torsdagen den 10 maj 2001 16:55 Emlyn wrote:
> More seriously, you have an implicit assumption here that survival of the
> species, or survival of intelligent life, or some otherwise defined class,
> is our "supergoal" (to borrow some jargon). Many here would argue that this
> is fundamentally at odds with extropianism, which has a more
> individualistic outlook... we would save ourselves, at the cost of the long
> term good of the species perhaps. Although it is not at all clear that this
> is a required tradeoff.
Exactly. I would say we owe no allegiance to any abstraction, be it
'humanity', 'Homo sapiens', 'western civilization', <insert suitable national
state> or even 'progress'. Abstractions are abstractions and should not be
regarded as goals in themselves. On the other hand, I think most of us think
that progress is good because it benefits us and enables more valued things
to come into existence and that it is a good thing if our species/descendant
species survive since we care about the survival of ourselves, our children
and our creations.
> > Death is recycling, and nothing is wrong with recycling. Do not be so
> > fond
>
> of
>
> > these worthless evolved phobias of death. The focus must be on life, and
>
> death
>
> > is not the opposite of it, just another aspect of the optimization
>
> process.
>
> Death is death is death. Natural selection is all well and good, it's
> gotten us this far. However, it's capricious, and it's cruel. The idea that
> intelligent beings would willingly submit themselves to it's tempest, given
> the option to not, is ludicrous.
I'm not certain the choice of nonbeing is always wrong, but it should be a
choice, not a necessity. I think we are in the long run aided more by the
love of life than the aversion of death - fear of becoming dead is good for
making us avoid individual actions and specific threats, but love of life is
a better guide to the more complex and long-range choices.
> I think the point that you are wanting to make is that natural selection is
> more efficient than the alternative, whatever that may be. I don't think
> that's necessarily so. The idea of becoming transhuman is that we can shape
> ourselves as we see fit, and as is best to meet the challenges of our
> environment. We can use many tools to do this, simulated natural selection
> amongst them. Plain vanilla natural selection (ie: kill lots of intelligent
> beings, repeat) is an extremely slow way to improve our fitness in the
> universe. It would be ludicrous to suppose, for example, that you could put
> a population of practically immortal transhumans next to a population of
> naturally evolving humans, and expect the "natural" humans to compete.
>
> Evolution is fine, fabulous. Natural selection is clumsy, slow, tyranical,
> and incredibly inefficient. Take it down from the pedestal.
Exactly. Whether evolution works well or not depends a lot on the fitness
landscape - if it is smooth and has a good kind of modularity it works well.
But we want to move into new fitness landscapes, where evolution would be a
less suitable guide.
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