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In this, yet another over-long, disorganized, and opinionated essay I will be exploring a question that the extropian movement treats as a triviality and the rest of humanity has not yet recognized.
Contents
Art Culture Philosophy Technology
The humanities have always been interesting. They are
the branches of inquiry which ask the fundamental questions of life and
seek the ultimate expression of our being. We express ourselves in art.
We study how we live with sociology, the study of culture. We think about
what we are, what it means to be physical through philosophy. These traditions
will soon have to make way for a new entrant into the fray: Technology.
Now and even more so in the future technology will be an increasing part
of our very being. Today we see it in prosthetics and other medical products.
Tomorrow we will have complete control over our own forms. When this happens
philosophy becomes a matter of urgent practical importance.
The questions are both very old and very new. In
the past it was "Why do we die?" In the future it will be "How long do
I want to live?" In the past the question was "What am I?" In the future
it will be "What do I want to be?" or even "What can I become?" While circumstances
may change, there are things that will always remain the same. We use our
logic to tell us what answers are valid but validity alone is not sound
reasoning if it has no connection to reality. Our senses tell us what we
like. What we like we call good. Our epistemology tells us that what we
call good is nothing more than a reflection on our selves and not that
of the nature of the cosmos. It is not supprising then that there are as
many opinions as there are people. Behavior, then, cannot be judged to
be right or wrong but only criminal when it intrudes into the lives and
choices of others.
Let us consider how technology has already begun
to change the humanities as they have been in the past. Before recordings
all live performances were lost forever after the last person who had heard
them passed away. Before motion pictures works such as Metropolis including
the first dramatic presentation of some of the ideas behind uploading could
not have been made. Without the electric guitar there could not have been
a Stairway to Heaven. Though video games have not yet received the renown
that they have earned they too are an art which is only possible now that
we have computers to make them with. Right now technology is only an auxiliary.
In the future, as it begins to be applied to ourselves it will become a
peer among the others.
Art is something that is produced by the individual
and provided, through a medium, to the commons. Culture is the reverse.
Culture is the collective actions of the commons which is taken in by the
individual such that it becomes a part of his being. Language, customs,
and technology itself are parts of culture. In the past cultures were so
isolated that only the most well traveled even knew of more than a small
handful. Places were so isolated that languages diverged between different
valleys only a few miles apart. Today with modern transportation and mass
media culture can be disseminated instantly around the globe. The internet
is the ultimate medium for this transfer, allowing ordinary people to communicate
voluntarily with anyone else they want. Ideally, one will be free to choose
one's own culture. Practicality mandates that some compromises be made.
However, it is always wrong to impose any cultural choice for any reason.
This can't be stated strongly enough with the words I know. Our very worst
laws are the ones that impose some form of cultural norm. The only best
culture is a free and diverse one. I hope that our technology serves that
end only.
Technology has opened the doors to understanding
our universe and ourselves by answering many of the riddles of ancient
philosophy. We know that the universe consists of substances that are called
mater and energy. We know that we are made of specific patters of this
mater. We are beginning to have some notion of what mater is and where
it comes from. As technology liberates us from our daily burdens, it also
forces us to decide what to do with the time we have left. It can be taken
as a general principle that if it is not criminal its not really wrong.
Considering that nothing that doesn't hurt anyone should be criminal, that
leaves us with many many choices with more being made available to us every
day.
That is a very negative position in that it answers
almost every question about should or should not with the non answer 'mu'.
Before I move on I want to make a very strong condemnation of one of the
most obnoxious and abhorrent positive viewpoints I have ever read. A certain
author, and perhaps a few others, have uttered, in the form of writing,
a phrase which reads "philosophically correct fun". There cannot exist
any sentiment any more inimical to the individual and his freedom than
that. it is the ultimate antithesis to free will. It is the language of
Marx and the depictions by Orwell. It demeans and disparages the free choices
a human may make by dictating that one category is correct and all others
are not. I hope that everyone reading this will resist people who promote
this idea with every ounce of will, energy, and strength.
The universe doesn't allow one the luxury of fudging
the facts. To successfully reengineer yourself you must first discard all
historical delusions about your own nature and being. You must consider
the atoms, molecules, and cells of your body at their most fundamental
level. You must consider your brain as a spontaneously designed robotic
control computer. Many in the extropian movement fixate on this one part
of the self to the exclusion of everything else especially the body but
also including one's life style and the relationships one has in living
in today's world. While it is true that the brain is still the finest computer
in the universe. Some computers may already be more powerful but none are
so elegant or efficient yet still it is only one element of a human life.
Not even the entire body is the whole of self when you count the expression
of yourself found in your possessions and your relationships with others
such as your employment.
