[ExI] Self improvement

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 04:36:25AM -0700, Keith Henson wrote:

> > Hence the Holocene extinction. Very friendly, that.
> 
> Are you saying humans went extinct in the Holocene?  Please expand.

There's that interesting word, human. What is a human? 
There are plenty of extinct branches on 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_evolution
Is a neanderthal a human? Is a posthuman is human?
If the species splits up again, and into a thousands
of new branches, who's the leitspecies, and just who
died and made it king? How about the rest of the biosphere?
And just who decides who's to live and who's to die?
 
> > There is nothing to understand. You must be able to define
> > friendliness in formal form first in order to start building
> > development constraints on trajectory to assert conservation
> > or minimax according to the metric.
> 
> You might be right.  On the other hand, I find the way you have put it
> to be obscure and faintly hostile.

It was not meant to be hostile, though after the nth iteration
of basically the same problem there is some exasperation on 
my end. 

Friendliness as is means everything and hence nothing,
so it has to be defined, at which point people should
realize they have a slippery electric eel in their hands.
It's one of these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecidable_problem

There are extremely nonobvious, pathological problems
deriving from the idea of a set (you're absolutely correct that 
relativistic signalling alone requires there to be 
asynchonous population) of guardians for the physical layer, tracking
a population of agents. I frankly think it's an awful idea,
and it needs to die.