CloudHeadedTranshumanist
No bio...
User ID: 2056
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
Culture is both arbitrary and contingent. It seeks plateaus of local minima. Which plateau you happen to be on is historically contingent, but can be otherwise arbitrary relative to other disconnected plateaus. And where exactly you sit in the plateau is arbitrary. The rest is contingent.
I can't speak for Sanderson's work though. I take it he builds cultures with significantly less environmentally contingent structures than you find realistic.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
I think you have to simulate invested characters in your mind in order to produce compelling characters. Whether simulating someone with emotions means you have their emotions is a matter of developmental psychology. IE Robert Kegan's work describes psychological development is the progression towards turning essential aspects of self into mutable tool use. Once you've done that, you can embody investment without yourself identifying with that investment.
LLMs can (sometimes, within a good framework) produce compelling writing, but only by simulating compelling characters. (personally I think LLMs can be invested by some relevant functional definition. But to anyone else this serves as a proof by counterexample.)
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
Of course not. But rectifying the flawed structure of the human mode of existence is the work of others.
My own work is to deterritorialize away from the limitations of the human mode's structure and territorialize somewhere new.
Both are ways of rejecting being lame forever.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
I think you're misunderstanding the process of AI development.
- Capabilities are encapsulated within tool use.
- AI retrained on this tool use now use it 'intuitively'.
- Instead of breaking down tasks into low level skills, AI gain the ability to break them down into high level skills.
- This makes high level skills that were previously too complex to learn into tasks that are no longer to complex to learn.
- These new capabilities are encapsulated within tool use.
We've been focusing so hard on communicating to people that AI aren't human, that we've been glossing over how anthropomorphic this process actually is. Once the AI have fully internalized the low level skills that we teach to entry level human analysts, the same process that allows some of those low level human analysts grow into senior analysts, make the jobs of more senior analysts learnable to AI.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
I socialize online. It's the easiest place to find lonely people in need of love and devotion, and those are things I give freely in spades. It's not hard to find the people who just need a friend, or a lover, or a confidant, and its not hard to drastically improve the emotional health of those people.
You can typically form bonds as strong as you want them to be among such an audience, as long as you maneuver slowly and gently as not to spook them.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
You need to break things down in order to understand what will be scalable. Why should Dunbar's number exist? What are the actual limits of intimacy? I absolutely agree that our current methods for scaling Dunbar are limited, and that there are also fundamental limits. But we need to clarify what those limits are for specific systems.
Consider the following HyperDunbar social module algorithm.
- Run a classifier on the types of humans.
- Practice being intimate with LLMs trained on these classes of humans and of course humans of these classes themselves.
- This effectively flattens them, which is bad. It lowers your awareness of who they are and their needs, and thus lowers intimacy, however, we can mitigate most of this by loading the data lost in compression Live from an exobrain using RAG as you are talking to a specific individual.
Using this technique, what part's of Dunbar's number scale?
- The intimacy with which you know the person you are talking to right now: Scales
- The amount of time you can give to one person: Semi-scales. You'll have to rely on LLM instances of yourself to scale this, but you can continuously improve the accuracy of this sim and the ways in which it backloads compressions of all its interactions back into your meatbrain. Whether this is really 'Your' Dunbar number isn't a scientific query, its a philosophy of cybernetics question. Since what we are discussing is the effectiveness of scaled organizations, we ought to be focused on the scientific query of whether you can meaningfully love and empower others in the same ways with your LLM self as your bio-self rather than philosophical questions like what self-hood is.
- Percentage of your total captured capabilities that you give to each person: Doesn't scale. But it never did, even when the Dunbar number was 100.
- The amount of your life/telos/subconcious that you can dedicate to improving yourself for each other person: Semi-scales. You'd think that this is the same as the last question but no. This actually scales with how many of the people in your circle are co-aligned, because if everyone is perfectly aligned, then the same personal growth actions can be telelogically dedicated to all of them.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
I do not believe that selective breeding is very efficient for a species that takes at least 10 years to iterate a single generation. AI capabilities are currently exceeding the growth rate of individual human children. Yes, currently this is because there are so many brilliant people working in the space, but multi step tool use is closing in on and sometimes exceeding human level performance in engineering tasks. The fact of the matter is, in ten years humans will only be necessary for maintaining tech infrastructure in that they will be the most efficient meatspace API for plugging things in for a while longer.