To get a perspective on things a good question to
ask is "if my brain is a computer, who is the user?" A simple answer would
be "myself!" while this is not completely false, it doesn't answer the
question of why you are the way you are and why you like and do the things
you do. A better answer would be "my genes." Your genes use your brain
as a tool for generating behavioral adaptations for a complex and dynamic
environment. Your brain, in other words, is merely a behavior generator.
It is certainly capable of most remarkable things and I encourage everyone
who has one to use it. An exploration of its nature as a part of the humanities,
especially in this new technological humanity, we would make a terrible
mistake to use any other understanding as a basis for choosing each of
our individual (or, in some cases, combined) futures.
One particularly stark version of a future is the
idea of taking this computer or what is imagined to be its program out
of the rich connected universe into a black cube-shaped void of abstract
computation. Studies involving sensory deprivation show that the brain
winds down and stops after 16 minutes or so of no input. While the virtual
worlds that are mentioned in such glowing terms may sound nice they all
share one fundamental flaw: they aren't the environment your brain was
built for. Simulating enough in this environment for your brain to function
normally would be both expensive and it would diminish yourself as a being
from one that is essentially independent (or at least a free agent) with
the various powers of acquiring food and erecting defense to one that prays
every nanosecond for the rest of eternity that nobody shuts off the power
from the world outside.
Another question that is much glossed over and overlooked
is the question of what is this program running on the brain that these
extropians value more than any other thing in the universe? For just about
everyone, including myself, the vast majority of the "content" in the brain
is very generic common knowledge content. What else is there? Our specialized
knowledge is merely an expression of ideas that are common to many professionals.
How much does it take to copy someone? I would say that it would take my
genome, a ton of publicly available knowledge (I brag too much?), and no
more than ten megabytes of truly personal information, much of it of marginal
value (the brain is that efficient). Thankfully, we are clever enough to
bury this under a ton of fictions that let us go about the things we do
in our lives. A slightly less healthy way of looking at things is to assert
that this wonderfully adaptive behavior generator is anything more than
what it is and then taking this view, try to enshrine this self as something
more than it is capable of being.
If a human is so little, then what is it we live
for? That is, of course, the central question of the humanities. It would
be wrong of me to present any type of answer to that in this section of
the essay because that would imply the existence of some deeper answer
than "I just feel like it". A better question to ask ourselves as we lie
on the modification bench and, at the same time, look down upon this stuff
which is us is as its renovator "what can we make from this?" The mere
fact that this potential you is lying on the table in the first place proves
that you have the courage, or whatever else it might take to stimulate
you, to rise up and effect a modification in your very being. This is not
a nothing, in fact it is something very special. This will alone is what
makes everything meaningful. It is so powerful that it takes this very
generic misshapen lump of meat (as some prefer to call it) and turns it
into the instrument of power bounded only by imagination. As imagination
is already something that is immeasurable we find that this is the original
fountain of ecstasy. Coming back down to earth a bit we are still faced
with a problem.
We know now that what it is we are most interested in
is not the bits of data or the axons or dendrites but rather its unique
motive. We can now safely discard everything because we know that what
needs saving is not necessarily the flesh or the patterns of bits but rather
the conscious will that may be the initiator of our own changes. So many
people have tried to throw a lasso around it by calling it a spirit, a
soul or a life-force. They have all failed because of the shining fact
that this is something so powerful that it defies words. It should not
be distressing at all because this is not a matter of consternation but
rather of rejoicing. We know that we don't need to worry about molecular
scans or any other trick of voodoo to protect us. All we need is our freedom
to act as we will.
We are also left with an inescapable fact that as
our respective life-forces continue, the thing that houses, inevitably,
does not. While our spirits may conquer whatever comes their way any new
change means the death of a part of the old. Even if the two forms live
side by side the neural interface that links the old to whatever the new
happens to be means the destruction of the form that was confined to the
skull. This is what is called transformation. There is no special case
or exception to this law. It is important to make it perfectly clear that
no group which says that one change is life and the other is death can
be anything other than wrong.
This death of form is not a flaw in the idea because
a freely chosen form never destroys one that was wanted. Similarly, the
frustration of the spirit in its will to change or its enslavement to some
alien, unchosen, form is the death of the spirit if not the form. This
is the equivalent of a decision to save a ship but kill all the crew. Because
of these things it is critical that we don't let our futures be dictated
by fools or sophists. We cannot be delinquent in our duties to ourselves
or our neighbors in protecting the right, for everybody, to change only
by choice. Without this freedom we have no chance to survive at all. Following
from this, we must not allow any bizarre form of technoculture arise and
destroy the hopes and crush the dreams of everyone with differing goals.
