Yesterday was a fairly lazy day for me… channeling Bruno, if you will.
What does that mean?
- Work a bit on tap dancing
- get a haircut
- skate a bit
- grocery shopping in the far-off Delhaize
Nice bike ride away next to the river! Spent too long in the store because I’m not used where to find things. - Update swing dance site
- Made a start with one of two reviews
- Accepted a request for another one
- prepare 2 dance classes
- Arrange to meet Rolando (took a surprising amount of time since he called me from his office phone but was no longer in the office ;-)
- Ordered & picked up a pizza to share with Rolando
- Met with Rolando, had dinner & a really great discussion for a few hours
- walked Rolando to the bus to finish discussion
- Got back and started typing in the ideas of the discussion (1 page of paper outline)
- Read through a friend’s presentation and email comments back
- Right before going to bed at 1.30: read a statement that we’re all brains in a simulation (Nick Bostrom). Roughly:
- At one point, we will be able to simulate a brain more or less perfectly. At a later point, this will become trivial, so world+dog will do it. So there will be many more simulated brains than real brains. Wait, why aren’t we there yet? Probability is much higher than of us being real brains…
- Get the idea that this might be easily falsifiable on physical grounds: either storing a brain will require so much space, or updating state will require so much energy, that it would require more atoms than on earth or more energy than the sun outputs in a reasonable amount of time.
- Start researching this. Estimates of the brain’s storage capacity range from 1 Terabyte (1024 Gigabyte) to 2.5 Petabytes (2.5 * 1024 Terabyte). That doesn’t lead to a theoretical problem for storage… obviously (hey: there are 7 billion brains out there already, and they can all be stored).
- Try to do back-of-the-envelope calculations about energy requirements. Fail again. (hey, there are 7 billion brains out there, and they can all flip one bit without draining the sun).
- Give up around 2.30 and go to bed.
I think I ought to redefine what a lazy day is….