Mind Power News No. 181: Read Your Way to Happiness

In this issue:

THE MOST DANGEROUS IDEA ON EARTH? Transhumanists are utopians. They foresee a world in which our intellects will be as far above those of our current selves as we are now above chimpanzees. They dream of being impervious to disease and eternally youthful, of controlling their moods, never feeling tired or irritated, and of being able to experience pleasure, love and serenity beyond anything the human mind can currently imagine.

HOW TO LIVE IN A SIMULATION: If you might be living in a simulation then all else equal you should care less about others, live more for today, make your world look more likely to become rich, expect to and try more to participate in pivotal events, be more entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around you happier and more interested in you.

THE SECRET SEDUCTION OF SUBLIMINAL MESSAGES: Subconscious programming is exactly like setting an airplane on auto-pilot. Once your subconscious mind understands clearly what you want, it will draw the object of your desire to you and guide you to it automatically.

OUR LIVES, CONTROLLED FROM SOMEONE'S COUCH: Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

CHINA BANS REINCARNATION WITHOUT GOVERNMENT PERMISSION: According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation."

HOW TO CREATE IN THE ETERNAL NOW: The importance of the Eternal Now simply cannot be over-emphasised. It is one of the most fundamental influences on the ability to create our own realities Now, rather than perpetually being frozen in a state of wanting but never receiving, a state that many find themselves in today.

The Most Dangerous Idea on Earth?

By Stephen Cave and Friederike von Tiesenhausen Cave
Source: Financial Times

It is easy to see how you could be tempted. It might start with genetically screening your children for a lower risk of a hereditary cancer. Or perhaps with a pill that promised to keep your memory fresh and clear into old age.

But what if, while you were having your future children engineered to be cancer-free, you were offered the chance to make them musically gifted? Or, if instead of taking a memory-enhancing pill, you were offered a neural implant that would instantly make you fluent in all the world’s languages? Or cleverer by half? Wouldn’t it be difficult to say no? And what if you were offered a whole new body - one that would never decay or grow old?

A growing number of people believe these will be the fruits of the revolutions in biotechnology expected this century. And they consider it every individual’s right to take advantage of these changes. They think it will soon be within our reach to become something more than human - healthier, stronger, cleverer. All we have to do is live long enough to be around when science makes these advances. If we are, then we may just live forever.

This idea, known as transhumanism, is steadily spreading from a handful of cranks and Star Trek fans into the mainstream and across the Atlantic. But it is an idea that Francis Fukuyama, famed for proclaiming the end of history when US-style liberal democracy triumphed in the cold war, has described as the most dangerous in the world.

In a world at war with terrorism, divided by religious fundamentalism and haunted by racism, sexism and countless other prejudices, how is it that transhumanism has earned the hotly contested title of the most dangerous idea on earth?

According to Nick Bostrom’s “The Transhumanist FAQ”, transhumanists believe “that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase”. With the help of technology, we will be able to enhance our capacities far beyond their present state. It will be within our reach not only to live longer, but to live better.

Bostrom, a lecturer at the University of Oxford and the intellectual spearhead of the transhumanist movement in the UK, sees it as the natural extension of humanism - the belief that we can improve our lot through the application of reason. In the past, humanism has relied on education and democratic institutions to improve the human condition. But in the future, Bostrom claims, “we can also use technological means that will eventually enable us to move beyond what some would think of as ‘human’”.

Transhumanists are utopians. They foresee a world in which our intellects will be as far above those of our current selves as we are now above chimpanzees. They dream of being impervious to disease and eternally youthful, of controlling their moods, never feeling tired or irritated, and of being able to experience pleasure, love and serenity beyond anything the human mind can currently imagine.

But dreams of eternal youth are as old as mankind and no dreamer has yet escaped the grave. Why transhumanists believe they are different - and why Fukuyama considers them so dangerous - is because their hopes are based on technologies that are already being developed.

How to Live in a Simulation

If you might be living in a simulation then all else equal you should care less about others, live more for today, make your world look more likely to become rich, expect to and try more to participate in pivotal events, be more entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around you happier and more interested in you.

By Robin Hanson
Source: JetPress.org

People love to pretend, and to watch others pretending. From story-telling to plays to movies to virtual reality, we keep getting better at making people feel like they are watching imagined places and events. We also keep getting better at role-playing, i.e., creating environments where several people can see what happens when they all pretend they are different people in another time and place. Eventually such role-playing simulations may get so good that people will often forget that it is just a simulation.

This brings us to the intriguing premise of many recent movies, including The Matrix, 13th Floor, Truman Show, and Dark City: what if people in the future create role-playing simulations where the people in it do not know that it is a simulation? This premise naturally leads to a premise even more thought-provoking: future people might create simulations of a world much like our world. If so, how sure can each of us now be that we are not now living in such a role-playing simulation?

A related scenario is the holodeck of the television show Star Trek Next Generation. The holodeck offers computer-generated environments that allow real people to role-play not only with each other, but also with sophisticated computer-simulated people. Today, computer-simulated humans contain only a pale shadow of the complexity and sophistication of real humans. But eventually, if we continue to make better simulations at lower cost, at least some of our simulated humans may be as sophisticated as real humans. In a holodeck, a simulated person might not realize that they were simulated. So the question arises: how sure can we each be that we are not a simulated person in a future holodeck simulation?

Obviously we cannot now be sure that we are not living in a simulation. The more likely our descendants are to be rich, long-lasting, and interested in simulating us, the more simulations of people like us we should expect there to be on average, relative to real people like us. And so the more we expect our descendants to be rich like this, the more we should expect that we are in fact living in a simulation.

Now if we, like those characters in recent movies, discovered specific clues in the world around us suggesting that we do in fact live in a simulation, we would of course consider those clues carefully to see what they say about how we should live our lives. But in the absence of such specific clues, many observers have assumed that no implications follow from the mere possibility that we might live in a simulation.

This is not quite right, however. In general, your decisions should be based on a weighted average over the different possible worlds you might live in. If you assign a non-zero subjective probability to the