Many of us will desire a more traditional version of
survival in that we will want to carry many aspects of what we are now
long into the future. We are faced then with a dilemma of remaining mostly
as we are today only extended long into the future or seeking to grow and
adapt with the changing culture. While I viciously oppose anyone or anything
that would deny anyone the former choice the latter one is more interesting
for a number of reasons. Here we have the problem of radically re-designing
a person without killing him. I, personally, reject any course of change
which involves the outright destruction of the original in a single step.
There is no sane way to reconcile this with the notion that the individual
has survived. If the person did this by choice, then the spirit surely
does but not the original individual.
One school of thought might propose continually
(every few years or so) making incremental upgrades as new designs become
available on an as-needed basis. These upgrades would be things such as
better eyesight or a better math-computer. A person following this school
of thought would survive each incremental change even if the very last
bit of the original has been replaced. The one flaw in this approach is
that the end result is a mosaic of various technologies with little or
no higher organization. One of the most beautiful things about the human
body is the clarity of its design. From head to toe, it is the expression
of a single concept of life. My own advice is to first work out what your
own personal ideal is and then design that before you do any major change
to yourself regardless of how radically different this ideal self may be.
With a destination in mind you can begin your journey.
In applying this advice to myself I am faced with
the loss of most of my current self in this transformation. I would prefer
to carry over as much as I can but I acknowledge that 100% transference
is almost certainly impossible. While this first change, though highly
unfortunate, is necessary it does present an interesting opportunity. Instead
of being constrained to being a being of fixed form we have the opportunity
to construct a form in which incorporates self transformation. By exploiting
this opportunity we can suck up a one-time partial death of self with the
confidence that we won't have to do it again for an extremely long time.
An auto-improving form is not at all hard to design.
I have a concept for an AI which I call Hypermind. It is a brain that incorporates
the useful features of a computer. On a daily basis this brain is more
adaptive than our current brains because it is able to reconfigure its
internal structure on-the-fly to manage new concept domains. While our
brains have strictly determined regions with very specific purposes. One
such domain is that of language. This is handled through Boca's and Werneke's
areas. A hypermind would be able to allocate new resources whenever it
needs a new faculty. In the long run, however, a deeper level of evolution
is desired. In addition to a genotype stored on some medium a cyborg could
have a meta-genotype.
This meta genotype would specify all of the personal
characteristics that you wish to perpetuate. It would describe, in some
very high level language, the hypermind itself. At some arbitrary interval
you would go into a regeneration mode during which your mind would recompile
its own meta-genotype with the benefit of all the things you may have learned
during that interval. Most importantly, mathematics which may have
many more centuries of development ahead of it. Because mathematics is
the foundation of any software, including hypermind, it is the single most
important factor in its performance and capabilities. A breakthrough in
mathematics could be worth as much as a million fold increase in hardware
size and speed. Like many software environments, a hypermind system will
be capable of recompiling itself. The new genome that your own mind produces
will be the blueprint for your body over the next interval. Any architectural
changes to your brain would be carried out in stages and hence continuity
would be maintained.
I do not claim that this is the only solution to
the problem, it is merely the one I have come up with. You may choose it,
some other plan, or choose not to do anything at all. The challenges are
indeed great but we are not without hope. We do not require salvation because
we are our salvation. The work we will do in the coming years will not
be easy nor will it be impossible. I wish everyone who wants to survive
will find a way to do so that is consistent with their individual values.
The flip side of that is that there may be people who, for any reason,
do not wish to survive. This is fine too. In fact, this is a critical freedom
because without the right to do something that could be harmful to yourself
you are not truly free to choose your own future. Today there are many
restrictions on what medicines you can take even beyond the flatly illegal
drugs that are of no harm to anyone except the user. There is no moral
imperative to save all life. Even if there were, I hope my discussion so
far has shown that there is no one definition of life or survival to brutally
impose on everyone.
To this point I have been trudging through heavy philosophical
ideas with some thought of culture and how it should be accommodating to
change. Now lets look at how technology can turn the body into a form of
art. There has always been a subculture of piercing, tattoos, and other
modifications of varying levels of sophistication. Some of these have become
quite extreme. I've heard about things ranging from a man who had plastic
surgery done to make him look more like a lion to voluntary amputations.
The singularity will allow this form of personal expression to rise to
a whole new level. Your personal vision of the ideal you is an art in itself,
perhaps the ultimate art.
