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DanArmak comments on Holden's Objection 1: Friendliness is dangerous - Less Wrong
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This is true but not relevant. It suggests that future life forms will be much more complex, intelligent, powerful in changing the physical universe on many scales, good at out-competing (or predating on) other species to the point of driving them to extinction. You might also add differences between yourself and flies (and bacteria) like "future life forms will be a lot bigger and longer-lived", or you might consider those incidental because you don't value them as much.
But none of that implies anything about the future life-forms' values, except that they will be selfish to the exclusion of other species which are not useful or beautiful to them, so that old-style humans will be endangered. It doesn't imply anything that would cause me to expect to value these future species more than I value today's nonhuman species, let alone today's humans.
So you value other life-forms proportionally to how similar they are to you, and an important component of that is some measure of compexity, plus your sense of aesthetics (grandeur). You don't value evolutionary relatedness highly. I feel the same way (I value a cat much more than a bat (edit: or rat)), but so what? I don't see how this logically implies that new lifeforms that will exist in the future, and their new values, are more likely than not to be valued by us (if we live long enough to see them).
Life may keep changing indefinitely, barring a total extinction. But that constant change isn't "progress" by any fixed set of values because evolution has no long term goal.
Apart from the nonexistence of humans, who are unique in their intelligence/self-consciousness/tool-use/etc., life on Earth was apparently just as diverse and grand and beautiful hundreds of millions of years ago as it is today. There's been a lot of change, but no progress in terms of complexity before the very quick evolution of humans. If I were to choose between this world, and a world with humans but otherwise the species of 10, 100, or 300 millions of years ago, I don't feel that today's bio-sphere is somehow better. So I don't feel a hypothetical biosphere of 300 million years in the future would likely be better than today's on my existing values. And I don't understand why you do.
Do you really value complexity for its own sake? Or do you value it for the sake of the outcomes (such as intelligence) which it helps produce?
If you are offered prosthetic arms that look and feel just like human ones but work much better in many respects, you might accept them or not, but I doubt the ground for your objection would be that the biological version is much more complex.
Could you explain what kind of complexity measure you have in mind?. For instance, info-theoretical complexity (~ entropy) is maximized by a black hole, and is greatly increased just by a good random number generator. Surely that's not what you mean.
<nitpick level="extreme">Bats are no longer thought to be that closely related to us. In particular, cats and bats are both Laurasiathera, whereas we are Euarchontoglires. On the other hand, mice are Euarchontoglires too.</nitpick>
<nitpick level="even more extreme">You might want to reduce that number by an order of magnitude. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_evolutionary_history_of_life </nitpick>
Thanks! I appreciate this updating of my trivial knowledge.
Will change to: I value a cat much more than a rat.
I meant times as old as, say, 200-300 Mya. The End-Permian extinction sits rather unfortunately right in the middle of that, but I think both before it and after sufficient recovery (say 200 Mya) there was plenty of diversity of beauty around.
No cats, though.
Yeah, it hadn't occurred to me to try and preserve the rhyme! :-)
Is there a blog or other net news source you'd recommend for learning about changes like "we're no longer closely related to bats, we're really something-something-glires"? They seem to be coming more and more frequently lately.
I just browse aimlessly around Wikipedia when I'm bored, and a couple months ago I ended up reading about the taxonomy of pretty much any major vertebrate group. (I've also stumbled upon http://3lbmonkeybrain.blogspot.it/, but it doesn't seem to be updated terribly often these days.)
I don't think you're getting what I'm saying. Let me state it in FAI-type terms:
I have already figured out my values precisely enough to implement my own preferred FAI: I want evolution to continue. If we put that value into an FAI, then, okay.
But the lines that people always try to think along are instead to enumerate values like "happiness", "love", "physical pleasure", and so forth.
Building an FAI to maximize values defined at that level of abstraction would be a disaster. Building an FAI to maximize values at the higher level of abstraction would be kind of pointless, since the universe is already doing that anyway, and our FAI is more likely to screw it up than to save it.
People have dealt with this enough that I don't think you're really objecting that what I'm saying is unclear; you're objecting that I don't have a mathematical definition of it. True. But pointing to evolution as an example suffices to show that I'm talking about something sensible and real. Evolution increases some measure of complexity, and not randomness.
So, I kind of infer from what you've said elsewhere that you don't equally endorse all possible evolutions equally. That is, when you say "evolution continues" you mean something rather more specific than that... continuing in a particular direction, leading to greater and greater amounts of whatever-it-is-that-evolution-currently-optimizes-for (this "complexity measure" cited above), rather than greater and greater amounts of anything else.
And I kind of infer that the reason you prefer that is because it has historically done better at producing results you endorse than any human-engineered process has or could reasonably be expected to have, and you see no reason to expect that state to change; therefore you expect that for the foreseeable future the process of evolution will continue to produce results that you endorse, or at least that you would endorse, or at the very least that you ought to endorse.
Did I get that right?
Are you actually saying that simpler systems don't ever evolve from more complex ones? Or merely that when that happens, the evolutionary process that led to it isn't the kind of evolutionary process you're endorsing here? Or something else?
I don't understand your distinction between "all possible evolutions" and "whatever-it-is-that-evolution-currently-optimizes-for". There are possible courses of evolution that I don't think I would like, such as universes in which intelligence were eliminated. When thinking about how to optimize the future, I think of probability distributions.
Yes! Though I would say, "it has historically done better at producing results I endorse, starting from point X, than any process engineered by organisms existing at point X could reasonably be expected to have."
No. It happens all the time. The simplest systems, viruses and mycoplasmas, can exist only when embedded in more complex systems - although maybe they don't count as systems for that reason. OTOH, there must have been life forms even simpler at one time, and we see no evidence of them now. For some reason the lower bound on possible life complexity has increased over time - possibly just once, a long time ago.
Two "something else" options are (A) merely widening the distribution, without increasing average complexity, would be more interesting to me, and (B) simple organisms appear to be necessary parts of a complex ecosystem, perhaps like simple components are necessary parts of a complex machine.
I think I see... so it's not the complexity of individual organisms that you value, necessarily, but rather the overall complexity of the biosphere? That is, if system A grows simpler over time and system B grows more complex, it's not that you value the process that leads to B but not the process that leads to A, but rather that you value the process that leads to (A and B). Yes?
Edit: er, I got my As and Bs reversed. Fixed.