RE: September 11: International Enough Day

From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Thu Sep 12 2002 - 08:23:22 MDT


>
> At 06:44 PM 9/11/02 -0600, Ben wrote:
>
> >> It is a proud and terrible thing to be one of the
> >> very, very few sentients born before the Singularity
>
> >I don't think that dying before the Singularity is either proud
> or terrible.
> >I definitely don't see the "proud" part -- why be proud about
> happenstance?
>
> Eliezer wrote *born before*, not *died before*. Admittedly, for most of
> those 100 billion or so, it was both.
>
> Damien Broderick

Well, being BORN before the Singularity isn't terrible at all -- if one gets
to PARTICIPATE in the Singularity, it's pretty damn exciting!! Perhaps so
much so that post-Singularity creatures will put themselves into virtual
realities where they get to experience the Singularity advent ;)

It's DYING before the Singularity that's, under some reasonable world-views,
tragic...

Personally, convoluted human creature than I am, I sorta *like* the idea of
working for the Singularity and finding it later in my life, as opposed to
having it given to me.

However, as I said before, I don't really attach much significance to these
fine-grained ethical/aesthetic preferences (be they mine or anyone else's),
which emanate from the specificities of human culture & human biology


-- Ben G






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