Stanovich, 'The Robot's Rebellion' (mini-review)

lukeprog

The jacket text for Keith Stanovich's The Robot's Rebellion sums up the book well:

The idea that we might be robots is no longer the stuff of science fiction; decades of research in evolutionary biology and cognitive science have led many esteemed scientists to the conclusion that... humans are merely the hosts for two replicators (genes and memes) that have no interest in us except as conduits for replication...

Accepting [this] disturbing idea, Keith Stanovich here provides the tools for the "robot's rebellion," a program of cognitive reform necessary to advance human interests over the limited interest of the replicators and define our own autonomous goals as individual human beings. Drawing on the latest research... The Robot's Rebellion describes how short-term and reflexive thinking processes dominate the higher-order thinking necessary for achieving autonomy from our biological programming. These higher-order evaluative activities of the brain... hold the potential to fulfill our need to ascribe significance to human life.

We may well be robots, but we are the only robots who have discovered that fact. [This] is the first step in constructing a radical new concept of self based on what is truly singular about humans: that they gain control of their lives in a way unique among life forms on Earth — through rational self-determination.

The book is an excellent introduction to the first stage of Yudkowskian philosophy: We are robots in a mechanistic universe running on a swiss army knife of cognitive modules. But at least we finally noticed we're robots, and we can use the skills of rationality to hop off our habit treadmills and pursue our values instead. These values are complex and often arbitrary, but we can use our reflective capacities to extrapolate our values based on "higher-order" desires, a desire for preference consistency, and other considerations. All this is argued for at length in Stanovich's book. The only thing missing is a discussion of what to do about all this when AI arrives.

The jacket text for Keith Stanovich's The Robot's Rebellion sums up the book well:

The idea that we might be robots is no longer the stuff of science fiction; decades of research in evolutionary biology and cognitive science have led many esteemed scientists to the conclusion that... humans are merely the hosts for two replicators (genes and memes) that have no interest in us except as conduits for replication...

Accepting [this] disturbing idea, Keith Stanovich here provides the tools for the "robot's rebellion," a program of cognitive reform necessary to advance human interests over the limited interest of the replicators and define our own autonomous goals as individual human beings. Drawing on the latest research... The Robot's Rebellion describes how short-term and reflexive thinking processes dominate the higher-order thinking necessary for achieving autonomy from our biological programming. These higher-order evaluative activities of the brain... hold the potential to fulfill our need to ascribe significance to human life.

We may well be robots, but we are the only robots who have discovered that fact. [This] is the first step in constructing a radical new concept of self based on what is truly singular about humans: that they gain control of their lives in a way unique among life forms on Earth — through rational self-determination.

Does it matter? Your genes and memes basically are who you are. They contain most of the necessary information to make you you [...]

Well, probably not in an information-theory sense. Genes and memes are part of who you are, but there's a whole buch of other stuff that wasn't inherited from anywhere and was instead learned from the environment. It is likely to consist of more information than the genes and memes combined.

I'm with you there, but I'm at a loss as to how you can reconcile this with your earlier post.

3[anonymous]15y

Anything you learned from the envrionment and can be transmitted to another brain is a meme, though not necessarily a very successful one. Meme's seem to be more or less used interchangeably with ideas, which isn't right obviously since there are things we learn that we can't transmit with currently available tools. If a day comes when I can directly upload and share the exact smell of a loved one or the muscle memory of me playing basketball for half an hour those things too will become memes, or some other kind of replicator if one wants to quibble about definitions. But I'm using learned from the envrionment in too narrow a meaning, I think you are using learn here as any difference of behaviour or function that is the result of your interaction with your envrionment. If a slight heavy metal contamination in my childhood caused me to grow a bit less neurotypical or less likley to receive a religious experience or fall in love or anything at all, if someone was trying to upload my brain, that would clearly be something that would need be simulated! It constitutes information about me, even if it isn't something we would in the everyday sense of the word call "learning". Perhaps I'm spending too much of my intellectual life in RH's scenario of a future of emulated minds competing with each other at the Malthusian margin, where my mind to be perfectly simulated on another medium, any of the states of my body or the rules that govern how these states transition to other states is a piece of information that can be shared and recombined with others. And you would necessarily find some propagating more while others not at all in essence replicator dynamics would I think being operating on a totality of what I am (I wish to emphasise I am making several implicit assumptions about the simulated envrionment here and these may not necessarily hold). But my primary point was, you can't really make a you without including lots of the information encoded in your genes or m

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Stanovich, 'The Robot's Rebellion' (mini-review)

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Stanovich, 'The Robot's Rebellion' (mini-review)

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