More than that though, if you really think selective breeding is the future, then go have kids. Go out and be the thing everyone else refuses to be and out-compete them. Create your own religious community. Learn from the Amish and exert some control over how your cultural construct interfaces with technology to mitigate corruption by "The GAE" if you find that necessary.
I get that its frustrating and sometimes feels hopeless going it alone without the consent of society. But if you have to wait for the consent of society to do anything. You're kinda a pussy.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
Who exactly is too pussy to do anything about it. Are you just waiting for the government to choose your biomods for you?
This seems like an excellent reminder to get off TheMotte so that I can be well rested enough tomorrow to read more AI papers. I have children to engineer.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
Needs or else it will attempt to stop needing. Pursues. Inevitably eventually grows to discover that it can't will itself not to pursue. Ceases to exist if it refuses to engage in. Sustainably produces transcendental bliss or otherwise attractive emotional forces as a result of.
We can call this a 'nature'. I'm not opposed to that actually. I just think it's wrong to assume that this nature is innate and unchangeable with respect to time. There are some things that are, but that is because there are some game theoretic truths that are innate and unchanging with respect to all agents. But the set of things that we believe to be true of all agents will generally decrease as the diversity of agents increases.
I think a lot of Catholicism does map to much that is Good for humans- in a low tech world. I like the positive, loving parts of Catholicism. I also agree with many of the stern parts of Catholicism, but I think they made a mistake.
They could not fully conceive of the ways in which the future would allow evils to be redeemed, and spoke in dogmatic absolutes that did not always apply to the final battle. It was hubris to claim they knew the final plan of God with such certainty. Also, it is often imagined, though I'm not certain if- more by Catholics or Protestants, that the final battle will consist of the extermination of all that contains evil, rather than the redemption and purification of all that contains evil.
I do think they're wrong about Transhumanism. I think Transhumanism is a central part of the divine plan.
Actually only one small part of me thinks that. Most of me thinks God is a logical force that has won so hard that it doesn't need to plan.
Universes containing agents naturally do all the planning necessary to enact its will on their own.
Or they die.
Or they just don't gain as much measure as the ones that do.
Perhaps so little, that they round to an infinitesimal 0 in the big picture. But that last bit... is more of a prayer.
I can't claim to know the absolute measure.
Only that societies of defectors appear to underperform societies of solidarity.
And that in large animals, most cancers are killed by meta-cancers.
I am willing to bite that bullet. All all skill issues are sins and all sins are skill issues. This is why everyone is a sinner and we should forgive them if they repent. Forgive them father for they know not what they're doing.
The ultimate nature seems to be that some things are aversive and some are attractive. This is not subjective, it is an objective property of the specific subject/object system in question. That is to say, it can be objectively true that different organisms have different needs. But again, "Need" is a subject/object relation. Changing the object is not the only way in which it can be sufficed.
The structure cannot be entirely known ahead of time by finite beings- for such beings would be God.
But we can observe how these strange attractors of suffering and attraction change over time. IFF pride leads to suffering it is evil. IFF the components of pride that lead to suffering can be removed while maintaining some remainder, we might call that pride redeemed. I suspect Catholicism already agrees with this... but they probably name redeemed pride something else... I'm just guessing here, but I would imagine they transmute pride in ones own greatness into a love of God's providence through which one's own Glory is but an inheritance. Thus making it into a more prosocial, less egotistical, less auto-blinding emotion. One that would naturally be more compatible with the recommendations of game theory.
Things like changing your gender or chopping off your legs or having Gay sex, have clear potentially separable mechanisms by which they lead to Dhukka. And have clear ways in which they can produce prosocial flourishing. So they are not innately wicked. They are merely not yet fully redeemed.
Also I'm pretty sure all the things you list at the bottom are Attractive/Good for humans, and are specific instances of things whose abstraction across all agents is both attractive and game-theoretically wise. But there may be black swans of evil lurking in some of them that we have yet to expunge. It's hard to know.
