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Lincoln Cannon

Lincoln Cannon

著者： Lincoln Cannon
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 Lincoln Cannon is a technologist and philosopher, and leading voice of Mormon Transhumanism.2025 Lincoln Cannon スピリチュアリティ
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  • Peter Thiel Recognizes the Antichrist

    Peter Thiel Recognizes the Antichrist
    2025/07/01
    In an interview with the New York Times, Peter Thiel discussed his perspective that Western society has exhibited decades of technological and cultural stagnation, with only digital technologies like blockchain and AI providing any substantial progress. Thiel attributed this stagnation to cultural anxiety about growth, leading to increased risk aversion and regulatory barriers since the 1970s. He criticized Transhumanist ambitions as falling short of the transformative vision of Christianity and warned that escalating fear of existential risk could lead, in the name of safety, to a totalitarian world order. Throughout the interview, Thiel expressed both skepticism and hope, asserting that human agency and openness to radical change remain essential to positive futures. I don’t entirely agree with Peter’s perspective on stagnation. Judging from the history books, culture seems to be evolving faster than ever before. And technological evolution certainly hasn’t stopped. Although risk aversion has surely slowed advances, many probably also underestimated the complexity of advances (perhaps flying cars, to use an oft-repeated example) whose absence continues to disappoint them. I also disagree with Peter’s criticism of Transhumanism. Although, to the best of my knowledge, he identifies as a Christian Transhumanist himself, maybe he doesn’t know enough Transhumanists. Many Transhumanists aspire to approximations, secular or otherwise, of Christianity’s vision of embodied immortality and exalted minds. And even most of those who value mind uploading still anticipate embodiment of those minds in substrates that function to empower those minds in our shared world, making “brain emulation” a more accurate description of their vision. Despite those disagreements, it appears that Peter and I would agree on another matter. That is, he recognizes the Antichrist. And, no, it’s not a dude with horns – except perhaps symbolically. It’s this, Peter said: “… if we’re going to have this frame of talking about existential risks, perhaps we should also talk about the risk of another type of a bad singularity, which I would describe as the one-world totalitarian state. Because I would say the default political solution people have for all these existential risks is one-world governance.” The Antichrist, as characterized in the Bible, is that would-be-god who would raise itself above all else called “God,” declaring itself “God.” It contrasts with Christ, characterized as that God who would raise us together as joint-heirs in the glory of God, if we’re willing to suffer together. The one is a profoundly egotistical centralization of power. The other is a profoundly altruistic decentralization of power, and shared risk. I’ve spoken and written about this and adjacent matters many times in the past. Decentralization is essential to human thriving, I contend. The only God worthy of worship is decentralized Godhood – not merely an abstraction, but rather a decentralized embodiment in Gods. And centralized power is dangerous enough for war even among the Gods. As a practical matter, I’ve encouraged engineering of decentralized reputation networks. I’ve warned about the risk of centralized currency. And I’ve advocated blockchain as means to defend against that risk. Peter went on to associate 1 Thessalonians 5 with the Antichrist: “But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.” From this perspective, the Antichrist is a seductive imitation of Christ, not an overt enemy, but a counterfeit savior. It promises “peace and safety,” a world without risk of suffering. But its method would actually lead to destruction. Subsuming individual agency and any genuine pluralism beyond superficial appearance of diversity into an enforced unity within its centralized power, it would enslave and essentially annihilate the rest of us. Of course, the very technologies that could empower us against centralization, particularly AI, could also empower centralization. So it’s not enough only to reject excessive risk aversion. We must also also reject indiscriminate acceleration of technological and cultural evolution. System architecture and governance matter a great deal, and must be intentionally and actively steered toward decentralization. Toward the end of the interview, Peter rejected fatalism, even the kind of fatalism that some associate with Christian theology. “Attributing too much causation to God is always a problem,” he said. And I want to echo that point. We shouldn’t regard prophecies, of the Antichrist or anything else, as inevitable fortune-telling. The purpose of prophecy, in the Hebrew tradition that...
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  • Vazza Overstates Constraints on the Simulation

