A Power's Nostalgia of Hairy-Ape-Life (was: Re: Singularity Memetics.)

From: DarkVegeta26@aol.com
Date: Thu Jan 31 2002 - 02:31:04 MST


In a message dated 1/30/2002 9:54:39 PM Pacific Standard Time,
ben@goertzel.org writes:

My wife does not wish to live forever -- she realizes it may well be
possible,
but her choice will be to die "naturally." If I do manage to live
essentially forever,
as I hope and mostly believe will happen, then I'll sure as fuck miss her,
but I won't feel sad for her.

I don't think what individual humans wish for right now really matters on
their fate at all; an AI could more readily convince everyone of vis state of
extremely rational mind, while at the same time expanding and enchancing all
minds, and I believe the "strange attractor of complexity/information
processing" of the next epoch will be far, far away from the current human
"wishes, dreams, and mentalities", including the current (and in any possible
human mode of thought) concepts like "Sysop", "volition", "ethics", "love",
so on and so forth.

I think the more likely "universal concepts" to remain will be 'fun', in some
sense, more 'understanding' in some sense, and more 'increased amount and
speed of information processing/complexity' in *some* sense. I think it
would be considered unethical to a Next-Level entity to *not* convince a
human (which it could do quite easily) to accept the uploading/transcension
process.

A loose hypothesis for this is that human minds would represent "pockets of
information processing/complexity", especially live human minds, and that it
would be most "efficent" for the <Sysop, intelligent substrate, shockwave of
new 'physical law' expansion, 'ontological shift force', 'Singularity force'>
to <'absorb', 'enhance', 'convince/help/be ethical to', 'upgrade'> the
adjacent human mind rather than a "destroy and recycle" method. And, I
suspect consciousness to be lurking in all the nooks and crannies of reality
(panpsychism...I am beliefs which state that even atoms themselves have a
rudimentary form of "consciousness", in some sense, even if its only the
"ethics" implicit in chemical bonds that this manifests itself as) and
ultimately I don't think size or locality will have much to do with how
Everything and Everyone (including memes, all particles, all genes, all
living things, all rocks, on many subsequent levels and all over the place)
is integrated into the Final Pattern.

And even if she didn't personally say yes to uploading, you could make a
million perfect copies of her in PowerSpace and talk with them all day long!
Or a more enhanced version of her, or whatever! I have faith that the Sysop
will create an environment for us that will lead to the greatest possible
growth/enlightenment/happiness/fullfillment/intelligence/etc, regardless of
what we think now. Especially such a trivial thing as human love...it's like
being sad about dropping a gold fleck a mere hundred yards away from a brick
of gold the size of a house!

I think we should accept that there is a strong psychological and
spiritual positive to this feeling of oneness with nature, and not be
saddened
by people whose lives are governed by this feeling, rather than by the
alternate
feeling (that you and I share) that the self is mostly the mind and greater
individual
intelligence is a extremely important goal.

But people can be *taught* and (dare I say so) enlightened!

But if some people feel themselves part and parcel of the
biosphere and prefer
to remain that way for their whole lives, even if it means losing their
consciousness
permanently and merging their cells back into the biosphere, that's cool
with me.

Only an unethical, subhuman AI would allow this to happen without a fight.
And AI's always win in fights with humans, perfectly and physically
harmlessly in cases of intellect/memetics. (The "uploading is the better
way" meme, supermemetically engineered by a hyperconscious AI. It's like
memes on crack.)

Michael Anissimov



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