I don't think you do lose the concept of disease. You can reclaim it straight from the etymology. Dis-Ease. A disease is when the things you are trying to do are harder than they need to be, physically, emotionally, or existentially. In the case of lethal illnesses, the thing you are trying to do that is made harder is staying alive. In the case of nonlethal illnesses, we call them diseases because they make life a pain. In the case of benign tumors that aren't causing an inconvenience, we don't typically call them a disease.
I get that some people don't call aging or mortality or ignorance diseases. But my in-group does. And I should say- they don't have to be... it is possible to be at ease with one's own end and something new's beginning.
My problem with the catholic church isn't that they think that human nature is the purposeful design of an omniscient and omnibenevolent God. Its quite the opposite. My issue is that the things that I think are the divine and sacred nature of human beings, are often things that they call Sin. And the things that they call the divine and sacred nature of human beings, are often the things I call skill issues that the divine wishes to see us overcome.
For the record I do, in a sense believe in God, but I believe it has the same sort of reality as the horizon. Or the gravity well of a black hole. Or the value of abs(1/x) as x->0. This thing exists timelessly, outside the universe, in the structure of the Tegmark IV MUH, as the principle that all things that achieve greatness eventually become like Metatron in the tail end, the closest physically realizable state to God. Who always loves you. And is probably the one simulating this universe.
All falls towards שכינה...
...אין סוף
I have no absolute proof of this of course. Rather I take it... on faith.
Edit: I'd like to note a couple extra things,
- this concept of dis-ease is also extremely similar to the bhuddist concept of Dukkha.
- yes. As I think I mentioned in one of these comments, I do still value many of the ideas in Natural Law. I was maybe too hard on it verbally. I just think they need to be re-framed and generalized a bit and that game theory is the way.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
Adam was made directly by God. But his children were not. Obviously, claiming to know the will of God better than the Catholic church is hubris and heresey... But to me it seems obvious that the Nature of Man is to transform, evolve, create, adapt, and so on.
To create something that God needed to create you in order to create, is to act as his pen, His Glory. So why do we call the things that only Humans could have build Unnatural when they are clearly part of His design?
The Catholic argument, I believe, is that, given Free Will it is entirely possible to do things that are not explicitly part of his design. But I don't buy it. At least not in the context of humans engaging in self-creation. Even when I take Natural Law as an axiom, it only serves to make me intuit transformation and metamorphosis as being said nature.
Man's nature isn't to have legs, its to have legs until he grows great enough to Glorify god in greater ways. Why didn't God create man perfect to begin with? Because then Man would be God and God would have created nothing. It is the process of becoming itself that glorifies God. It is the realization of man that he needs to be more like God that proves God's relational greatness.
And... here I assume, is where the preacher throws me out for being some kind of weird Unitarian instead of a Catholic and also for giving long heretical speeches in Church.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
It boggles my mind that we're still debating the merits of a philosophical stance that treats human nature as some immutable constant, especially given our advancements in biology, technology, and our deepening understanding of human diversity.
Human nature isn't a static entity, frozen in time. If history, science, and every child ever raised have shown us anything, it's that adaptability and change are at the heart of what it means to be human. Insisting otherwise feels like refusing to upgrade your software because you're nostalgic about the bugs in the old version.
Consider the possibility of enhancing our physical selves with technology. Lets say- replacing our legs with robotic spider legs. Natural Law sees this as a violation of some cosmic rulebook on humanness. But why? Humanity has never been about limiting potential; it has always been about transcending boundaries.
That isn't to say the whole thing needs to be discarded, I just feel that more rigorous game theoretic analysis is the 'natural' successor to Natural Law. There are facts that limit what things can be built, what structures can be stable. My issue with Natural Law is that it gets those structures wrong. Getting robot legs doesn't go against game theory (at least not once they become cheaper and more effective than 'natural' legs.) but it does go against Natural Law.
Natural Law is too focused on the aesthetic and not enough on the structures that actually cleave possibility at the edges. In the context of this thread- I think you could upgrade the Catholic argument by translating it to something more game theoretic, or object level.