    Vazza Overstates Constraints on the Simulation
    2025/05/28
    Most of us first encounter the Simulation Hypothesis through science fiction, often experienced as something of a metaphysical thrill-ride. But as computational theory and cosmology advance, serious thinkers – philosophers like Nick Bostrom, physicists, computer scientists, and even theologians – have begun analyzing the feasibility of computed worlds. Recently, Franco Vazza published “ Astrophysical constraints on the simulation hypothesis for this Universe: why it is (nearly) impossible that we live in a simulation.” In this paper, he provides a scientific analysis of the Simulation Hypothesis. Vazza’s analysis is impressive in both scope and detail. He incorporates influential contemporary hypotheses about the relationship between information, energy, and the structural constraints of our universe. These include the Holographic Principle, Landauer’s limit, and astrophysical energy bounds. From them, Vazza reasons that any simulation of our universe (even on reduced scales) would require astronomically large amounts of energy. So large, he judges from his calculations, the energy requirements would be greater than anything feasible within our universe. Not even black holes instrumented as computers, at what he deems to be the bounds of theoretical speculation, could handle the demands of a low-resolution real-time simulation. Thus, he concludes, energy requirements render the Simulation Hypothesis practically impossible for any simulator that may operate within physics like our own. Of course he doesn’t know about physics unlike our own, which he admits. But he points out, rightly, the practical triviality of speculation about physics unlike our own. The more alien the imagined physics, the less such imagination implies anything meaningful about our own potential. So alternative physics can’t save the Simulation Hypothesis. Although I’m not expert in the related physics, I assume Vazza has accurately characterized the scientific hypotheses on which he calls. And although I haven’t carefully reviewed his logic and math, I assume they are valid and correct. However, even granting those particular assumptions, a model is only as strong as the ensemble of its assumptions. As much as I appreciate Vazza’s audacity, I find his conclusion overstated and his apparent confidence unwarranted. He overlooks or glosses over foundational assumptions that deserve more attention. It’s premature to declare the Simulation Hypothesis “impossible,” or even nearly so. Overestimating Costs Perhaps the greatest overreach arises from assumptions that Vazza uses to calculate energy requirements. He acknowledges the Simulation Hypothesis doesn’t depend on simulating an entire universe, or even an entire planet at full resolution, although he focuses considerable attention on such ideas. And he does briefly consider the possibility of solipsism. But he stops short of fully considering minimal costs for supporting subjective experience. Consciousness is not well understood by science or philosophy. Mind may emerge from or supervene on relatively coarse substrate, which resists easy quantification. We cannot say, at least for now, what a minimum necessary substrate for experience would be. But we can say, with the confidence of speaking from definition, that a simulation would need only provide whatever substrate proves sufficient for consistent and convincing experience. To achieve that, a simulation may economize substantially. For example, it could leverage compressed statistical descriptions of substrate that, in turn, feed on-demand minimal-resolution rendering of substrate. Vazza suggests this would still be too costly due to the energy requirements of error correction, which he briefly characterizes in a footnote as being consistent across both irreversible (standard) and reversible computing contexts. However, competing hypotheses suggest that the cost of error correction may be considerably decreased within the context of reversible computing. It’s worth recalling that, in calculations like these, small differences in assumptions can multiply into vast discrepancies between conclusions. We can see this across a diversity of approaches to the Simulation Argument. And that’s to be expected, as we can see this elsewhere. For example, small differences in values assigned to components of the Drake Equation yield wildly different estimates for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations. Underestimating Superintelligence Central to the Simulation Hypothesis is the idea that the simulators are, compared to us, vastly more intelligent – superintelligent. Vazza’s assessment of energy production possibilities, however, come merely from contemporary observations of transient natural phenomena such as supernovae. What about hypothetical technologies for sustainable energy that humans can already imagine, such as encapsulating stars in Dyson spheres, extracting energy from the rotation of ...
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  • Technological Uniformity Saves the Simulation

