[ExI] Whatever happened to morphological freedom?

[Alan Grimes]

Anders Sandberg wrote:

> I guess I *have* to respond to this :-)

> Of course it is still around. It is even cited here and there in
> bioethics these days. I am working on a Morphological Freedom 2.0 paper
> with some colleagues.

And I will start saving up my harshest criticisms for it. ;) I might
even unleash the Tortoise and Achilles on it.

> I think it has some real world traction ethically
> and politically, and might be something we should be pushing into the
> civil rights agenda.

Only to be revoked a few hours after you figure out how to fabricate
computronium. =(

> However, I think the issue discussed here on the list is separate. MF is
> about rights - what autonomous individuals should be allowed to do.

Yep.

> But there might be technological possibilities that are so enticing,

SPEAK FOR YOURSELF.

> or long-term evolutionary or economical pressures that are so strong, that
> in the limit people or post-people become morphologically similar
> (perhaps with an insignificant minority avoiding it).

That would be extremely unfortunate.

> This is not an
> ethical issue in the usual sense: it could even be the result of
> individual, fully informed rational decisions. There might be a loss of
> value in diversity (a bit like language loss) or even something deeper,
> but it would be a collective level ethical issue rather.

Say what?

> If the price of bodies is so high that hardly anybody can afford them,
> as a negative rights libertarian type I still think that is compatible
> with morphological freedom.

Absurd.

Progress --> things get more plentiful and cheaper. Therefore bodies
will always get cheaper and more extravagent bodies will become possible
(though never practical).

Furthermore, do you really expect me to believe that a M-brain is
affordable but a few extra tons of titties are not? =P

The only imaginable scenario is if the virtual population is allowed to
get north of 10^18th or so, each greedy for resources. Obviously, such a
population rate of increase and density are unacceptable. As you
illustrate, an acceptable quality of life is not achievable under such
circumstances so therefore both a diaspora to the infinite vastness and
a sensible throttling back of the birth/duplication rate to maybe
doubling only every 20 years or so, would eliminate all practical
resource contention.

> My positive rights colleagues would argue
> that to have real MF we need a society that can support buying bodies
> somehow (and within some limits; this is what we are thinking about in
> our paper). 

Why wouldn't such a society exist naturally? I started rambling about
uploading in the normally quiet channel #neuroscience on
irc.freenode.net, and the person who responded was like "Say what???" =P

Later he said:


(00:29:07) cads: I think that crowd want their efforts to produce an
unrealistic level of ego aggrandizement

(01:00:36) DevilInside: transhumanists tend to be somewhat insane
(01:00:48) DevilInside: i guess i would be a moderate, sane one
(01:01:16) DevilInside: also, how often have absurd theories about the
future of scientific and technological progress ever come close to
reality all that much?
(01:03:19) DevilInside: also,  i don't think you can transfer consciousness
(01:04:00) DevilInside: you can maybe at one point create conscious
entitites that aren't human
(01:04:12) DevilInside: but you can't transfer the consciousness of a
biological human to that, how is that possible?
(01:04:46) DevilInside: of course most likely the future of cognition
and understanding doesn't belong to anything resembling naturally
evolved humans, and why should it?
(01:05:00) DevilInside: even the smartest humans are deeply flawed wetware
(01:05:30) DevilInside: evolution got us here, now we are going to start
a completely different kind
(01:06:07) DevilInside: so are these transhumanists saying that HUMANS
are going to change into sometihng else? i think it'd be false to even
call these entities human anymore

and:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8576072297424860224#

So you are proposing that uploading will take off just like cellular
telephones have? Absurd. If you argue with the people, they'll declare
war on you.

Only 0.5%-ers want to upload.

> (Still, I can imagine things like Oxford's Port Meadow to remain.
> Wikipedia: "In return for helping to defend the kingdom against the
> marauding Danes, the Freemen of Oxford were given the 300 acres of
> pasture next to the River Thames by Alfred the Great who founded the
> City in the 10th Century. The Freemen's collective right to graze their
> animals free of charge is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 and has
> been exercised ever since." - there are usually some cows or horses
> around, although their importance to the economy and to most people have
> dwindled more orders of magnitude than were imaginable when king Alfred
> was fighting vikings. So maybe there will be a few morphologically free
> bodies frolicking somewhere on future M-brains, protected by regulations
> laid down in the remote 21st century.)

That sounds barely acceptable, I would like to apply for a reservation
of ten acres.

I had toyed around with such notions for several years, I even
contemplated writing a story about such a scenario. In one permutation I
lived for many centuries in an 8' cube, under constant torment of beings
covetous of my atoms. I am not sure how I would have ended the story.
One possible ending is that one instant I would just vanish,
inexplicably to the m-brain, into another dimension or to a planet far
out in free space. Another ending would have me mastering control over
the fabric of reality, (the M-brain caring nothing of physics, only
computing cores), and then unleashing a firestorm of vengance that would
utterly obliterate the singleton.

I must confess that there are other singleton scenarios that I find
attractive but, for ethical reasons, don't actively advocate except,
possibly, to try to dilute the insane stampede towards uploading and
m-brains.


-- 
DO NOT USE OBAMACARE.
DO NOT BUY OBAMACARE.
Powers are not rights.