I don't want to scare anyone with the examples I
mention above I am only trying to lay out some ideas here and try to explain
how things will be changing. In my bioengineering essay I explained how
post singularity technologies will, if all goes well, allow us to choose
our own forms. Here, I want to fill in the other side of the picture. In
the past we have been constrained by practicality. Whatever we wanted to
do we had to leave our bodies in a condition that would serve us in our
daily lives. Neural interfaces mean that our selves can be something more
than whatever our traditional body happens to be. We rely less and less
on manual labor every day, using robotic labor instead. Even today we find
our bodies becoming spare at an increasing rate. There will be no concept
of disability in the future not only because any ill can be cured but also
because physical limitations as they are conventionally understood will
not be a limiting factor to one's lifestyle.
I have heard many ideas about what people might
want to be. One particularly ambitious person wants to take over an entire
planetary system such as Jupiter and its moons and convert it to a massive
computer brain of some sort. There are so many stars and planets in this
galaxy that something, even on that scale, is not an unreasonable request.
I wouldn't, however, condone any one being taking over anything larger
than a single star cluster. A more modest desire I've heard was a person
who wanted to be uploaded into a dodecahedron of computronium. Mechanization
of that sort isn't the rule, or at least I won't allow it to become a rule
of any sort. There are lovers who would look forward to sharing the same
body. There are some who would create even larger joinings. I once met
a girl on-line who wanted robotic arms and legs so she could take them
off when she didn't need them. There is nothing wrong with wanting any
of these things. The key is the recognition that this is purely a personal
choice and that nobody has the right to impose their personal viewpoints
on anyone else.
Naturally, all of these diverse viewpoints and desires
will put a strain on any culture. I hope that people on the fringes will
have the sense to start their own communities or move to other planets
to start new civilizations. The universe is so vast that there can be no
legitimate motive for any conflict between the new cultures that will hopefully
be allowed to flourish in a bright and hopeful future. The joy and the
beauty of a bright future is that the entire universe can become the canvas
for the rich diversity of human aspirations. Unfortunately that is not
the only possible future.
The Humanities Vs. The Inhumanities
Some people have told me that I should rejoice at the
"end of the biological age" because of the grand diversity of "machine
phase life" that will emerge. While there may be an arbitrarily large number
of uploads running around in computronium cubes that cannot be called diversity
because the only diversity that matters to me is the inclusion of all biological
species (except perhaps for viruses and other parasitic organisms). The
radical singularitans who seek to upload themselves and wipe everything
else out are monsters of a kind that has never before been conceivable.
I am a singularitan myself but I have enough sense to feel a due sense
of reverence to humans and all their ancestors.
The lesson of evolution is that every generation
builds upon the one before. To wipe everything out in an ultimate act of
wanton destruction. Anyone who carries out such an agenda is also committing
an act of ultimate hubris, a conceit that the things we create are, alone,
sufficient that we can do without anything that went before. The conservative
process of evolution works because it always keeps backups can be discarded
for some wholesale "upgrading" which may, quite easily, hit some dead end
and that would mean existential annihilation because all of the previous
generation has been wiped out. There are claims that just because these
machines will have a mystical and very poorly understood thing called intelligence
that caution can be thrown to the wind. The only thing that is crystal
clear is that whatever intelligence is they don't have it. Whatever contraption
is pushing the blood through their veins is clearly not a heart.
The radicals say that the end of biological life
is inevitable and that our only hope to survive as individuals is to be
like Saruman and pledge our allegiance to the great Sauron. I may be totally
insane and completely unrealistic when I say that I have hope that there
can be a lasting peace between the lust for computronium and the more traditional
lusts. I don't say this because I have any confidence in success but only
the knowledge that I will either succeed or die. It is a strange thing
that this should give me comfort. The chance for success might be as small
as they claim that it is but it is still worth fighting with every effort
for. I don't think one can be truly human unless one has the strength to
stand up for what he wants and would otherwise have every right to obtain.
Never surrender to fate!
Even before these changes hit their full stride, we
should be thinking about what they will mean to us and our society. A central
question that each of us will be asking ourselves is "what do I want?"
This is not such an easy question nor would I expect many to have the same
wants over some protracted period of time. Choices about self-modifications
should not be taken lightly nor should any dogma about the nature much
less the desirability of any given modification be tolerated. It is for
each individual to decide for himself what he wants to do. We also need
to reevaluate our society and choose the values we wish to keep and which
have served their purpose and should be forgotten.
We urgently need to begin publicly debating the
politics of the new age with the goal of establishing a peace between all
the major interests that leaves room for the more eccentric ones too. Some
people say that there is no solution, that everyone must either adapt or
die. In the primordial soup that was the case. There is no reason to repeat
that bit of history. Bacteria grow exponentially. Intelligent beings are
much more rational in their choices.
As the author of this piece I have discovered that
I can't finish it myself. Here is where you should take over the writing
and express your own vision. If it doesn't involve a global apocalypse,
the people here at the Singularity Action Group are here to help make it
a reality.
Singularity Action Group website frames version.