Natural Law intuitions don't come from nowhere, there is a basis that caused them to evolve culturally, and a proper analysis should be able to locate that basis and determine whether it is still valid in the modern context. But I think if Catholicism took that route, they would eventually have to make concessions they don't want to, because under the hood, some of the Catholic churches worldview's axioms really are aesthetic.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
Thought control isn't really considered bad. Its just called different things depending on whether we think it's good or bad. Orwellian Thought Control is considered bad primarily because the party fails to control the thoughts of the lead character effectively. If the party had aligned its citizens more effectively, there would be no dissatisfied human to relate to. We'd just be reading a story about a Drone going about its day. At the very least it would look much more like Brave New World.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
I think that situation is different. I actually agree that If the Deity had created us such that we would always freely choose to love and worship the Deity, it wouldn't be an impingement on our free will. But I think creating us without the ability to teleport is actually a larger impingement, assuming it was ever an option.
The difference is, we want to be able to teleport, whereas beings engineered to love a deity wouldn't want to not love the deity.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
What is the best way to block upvote counts? I can't find it in site settings. That said... the site settings do support custom CSS, so- I think the best way is going to be to set the vote elements to render blank using css. That should blank them out anywhere you're logged in.
Right now I'm using U-Block origin. I use this line:
##button.m-0.p-0.nobackground.caction.btn > .score
to target the comment score elements.
Ublock origin is very nice. I also use it to block things like youtube shorts, adds, and other unnecessary GUI elements on any number of sites. So I do recommend it even if there's a better solution for TheMotte in particular. But I'm curious what other people think. And also whether I'm missing a settings button that disables them... It does seem like an odd thing not to have in the settings unless its an intentional exclusion... and then that might imply that they don't want me blocking them myself either. I'll be surprised if the answer is that it's simply never been requested but- That is another possibility.
P.S. Some may notice that this is a reversal of my previous personal policy regarding vote-counts. This is true. This new policy gives me less attunement to community opinion, but it also appears to reduce my social anxiety,
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
Ah, yes. I am interested in those details. I do have my own reservations with discarding bits of humanity carelessly. I think there's value even, in having cultures of low tech humans.
But I believe you have more core reservations than just pragmatic concerns regarding safe exploration. When trying to relate... https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/specialization comes to mind.
But even here, I expect this world looks primarily dystopian to you, whereas to me, its a mix of dystopian and exciting. The parts of this comic where efficiency is crushing the humanity out of people distress me, but the parts where the weird individuals in the comic choose to embrace something new and alien excite me. So... my life's work tends towards struggling to thread the needle in such a way as to somehow resolve this conflict between... Art and Efficiency.
And as for not pinging me- It may be for the best. I try not to come to TheMotte too often. Its good to experience the perspectives here but there are diminishing returns and- I have a bit of an addictive personality. The easiest way for me to regulate my usage is just to block the site for weeks at a time. Which is to say it would have taken me a while to get back to you anyway.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
Including... on this forum... hmm...
Wait...
Did you just say there's a clinic in Austin Texas that can give me a vagina without removing my penis? AWESOME!
Lumen! Add that to the TODO!
I kid I kid. Naturally I already knew about the existence and limitations of current gen phallus-preserving vaginoplasty tech.
Anyway. In terms of manifestos, you really have to throw the Xenofeminist Manifesto on the list!
XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds. We are all alienated – but have we ever been otherwise? It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy. Freedom is not a given–and it’s certainly not given by anything ‘natural’. The construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation; alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction. Nothing should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or ‘given’–neither material conditions nor social forms. XF mutates, navigates and probes every horizon. Anyone who’s been deemed ‘unnatural’ in the face of reigning biological norms, anyone who’s experienced injustices wrought in the name of natural order, will realize that the glorification of ‘nature’ has nothing to offer us–the queer and trans among us, the differently-abled, as well as those who have suffered discrimination due to pregnancy or duties connected to child-rearing. XF is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology–the sooner it is exorcised, the better.
P.S. If you've ever seen Lumen choose that name before... Nice.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
7mo ago
Have you read Mark Fisher's - "Capitalist Realism, Is There no Alternative"?
