[ExI] Human extinction

[Lee Corbin]

Stefano wrote

> On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 7:59 PM, hkhenson <hkhenson at rogers.com> wrote:
>> On another list I said.
>>> > My best guess is that physical state humans will not exist long
>>> > after the singularity--something I can't see holding off even half
>>> > way to the end of this century.
>>> > Then the question becomes how our intellectual descendants deal with
>>> > the problems. I suspect at best humans will have the status of
>>> > cats--in some ways an unnerving prospect considering what we do to
>>> > cats.

I don't really care about status all that much. Primarily, I'm 
interested in survival so that at least I have a chance to
improve my station and my prospects for more enjoyment
of life. Ultimately, I want to delight in understanding to the
greatest extent that "I" can.

So for me it would be wonderful if tomorrow everyone else's
IQ doubled, even if mine were excluded. Think of how many
interesting people there would be to talk to! Think about how
rich we'd all  become, even a dumb shmuck like me.

The very idea that we would be *treated* as cats are now
treated, scarcely deserves comment. Cats are routinely killed
by large dogs, suffocated to death in extinction chambers, and
thrown into the river to drown. If we survive at all, it will be
in style, I think.

Stefano inquires:

> What is really "human" and what is "extinction" or "survival"?

To me, it's relatively simple. My remote ancestors of 500 million
years ago are extinct. Period. We are no more *them* than they
"were" once tiny prokaryote cells. And if we are replaced by 
beings that are no more like us than we are like prokaryote cells,
then we too will be extinct. There *must* be objective similarity
or else you, or your species, exists no longer.

> After a fashion, a measure of how successful a species is in Darwinian
> terms is how fast it "disappears" - being replaced by its evolutionary
> successors.

By this peculiar logic, some lemming like ancestor of ours that ceased
to be 600 million years ago is more successful than were Neanderthals.
Suppose that those lemmings lived for a million years. Well, that's
wonderful from their point of view, but the Neanderthals should realize
that we are vastly more similar to them than we are to the lemmings, 
and they "survive" (if one wishes to continue this abuse of language)
in us.

> Nietzsche himself says: "The species, seen from a
> distance, is something as insubstantial as the individual. The
> 'conservation of the species' is only a consequence of the growth of
> the species, that is of a victory on the species, in the path towards
> a stronger species. [...] It is exactly with respect to every living
> being that it could be best shown that it does everything that it can
> not to protect itself, but to become more than what it is".

Despite himself, it's clear that Nietzsche believed in some sort
of racial soul. Simply because a certain species existed somewhere
in a chain of evolving creatures, this gives him license to have the
first in the chain identify with the last in the chain. So just what is
it that has remained the same about them?  A soul?  What else
could it be?

> Accordingly, there is no real reason why we should not reserve our
> emotional investment in the human *clade* rather than, and as opposed
> to, the "mankind" at any given moment of time.

Let me get this straight.  Were there a button (sorry, Damien) that
would instantly cause any given human (or all humans) at this very
moment to evolve into vast, vast creatures with intelligences
comparable to God's and who looked at us the way we look at
our one-cell progenitors, you would push such a button?

If you pushed that button, we would all be dead, and instantly!
(Unless, of course, you believe that our soul still remains the
same---because otherwise, on objective grounds, we no longer
exist at all.  Not at all.)  The person who I am would henceforth
receive exactly zero runtime.

> And again, it is at the end of the say [story] arbitrary to limit
> our vision of such clade in terms of an uninterrupted sequence
> of DNA replicators, the "children of the mind" being conceivably
> deserving to be considered as our children as
> well as our biological offspring.

One does *not* survive through one's children. This is a horrible,
evil fallacy, along with the consoling lies of religion the
practitioners of which, who in truth see the reality of death
invent consoling fairy tales. My poor departed father is actually
quite, quite dead, unfortunately. He does not survive in me, no,
not in the slightest. The only extremely weak way that he
"survives in me", is that I do have a few of his traits. But then
I have a number of Issac Asimov's traits too, so perhaps it
should be said that Issac Asimov survives in me. Bah! Nonsense!

Lee