From: Gordon Worley (redbird@rbisland.cx)
Date: Sun Jun 16 2002 - 10:17:39 MDT
On Saturday, June 15, 2002, at 07:38 PM, Samantha Atkins wrote:
> How can or should one be "indifferent" to one's species and to the
> survival of all existing higher sentients on this planet? If one is for
> increasing intelligence (how one defines that and why it is the only or
> most primary value are good questions) and the increase of sentience, I
> fail to see how one can be cavalier about the destruction of all
> currently known sentients. How can one stand for intelligence and yet
> not care about billions of intelligent beings that already exist?
First off, attachment to humanity is a bias that prevents rational
thought. I and others have broken this attachment to keep it from
clouding our thinking. It is the result of being genetically related to
the rest of humanity, where the death of all human genes is a big enough
problem to cause a person to give up a goal or die to save humanity.
This kind of thinking, usually, is good because it keeps the average
person from thinking it's okay to blow up Earth. This same kind of
thinking, though, can be bad if it makes us overly cautious and Luddites.
Some of us, myself included, see the creation of SI as important enough
to be more important than humanity's continuation. Human beings, being
self aware, do present more of an ethical delima than cows if it turns
out that you might be forced to sacrifice some of them. I would like to
see all of humanity make it into a post Singularity existence and I am
willing to help make this a reality.
-- Gordon Worley `When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty http://www.rbisland.cx/ said, `it means just what I choose redbird@rbisland.cx it to mean--neither more nor less.' PGP: 0xBBD3B003 --Lewis Carroll
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