[ExI] hard science

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Fri, May 2, 2014 at 8:51 PM, William Flynn Wallace
<foozler83 at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> So we all have the Superman fantasy:  better body, better brain, etc.
> Everything I know about psychology says this will happen:  it will become
> the new normal.  We will adjust to it and be no happier than when we
> started.
>

### I don't think this will be the case. The development of uploading
technologies, whether by BMI or by destructive scanning, is likely to be
associated with gaining an intimate understanding of, and the ability to
precisely modify, the motivational and hedonic substructures of minds being
uploaded. I do not know if e.g. totally removing the hedonic and aversive
components of subjective experience is compatible with survival of a mind
in a social milieu but I am convinced that our present human personality
repertoire is only a minute subset of all viable mind designs. Therefore,
once the technological limitations to deeply modifying minds are gone,
there will be an adaptive radiation of mind designs driven by evolutionary
pressures within the social computational substrate that will generate a
variety of mind types, and few of them will be "normal" by our present
human standards.

Rafal
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20140502/6cac91ef/attachment.html>