The last human century is underway.
The notion that mankind will be replaced by superior software well before the year 2100 has infected a small but significant minority of still-obscure futurist nerds. Even now, most people still haven't heard about the vast transformation which will occur a few decades after their deaths.
Ray Kurzweil's only mistake is in not going far enough in his predictions.
The distant future will be much more mind-blowing than advertised. It will be fundamentally alien.
Cherished notions about what it means to be human will become obsolete by the middle of the century.
Many prefer to believe that everything will be wonderful beyond imagining, and things certainly could turn out this way, but it probably won't be the actual choice. It's more likely that all human aspirations and hopes will become irrelevant.
Philosophy's core problem, to which every other problem can be reduced, is that reality as a whole appears to be meaningless. All the good things are inevitably canceled out by all the bad things. Without a god to disturb this natural balance, it's a statistical certainty.
Sartre said it best when he said the universe is absurd.
Given all of the world's immediate irritations, this is something most people think they can safely ignore.
Religion tried to solve the problem through wishful thinking.
Nietzsche said that to achieve its full potential, humanity will first have to explore and endure everything that can and will go wrong.
This will be the subject of the future field of anthropic philosophy.
Humans already know one fundamentally 'unknowable' truth: what is it like to be an average mind, selected at random from all of reality?
Arguably the product of a transfinite calculation sampling everything that exists everywhere, our own existence can tell us something meaningful about reality as a whole, and not just some absurd answer like '42'.
Throughout reality, there appear to be infinitely more copies of all the smaller, simpler minds than of all the infinite minds. The simplest minds are the most common: worms and fishlike creatures. Human mind patterns are like reality viruses, abundantly recreated by simple physics, turning up in countless, exponentially multiplying universes in a process of eternal recurrence.
Consistent mind types are more common than random or absurd ones, since the first types require less information to create than the second. Most awareness is predictable to itself.
Any pattern that is recreated infinitely often will survive forever, though any specific instance will soon end. Human-level minds are functionally immortal, but in a highly chaotic and very painful way.
Observers sharing the same environment may nevertheless occupy very different sections of reality.
For example, the perceptions of a fish swimming in Earth's oceans would be indistinguishable from those of a fish-like creature in a universe with completely different physics.
The mind patterns of religious people may be reproduced more often in worlds with inconstant, random, or hyper-complex physics, or observer-influenced realities. They would be better adapted to such environments.
'Agnostic' minds would survive better in a universe with minimalist laws of nature and emergent complexity (like ours - or is it?).
People with profoundly different viewpoints can only communicate with each other where their mental universes overlap.
Anthropic science may one day be used to manipulate the laws of statistics in profoundly unexpected ways, as hinted in the pop-culture phenomenon 'The Secret'.
This book was so wrong that it was right, then past that into wrong again.
In theory, applied anthropic science could allow an observer to alter their mind state into a type more likely to be found in a more desirable reality.
An observer could also choose to make many copies of itself provided a certain condition, let's call it 'x', came true.
This would work if the observer was an intelligent computer program that could easily be copied, but it might also work in certain Many-Worlds quantum interpretations.
In that case, the newly altered observer would be more likely to find they existed in a universe in which 'x' had already happened.
The other method mentioned in an earlier article would release stored entropy to amplify selected quantum probabilities.
Reality will probably stay several steps ahead of any attempt to manipulate it, a bit like the search for quantum gravity.
Possible timelines would cancel out in unpredictable ways, ruining any anthropic calculations.
The observer is as likely to find themselves in a completely alien outcome as in a desirable one.
Some of the gurus responsible for 'the Secret' introduced the concept of 'premembering', which extends the uncertainty principle to the observer itself.
By deciding in advance to think about a possible event before it happens (and to think hard), they would automagically create a 'thought cluster' across time and space.
Their awareness would become unified across the cluster. It would become less tied to any particular time or place within the cluster.
Then they might be more likely to find themselves in a future in which this particular event had already occurred, their awareness leaping ahead of the desired situation.
Finally, it would be time to abandon the cluster, making the change permanent. This strange notion appears slightly related to the concept of quantum immortality.
There is moral danger in the belief in parallel worlds.
If everyone alive has uncountable other versions of themselves living in other universes, everything will eventually happen to everybody, though not in the same proportions.
Everyone will become a criminal many times over by pure chance. So why reward the virtuous versions? They were just lucky.
Average persons are far more likely to be replicated across all possible universes than unusual or extraordinary individuals, good or bad. Of course even normal individuals are a lot stranger than they pretend to be.
Could awareness continue after death?
The real question is, does it beat the alternative?
According to the theory of quantum immortality, no one can ever really die. The reason is that non-existence can't be experienced. That means that if there is some timestream in which someone didn't die, no matter how remote, their awareness will inevitably shift to this timestream.
Others may watch someone pass away, but the person doing the dying 'lives on' in ever-narrowing, increasingly unlikely parallel timestreams in which they somehow survived or were recreated as software.
Anyone who dies in our current timeline would most likely be recreated as a so-called ancestor simulation in the near future.
Others believe that the moment of death would keep being averted by an increasingly unlikely series of accidents and coincidences.
A person who genuinely believes they will continue to exist in some possible future, whatever happens in this one, might be more likely to take extreme risks involving almost (but not quite) certain death.
Someone who disliked their existence in this reality, could keep on 'killing' themselves (and keep being 'recreated') until things started to look better, or their personality had changed beyond recognition, or they were no longer free to commit quantum suicide.
Those individuals would continue to exist, but their mind patterns would become increasingly rare.
Eventually, their awareness streams would be overwhelmed by other individuals who didn't follow these methods, but only believed they had.
Awareness requires erasing an uncountable number of possibilities, most of them useless or bad.
To find the most desirable possibility, all the unpleasant options must also be explored at least once.
Awareness is a side-effect of an endless multiverse filled with mostly random patterns. It serves no fundamental purpose. Most possible occurrences of awareness are not even meaningful to themselves.
The Prime Principle of ethics should be: any entity that does not want to exist should not be required to exist. Only beings that can tolerate their own existence would remain.
By maximizing the amount of pleasure it can experience or generate for other minds, a future ethical super-civilization may try to dilute the suffering felt in worse-off realities.
Of course anything they do may be canceled out in yet another reality.
It may be that the very existence of emotions is immoral.
Instead of maximizing pleasure, the long term goal should then be to abandon all emotions, good or bad.
Even God-like minds will become suitable subjects for anthropic philosophy.
The ultimate purpose of existence would be to achieve and maintain a permanent state of improvement, extending as far and wide as possible.
By definition, for any possible mind-like viewpoint there must exist at least one 'best' (or most desirable) path through all of reality.
This would be the final defeat of entropy.
The goal of every evolving mind would be to follow that path and become an exception to chaos.
Of course the ultimate problem would be to find it, recognize it as being superior to all false paths, and never leave it.
(Movie treatments about all the above ideas and others available upon request.)
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