[ExI] far future

[William Flynn Wallace]

Though it took me a long time to leave the church, I now cannot understand
why anyone would think our bodies were created by some god.  We are put
together, cobbled together, patched together, and all systems usually work
well enough to get us to mating age.  Beyond that we start downhill.  We
are susceptible to innumerable diseases both physical and mental.  Among
the mental are not diseases per se but faults of our mind.  If you haven't
been there already, check out Wikipedia and search for 'cognitive errors'.
My colleagues in social psych put most of them there.  Pages and pages of
how we can and usually do go wrong.  Creating a new mind in my book will
take most of what we are and dump it.  Some emotions go:  anger,
resentment, retaliation, joy in seeing others hurt or killed, and maybe
more.  Some tastes go:  fat, sugar and salt need to be drastically lowered
in motivation, sex needs to be time-programmed (only feel an interest from
7 to 12 at night) and more.  We need to see much further into our
unconscious mind than we do now.  This is the sort of thing I asked the
group to offer.

As an aside:  I have written help and gotten an incomprehensible return
that looks like some sort of programming commands and does not address my
questions:  how do I find out the topics people on the list are interested
in?  When I click on reply does my email go only to my correspondent?  Or
to everyone?  If you could just take a minute to explain this site to me it
would be a big help.

Thanks!

Bill Wallace


On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 5:11 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> On 09/01/2014 21:39, Ben wrote:
>
>> It occurs to me that minds that were evolved to cope with the African
>> Savannah on approximately the metre scale, are woefully inequipped for
>> understanding how the universe works.  The reason that the double-slit
>> experiment, and all the other manifestations of quantum theory (and many
>> other things) are mind-blowing to us is probably that our minds never
>> needed to understand those things during our evolutionary development.
>> That kind of understanding will probably require a different mental
>> architecture than the one we have.  It's likely that anyone capable of
>> understanding how the universe works can't be 'human' in any
>> currently-accepted sense.
>>
>
> I think this is right.
>
> Our perceptual and conceptual apparatus is demonstrably weak when moving
> out of our domains of evolutionary adaptiveness. Just look at how hard it
> is to think about implications in logic correctly, let alone
> multidimensional spaces. The fact that it can handle so much is amazing,
> and might even hint at some kind of "Turing universality" of our thinking.
> But even if things can in principle be thought or understood by human-style
> minds they might be too slow or big to be thought in practice.
>
> An even more worrying possibility might be that our motivation systems
> (and hence emotions and ethics) are also wrong for the universe at large.
>
> In the most general case the No Free Lunch Theorems kindly tell us not to
> bother: no mind is better than any other mind across the space of all
> possible universes. But this global egalitarian nihilism doesn't apply to
> our universe, since it is a special case: not everything is equally likely,
> and for any utility function there exist more or less adequate minds when
> trying to maximize it in our universe.
>
> The moral is not to trust intuitions outside our domains of evolutionary
> adaptiveness. And to embrace the individuality of this particular universe
> with all its quirks. It got just one time dimension, scandium, maybe
> Thorne-Żytkow objects, and power-law distributions everywhere! Yay!
>
>
> --
> Anders Sandberg,
>
> Future of Humanity Institute
> Oxford Martin School
> Faculty of Philosophy
> Oxford University
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
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