From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Mon Feb 21 2005 - 01:23:27 MST
> Collective Volition as a concept I think is simple - it is those
> common elements of our personal volitions which would statistically
> dominate some hypothetical survey of some contextual group. In this
> case the context is some society (possibly the entire world).
> Moreover, he pushes the problem to "what we would want if we were
> indefinably better".
Well, an obvious problem, pointed out many times on this list, is that most
people in the world are religious.
For a religious person, the ideal "person they would want to be" would be
someone who more closely adhered to the beliefs of their religious faith...
And the ideal world of this ideal religious person is going to be an ideal
world according to their particular religion.
But different religions contradict each other... and they also contradict my
secular, transhumanist belief system...
Looking around me at the actual human race, I don't see all that much
convergence among human desires for the ideal world, nor among the desires
that humans would have if they were replaced by their ideals...
Put bluntly and colloquially... the collective volition of the universe race
would probably be psycho and schizo...!
-- Ben G
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