Virtues of a liberal arts education

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<p>Hi Canuckguy, I typed something arbitrary, just to see if you would still recognize me. :slight_smile: Glad to see you again. How come you always sound like a British gentleman? I know, I know,… You remind me of grammar school in the older days. :-)</p>

<p>““I used to say sciences the destination, humanities the scenery.””</p>

<p>"A technologically mature “posthuman” civilization would have enormous computing power. Based on this empirical fact, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero; (2) The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero; (3) The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.</p>

<p>If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealthy individuals who desire to run ancestor-simulations and are free to do so. If (3) is true, then we almost certainly live in a simulation. In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between (1), (2), and (3). </p>

<p>Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation."</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf[/url]”>http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>"According to the computability-oriented view adopted in this paper, life after death is a technological problem, not a religious one. All that is necessary for some human’s resurrection is to record his defining parameters (such as brain connectivity and synapse properties etc.), and then dump them into a large computing device computing an appropriate virtual paradise. Similar things have been suggested by various science fiction authors. At the moment of this writing, neither appropriate recording devices nor computers of sufficient size exist. There is no fundamental reason, however, to believe that they won’t exist in the future…</p>

<p>By stepping back and adopting the Great Programmer’s point of view, classic problems of philosophy go away."</p>

<p><a href=“ftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/everything.pdf[/url]”>ftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/everything.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;