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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28724 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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true transcendence through a more spiritual realm

What about uploading?

As far as I'm concerned, that's the essence and goal of transhumanism. Everything else is a distraction. We move swiftly on to posthumanism, building bodies to our liking. You do a neuron-by-neuron gradual, conscious replacement of everything in your brain with transistors or whatever computing material we use by then. Once you're machine-legible, you can either stay in VR or print out a new body and install your brain, or you copy yourself massively, or you add on new capabilities digitally (ranging from Matrix-style accelerated learning to fundamentally increasing one's speed and depth of thought). Or some combination of these.

Now there are formidable technical and political/practical problems with this vision. Who knows how easy it is to augment one's own mind? Will more than 0.001% of the population survive to see this? Does AI eat us for breakfast before we even have a chance to kill each other?

But, if our species survives, there is no alternative to leaving fleshy humanity behind. There's nothing an organic human can do better than a posthuman, uploaded being drawing upon more energy, more mass, more resources. They would be able to think faster, act faster, reproduce faster, be more intelligent, more powerful, more resilient. There's no way our 20 watt brains are at the peak of what's physically possible, less so our bodies.

Imagine being a legacy human in an era of posthumans. You're constantly watched in ways you can't even understand, let alone counterattack. You have no sovereignty, no power, no ability to participate in a cultural life that's beyond the capacity of your senses and intellect. You might as well be a zoo animal. There is no escape except death. If you get on a starship to explore the universe, posthumans will already have gotten there first. You're not going to outrun smaller, faster hardier mechanical bodies. It would be an extremely sad existence to my mind.

I chose the words 'machine-legible' precisely because I know that it epitomizes what some people here don't like. But there are irresistible competitive forces pushing us in this direction. I don't think Ted Kaczynski's vision of technological regression is possible. People naturally want wealth, power, fun, longevity and status. The Epic of Gilgamesh is, to to some extent, a search for immortality. This impulse is deep-seated. People are always going to try to transcend their biological limits and see what they can truly do. Technology isn't going to give us just Star Trek's glass spires and cool toys, it's not going to culminate with a civilization that primarily caters to jumped-up apes.

Take terraforming Mars. The whole idea assumes that humans need water, certain temperature ranges, oxygen, gravity, planets... Why accept such restraints? Why not flock to orbit the stars that provide all this free energy? Why should people live on Earth when they could live on the orbit of Mercury, or closer to the Sun? Isn't it more habitable there? Why should we see Mars as a planet for living on, when it could be cubic kilometres of construction material, inconveniently sitting at the bottom of a gravity well? That's real transhumanism in my book, a radical change to how one sees the world. And it's backed by trend lines in GDP, computing power and so on - every hockey-stick graph that shows us at unprecedented growth.

You're not going to outrun smaller, faster hardier mechanical bodies.

Sure, but those minds are still dependent upon a physical substrate. The uploaded mind isn't floating around in the ether, it's stored in some fashion on a physical computer or in a robot body. And if the machine stops...

But the Committee of the Mending Apparatus now came forward, and allayed the panic with well-chosen words. It confessed that the Mending Apparatus was itself in need of repair.

The effect of this frank confession was admirable.

'Of course,' said a famous lecturer – he of the French Revolution, who gilded each new decay with splendour – 'of course we shall not press our complaints now. The Mending Apparatus has treated us so well in the past that we all sympathize with it, and will wait patiently for its recovery. In its own good time it will resume its duties. Meanwhile let us do without our beds, our tabloids, our other little wants. Such, I feel sure, would be the wish of the Machine.' Thousands of miles away his audience applauded. The Machine still linked them. Under the seas, beneath the roots of the mountains, ran the wires through which they saw and heard, the enormous eyes and ears that were their heritage, and the hum of many workings clothed their thoughts in one garment of subserviency. Only the old and the sick remained ungrateful, for it was rumoured that Euthanasia, too, was out of order, and that pain had reappeared among men.

What about uploading?

Say an LLM trainer (hypothetical future robot-AI-thing) followed you around for 10 years, recording everything you did and said, and then recreated your personality, worldview and identity perfectly, such that you could present it with any problem or situation and it would react the way 'you' would.

Would you kill yourself, safe in the knowledge that you had achieved immortality? There's a viscerally unsatisfying nature to 'uploading' that can't be ignored.

There's a nice short story by Greg Egan that explores this, "Learning to Be Me". I won't spoil it, even though it's older than Russian Federation.

Sounds great, I’ll try to track it down.

I'm with the spiritualists on this one. It is making a copy and then destroying the original. Our original bodies contain an essence and a continuity of existence that is then broken. You can't Ship of Theseus your way out of this by copying neuron by neuron. The copy is not 'you'. 'You' would die in the process, or would coexist with the copy, showing clearly that you are different entities.

I'd be open to regenerative techniques such as gene therapy or even nanites to repair organic tissue indefinitely, but I wouldn't go for a cybernetic version of immortality.

To be honest I'd probably even avoid Star Trek style transporters.

Your continuity of existence is broken every night. Thousands of nerve cells die and you also lose consciousness for hours.

