[ExI] Human extinction

[Stefano Vaj]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 6:46 AM, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
>> (In fact, I tend instead to consider that diversity can only be based
>> on everybody's love for their own identity).
>
> What does that mean? I can't parse it at all. Diversity (or diverseness)
> is to me an objective *condition* that may or may not hold to some
> degree about one group of entities compared to another (more
> homogeneous) group of entities.

What I mean, is that a love for what you are is a love for what makes
you different, and by loving what you makes it different you end up
not liking the prospective of such difference getting lost... :-)

> Yes, that's what those things are about all right. Each of
> them you mention is indeed aimed at improving human
> stock (one way or another). But *my* preferences don't
> always coincide with that, as I've said. Better us, say I,
> than entirely non-human entities a billion times our superiors
> in every way, if it's an either-or choice.

But there are no well-defined boundaries or quantum leaps! Once you
like having successors, and you like such successors to be an
improved, enhanced version of yourself even at the cost of an
"identical" reproduction of your self, you are well on the way to
define (species) extinction not as the fact that your species has
evolved and/or branched, but as the fact that the inability to do so
or the misplaced effort to keep it unnaturally as equal to itself as
possible along time has increased the risk of its disappearance
altogether.

>> This is why those who believe that "survival" - in some other sense
>> than individual, physical survival - should be considered as a primal
>> value, should hardly fear a posthuman change in terms of an
>> "existential risk".
>
> Well, at the risk of repeating myself, I cannot agree. By
> the "similarity of structure" criterion, there is everything
> to fear.

Yes. But you conceded that keeping all and every subsequent specimen
as similar as possible to a "model" (and which one, exactly? an
absolutely average and abstract human being vintage 2005?) is hardly a
satisfactory plan...

> But suppose the big S occurs, the solar system sports only
> entities who are to us as we are to amoebas, and they come
> into stellar conflict with a still-DNA molecularly reproducing
> people (with tails, four legs, six eyes, and a fondness for
> tyrannical government) who nonetheless appreciate art and
> music in ways not altogether different from us, and who have
> the same kind of loyalty/solidarity continuum that I've just
> described.  I would be on *their* side, not on the side of
> my inhuman descendants.

Wouldn't they be both your "descendants"? Of course, most or all of
the DNA-based "race" would not be literally part of your offspring,
but there again the "children-of-the-mind" godlike race would not
either, so if you were you still around I think you could plausibly
take side for either of them, exactly depending on affinities of one
kind or another.

But what happens if you are not around, and a single "race" is there,
or multiple "races" that are equally removed in evolutionary terms or
general structure from current humanity? What I am saying is that I am
not especially concerned by the fact that they may end up as different
from me as I am from a distant ancestor.

Stefano Vaj