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Sunday, 27 August 2017
Continuous with the notion held by some that since human experience is something (some thing) instantiated in a physical structure operating according to known laws, it will soon be possible to 'upload the connectome', together with a bunch of other biological and environmental differentials, into another medium which will then become the matrix for that experience, with the difference that the path to be followed henceforth by the experiencer will no longer be contingent, or will only be contingent in a non-contingent way - continuous with this, our hypothetical complete theory of consciousness will enable us to extrapolate all possible future paths of experience from any clearly defined starting point. In either case it would be possible to run unlimitedly many alternative scenarios, and on condition that they each resolved to some uniform end-point, say a 'good death', to compare them and find which of them offered the optimal solution in terms of the internal criterion of a life well-lived, (or the external consensus criterion for that matter, since they are bound to differ.) One can imagine then that for each fully defined experience as a starting point, which would naturally involve a full specification of the experiencer, there would be a best possible resolution. It might, for example, involve the convergence of the life trajectory into an ascending spiral of wisdom and initiation, so that one died as a sage-king. This best possible resolution would exist like the solution to a set of equations, and it would necessarily encode the series of precisely calibrated external events required to catalyse the desired sequence of internal realisations. The question now is, what would happen if the inescapable evidence that this was all a simulation were among the external events that were encountered along the way? Would this destroy the optimality, or alternatively, does the assumption of optimality mean that such a realisation would have to necessarily be included among that set of precisely calibrated initiations? Curiously, the result of this thought experiment seems to point to the second as the only acceptable alternative. If there is an authentic resolution of experience, it must be so independently of whether experience is metaphysically original or a simulation. And even if there is in fact no such resolution, no optimality, it still points to something very peculiar about experience.
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