food for though (mostly offtopic): what if most simulations are actually nurseries, run by our descendants as an alternative to mostly random procreation?
...I imagine that in a very distant and complex hypothetical future, the only way that super-intelligent beings could reproduce in a way that the offspring would truly be similar enough to their parents, so that they could feel empathy one towards another would be either by: (1) clone and mutate an existing individual (think mind-cloning, like software copying) and mutate, and (2) create "children from scratch" and raise them, for at least a few "eons" in successive simulations of their parents or ancestors pasts (any other alternative, I'd imagine, in a post-singularity world evolving incredibly fast, would result in offspring so different from their parents that it would make empathy and the existence of a shared culture with shared artistic and aesthetic values impossible...)
...maybe we're just "babies" in the first level of a simulated nursery, waiting to complete the stages to "adulthood" in world of unbound, "software like", intelligent beings :)
EDIT+: ...just realized that this could be made up into pseudo-scientific pseudo-theory of reincarnation (which I don't believe in, but I find it interesting) ...if any buddhist or hinduist mystic reads this and takes my idea and does something intersting with it, please give me credit as original author :)
...I imagine that in a very distant and complex hypothetical future, the only way that super-intelligent beings could reproduce in a way that the offspring would truly be similar enough to their parents, so that they could feel empathy one towards another would be either by: (1) clone and mutate an existing individual (think mind-cloning, like software copying) and mutate, and (2) create "children from scratch" and raise them, for at least a few "eons" in successive simulations of their parents or ancestors pasts (any other alternative, I'd imagine, in a post-singularity world evolving incredibly fast, would result in offspring so different from their parents that it would make empathy and the existence of a shared culture with shared artistic and aesthetic values impossible...)
...maybe we're just "babies" in the first level of a simulated nursery, waiting to complete the stages to "adulthood" in world of unbound, "software like", intelligent beings :)
EDIT+: ...just realized that this could be made up into pseudo-scientific pseudo-theory of reincarnation (which I don't believe in, but I find it interesting) ...if any buddhist or hinduist mystic reads this and takes my idea and does something intersting with it, please give me credit as original author :)