Guardsman Bass wrote:If I remember right, while the differences between Universe-One (ours) and Universe-3 (beyond the Minos Gate) are such that they can't interact, that's not the case for Universe-3 and Universe-2 (Hell and Heaven). That could be problematic in its own way.
It does open a nasty possibility, similar to
this:
CFAI wrote:More importantly, Greg Egan skips over the question of why all of humanity, all the polises, and Old Earth, have suddenly turned peaceful simply because everyone is free, immortal, and rich. It only takes one aggressor to make a war, and during the twentieth century, offensive technology has considerably outrun the defensive. No present-day shield will withstand a direct hit by a nuclear weapon. Whether offensive technology overpowers defensive at the limit of achievable technology is another question, and obviously the answer is "It could go either way."
But even if the various "polises" - different operating systems - in Diaspora were surrounded by utterly impermeable defenses, that would create another moral problem, this one even worse: that of an evil polis, where the rules against coercion don't hold, and some ruling class creates and tortures countless trillions of sentient victims. By hypothesis, if defensive technology beats offensive, there is nothing that anyone can do about this evil polis; nothing that can break the defenses.
It would really have sucked if Hell was an analagous situation.
Then again, if information (minds) can be transferred from one domain to another it means
some interaction is possible, so the place isn't completely impenetrable. But it would be pretty tricky if, say, physics was sufficiently different that most physical structures from our universe couldn't survive there.
Simon_Jester wrote:Well, they don't consider the principle of reciprocity to be a basic axiom; they believe that the laws of nature cheat. Vulnerable gods are only going to exist in a universe that doesn't play favorites, and that's not the one that they think they live in.
Picture the cosmos as being like a Looney Toons cartoon, with humanity as the villain, and you have a good image of how typical believers expect human efforts to cross God to go.
The analogy I like best is somebody inside a computer simulation trying to fight somebody who controls the simulation. There's a physically plausible scenario where the principle of reciprocity doesn't apply; you can easily hurt such an entity with a few taps on a keyboard, but it would find it pretty hard (maybe impossible) to hurt you from inside the simulation.
Edit: that might actually be an interesting alternate take on this premise. The most plausible way for humans to beat the malevolent programmer would probably be to find a way to upload ourselves into bodies in the "real universe" in which it exists. Reminds me a little of
this.
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