[ExI] Coherent vs. Incoherent Fears of Being Uploaded

Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com
Sun Jan 24 13:32:45 UTC 2010


On 24 January 2010 01:37, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/1/24 Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>:
>> I beg to differ. A gun held to one's head, or any other proximate
>> chance for physical threat, often indicated by pain, simply unleash
>> one's gene whisper to run away as fast as one can. Exactly for the
>> same reasons why a fruitfly does not dive into water or a rat likes
>> sex. Because those who are inclined otherwise would not leave much
>> offspring.
>
> That's the reason, certainly. There is nothing fundamentally wrong
> with being dead. Still, even though I have this insight, I don't want
> to be free of the manipulation; and this of course is part of the
> manipulation.

I am not saying that I want. Just wondering whether the survival
instinct of a nematode really depends on the alleged "consciousness"
emerging from the ineffable features of its organic brain...

BTW, I agree on the other hand that the ideas according to which a
sufficiently "intelligent" computer would automagically express
survival istincts, will of power, sense of "identity",
perception/illusion of "consciousness" and other obviously
antropomorphic features and idiosincrasies are simply projections.

A computer, no matter how "intelligent", would do that only if it is
expressly programmed and designed to emulate such features - and/or if
it is the final product of an evolutionary history progressively
selecting those traits amongst random variants.

Thus, I am not much sanguine on the concept itself of AGI. There is
nothing general in our own "intelligence", besides the universal
computational abilities we share with innumerable non-human and
non-organic systems, and a fully-persuasive, Turing-test-level,
human-like "entity" running on a PC will be IMHO by definition either
an uploaded human, or an arbitrary mix of human beings' characters.

-- 
Stefano Vaj



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