I argued previously that inflationary cosmology and its successes give us good reason to think there is probably a multiverse that spawns 10^37 *more* universes every second. I think Kurzweil has argued that there probably have not been any other singularities elsewhere in the universe already and that there are probably theoretical limits preventing civilizations from visting other universes in the multiverse since otherwise, we would almost certainly have observed them.
I agree with Kurzweil on certain points. I think any intelligent life would have evolved with very similar evolutionary pressures and thus share broad similarities in their motivations (e.g. creativity, pursuing knowledge for its own sake, probably something like the emotions that ground morality (e.g. care, guilt, resentment, etc -- which by the way I think grounds moral truths once you add a general deliberative capacity, but I can go into those philosophical arguments/my dissertation later if people are interested), wanting to control the external environment and put it to use to pursue knowledge). I thus think that there probably aren't post-singularity civilizations in our universe already since we would probably have observed them for the same reasons any other sufficiently intelligent civilization would most likely observe us when we spread to other galaxies. I suppose the other option is that there are other post-singularity civilizations out there but their evolution was timed just right such that given constraints of speed of light (if they are real constraints) they have not yet had time to reach us. This seems to me unlikely, but who knows, the universe is a pretty big place. I disagree with Kurzweil that the fact that we have not observed such civilizations in our universe is evidence that there must be theoretical constraints against travelling to other universes in the multiverse. Given the implications of the multiverse hypothesis, I think all that means is that if it is possible to travel to other universes in the multiverse, there must be a constraint that the number of universes a civilization can travel to must be at most a small percentage of the 10^37 universes per second that are spawned by the multiverse. So long as there is that much weaker constraint, our observations are still compatible with the anthropic predictions of the multiverse and the singularity, namely that intelligent life on most of the universes spawned would not observe any alien civilizations colonizing their universe. John On 3/27/07, Eric B. Ramsay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I am very enthusiatic over the idea of humans creating a singularity and hope myself to contribute meaningfully to this effort down the road. In the same way that I believe it should be possible to have an AGI, I also believe that there may very well be other intelligent life out there in the universe. Given the current estimated age of the universe, other intelligent races may be millions (if not billions) of years ahead of us technically. If that is so and if an AGI singularity is possible, it stands to reason that such a thing would already have been created. If we go with the strongest definition of what the term "singularity" implies, then is the universe big enough for two? Eric B. Ramsay ------------------------------ This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=11983
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