[extropy-chat] In the Long Run, How Much Does Intelligence Dominate Space?

[Lee Corbin]

Damien S. writes

> Sent: Tuesday, July 04, 2006 2:12 PM
>
> On Tue, Jul 04, 2006 at 11:36:26AM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:
> 
> > Eugen takes the ecosystem view, and adduces the historical
> > successes of free markets and other "out of control" systems.
> > Russell and I take the "good housekeeping" view, if I might
> > phrase it that way, that a powerful intelligence keeps her
> > area as clean as a Dutch housewife does hers. This too has
> > historical precedents (e.g. some ecosystems are not very
> > complicated, having fallen under control of one species,
> > or even the Dutch housewife herself).
> 
> The area controlled by a Dutch housewife is not an ecosystem.  It is a
> small area embedded within a much larger ecosystem, without which the
> housewife would be dead.
> 
> Organisms (try to) keep themselves clean of other organisms (no bacteria
> in our bloodstream, please); "good housekeeping" can exist within
> eco-diversity (lots of bacteria in our gut, and we need them.)

Yes, that's true: up until now, all life that we know of is immersed
in an ecosystem (with the possible exception of certain very deep
creatures who live off of little but heat).

Yet humankind is probably not so far away from being able to subsist
in deep space near a star such as the sun, having figured out how to
directly synthesize food directly from energy. So if *we* are not that
far from doing it, I suppose that an advanced AI should be able to.

Why not?

> I think it's more like that our intelligence is made up of a lot of
> competition, between and within the hemispheres.  There's a common fate
> constraining all the cognitive processes -- all in one body (unless you
> include memes escaping) -- so a strong pressure to get along, but a
> single will imposing rules doesn't strike me as the only or even the
> best way of describing what goes on.  More like the Dutch government, a
> feedback process coordinating lots of other processes, sometimes for the
> common good.

I mostly agree!  Yes, it seems that either by Dennett's "multiple drafts"
or by other evolutionary competitive processes, intelligence will be and
is most effectively fueled by sets of competing hypotheses, implemented
one way or another.

However, the point that seems to be remaining here between what you
have written and what I wrote is a question of integrity: just how
much wholeness is (or are!) an entity to be supposed to consist of?

Consider again a housewife: yes, her intelligence is also composed
(we surmise) of competing tendencies and hypotheses, but it is
proper to regard her as a single entity. That's the way I think
that it will be within some specified physical radius r.  All
matter inside radius r will be controlled by a single will (no
matter how its internal architecture works). Sometimes today we
speak of nations in this way. Either the nation goes to war against
another, or it does not. That at least is the model of nationalism.
(Yes, in some cases like the U.S. in Iraq, it's hardly the case 
that "the nation" really is a unified entity. But it is supposed
to be, for example, as a single member of the United Nations.)

Thus, it's a continuum. I think that an AI will exert its control
through nanotechnology throughout such a local sphere, and down
to every last molecule. You (and Eugen, perhaps) evidently believe 
more in a dominant symbiosis.

Lee