[ExI] next stop, whoville, was: RE: Dark Matter

[spike]

On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl
Subject: Re: [ExI] Dark Matter

On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 08:00:33AM +0000, Anders Sandberg wrote:

>>... In fact, we cannot even handle planetary scales...

>...I think the failure is due to absence of evolutionary pressures to
evolve e.g. place cell representations for large scale landscapes...
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We have a pretty good feel for the fact that human population is already at
or beyond the long term environmental carrying capacity of the earth.  But
we don't necessarily need to solve that by reducing our numbers, which is
difficult or impossible to do gracefully.   But we have an evolutionary path
open to us which will likely become very important.  

We humans in our current form are very disorganized at the atomic level.  If
we manage to upload to a smaller more organized substrate, we can get to
more human minds using less matter, less land mass, less energy.  

Even before we get to true uploading, if we can tweak our own internal
emotional operating system, we could perhaps figure out a way to adjust our
male sexual ideal from the 6 ft tall 200 pound to a 4 ft 100 pound male for
instance.  We could perhaps get there just with ordinary embryo selection
using only current technology.

With carry-everywhere internet connection, we have the first step toward
outloading and wearing our human knowledge base.  In the last few centuries
with the industrial revolution, we have freed ourselves from the need to
fight alpha predators, and largely freed ourselves from having to fight each
other at the individual human scale.  With those developments, we have
opened the door to evolving downward in physical size.  From their point of
view during the evolving downsize process, for the first time in history,
the physical size of the planet actually increases from their perspective.
All we now need is a way to influence female mate selection instincts to
choose downward in physical size; we should be able to do that somehow.

We can imagine a civilization of small, numerous, well fed prosperous super
interconnected inter-evolving humans, who pity those left behind in the
sparsely populated areas of the planet where the hungry, violent ignorant
biggies live in wretched poverty, still battling the brutal elements and the
wild beasts.

Next stop Whoville.

spike