Unless you're a a dualists positing 'souls' that are crucial and somehow distinct from the unique pattern of information in every person's brains, you aren't making much sense.

I won't make an argument to 'souls', but I will place my stake on continuity of existence. There is some loss and gain of brain and other cells and loss of consciousness, but this is not a break in continuity of existence.

I understand this is not something I can logically convince others of. They will have to make their own decisions on what 'they' are and how 'they' can gain immortality.

The brain doesn't stop working entirely at night. I have reason to believe I wake up the same process as I was, which is completely lacking in the case of murder-teleporter, not to mention the LLM scenario.

People who blithely accept non-continuous cloning as acceptable substitute for themselves ought to experience talking to their own clone before being told that they'll be killed right now and it will live on. I think this will disabuse many of any further impulse to claim that's the same thing as going to sleep.

We have zero reason to believe anything beyond the very specific arrangements of matter determines everything about an individual, therefore a perfect copy with sufficient fidelity would be that person.

they'll be killed right now and it will live on.

Why do you think instincts have much to say about thought experiments or sufficiently advanced technology ? They don't. Instincts can't even cope with something as mundane as radiation, or orders of magnitude. We don't have instinctual facility with numbers, there's some evidence that people whose language lack the concept cannot even learn to count.

Meanwhile the survival instinct is ancient and really not that smart.

Nothing about the very specific arrangement of matter explains why there has to be an awareness behind the matter and the electrical processes of the brain. However, as long as it exists, it would be trivial to see if the perfect copy with sufficient fidelity shares that awareness with me. If it doesn't do so while I live, I'm not about to count on it doing so after I die, simple.

(You don't have to bother asking me how I know whether or not the awareness exists. It's self-evident to me and I'm not a solipsist so I don't believe yours isn't self-evident to you, either. I consider the denial of self that's common in rationalist circles to be stubborn attempts to does-not-compute reality into the bounds of their theories. Call dualists incoherent all you want, as long as you have the guts to admit you don't have the answers either.)

You do a neuron-by-neuron gradual, conscious replacement of everything in your brain

That's the point of this caveat. IMO it's still a huge gamble, but as @self_made_human discussed above, if there's even a chance it works it seems like a good gamble to make. I'm conflicted about the spiritual repercussions though.

I don't think Ted Kaczynski's vision of technological regression is possible. People naturally want wealth, power, fun, longevity and status.

It's pretty funny that a mathematician with a 150 IQ couldn't see doing away with industry was implausible from just the game theory angle, however..

Why should we see Mars as a planet for living on, when it could be cubic kilometres of construction material, inconveniently sitting at the bottom of a gravity well? That's real transhumanism in my book, a radical change to how one sees the world.

Indeed. Let me quote imo the least appreciated contemporary British philosopher:

Conspicuously missing from the public space debate, therefore, is any frank admission that, “(let’s face it folks)—planets are misallocations of matter which don’t really work. No one wants to tell you that, but it’s true. You know that we deeply respect the green movement, but when we get out there onto the main highway of solar-system redevelopment, and certain very rigid, very extreme environmentalist attitudes—Gaian survivalism, terrestrial holism, planetary preservationism, that sort of thing—are blocking the way forward, well, let me be very clear about this, that means jobs not being created, businesses not being built, factories closing down in the asteroid belt, growth foregone. Keeping the earth together means dollars down the drain—a lot of dollars, your dollars. There are people, sincere people, good people, who strongly oppose our plans to deliberately disintegrate the earth. I understand that, really I do, you know—honestly—I used to feel that way myself, not so long ago. I, too, wanted to believe that it was possible to leave this world in one piece, just as it has been for four billion years now. I, too, thought the old ways were probably best, that this planet was the place we belonged, that we should—and could—still find some alternative to pulling it apart. I remember those dreams, really I do, and I still hold them close to my heart. But, people, they were just dreams, old and noble dreams, but dreams, and today I’m here to tell you that we have to wake up. Planets aren’t our friends. They’re speed-bumps on the road to the future, and we simply can’t afford them anymore. Let’s back them up digitally, with respect, yes, even with love, and then let’s get to work …” [Thunderous applause]

entire essay in pdf ^^

Thought-provoking stuff. I wish he'd be clearer and say 'New Space is wedged between their grand, extremely based and megalomaniacal visions of stellar-scale deconstruction and the tiny, incoherent things that are politically acceptable to announce'. If that was the message. I'm not sure anybody's too certain about what Land is saying. Perhaps not even Nick himself: https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/1334309844086480896#m

In any event, it's locked in. It couldn't matter less what the hoi-polloi want - the planets will be disassembled regardless either by us, by someone or something. Or if not, then only because it's not efficient and there are more economical uses of resources.

People seem extremely keen on the "nothing ever happens" philosophy - some form of stasis.

If that was the message. I'm not sure anybody's too certain about what Land is saying.

I think he's pretty certain what he meant but I also think if you read him avidly rather than with apprehension, you're probably bonkers.

Given how things have worked out in the past, it could very well be that the project for deconstruction of planets will get off the ground at the same time someone figures out making your own pocket universes using a particle accelerator, ingenuity and an unbelievable amount of chutzpah.

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