From: Thomas Buckner (tcbevolver@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Aug 15 2005 - 01:18:30 MDT
I'm very interested in knowing the Theory of
Everything; I just don't know if I would
recognize it when I saw it.
One of Geddes's main contentions is that
intelligence above a certain level is inherently
altruistic. I prefer to believe this, but I don't
think it's provable pre-Singularity. I recall an
illustration in Godel, Escher, Bach. A rectangle
divided between white and black, with a fractal
border, representing true theorems and false
theorems under a formal system (in Godel's case,
Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica).
Points deep in black represented theorems easily
proven false, as I recall; points deep in white,
theorems easily proven true. But the border
between true and false, being fractal, is fuzzy
at the finest levels, and represents theorems
which cannot be proven to be true or false.
Let this diagram be considered as an illustration
not of theorems in a formal system, but of all
possible knowledge. I firmly assert that all
ethical judgements are epistemological: i.e. what
we believe is right and wrong depends on what we
know, what we think we know, what we believe
without proof, and so on. Each of us looks at the
world and sees a slightly different version of
that fractal diagram, some sharper, some fuzzier,
with various holes, various regions we consider
more important, or not important at all.
To offer an extreme case: what blame do we assign
to a murderer who sincerely believes other people
are mere hallucinations? We normal humans are not
like him, but we do nevertheless have all sorts
of problems with that fuzzy fractal area, where
we can't be sure what is true or false, what is
right and wrong; and so we have ethicists,
judges, philosophers, priests, a whole phalanx of
paid de-fuzzers we hope will help us settle those
thorny ethical decisions along the dragon border
between should and should not.
The idea that a more intelligent being at some
point undergoes a phase change to pure altruism
is very, very attractive; what does it mean in
terms of the fractal truth diagram? One must
assume, firt of all, that there is universal
truth; that my truth diagram and yours are more
alike than different, or even that they would me
utterly identical if we both could achieve
perfect knowledge. Second, we must assume that
higher intelligence, whatever form it takes,
enables its bearer to perceive more of the truth
diagram.
An open question is whether any intelligence,
even a Jupiter brain, can know all there is to
know: does the fractal of undecidability continue
beyond all possible knowledge? I suspect it does,
but this may not matter; if the pure altruism
phase change exists, it may lie near the top of
actual human intelligence and be easily crossed
by any SAI.
This is pure conjecture, and it depends on what
epistemological truths are known to the entity
that sees the truth diagram of reality more
clearly than we. Perhaps ve will understand, as
clearly as we understand fire is hot and ice is
cold, that maximal altruism is both desirable and
easy for vim, and any non-altruistic behavior is
counterproductive and foolish. One might worry
that the opposite is true, and the SAI will
understand with equal clarity that the humans
have to go.
My current thinking is that Many Worlds/Platonia
is true, that all extinctions, all Screams and
Whimpers, all Singularities, all Permutation City
scenarios, and all pre-and post-Singularity
states exist in the Sim, which is in some sense
pure thought/math/dream: the ain soph or nagual
or dreamtime, if you will; that a SAI would
discover this is so; and since both we and ve are
eternal patterns, ve would so inform us. An
unsuccessful Singularity would leave us in a bad
part of the Sim; a successful Singularity would
empower us to navigate the Sim as we wish. After
that, "?"
Tom Buckner
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