From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Jul 15 2003 - 11:06:08 MDT
On Mon, Jul 14, 2003 at 09:49:34PM +0000, brent.allsop@comcast.net wrote:
>
> Very good questions!
Thanks!
> To take this to the next level will our spreading "garden" consist of
> evolution - or more precisely death? Will there be lions that eat lambs and so
> on? Or will everything "natural" or "primitive" be "uplifted" and will
> progress be made, from then on, by better intelligent and intentional methods
> than "survival of the fittest"?
A good question :-) I recall that many years back I posted similar
sentiments to the list about expanding the sphere of living beings, and
was chastized by Eliezer (I think) for seeking to create beings living
painful lives. My position then was essentially to let evolution sort it
out; to quote from Zindell (who quotes "Jin Zeniumura" who may or may
not exist):
"I am not interested in things getting better; what I want is
more: more human beings, more dreams, more history, more
consciousness, more suffering, more joy, more disease, more
agony, more rapture, more evolution, more life."
I still hold part of this view, but I think it has matured. I don't
think it is realistic to imagine everything being uplifted to being
happy and smart (like in the _Hedonistic Imperative_ by David Pearce
where we will sometime around the year 3000 finally save the last deep
ocean invertebrate from aversive experience - I love that passage :-).
We will likely do this a lot anyway, and might even pass laws about
helping creatures endowed with enough nervous systems. But if we are to
constantly monitor every environment we have created, deliberately or
not, to save structures from bad experiences and competition, then we
are not going to be doing much else. My ethical position is that we do
not have a moral obligation to help everybody and everything, it is up
to us to make the judgement from case to case, aided by some general
principles. Personally I would love to help a lot of beings in creative
ways, it is just that I don't think I *have to* help them.
In fact, attempting to "save" every creature is very close to the kind
of top-down control that stifles surprises and evolution. We want to
minimize irreversible information loss and unnecessary pain, but there
is a lot of useful information loss and pain too.
My taste in gardens is much more towards the British landscape garden
than the formal French garden.
> I like to hope that 1000 years from now there will be beautiful
> gardens in which death (including survival of the fittest) will no
> longer exist. But I know that many people alive today would want
> "nature" and "evolution", including survival of the fittest to
> survive. Because of these desires by some will there be places in the
> universe where "nature", "survival of the fittest", places where lions
> consume lambs. and so on continue to exist? Or will rationality win
> out and will death of all kinds be completely overcome in all places?
I think death in its general sense as erasure of information is
unavoidable within the current laws of physics. As Robin pointed out a
future ecology/evolution is likely going to be dominated by rational
self interest and economic style interaction, and that looks a lot more
humane than current ecology. But the introduction of metazoans
or vertebrates did not remove the single-celled organisms or
invertebrates from the system, and I think there will be plenty of
old-fashioned survival of the fittest going on in the interstices and
frontiers of the technosphere. Who notices the plight of spontaneously
evolving viruses within the M-brain communications networks, or what
creatures evolve from a stray terraforming seed?
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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