    Technological Uniformity Saves the Simulation
    2025/05/07
    Nick Bostrom’s formulation of the Simulation Argument is a rigorous reworking of what is, at its heart, an ancient question. Are we living in a created world? He distills the answer into three stark possibilities, a trilemma: Doom: Almost all civilizations destroy themselves or otherwise fail before developing the capacity to create detailed simulations of their ancestors. Abstinence: Some civilizations develop this technological capacity, but almost all choose not to simulate conscious agents, for ethical or other reasons. Simulation: If our civilization survives and runs ancestor simulations, then simulated agents would vastly outnumber non-simulated agents, and, all else equal, our credence that we’re simulated should be very high. In a critical analysis, Brian Eggleston highlights an unstated assumption underlying Bostrom’s formulation: we are not alone as technological pioneers. Specifically, Bostrom’s trilemma only entails the third possibility, that we’re simulated, if we assume that some other civilization – not only our future descendants – already ran ancestor simulations before our present. Without this assumption, we could imagine humanity as the first or only simulator, collapsing the trilemma into merely weak possibilities without force. Principle of Technological Uniformity However, I believe there’s an unstated intuition, yet another unrecognized assumption, behind Bostrom’s formulation. And that intuition, when identified and formally expressed as an assumption, fully addresses Eggleston’s criticism and maintains the force of the trilemma. I call that assumption the Principle of Technological Uniformity (PTU): If a given technology is feasible, beneficial, and once achieved by a civilization, then, all else equal (barring radically unique physics or values), that technology probably has been or will be achieved by other civilizations operating within similar conditions. PTU has at least three important characteristics. First, it provides rational grounds for supposing that becoming a simulator increases the probability that other simulators exist. Second, it reflects and extends many empirical precedents, including those broadly categorized as convergent evolution. Third, it maintains the strength of Bostrom’s trilemma, solving the problem that Eggleston identifies without appealing to exceptionalism. Philosophical Support PTU is grounded in the principle of mediocrity, or what people sometimes call the “Copernican” principle. As Copernicus removed from Earth the privilege of being the center of our conceptualization of the cosmos, so PTU would have us resist the temptation to privilege our human civilization uniquely in time or space or significance. Instead, given uncertainty and no evidence for our uniqueness, we should regard ourselves as typical. Human civilization on Earth is just one among many technological civilizations, subject to similar physics and incentives. PTU is related to the anthropic principle. When considering the possibility of others developing technology like us, we shouldn’t default to flattering assumptions that would make us exceptional. To the contrary, as we observe ourselves developing increasingly detailed simulations, that should raise our credence that others have developed similar technologies before us. PTU is a meta-induction about technology diffusion, similar to but distinct from the self-sampling assumption. Eggleston’s criticism hinges on the possibility that another civilization has already become a simulator. PTU invites us to assume this possibility has a significant probability, both for the philosophical reasons mentioned above, as well as empirical reasons shared below. We should assume that, where potential and incentive align, scientific discoveries and technological developments propagate, not deterministically, but frequently enough to warrant inductive reasoning from specific observations to generalizations. Empirical Support PTU is not merely a philosophical abstraction. Biological, cultural, and technological evolution are replete with convergence. Life and intelligence within similar constraints repeatedly arrive at similar solutions to similar problems. Biological examples abound. The camera eye, constructed from radically different biological materials, appears to have evolved independently in both cephalopods (ancestors of the octopus) and vertebrates (ancestors of humans). Powered flight apparently evolved independently in insects, birds, and bats, reflecting similar constraints in aerodynamics. Where an environment rewards a particular function, nature finds a way to achieve that function, often more than once. Cultural examples also abound. Agriculture seems to have begun independently on multiple continents, perhaps millennia apart. Writing systems appeared at disparate times in Sumer, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica with little to no evidence of direct transmission. Even intricate toolmaking, such...
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