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God Near or No Mind Hair

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This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don't all die.
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God Near or No Mind Hair

Robin Hanson
Sep 13, 2010
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God Near or No Mind Hair

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(I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the following argument isn’t original, but I haven’t seen it elsewhere yet.)

If our descendants do not destroy themselves, then over the next trillion years they may become knowledgeable and powerful enough to create new baby universes that expand to look much like the universe we can see. Such a universe might then evolve its own intelligence, which would grow powerful enough to repeat the process. A self-reproducing universe would have a chance p of evolving intelligence, which would then birth an expected number N of similar baby universes, such that p*N >1.

Our descendants might even become powerful enough to imprint themselves upon such a baby universe. An imprinted universe would somewhere contain mind(s) with important specific similarities, such as memories, personality, or values, to the minds of its creators.

One of the following two remarkable conclusions seems likely:

  1. No Mind Hair – Even if our descendants command billions of galaxies and study physics for trillions of years, they still cannot create self-reproducing baby universes, and reliably imprint their minds on them. Such a task is beyond the abilities even of such gods. They are trapped; their baby universes just cannot have “mind hair.”

  2. Gods Nearby – Somewhere out there in our universe is probably hiding the imprinted minds of our universe’s creators. If we search long and far enough and understand physics well enough, we may well find them.

Here’s why. If our descendants can make self-reproducing universes, then there’s a non-zero chance they will do so, and if so there’d be an infinity of such universes. But out of an infinity of expected universes we are quite unlikely to be in the first, making it quite likely that our universe had creators. If such creators could imprint their minds on our universe they probably would have done it. So, either imprinted versions of our creators are probably out there somewhere in our universe, or no feasible power can reliably mind-imprint a self-reproducing baby universe.  Such imprinting could at best succeed rarely. QED. Either conclusion is remarkable.

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God Near or No Mind Hair

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God Near or No Mind Hair

www.overcomingbias.com
Ronfar
May 15

3) Survival of the fittest – why the fittest? Why not the reddest, or the oldest, or the most depressed?

Because "fitness" is defined in terms of what survives.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter
May 15

There's a Stephen Baxter book, Manifold Time, with a version of this argument which extends to non-intelligent creation of new universes as well - there's a paraphrasing of it here:

http://www.csub.edu/Physics...

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