Re: gods, AI and the human ego.

Brent Allsop (allsop@fc.hp.com)
Tue, 3 Aug 1999 17:53:42 -0600 (MDT)

Rob Harris Cen-IT <Rob.Harris@bournemouth.gov.uk> said:

> If you were interested in seeing these species in action. I'm
> sure they're not very exciting to an SI. I know ! Lets get a petri
> dish and grow a load of bacteria from some undiscovered primal pool
> ! yeah....look at 'em go.....see how they mop up all that nasty
> glucose! Not very exciting is it? We currently have interest in
> dinosaurs and stuff, as they're very big and scary - hardly a
> concern for an SI - it would be more like my petri dish example to
> them.

Also in his argument against SIs being interested in helping us solve our problems says they'd rather be:

> snorting coke off a pair of cosmic tits. As would I be.

So would I but, think about what "cosmic tits" are for a moment. Why would anything like a cosmic tit be any different than a "cosmic petri dish"? I'll tell you the difference. Evolution, our creator, wanted us to be interested in certain activity, specifically sex or tits. So, it hard wired some very powerful (puppet strings) joys and pleasures produced by chemicals such as those found in coke to sexual behavior. Tits are nothing more than evolution hanging a reward on a stick trying to direct you to participate in this activity. Currently, we are nothing but slaves to such process set up by evolution. Are you saying SI's would remain slaves to such absurd, to them now meaningless, directives?

Soon, we'll surely have the ability to cut such puppet strings that our creator uses to control what we "like to do" and re-wire them to be anything we want. If there is some logical reason for interest in some otherwise boring thing, like a petri dish, then you can reconfigure your motivational structures so that following life in a petri dish is now thousands of times more orgasmic and pleasure-full than "snorting coke off a pair of cosmic tits". Given such abilities and free will or ability to change yourself to want what you want to want, which an SI would surely have, which would you rather do - be a slave to what your creator wanted you to do: coke and tits or something that has possible real value like a petri dish or something else of similar or more real and logical value and universal significance?

> Unless the root evolution of the SI species did not produce
> "sympathy". We cannot assume other, alien species, especially vastly
> advanced ones, will be anything like us.

I think you are very wrong. There are very powerful logical survival reason why all beings must eventually develop things like sympathy and kinds of altruism. Humanities very survival is very dependent on this. If you assume an infinitely large universe (for practical purposes ours seems very close to this) having the habit of doing things like eating up and shitting out all lessor beings as if they were nothing more than digestive bacteria will always lead to your destruction because eventually you'll run into some other being more supper than yourself and end up as something like their digestive bacteria. We don't do this naturally. The first ocean explorers greatly abused native cultures and peoples they found. Now, we've seen the power and logic of being much better than this, and look at the results today!

If you really are a supper being, and have phenomenal cosmic powers, it will be trivial for you (as in like giving up a few pennies to a charity for us or like giving .001 percent of your attention for a day.) to at least help them out a bit and more or less stay out of there way so they too, can survive, thrive, grow, and eventually, like you, get all they want too. All SIs must eventually realize and adopt such philosophies or themselves be destroyed by the next more supper intelligence to come along. Given advanced and immortal societies, there is plenty of resources to go around for every possible being. There is no reason to be selfish which only results in everyone eventually killing most everyone else, and making the universe very lonely, sad, and boring. Not in the best interest of anyone.

> OK, my son, I'll see what I can do........ahh......here's some
> tweezers. Pick all the bacteria out of that piece of shit, and I'll
> save you from hell.

Oh these tweezers are great! This is amazing how they are configured to automatically work on the atomic level to not only easily and automatically find all the bacteria, but to find and repair the ones that have already died. And look at that feature, it launches them out into space in more or less a bacteria heaven where they have room to learn, grow, progress, and eventually become sentient Gods like ourselves and join up with the global consciousness. And it only took less than .0000000001 percent of your total effort of one day to produce these tweezers, that's great! I feel so much better and no longer guilty, thanks for these tweezers.

Hey you supposed real God out there, are you listing to what I'm saying here?!?

Brent Allsop