Vladimir_M comments on Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: NancyLebovitz 17 September 2010 01:44AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 26 September 2010 01:04:06PM *  6 points [-]

I don't know what to make of this:

Suicide note

Article

The man who took his own life on Harvard's campus Saturday left a 1,904-page suicide note online.

According to the Harvard Crimson, Mitchell Heisman wrote "Suicide Note," posted at http://suicidenote.info, while living in an apartment near the school. The note is a "sprawling series of arguments that touch upon historical, religious and nihilist themes," his mother, Lonni Heisman, told the Crimson. She said her son would have wanted people to know about his work.

The complex note, divided into four parts, touches on Christianity, the Holocaust and social progress, among other topics, and mentions Harvard several times.

IvyGate calls the note "probing, deeply researched, and often humorous."

Heisman was 35 when he shot himself on the steps of Harvard's Memorial Church Saturday. He had a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Albany. According to the Crimson, he worked in area bookstores and lived on inheritance from his father, who died when he was young.

I've begun skimming a few of the chapters (the titles aren't anything if not provocative). On the one hand I am quite predisposed to view the entire work as mostly bunk, because manifestos of this nature often are. However on the other hand, the idea of a philosopher driven to death by his learning is a stimulating archetype enough for me to explore this. And yes I know that considering he quotes:

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death. If this is true, and they have actually been looking forward to death all their lives, it would of course be absurd to be troubled when the thing comes for which they have so long been preparing and looking forward. —SOCRATES, PHAEDO

Its certain he was playing on that.

I've decided to post this here for rationality detox so I don't pick up any craziness (I'd wager a high probability of there being some there).

He seems to have developed what he terms a sociobiolgical analysis of the history of liberal democracy, reminiscent so far in parts of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. This judging by a few excerpts of the ending chapter culminates in a kind of singularitarian view and the inevitability of human extinction at the hands of our self created transhuman Gods.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 27 September 2010 04:41:03PM *  9 points [-]

I just skimmed a few random pages of the book, and ran into this stunning passage:

Marx’s improbable claim that economic-material development will ultimately trump the need for elite human leaders may turn out to be a point on which he was right. What Marx failed to anticipate is that capitalism is driving economic-technological evolution towards the development of artificial intelligence. The advent of greater-than-human artificial intelligence is the decisive piece of the puzzle that Marx failed to account for. Not the working class [as Marx believed - V.], and not a human elite [as Lenin believed - V.], but superhuman intelligent machines may provide the conditions for “revolution”.
[...]
If this is correct, the first signs of evidence may be unprecedented levels of permanent unemployment as automation increasingly replaces human workers. While this development may begin to require a new form of socialism to sustain demand, artificial intelligence will ultimately provide an alternative to “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” [...] The creation of an artificial intelligence trillions of times greater than all human intelligence combined is not simply the advent of another shiny new gadget. The difference between Leninism-Stalinism and the potential of AI can be compared to the difference between Caesar and God.

The small part of the book I've seen so far sounds lucid and without any signs of craziness, and based on this passage, I would guess that there is whole lot of interesting stuff in there. I'll try reading more as time permits.