[extropy-chat] Sustainability philosopy as a justification forexistence

[John]

"Then there's public transport - it's not only for the poor and disabled, despite what some people may think."

Darn right! I use public transport from time to time! Oh wait... I am poor.

I think Robert has taken a bit of a one sided battering on this one. Although, I find I can at least somewhat see where he's going with it.

This may have something to do with considering myself an innovative person. Whenever I see something I can't help but take it apart and see if there's anyway I can improve it, even if it's working fine before I touch it; "If it ain't broke, tweak it until it is!"

My brother is a patent lawyer and I've spent a countless hours time chatting about ideas to him and investigating the possibility of filing patents on designs and ideas I've had for magnetic nozzles etc.

One thing that has suprised me quite a lot is that basically, if you've had a great idea, you can almost bet your life that at least one other person is already onto something very similar or already filed for it. If you revisit the patent office with new ideas regularly, you'll see just how incredibly frequent this is - and how little most people appreciate the repetition of ideas. My brother, as someone who deals with the problems when the ideas cross over, can attest to the similarities and, often, almost insignificant differences between designs claiming to be unique.

Not being a particularly religious person, I don't have a lot to comfort myself when it comes to the idea of death.

But one of the few things* I do take some kind of strange comfort in is that even after I die, I'm sure there will be people with minds working in a similar pattern to my own. They won't be me, and they won't have exactly the same ideas, but they'll be approximations.

My point here is that I think people sometimes over emphasise on each individual being unique in a superior sense. We're each unique, but I think there are a lot more similarities than differences - the motto of the IP guys being "Evolution not revolution!"

Robert's argument is an absolute, and one that will likely take a long time to reach. By the time we do reach it, our capacity for computation will be disgustingly huge by comparison with today and there's almost no way our understanding of the universe or ourselves will be as it is now. It's quite possible we're making predictions for 'future shortages' that are never going to occur in the way we see them now simply because we'll discover some new layer of space previously known to us. E.g. 100 years ago - "We'll run out of coal and the world will stop", then along came nuclear physics. 

Also, I seriously doubt (and I really mean seriously) that our concept of self will still be anything like it is now - e.g. we might exist as a pool of consciousness (just mutation factors) that operate on one big shared pool of data, not individual memories and private ideas. In our pool, 'killing resources' won't be analogous to killing people as it is now, we'd be trimming off things everyone had access to and didn't want anymore. The only thing close to killing humans today here would be killing the individual 'mutation factors' (the 'randomness' that causes us to interconnect ideas in a less than perfectly linear fashion) and when you examine precisely how the human brain invents ideas even now, there is very, very, very little spontaneity about it (neurons interconnect by 'linear' logic as simultaneous depolarisations occur that can produce a better result, they don't 'just do it' in the romantic way an artist would like to think they do - and you should be grateful they don't, because it's the reason you're able to type a reply to the list). Even art has a linear nature to it, the artist isn't just making up randomness, they're trying to convey something, somehow directly from empirical experience (perhaps modified a bit in their mind's virtual environment, but modified with reference to other emprical experiences) - be it a photorealistic picture or abstract swipes with a 4" brush (Would an artist with no memory of empirical experiences be able to create art?). 

If you want to experience the romantic beauty of more random thought, try some magic mushrooms or acid. Perhaps once we can upload our minds, we can do even better by purposefully distorting our neural interconnections with randomising algorithms to increase 'spark' inventivity (To me, this is a perfectly valid use of psychoactive drugs).

There is a large quantity (perhaps even a majority?) of redundant data shared between us that we just won't need in an upload type of environment (we can delete a whole load of it and still not loose -anything- unique, what so ever - you couldn't even really call it compression, it'd just be a vector format). So, pragmatically, in an upload environment, I think there'll initially be a huge amount of room for improving the 'efficiency' of consciousness by just getting ride of all the repeating memories we share. We'll start off needing loads of space for it all. Then, once we start sharing with each other, we'll go through a rapid efficiency improving stage as we realise that my memory of orange is virtually indentical to Robert's, and everyone else's (or at least parts of that memory are, meaning that they can removed stripped without any loss to 'uniqueness')

In today's world, going out and hunting down 'lesser' entities wouldn't be necessary (If you're thinking in terms of SENS stuff). Controlled breeding and/or better education of their children would 'evolve' them out of the system as they died away naturally. Condoms and people using them would seriously help the population problem all on it's own. In Robert's ultimate, we might assume that the lifespan of our entities will be gigantic (that they burn up resources at an unacceptable rate, that endangers the entire group's survival, compared to discovering them), and so some form of active cleaning up would be required. This is already happening in places like Africa and China in a passive drive - trying to get them to use condoms or sign up for sterilisation.

