TheDividendReport t1_ivameff wrote on November 6, 2022 at 3:53 PM

Not quite a relevant answer but the pace of technological progress juxtaposed with the pace of the climate crisis makes me feel pretty gaslit.

Like I’m gaslit by reality. Out of the billions of years that I could be a sentient thing, the thousands of years I could be a human, I wind up in this time? Really? This has to be a simulation. I chose the most interesting time in history to be alive. That almost feels closer to occams razor then the alternative

Surur t1_ivary3g wrote on November 6, 2022 at 4:30 PM

> Out of the billions of years that I could be a sentient thing, the thousands of years I could be a human, I wind up in this time?

Well, that is a sign that humanity wont be around for very long. If you look at the graph, you are much more likely to be in the thick part of the graph than the thinner areas in the past when humanity was only a few million people.

If humanity has a great future ahead of them, you would likely have been born when we were trillions, but it seems much more likely that you are born when we are billions, and this is the most humanity will ever achieve.

TheDividendReport t1_ivat7ss wrote on November 6, 2022 at 4:39 PM

… fuck. Okay, but this can still be true. I chose the most interesting time to be alive: the apocalypse. Death will be taking off the VR headset and returning to the time of me being one of trillions.

Excuse me while I go inhale some more copium.

Saerain t1_ivdt6v2 wrote on November 7, 2022 at 5:47 AM

Here I thought you were gonna make the point that even total ice loss means sea level rise an order of magnitude more distant in time than these technologies.

red75prime t1_ive3lne wrote on November 7, 2022 at 8:05 AM

I suspect that there's something wrong with the idea that I'm randomly chosen from a pool of all sentient beings. I can't express the problem clearly, but it looks like that the idea requires existence of supernatural "essence of me" that could have been instantiated in other sentient being, while that being has nothing in common with me (beside sentience).

TheDividendReport t1_iveloao wrote on November 7, 2022 at 12:16 PM

Not just sentience, DNA. You could also subscribe to the more “woo” areas of panpsychism and believe that all consciousness stems from one source. Perhaps that source is literally seeking experience from all simulations of experience. It could be a technological simulation. It could be a spiritual simulation.

red75prime t1_iverg6i wrote on November 7, 2022 at 1:11 PM

> the thousands of years I could be a human, I wind up in this time?

It can be continued. The decades I could ponder those questions. The minutes I could observe this date and time on a calendar. And so on. Reference class problem.

Going the other direction, if you disentangle consciousness from everything that links it to whatever you observe now, it would be equally present in every conscious being, so the question "why it is present in me?" loses surprise. It is present wherever whenever, so in me too, no biggie.