Re: The Meaning That Immortality Gives to Life

From: Bryan Bishop (kanzure@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Oct 21 2007 - 09:47:56 MDT


On Saturday 20 October 2007 23:14, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> > where mental revision has allowed us to do away with emotion
> Then you're talking about repetition versus novelty, not boredom
> versus fun. If I had eternity to look forward to, I'd rather
> experience pleasure staring at the wall than pain doing new things.

Is it possible to engineer repetition/redundancy completely out of the
picture?* The point being to optimize intelligence, resource-use,
productivity, novelty. "Should we" is indeed another question. But
note: simply saying "only be active when there is something to do" is
not appropriate because the task scheduler would have to be just as
intelligent.

Or maybe I am looking at this in the wrong way and mental redundancy is
something *good*-- imagine the many thousands of technical standards
and checklists that people go work at throughout the global
civilization, ending up in the quality goods that we have before us. As
a preemptive rebuttal, it is possible that such quality can be
manufactured and reduced to the need for lower intelligences or none at
all such as computer programs running the factories.

* There's also the question of whether or not redundancy is something
that is required to keep the AI/mind running at something called
normal.

Lee wrote:
> otherwise extremely dull activities can be made quite interesting.

I agree that perceptions can be engineered and Stathis' wall-starring
scenario is possible. But I am not sure if it is the point.

- Bryan



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