[ExI] "an aboriginal human from 70,000 B.C."

[Lee Corbin]

Damien writes

> Lee wrote:
> 
>> > A world where all that he cared about is very ancient and
>> > not very interesting history.   Are you sure any but the extremely rare
>> > individual would thank you or be able to cope?
>>
>> Do you think that an aboriginal human from 70,000 B.C. could
>> somehow be brought to cope with living in a modern apartment
>> with running water and a well-stocked refrigerator?  If he had an
>> income, he and his friends could even buy replicas of the old
>> sacred drums or whatever he missed.  Somehow, I don't think
>> he'd be too crushed and bewildered to prefer being dead.
> 
> Lee, do you think an aborigine from 2008 could make those adjustments 
> (unless he'd been brought up to them), without being crushed or often 
> stranded fatally in a world he'd never made, a stranger in a strange 
> land?

Yes. But at least 2008-type people will be no worse off than they
are now.  Because, as from what follows from you next say

> Read about the outback communities in Australia if you maintain 
> this airy notion: the ruinous failure to adapt even after 200 years 
> of European penetration and remaking of the land, even after 
> schooling and policing by this alien culture. The very bases of 
> traditional culture are all but gone; the land and animals and plants 
> are either obliterated or held under lock and key by aliens; the 
> languages have all but perished--and, far from nipping out to K-Mart 
> to buy a replica drum, the kids sniff petrol until their brains rot, 
> while the adults beat each other brutally and fuck everything that 
> moves, including the petrol-sniffing kids. Yes, that's an 
> exaggeration, but it's real to a bitter extent.##

If we examine the piecemeal actual causes, we see that those
people are in no way permitted (or find it impossible) to maintain
the same traditional culture that worked better for them. The
Americans tried another approach,  locking up their aboriginals on
reservations, free to practice whatever traditional ways they wanted
to (though I confess they didn't get good hunting land, in general).
But new technology and new drugs sneaked in anyway. With
similar, but not so extreme results. (Probably because the American
Indians were already at a rather higher level of technology and
civilization than the Australian aborigines.)

You do highlight a danger I had not considered.  Let's suppose
as did the original hypothesis of this thread, that a few million or
thousand of us find ourselves living suddenly in 20,008, but 
only (of course) as uploads, matter being far too valuable in
this corner of the galaxy to waste on primitive methods of
computation.

Then there could indeed be a menace from actually shocking ideas
---perhaps SL9?---and bizarre changes that one might have the
freedom to inflict on himself or herself. What to do? Easy! 
By then our immensely superior mind-children will have warning
labels on all such memes, and if people really do want to kill
or damage themselves, then what?  Deny them the "right" of suicide?

I imagine that something of the same paradox may exist and have
existed in Australia.  If, say, two percent of the Chinese immigrate
to Australia, and the continent gets its own dictatorial Central 
Committee, then what should the chairman do about the aboriginal
problems?  Since unlike our remote descendents he has no really
better understanding of what is happening than the victims (the
aboriginals) themselves, he's got to end up doing some guesswork
---or better yet, trial programs here and there on various small
units within the native population. 

I might suggest, for the sake of their own children's happiness if
not for the parents, that they be taken as individuals---not communities
---into Melbourne or Sydney, and in effect forced to live like everyone
else, so that these memes and artifacts, (e.g. alcohol) won't be so
hideously destructive to them. (I actually see no better solution to
this very sad situation.)

Or maybe investing some real money (I don't know how much this
would cost) to try to restore certain regions to how they were. But
this seems hopeless---"you can't get the people back on the farms
again", as I think is said here, and now that they've heard of the
features of modern society and technology, and find many of them
appealing, there won't be any stopping them from getting the ones
they want.

On a positive note, the "treatment" that the aborigines has received
from the European colonists was far better than that usually afforded
historically.  Any local nuisance population vastly inferior in technology
was quickly eradicated without a qualm.

> The difference, you might reply, is that *we* start with a 
> cosmopolitan sense of the contingency of our own culture,
> a trained capacity to adapt to change. Maybe.

I'm not so sure either.

> Or better yet--in the future, new knowledge will be implanted directly.
> You'll thrive by becoming, in a jiffy, rewritten into someone other than you.

Yikes!  I've been warning "radical uploaders" since 1990 or 91 in an
article in the Immortalist by that name. If you choose (even willingly
and in full knowledge) any path of personal evolutionary development that
fails to provide for earlier versions of you to also get a little runtime,
then you're just committing suicide in a brand new way. I'm shocked
that even folks like Ralph Merkle (conversation) years ago didn't see
any danger here.

> How wonderful. Sure you  want that?

Totally agree.  100%.

Lee

<http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22896877-601,00.html>
> 
> No jail for rape of girl, 10
> 
> NINE males who pleaded guilty last month to gang-raping a 10-year-old 
> girl at the Aurukun Aboriginal community on Cape York have escaped a 
> prison term, with the sentencing judge saying the child victim 
> "probably agreed" to have sex with them.
> 
> Cairns-based District Court judge Sarah Bradley ordered that the six 
> teenage juveniles not even have a conviction recorded for the 2005 
> offence, and that they be placed on a 12-month probation order.
> 
> Judge Bradley sentenced three men over the age of consent of 16 - 
> aged 17, 18 and 26 - to six months' imprisonment, with the sentence 
> suspended for 12 months.
> 
> Because the 28-day appeal period has expired, the sentences cannot be altered.
> 
> Judge Bradley said from her Cairns home yesterday that she considered 
> the sentences "appropriate" in the case because they were the 
> penalties asked for by the Crown prosecutor.
> 
> =========================
> from an email exchange last year following the court case:
> 
> ========
>>So ... they don't have any minimum age of consent?
> 
> I'm sure they must have. But it's a hierarchical male-brutalized 
> sub-society at the end of its tether.
> 
> The article depicts a terminal "behavioral sink" with the top rats 
> picking with impunity on the lower rats,

Hey!  That's what we've set up for prisons here. How interesting!

> but everyone seething with 
> barely controlled fury, ready to kill each other, so the judge tried 
> not to inflame the brain-damaged lunatics. Not good law, but maybe 
> workable politics.