[extropy-chat] Just curious, it's not natural!

[Robert Bradbury]

On 10/31/06, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
>   But what happened to *me* in there?   I'm more than my memes, pal.
> Don't forget my memories.
>

Well memories are memes and at least some of them are essential components
of the survival and reproduction processes.  (Think of being a teenager and
how many strategies you tried before you got some booty...)

That's me, maybe.  I don't want to "become", especially if the end
> product is not me.  I would rather "are".  As you put it.
>

Then you will be fighting a continual and probably eventually lose the
battle.  I have yet to see a strategy that guarantees avoidance of the
external hazard function.  For many the  breaking point will be the
decisions involving when and how to upload.  For others it may be managing
the "self"-collective after uploading.  The problem is deciding when losing
some part of oneself (some genes, reproduction behaviors, ones tribe, some
ideas, etc.) constitutes "no longer surviving".  For some it involves the
"destruction" of memes derived from very old books programmed into them
before they ever learned how to *think* about them.

Lord forbid that animals simply like to "do it" (even if they sometime get
the target wrong -- for one of my mother's dogs it was her leg).  The
'perfect'  omnipotent sysadmin would never have designed such a messed up
system!

Secondly, if the Singularity tarries, there won't be any people,
> me or like me either one, you or like you,  *señor  *Bradbury.
> *La ilaha ila Allah; Muhammadur-rasul Allah. *
>

I've been thinking a lot about inertia.  I like to remember there are many
more people leaning towards the saner primary meme frameworks than the less
sane frameworks.  I'm not sure you could say that rational frameworks are
dominant yet but the populations leaning that way do outnumber and carry
significantly more throw weight than those leaning in the other direction
[1].

The trick will be to shift things so ones near term survival interests that
tend to trump the more ethereal "promises".  Also bear in mind -- because
the singularity will crunch a significant fraction of those ideas attached
to entities people believe themselves to be a faster singularity (one which
exceeds the rate of people adapting) could end up causing much more death
and destruction compared with a slower one.

The human social and political components are the least well understood
parts of Kurzweil's "Law of Accelerating Returns".  "We", for the most part,
haven't even started the discussion of how fast we should go.    I tend to
be more worried about a backlash against the Singularity than it not
arriving soon enough.

Robert

1. E.g. Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China, Thailand, much of Russia & India, AU,
NZ, Canada, a large fraction of Europe, the blue states in the U.S., some
significant parts of Africa (usually S. of the equator) .
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