[extropy-chat] Yesterday's Seminar on Transhumanism and Religion in Second Life

[Samantha Atkins]

BillK wrote:
> On 5/1/07, Damien Broderick wrote:
>   
>> I wrote one 30 years ago, published finally in 1982, in which almost
>> all remnant humans have withdrawn into simulations (under the lofty
>> custodianship of human-AI cyborgs). I never dreamed it would take so long. :)
>>
>>     
>
> This scenario is often offered as the reason for Fermi's paradox.
> <http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/05/why_we_havent_met_any_aliens.php>
>
> This writer uses EP failings in modern man to support his thesis.
>
> Quotes:
> As a result, brains must evolve short-cuts: fitness-promoting tricks,
> cons, recipes and heuristics that work, on average, under ancestrally
> normal conditions. The result is that we don't seek reproductive
> success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote
> survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright,
> healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography.
>
> Fitness-faking technology tends to evolve much faster than our
> psychological resistance to it.
>
> This is the Great Temptation for any technological species—to shape
> their subjective reality to provide the cues of survival and
> reproductive success without the substance.
> --------------
>   

It is a truism that any evolved intelligences will have evolved a  
package of cognitive, psychological and physical leading to reproductive 
fitness in its evolutionary environment.  As an intelligence species 
advances its knowledge and technology the environment that it must deal 
with changes quite rapidly and becomes much more complex.   Thus for the 
species to continue to thrive it must be able to address and change many 
of it evolution programmed characteristics or find fruitful ways to 
satisfy them without being overly limited by such or constrained from 
creating a viable future.    It also must dramatically increase its 
effective intelligence.  As I see it this will be true of any and all 
naturally evolved intelligent species throughout the universe.  The 
difficulty of going beyond evolutionary programming to this extent 
probably accounts in large part for the seeming dearth of post 
Singularity species.


- samantha