evidence of other civilizations is that they would prefer not to advertise themselves. It would be quite bad if another civilization (or, again, being) who was much more powerful than you and also much more meaner than you discovered you. Its just not worth the risks. I imagine there have been very extensive efforts made by other civilizations on working out how to hide themselves from potential predators.

I often wonder about black holes. Is there any chance those are the galactic equivalent of a nuclear bomb? Could a civilization somehow be hiding in one to protect itself? Probably not, but there is just so much we don’t know.

Nice post, by the way.

http://www.jeriaska.com/blog/2006/evolutionary-development/

Running most of a civilization in a virtual reality doesn’t preclude manipulating the external world when it is required. Most likely via robotics and nanotechnology.

As for the power requirements, they would probably be high, but not as high as if that civilization wasn’t in a virtual world. A very advanced computing technology might require relatively little energy inputs per operation. We’ve only had computers for a short amount of time, and already there’s a huge difference between how many calculations per second you could do with 100 watts 30 years ago and how many you can do with 100 watts now.