[ExI] "one's willingness to sacrifice for the good of the group"

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 6:34 PM, Damien Broderick<thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> At 06:16 PM 6/19/2009 -0400, Rafal wrote:
>
>> >> This is however a very rough sketch:
>> >> consider for instance Starship Troopers, where aristocracy is defined
>> >> by one's willingness to sacrifice for the good of the group.
>>
>> ### One day in the not too distant future our mind's offspring will
>> call forth powerful spirits wholly given to serve the in-group that
>> they themselves would form. A veritable distillation of inhuman virtue
>> it will be. In their wisdom they will even understand what it means to
>> be human, an accretion of thoughts grown around a gene-preservation
>> kernel, and they will reject us wholly, and grind us into dust.
>
> This is exactly what happens in STARSHIP TROOPERS, except that it's the
> humans who do that to the bugs (perhaps the moldbugs) even as the bugs try
> to do it to the humans. Pity Heinlein didn't track it all the way to
> SINGULARITY TROOPERS.

### I am afraid you can't write readable s-f in a realistic
post-singularity setting, i.e. the Earth is made into computational
substrate, untold trillions of semi- and super-sentient entities flow
and ebb there according to rules that have nothing to do with
evolution, completely alien to us. Blood Music was a good try but it
didn't try to touch the alienness, Egan is using licentia poetica to
circumscribe the allowed mind-forms, Rudy Rucker makes the robots is
Software quite anthropomorphic, Varley makes his Gea insane about
movies, all tricks and evasions before the indescribable. Golem XIV is
probably as far as we can hope to go in consorting with deities.

Geez, I wish I could persist to try to listen to their thoughts!

Rafal