is ai a medium in the way film is a medium?
i mean, i plainly disagree. it seems a failure of imagination that octopus, algae mats, raptors, ant colonies, bees, elephants, etc couldn't, with a little teleological oomph, build a universe-colonizing technology. so this narrative does not help me locate myself as a human, rather than as any of those.
("The human form in particular is especially suitable for technological evolution" -- i feel that, were i for example an octopus, i could easily make a similar argument about why any high technology would be contingent on intelligent creatures with tentacles. so again, this does not help me locate myself as human.)
overall, it seems to me that if the teleological mushrooms are most interested in simulating powerful artificial minds, and can spookily determine certain events, they could easily find a faster route to "the good stuff"! so i'm still left wondering: why is there something?
And, well, maybe you are only important insofar as your experience is required to compute something that'll have a causal effect on a more important distant descendant of yours.
right, but my point is that, for all i know, we are not yet close to a singularity. small details of subjective experience many hundreds or thousands of years prior could be "remembered" in the sense that the simulated instant depends on them. so this metaphysics does not help me locate myself temporally near the singularity, either.
it just asserts (as in Fn. 3) that the specific details of its history are such that the outcome on the distant descendant ends up being xyz.
perhaps this point is critical to our disagreement. i don't expect that there's a meaningful difference (from the perspective of one of the simulation's denizens) between reifying a moment for which my current subjective experience is a logical necessity, and reifying the moments in which the subjective experience is more traditionally thought to be taking place.
in other words, the glider experiences all the time between its start and end, even if the metamind moves ahead in leaps and bounds.
Another class of examples: very often in social situations, the move which will actually get one the most points is to admit fault and apologize. And yet, instead of that, people instinctively spin a story about how they didn't really do anything wrong.
as a nitpick (i find the other examples compelling): recruiting others to go along with obvious lies is a strong test and demonstration of status-power.
if the underminds want to colonize this universe, why would they use humans rather than algae, dinosaurs, earth mushrooms, ants, turtles, etc? what is so interesting about a human-descended singularity, compared to any other singularity?
as well, this doesn't seem to address certain holographies. perhaps it is me who is important, or perhaps it is some distant descendant in the far future, whose existence depends critically on a typo i'm about to make. (said typo is the complex result of my personal history, explaining why i am blessed with "subjective experience", and not merely surmised.)
a force that wills complexity is an interesting postulate, but i cannot recommend this essay as a self-consistent treatment of the idea.
(thank you for writing it, to be clear!)
this. if what you want from these people is a set of NPC punching bags, then by all means. but perhaps you would find value in helping them achieve insight.
recommend finding your most sports-watching friend, and asking to tag along the next time they watch sports. sports bars are loud and obnoxious; home viewings can be fun and cheerful. i suspect your wit and humor would be greatly appreciated by the other attendees!
sf is the relatively much younger city, and radically reinvented itself as few as 60 years ago. by that metaphor, i am not surprised that its ideas smell more fresh.
yes! i understood your meaning, and intended to respond to it! i see the argument you are making, but disagree with its conclusion: asking "which of these events is worse?" is a type error. they are incomparable.
should britney spears be forced to perform in order to save a life? should the trolleyman make a Toxic choice? <-- these questions are so contrived that they are not meaningfully answerable. the 'correct' response is "please stop placing me in hypothetical situations!"
referring to your ladder, what i mean is this. hearing the news of event number 1 may have a larger impact on me than the news of event number 5. however, this is not at all the same as making a choice between the two events. if presented with such a choice, one 'should' kobayashi maru. any other response is morally and ethically bankrupt. at the very least one 'should not' make the decision frivolously: "oh, yep. option 5. already considered it. give me something harder next time, huh?" disgusting.
(it may be possible to appeal to an exoself, who is able to sort between the potential news items, but this brings in rather more metaphysics than i am comfortable making claims about. specifically, it's not clear to me how to reason about the interaction between the self's and exoself's desiderata.)
to resolve your slope, it is 'obvious' to me that items 1-5 are equal, while 6 and 7 are in different categories. i myself may have specific revealed preferences between 1-5 (though, see above), but my selfishness is not an ethical principle. nor are my emotional responses my barometer of what's good.
i do not find these events to be comparable, after a great deal of reflection.
surely both of these cannot simultaneously be true.
(i don't mind at all when someone is late! they probably had reasons. i'm curious to hear the story!)