An interesting question arises as to why our simulators have given us such a wide platform to play with. It could be that they’re bored and need someone to talk to.

Delving deeper into time or covering the universe with nanobots loads their simulation room more and more until a warning bell hits somewhere and they choose to pay attention.

This is where I think that religion in the sense of compassion/empathy/humaneness is important, really important. It is almost obvious to the neutral observer that this universe is pretty much not optimised for compassion. Maybe compassion is the unexpected surprise result of out simulation.

Therefore when our simulation hits the ringing bell, then our options have essentially boiled down to 2. Either the entity that is our descendant is clever enough to outwit the simulators and take over the basement universe or due to continuous maintenance of compassion, the entity is kept around as ” the compassionate guy”. Pure techno commercial ai is no. 1. Fai is no. 2 and some no. 1.

Although there is now exponentially more human brain activity than ever before due simply to population size…

Mormonism may be unique in Christianity–I don’t know for sure–in proposing a different model of time.

Traditional Christianity’s model of time is a precipitate fall, followed by an upward slope (probably not smoothly upward), in which Noah receives a covenant and promise, then God makes additional covenants and preparations with Israel and the patriarchs, then the world is prepared for the Advent of the Son, and then Christianity spreads and is still spreading. There is some dispute about what comes next. I believe progressive Christians, like progressives generally, believe in an upward bending curve that soars to the asymptote. Christians who believe in the apocalypse will have models that differ in the details but that include some kind of drop. I have the impression that mainstream Christians often believe that after the advent of Christ time has no particular shape: what matters is individual salvation so time as such doesn’t have a destination or a meaningful pattern; there will be movement, but not in any way that matters. Time as a random walk. Some traditionalists may also see time as an inverted V, peaking in Christ, or at some later point in the spread of Christianity, and declining since until the end times. I don’t really know, and would welcome informed comment.

Although Mormons in a sense see Christ’s advent, death, and resurrection as the peak of mortal time, as any Christian in a sense would, there is a stronger sense in Mormonism of cyclical time. It’s a cliche among Mormons that the Book of Mormon describes repeated turns of a wheel called “the Pride Cycle.” (Actually, the subject of time in the Book of Mormon is interesting in itself, Although there is a definite cyclical repeated pattern of time, the overall pattern is an inverted V, beginning with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, climaxing in the appearance of the resurrected Jesus to the Book of Mormon peoples and the establishment of a kind of quasi-utopia, and then the decay of the utopia and collapse into savagery, barbarism and eventually total annihilation.) But more than that, Mormons see a repeated pattern in history of a divine breach into our world with inspiration, revelation, commandments, and a pattern of ritual and morals; which catalyzes progress and growth along some dimension; which in turn catalyzes moral decay, pride, and impiety; which leads to a collapse. Then the process repeats. But the process isn’t perfectly cyclical because each divine revelation isn’t identical. Most Mormons think of each dispensation as mostly additive, so the overall picture would be much like a spiral, but I see that as a facile view. There is an additive component but some of the differences can’t be captured cleanly that way, and are more like the sounding of different and not entirely compatible themes. The conventional Mormon view, in addition, is that the Mormon revelation is the sum of all prior revelations, therefore the final revelation, and that our civilization’s collapse will be the end of the world. My disagreement here is probably my only serious heresy. Beginning with Christianity, modern religions tend to claim their predecessors and precursors, so Christianity accepts the Old Testament, Islam recognizes the Bible in some sense, and Mormons take the Bible as canon and have a fairly common sense that Islam was probably a genuinely revealed religion in its day. Bahais do something similar. But then each claims that they are the final revelation. That’s a lot of ‘This Time Its Different.’

Still, unless you believe that unending mortal progress is possible, if you believe in a spiral, not just an ever-repeated cycle, than you have to believe that the process comes to a stop somehow. That’s the function of the singularity for the techno-commercial types and the eschaton for the faithful. Part of what makes progressivism so dangerous is that it believes in progress forever and has no notion of that it reaches an end, and therefore no notion of what they’re striving for.

Does each leg of the Triad have its own notion of a spiral? The religious probably mostly have a sense of a cycle of sin and cursing followed by righteousness and blessing. Is there any sense that the total movement is not just cyclical but spirical? I don’t know, but they may lack of the underlying sense of some kind of progress. The techno-commercial singularists clearly have a vision of underlying progress where tech and wealth and complexity have been increasing throughout history if you view it at the lowest possible magnification. But do they have a cyclical view? Is there a clear techno-commerview view explaining why expansion leads to collapse, collapse to expansion (albeit with each collapse and expansion potentially surpassing the one that came before)? If not, then there is nothing inherently spirical about the techno-commercial view either. The ethno-nationalists are interesting. There is an implicit or explicit view of a hierarchy of races. Ur-humanity, followed by Civ. 1 in the Middle East, then the superior Civs. in the Med. and China, then the best current civ, the White/Northwest European/Anglo (depending on who you talk to), which combines intelligence, aggression and civic-mindedness. Not all would agree with this and some would disagree violently, but it seems to be in the ballpark. There is an obvious basis for a cycle too: new races–new populations with good genes and traits–prosper and conquer and in the process miscegenate their genes and lose their sense of racial solidarity. You can see how this cycle could be compatible with an underlying sense of progress, since the good traits aren’t actually lost but scattered, and since the collapse creates the conditions where natural selection can work and where ethnogenesis can occur. But its hard to think that this kind of thing can “progress” forever–evolution has a limited toolkit–and its equally hard to see any specific stopping point like the singularity or the eschaton. Is the ethno-nationalist singularity the race that has all the right traits to end up on the top of the heap and create civilization, but also has some kind of strong and enduring genetic basis for ethnic solidarity?

Let’s think about the ways in which we currently manipulate time, or distort our perspective of such. What first comes to mind is the processor. Baring its operation to its bones, it’s just transistors and wires, simple on/off switches. Imagine imitating the operation of a processor with people. A person flips light switches for transistors. Another person calculates each logic gate. Yet another yells out instructions to the team of transistor men using the results from the logic men. How many eons would be required, using this setup, to run the POST CPU self-check that happens when you start up a computer? The amount of cumulative time I am wasting in my apartment just on CPU idling defies comprehension. For crying out loud, MIPS is a unit of measure for processing. MILLIONS of instructions per SECOND.

As for perception of time, time-lapse photography has opened up avenues of understanding phenomena previously unreachable from anthropomorphic timescales. We slow time down to watch the actions (and perhaps even social behavior) of plants and echinoderms. We speed it up two watch storms generate, grow, and dissipate and again. We can hold time still to check if the ball hit the glove before the runner touched the base.

Let us all desperately hope that this is no Law of Conservation of Time.