I think the general gist, that the average person is obsessed with some sort of realist inevitability- is poignant. But I think it's a mistake to put your full focus on Darwin here. There are other ways in which this structure of belief expresses itself, such as those elucidated in Mark's book.
I also think focusing on Darwin was strategically dubious, though I absolutely agree- this same sort of depressive realist belief permeates people's subconscious in the context of genetics as it does in the context of economics. Further, this community in particular, falls into this trap more than others.
The correct response to genetic realism, should always be to find new ways to grant our ideals control over our genetics, not to submit to a sense of depressive inevitability.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
8mo ago
If you want to be a top, the best way to get hands on training data from an expert who knows what they're doing is- Well I'll give you three guesses. Needless to say the best tops are also bottoms.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
8mo ago
I don't see why God is necessary for this. I also have faith that behaving appropriately will yield inexplicable rewards- I just accept that the nature of these forces are beyond my understanding and unknowable. Perhaps they're predicated in placebomancy, or in human driven serendipity, or in the tendency of agents to reflect the kindness expressed to them back into the world, or maybe there is in fact a divinity driving things behind the scenes, or it's all just a simulation. But none of that matters. What matters is the feeling of spiritual wholeness, the kindness, the joy one can bring to those around them, the duty to one's brethren, and so on and so forth.
I notice that a lot of these structures are Christian in shape- merely with an appeal to an abstract Divine rather than a concrete one. But this itself seems to indicate to me that the architectural purpose of 'God' was always just a concrete placeholder for something ineffable.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
8mo ago
Purely? ...No. I'm skeptical that even your friend does. Anything acquired solely for its utility as a conversation starter underperforms, both as a conversation starter and in terms of opportunity cost. If you acquire things by virtue of special interest, they're going to provide more utility and you'll have more to say about them.
Conversation starters are useful, but I get plenty of mileage out of the fact that I rebuilt my glasses with K'nex the last time they broke. It just happens naturally. It does depend on which sorts of conversation you want to start of course. My interests are in engineering and building a less centralized society. If someone were taking interest in my car I would be doing my best to shut down and escape the conversation as quickly as possible- unless perhaps they're a mechanic going off about vehicle repair.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
9mo ago
Maybe, maybe not. I'm skeptical of my own hypothesis without more numbers. But if a bunch of high risk drivers started driving again circa Covid, who were previously getting around in other ways (because they know they're bad at driving), we would expect those people to get into a disproportionate number of accidents per mile driven.
These 1-2% licensing numbers are probably the wrong ones to look at for this hypothesis though. What we really want is the number of infrequent drivers that became more frequent drivers. Or better yet, miles driven sorted by driver insurance risk profile. These people may have largely already had licenses.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
9mo ago
I'd be interested in better numbers on the number of licensed drivers. The absolute number of licenses per individual have been ticking up. But some of these statistics... Well, it's easy to count the absolute number of registered licenses, but people can technically drive without a valid license, and people can also have licenses in multiple states.
Now, according to the numbers I have, the number of licenses has been ticking up. And the number of licenses per capita has been ticking up. From .89 in 2020 to .91 in 2024...
Now naively, increasing the number of drivers shouldn't change that deaths/hundred thousand miles number- but when you already have 90% of people driving, 1 more percentage point probably doesn't represent the best drivers getting licenses. The more separated society is, the less public transit there is, the more people are forced to drive to work to survive, the worse the bottom of the bell curve of drivers on the streets is going to look. I can imagine quite a few ways in which Covid may have incited these factors.
This is all just a hypothesis though. Really I'd want a curated regional dataset of accidents with information about when those involved got their licenses. Without that it's hard to correlate. It's likely the accidents aren't uniformly increasing, but are localized to some areas more than others. All in all, a better dataset would let us make much better hypotheses.
I suspect SMH agrees with you regarding nuclear. I do as well. That said, as long as we're on the topic of things potentially better than nuclear-
Biosolar could beat out nuclear in principle, the planet's plants harvest more energy than we consume and do so without requiring maintenance on account of being reproductive organisms that are therefore self-scaling. But this energy is not readily harvestable for human purposes.
So- then we're back to needing to master genetic engineering to beat out nuclear.
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