Theoretically, a single intelligence (Robert or I for instance) could grow and grow until it drains the entire universe of resources due to it's massive scale. So the entirety of humanity would only do that more rapidly given the same rate of expansion per entity. However, we can be a bit more pragmatic about it and take into account the ideas I mentioned above regarding an equally expanding understanding of the universe and a new understanding of consciousness counteracting the effect somewhat. Also, we can make an immediate effort to control the quantities of individuals entering into our 'dyson sphere super computer' rather than just waiting for them to spiral.

Rather than be nasty and actively wipe out billions of people, you could start with only passing those consciousnesses into your sphere that already displayed some signs of a 'unique spark' rather than everyone that just prefers to cruise through existence. Of coarse, this can get quite complex given that part of the reason I'm not the latter is purely due to my education and environment. But this prelude before a person's mindset becomes solidified represents a big efficiency drive. Criminals are an example. Once a child grows into a criminal, it suddenly costs tens and tens of thousands of pounds (minimum) to deal with what would have cost next to nothing for the parents to avoid initially. When my mum smacked me and told me off as a kid, it meant that the rest of society wouldn't have to deal with a substantial tax burden when I grew up.

My initial upbringing has also allowed my mind to remain open, which is perhaps one of the hardest things I think you can teach a child. I, for example, don't immediately cringe shut at the idea of allowing religious people to carry on thinking what they want to, or deleting individuals (like myself) when there are others who are similar and not enough resources to support us both.

In a similar way, my primordial super computer upload space (limited rooms! apply now!) might not have the spare room to accommodate individuals who aren't already 'well behaved', that need subsequent parenting on the others' behalf. So instead, I might prime it with individuals judged by society to be 'unique' candidates (Not necessarily celebrities, no - since so many of them aren't that unique in reality. Celebrities like Jimi Hendrix might qualify).

If society just flat out didn't have the money to pay for criminals to be dealt with in the way they are now, they'd just be shot for efficiency. It's only because we have the luxury of spare resources that they're not - lucky them hey?

Saying all this, I do like the idea of smelling the roses and planting seeds as opposed to pruning.

I also stop and question from time to time this unquestioning 'drive forward' we have. Again, as someone who constantly tweaks things and messes around to make them better, it's something very personal to me; understanding why I'm actually doing that in the first place.

Sometimes, I like to read books, watch films, play slowly to drag out the experience (which is just allowing more memories to replay and more time for interconnections to form in my brain).

It may be that we don't see a continuously exponential rise in our consumption (see the above bit about vector formatting away redundant junk) and intellect once we achieve uploading. That instead, we go through a boom phase and then begin leveling off, at least temporarily, before our consumption rate becomes unsustainable. There may only be so much to know. The curve will be dictated by a.) how quickly we acquire / process that knowledge and b.) how much of it there is in relation to resources available for processing it. E.g. If there's more possible knowledge (logic takes energy to process) than resources, the curve will still be rising when we run out of stuff to fuel the processing. Or perhaps there's enough energy to process all the knowledge possible, and so it'll start leveling off as the knowledge starts being regurgitated (and our cleaned up resources get messy again as we use up all the spare resources).

But cutting everything short, the idea of 'uniqueness' (which is closely tied to compression) is something that really interests me. I suspect that it'll only become more and more important as we approach and enter uploading. In order to compress something, you need to be able to evaluate it for repetition, which is difficult when we all have private consciousnesses and memories. Once those are uploadable, the data they contain will be exposed and become discrete and highly quantative making it easy to route through things presently thought of as private and incapable of being judged by another and delete away the redundancies. This will also be aided as we develop better and better ways of converting huge fields of qualitative information into discretes that can be processed in a similar way, as well as better computers and algorithms for working through it all.

John

*One of the other things that makes death slightly easier for me is an appreciate for the cycle energy is passing through and knowing that perhaps some other form of life might be able to make some use of me to carry on with it's struggle against thermodynamic equilibrium if I'm unlucky enough to die. That I came from the soil and that's where might end up again, just as a transient arrangement of the the energy previously in the soil that happens to be.
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