Simulating even a single posthuman civilization might be prohibitively expensive. If so, then we should expect our simulation to be terminated when we are about to become posthuman.
I see he's got it budgeted and CBA'ed. (And here I thought digital was cheaper than analogue.)
Because, you know, posthuman is so fucking expensive compared to the mere matter of doing a full simulation of a merely human civilization to the point where we all are conscious, see the same reality (with the same biosphere and animals) and so on. Bah, boring. Guys like him can code it in their sleep, and they're the hardest part to simulate, since everyone else is so stupid and worthless. Sorry, this is how I see this stuff.
This, like a lot of posthuman speculative work, is not so much philosophy as a search for a workable and stimulating religion that might satisfy techno-intellectual workers under a reductionist materialist neoliberalism. Call that last bit what you will: the next phase of capitalism, Rise of the Machines, etc. Under the systemic logic and given the trajectory of ongoing developments, the human is eventually to be extinguished or replaced or supplanted by its own creations (even if human bodies keep being reproduced). First engineered to a soulless utopian fit, then taken over by new species of our own invention: supermen, bio-mech hybrids made for space, or straight-up machines. Unless we decide we don't want that as a species, which is unlikely.
A mythology is needed for the meantime, to reassure us (or to reassure some of us who are working on that extinguishment) that it's okay because, hey, the human never existed in the first place. None of us do!
I see a lot of these kinds of assurances being fronted in various guises, as the neuroscientific/genetic/behavioral economic explanation for the questions philosophy and social sciences supposedly used to cover.
As a religion for more than a handful of actual humans, however, it misses the part where it satisfies the gaping needs for validation, warmth, belonging, simplicity and fulfillment emanating from most of the human beings, which is why they tend to turn to religion in the first place, and why the big ones (religions, not humans) look like they do. Which is to say, quite unlike this one.
Except for the part where this life we're living, the only one we have, isn't actual, doesn't matter anyway, since everything (in the universe!) was made by an unseen all-powerful creator, of which we are the hobby. That part, he's got down. (Yes! Now I'm figuring out why I'm sometimes offended by this nonsense!) So he's got a substitute for himself, anyway.
Or, wait, maybe he's doing this? A wise guy, eh?
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/rea ... d-of-a-pin
According to unimpeachable sources, it's not how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, it's how many can do it on the point of a needle — which, of course, makes more sense. Second, the earliest citation I can find is from a book by Ralph Cudworth in the 17th century, which is suspiciously late in the day.
Insight on this question is provided by Isaac D'Israeli (1766-1848), the father of British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. Isaac was an amateur scholar who published a series of books called Curiosities of Literature (the first volume appeared in 1791), which were quite popular in their day. D'Israeli lampooned the Scholastic philosophers of the late Middle Ages, notably Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224-1274), who was famous for debating metaphysical fine points.
Aquinas wrote several ponderous philosophical tomes, the most famous of which was called Summa Theologica, "summary of theology." It contained, among other things, several dozen propositions on the nature of angels, which Thomas attempted to work out by process of pure reason. The results were pretty tortured, and to later generations of hipper-than-thou know-it-alls, they seemed a classic example of good brainpower put to nonsensical ends.
For example, D'Israeli writes, "Aquinas could gravely debate, Whether Christ was not an hermaphrodite [and] whether there are excrements in Paradise." He might also have mentioned such Thomistic puzzlers as whether the hair and nails will grow following the Resurrection, and whether or not said Resurrection will take place at night.
Now to your question. D'Israeli writes, "The reader desirous of being merry with Aquinas's angels may find them in Martinus Scriblerus, in Ch. VII who inquires if angels pass from one extreme to another without going through the middle? And if angels know things more clearly in a morning? How many angels can dance on the point of a very fine needle, without jostling one another?"
Martinus Scriblerus ("Martin the Scribbler") was a pseudonym adopted by the 18th-century wits Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Thomas Parnell, and John Arbuthnot, who collaborated on a satirical work entitled Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, published in 1741. Turning to chapter VII of this book, now available online courtesy of Google, we find the first two questions cited by D'Israeli but not the one about dancing angels. Did D'Israeli make it up? Nah — he undoubtedly cribbed it from the aforementioned Cudworth, who in True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) writes: "… some who are far from Atheists, may make themselves merry, with that Conceit, of Thousands of Spirits, dancing at once upon a Needles Point …"
We find this last quoted in Mathematics and the Divine: A Historical Study by Teun Koetsier and Luc Bergmans (2004). Koetsier and Bergmans have nosed out a few still earlier antecedents: William Chillingworth in 1648 wrote of clergymen disputing, "Whether a million of angels may not sit upon a needle's point," which in turn may refer to Swester Katrei, "a fourteenth-century German mystical work," in which a character observes, "doctors declare that in heaven a thousand angels can stand on the point of a needle."
Not to drag this out, but you see what's going on: wise guys at work. All the items quoted above are burlesques of actual treatises in Aquinas's Summa. Fact is, Aquinas did debate whether an angel moving from A to B passes through the points in between, and whether one could distinguish "morning" and "evening" knowledge in angels. (He was referring to an abstruse concept having to do with the dawn and twilight of creation.) Finally, he inquired whether several angels could be in the same place at once, which of course is the dancing-on-a-pin question less comically stated. (Tom's answer: no.) So the answer to your question is yes, medieval theologians did get into some pretty weird arguments, if not quite as weird as they were later portrayed.
— Cecil Adams
