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Hyena comments on Is Kiryas Joel an Unhappy Place? - Less Wrong
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Comments (186)
If you're living near Malthusian equilibrium, there's probably no smiling involved. Not even the poorest people on Earth are usually living close to that point. In fact, I'm not really sure any modern humans ever have.
Frankly, I doubt the emulated brains would be sentient. Turning that off would make them far more productive, so that would be a logical early development. Happiness is probably a non-question in that case.
You seem to be interpreting Malthusian equilibrium in an odd way, as being at starvation or something. An equilibrium is simply when the population is not growing, when deaths equal births, with many possible permutations and variations. Why aren't the poorest people either currently or historically at equilibriums? In Farewell to Alms, Clark cites examples of how societies can raise per capita welfare in an equilibrium through methods like infanticide (China and the Polynesian islands) or poor sanitation & public health (England).
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that a specifically <i>Malthusian</i> equilibrium attains only at carrying capacity. Though it would be interesting to argue that human carrying capacity is multidimensional and so can be reached without starvation. That's a different argument, though.
The syntax is *Malthusian* or _Malthusian_. See 'Help' at the bottom right of the comment box.
It can. This isn't at issue (see elsewhere on this page). Carrying capacity is defined by subsistence wage, with starvation as the lower bound, and subsistence wages can vary quite a bit. So carrying capacity will vary from time to place to culture to tech level.
Explain your concept of sentience. It seems implausible to me that sentience could be removed without harming productivity, particularly in a realm of existence in which intellectual labour is the only labour.
Read Blindsight.
...OK, so it's a 380-page novel. Still, it's a ripping good read, and it will give you an intuition about why sentience isn't necessary for "intelligence" in the sense of effective goal-oriented behavior.
I'm not certain that that book made a good argument for that position. It was after all, fiction.
Is there a serious non-fiction treatment of the question?
Fortunately, Watts shows his homework and provides an entire appendix explaining the science he is drawing on (as one would expect from a scientist): http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm#Notes
I've read through a number of his references and a few things on his blog like PRISMs, although his main source, philosopher Thomas Metzinger's Being No One, kicked my ass. You want 'serious non-fiction'? Go to.
I also had my ass kicked by Being No One.
To anyone interested, the book is worth picking up for the chapters on neuro-phenomenological case studies alone, even if the rest of the book is liable to melt your brain. Metzinger has another book on the subject, The Ego Tunnel, that is supposedly more accessible, but I haven't read it.
In Blindsight, a close relative of Homo sapiens sapiens is described as not consciously sentient but able to intelligently interact socially with humans. This seems unlikely.
The not-conscious ET aliens were much more believable, since they were not a close relative. You got the feeling that their interactions with humans had a Chinese room feel to them.
Why? Already non-conscious animals like dogs, chimpanzees, and parrots are capable of some fairly sophisticated social interaction; dogs even understand gestures like pointing.
They're not conscious? I must have been in bed with the flu when this was explained to the class.
Yeah this looks like the old conscious/sentient/intelligent conflation (where the middle word seems to serve no purpose but to enable confusing the two on either sides of it...)
I plead guilty to perpetuating the confusion. If I try to be more correct and say something like 'Already non-self-conscious animals like...', then it looks like I have some complex idiosyncratic classification in mind and I mean something more sophisticated than what I do. There's no real good solution here.
I wonder when consciousness evolved in our ancestors? 4 Mya? 2Mya? 500 kya?
An excellent question. I've always enjoyed Julian Jaynes's theory of bicameralism where consciousness only truly developed ~3kya or so.
It makes for a good story, but I really doubt that's the case.
A fair point. Still, it blew my fragile little mind the first time I read it (this being prior to EY's sequences, which IIRC treat the point somewhere).
I did. It was pretty good, man.
Comprehensive self-awareness that we're familiar with as humans.
In fact, turning this off is one of the first things we do, we just tend to call it "the zone" or whatever else. We're actually much more productive without it. Nick Bostrom actually posited a world wherein this dynamic prevails in his outsourcing scenario.
I think flow is the technical term.
Yes there is. Moping around about how miserable your life is wastes resources and is in general not productive.
My mop doesn't mope but it's excellent for mopping and a smile is likewise useless on tile. There's no reason to presume that we couldn't have emotionally dead producers, there just may be no value to anything they do. But they're grandly productive.