--- Lúcio de Souza Coelho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 6/15/07, Matt Mahoney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > (...) > > - Uploading your mind and simulating a world where resources are > plentiful. > > > > For all you know, the latter has already happened. > (...) > > Err... in *my* world many resources are getting scarce, and indeed I > thought that all this discussion was about that. :)
Resources are not so scarce that we cannot live comfortably, at least more so than in the past, in spite of increased population. Lack of resources is hardly the limiting factor in life expectancy, as it was in the dark ages when food, medicine, and knowledge were scarce. It might be that in the real universe, physical resources are extremely scarce (if they exist at all), compared the the simulated universe we experience. > Besides, virtual worlds will have their own resource problems in the > real world - caused by increasing memory and processing demands. > (Actually the crude virtual worlds of today, like Second Life, are > already limited by that problem.) However, virtual worlds populated by > uploads would be, granted, more efficient, in the sense that a human > upload would need far less matter and energy than an actual human. Yes, computational resources are really the only ones that matter, and there are good reasons to believe that the universe is simulated by an enumeration of Turing machines, so these resources are actually unlimited. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- 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/?member_id=4007604&user_secret=7d7fb4d8
