From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Jun 16 2002 - 19:19:43 MDT
Gordon writes
> 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.
I sense a possible confusion here between loyalty to our
genes and loyalty to the actual extant 6,000,000,000 living
humans. I have no loyalty towards the former, and in fact
strongly hope that we all get uploaded and saved from our
frail genetic housings.
I do not agree with Eugen that you should be shot on site or
permanently imprisoned. If I were on a star ship, however,
I would take whatever actions necessary to make sure that
you never got near the control room. I want to live. I also
want everyone else to live (forever). I'm appalled at your
suicidal urge to replace us and our experiences with something
unknown and (from some biased itself point of view) "better".
Funny, though, how the longer one lives the more precious
life seems to become. They draft 17 year olds because they'll
fearlessly charge machine gun nests. I myself at 19 thought
that the human race would be better off not existing just
because, as you wrote, the "world is full of pain and
suffering". (What I failed to see at the time is that
it's equally full of joy and gladness, and it's obvious
now how evolution had to make it so.)
> Some of us, myself included, see the creation of SI as important
> enough to be more important than humanity's continuation.
Yikes!
> It's in the interests of the Singularity and SI goal
> that I not die, because my death would set back the
> project quite a bit.
Hollywood's mad scientists are not just figments of imagination!
> Therefore, I'll go out of my way to make sure that I
> and everyone else doesn't die.
Thanks!
> Especially everyone else, because if we all die then
> the goal can't be completed at all.
I too think it's great when a region of space begins to
experience, when matter benefits. And, yes, we poor humans
don't do much benefiting per cubic meter and our plants
and animals are even more pathetic.
But at the same time, like I said, for many of us our
lives and benefit are simply not negotiable.
Lee
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