Leaky Abstractions and Uploading

The human experience of the world is built on layers and layers of abstractions--for instance, the human eye doesn't actually perceive movement. It shoots a series of little snapshots, and then your brain reassembles them, does a little calculation and tells you if things are moving. You don't actually see anything move. Also, you have a tiny blind spot in the middle of your eye where the optic nerve attaches to your retina. Also, your peripheral vision is a) blurry as all get out and b) color-blind. Your brain just fills in the blurriness for you

Now, mostly none of this actually matters. You mostly can tell when things are moving, and you mostly don't care that there's a tiny spot you can't see in the center of your eye. They're a good abstractions: they don't distract you with extraneous details, and leave you the information you need. Mostly. Sometimes though, knowing that there's a tiny blindspot in the center of your eye is important. Like when you're trying to look at a tiny, tiny speck of light--a star, say. Then it's useful to know that looking a few degrees to the left or right will get you a much clearer and brighter image.

The point of all this is: abstractions leak. Biological abstractions, software abstractions, mental abstractions, physical abstractions--all of them. When they leak, things can go wrong really fast. Auto-immune disorders, buggy code, phantom pains, dogmatism, faulty scientific theories; all of these can be traced to abstractions that have sprung a leak.

There's not really a solution for this problem. We need abstractions. Without them all there is is a mass of chaotic, incoherent data screaming at us. Without abstractions, we can't function. Before acting on anything, first we have to create an abstraction of it. The only solution is to be aware of the existence of our abstractions and be wary of their capacity to trick us. The map is not the territory, etc. If we're lucky, maybe we come up with a better abstraction every once and a while.

So what does this have to do with uploading? Well, think about it--uploading is moving our entire existence into an abstraction. Instead of moving our real arm through real space to manipulate real objects, we move an abstraction of an arm through an abstraction of space to manipulate abstractions of objects--all of which has to be processed through code running on real hardware, which may or may not have a piece of conductive dust fall across an important component. Simply put, the possibility for catastrophic abstraction failure becomes enormous. Our physical bodies have a multitude of feedbacks, some quite extreme, to keep our abstractions in line with reality--the senses, pain, hunger, exhaustion, etc. Uploading will quite deliberately trade those meaningful feeds for user-generated ones. Instead of keeping tabs on what's happening to the real physical substrate for our existence, we'll be drinking virtual champagne while having virtual sex with each other.

It strikes me as a scenario with some pretty striking fail states.

The Simulation Argument

It goes like this: "Pretty soon we're going to have really powerful computers. One of the things that people will want to do with these really powerful computers is run simulations--simulations of their own societies. Then those simulations will probably also want to run simulations! And so on. In fact, there will likely be far, far more simulated people than actual people. Wait, did I say 'will?' I meant are. Yeah, it's statistically likely that it's happening right now, and we're the simulations."

The problem I have with that is this: how can you build a computer that can simulate the existence of (as many or) more molecules than are used to build the computer? Electro-magnetic, weak nuclear, strong nuclear, gravitic forces would all have to be simulated, and the number of calculations necessary to work all that math out for a single molecule would almost certainly take more than one molecule. Take the gravitic force in particular--gravitic force extends over a monstrously huge area, so that every molecule in the entire Earth exerts a gravitic effect on every other--every molecule in the solar system, every molecule in the galaxy, every molecule in the universe. Simply working out the gravitic interactions in my left hand could take a solar system's weight in computronium.

Assuming that we are ourselves a simulation, that leaves two possibilities. Either our experience of the universe is semi-illusory, and individual atoms don't actually exist unless unless they have to in order to maintain the illusion. (Wouldn't that be an interesting explanation for the wave/particle duality!) Or alternatively, the laws of physics in our universe are grossly simplified versions of those in the simulating universe.

Now, step two of the simulation argument is that the simulations will probably run simulations of their own. So what happens if we, semi-illusory/drastically simplified simu-verse, try to run our own simulation? Either we build a computer according to the faked laws of physics and, unable to pull off a simulated quantum computer, our universe crashes. Or we are forced to simplify the governing laws of our own simulation, either by making it much smaller molecule-wise than our own, or by faking some stuff.

Imagine matrioshka dolls (those Russian nesting dolls): just as each one is smaller than the one that contains it, so too is each simulation smaller than its progenitor. Depending on how efficiently universes can be simulated, each one may be vastly smaller--an order of magnitude smaller or more. If this number is large enough, it can very much bork the entire premise.

Representation and Taxation

I had a little epiphany just now: it's not taxation that necessitates representation, it's economic entanglement.

Sure, in the American colonies taxation was the flash point for revolution. It wasn't, however, the real problem: the real issue was that America was being run as a raw resource exporter/finished goods importer to drive England's economic growth. The taxation of tea was just one of dozens of ways the colonies were milked for wealth. For every cent of taxation, dollars and dollars were extracted via private companies: furs, timber, slaves, sugar, and so on. Taxes were just the government's way of skimming a bit of those massive privatized profits off for itself.

At that point England's economy was built on the backs of its colonies and outposts in America, Asia and Africa. Together they constituted a single economic system: without the colonies to provide resources and markets, England's domestic economy would have collapsed, and the economies of the colonies were similarly dependent (deliberately and systematically so) on England for essential goods. And that's where the lack of representation became so pressing: As long as political power was concentrated in the hands of the English, they had every incentive to design a system that rewarded only themselves. Only if political power is distributed throughout the whole economic tangle is there any political incentive to spread wealth with anything approaching fairness. Economic involvement without representation leads to exploitation.