Well, one other way to look at it is that "you" are a self-modifying computer program who just happens to be operating on a neural net that evolved inside of biological self-replicating machine.
The fact that your body (which comes equipped with reproductive, digestive, and various locomotive and manipulating organs and appendages) happens to be running you as its operating system as opposed to running say... the mind of a dog, fish, gorilla, or stagnant vegetable simply means its survival chances are higher when it has someone intelligent at the wheel.
The body is essentially a self-replicating machines with all its immune system and digestive track and other bits to perform its needed self-replication. But alone it isn't capable of meeting its own needs without a mind (aka You) to help it maneuver through its environment. Plants have no minds because they only work through photosynthesis and absorbing nutrients from the soil, they also get eaten by herbivores en mass. Animals run primarily through instict, basically working like old-school computers on legs running some basic instinctive programming that is rather difficult to self-modify.
You are an intelligent self-aware optimization process that is currently operating on one of the best computing platforms that nature has managed to cobble together over millennial of evolution. Your basic human body, devoid of a personality and collection of acquired cultural memes, is little better than a mindless vegetable or a feral animal (sadly one devoid of claws or other natural defense mechanisms). Your body counts on YOU to help it operate its limbs and vocal chords to help it mover around and navigate an increasingly complicated world.
Fortunately, YOU are smart enough to learn about things like nutrition, exercise, medicine, and potentially various trans-human technologies that could help you maintain your body better than it could ever do on its own. If you have a heart condition that could kill you (and your body), you can find ways to cure it or get a replacement heart. If you find your condition incurable then you could potentially enact plans to prepare for your eventual death, ensure your progeny (or other humans) get the resources they need to survive, you could even donate your organs for transplant to improve the survivability of others.
Or you could invest in cryogenics to have yourself frozen and possibly revived and brought back to life later. If evolution had ever found a way for your body to reanimate itself after death then it would gladly have taken it (there are plenty of creatures who's bodies can regenerate limbs or survive freezing cold or poisons). As your bodys Operating System, it's your job to decide how to best improve both its and your own survival.
Or you could try downloading yourself into a completely new and better optimized body instead of your regular human one. If you try that... then I guess your mindless vegetative body won't complain.
Hello everyone,
After being introduced to the fascinating subject of evolutionary theory by Less Wrong and starting reading The Selfish Gene I have been slowly coming to terms with the mind-blowing revelation that I am simply a machine built to ensure the preservation of my genes, and that they are the only part of me that will outlive me. This is a change of huge magnitude, requiring I abandon the usual cached thoughts and perceptions of humanity as somehow special, detached from and above the world and baser matter that built us.
Such a revelation should make me question all my assumptions, permeate my thinking, yet I find myself still thinking much the same ways I did before. I have not fully integrated this information and its implications into my world-view. I have noticed myself changing my mind less often than I think, and hope.
My question to you is therefore, how would you expect a person who had learnt of their status as a "mere" gene machine then reflected and fully integrated the knowledge to think? What new thoughts and habits would they form compared to their old life as an immortal special creature, allegedly made in god's image? What would you expect to change?
I offer the following suggestions of the kinds of change this hypothetical person, let us call them "the subject", would make:
- The subject would have to reformulate their attitude to other non-human life-forms or potential lifeforms. With no divine spark seperating us from other animals or artificial minds, they would experience the freedom to decide what they place in their "tribe" (I'm reminded of Human the piggy in Speaker for the Dead realising he can include other cultures and even alien species in his definition of his "tribe"). Would they show more empathy towards non-sapient animals too? How else would this manifest?
- The subject would become more aware of their own mortality and that of others. This would hopefully result in taking additional care of themselves and others on the basis that each has only one chance to be happy and our indifferent creators will not do so. Regrettably this could go the other way and result in undervaluing life given its brevity and seeing no need for morality.
- The subject would feel additional kinship towards fellow humans, bearing in mind that their fundamental structure is almost exactly the same. They would hopefully have greater difficulty labelling others as inhuman or evil and be better capable of empathy. This coupled with their own mortality might incline them to pursue longer-term projects for the benefit of humanity as a whole.
- Less laudably the subject might make their new awareness a source of pride instead of humility, and take pleasure in looking down up those who still hold such "backward" beliefs, seeing them as weak for embracing reassuring falsehoods and having inflated senses of their uniqueness and special-ness.
These are all very general, and I would be very interested to hear your ideas of specific behaviours such a conversion would engender if properly reflected upon and integrated. Thank you for your time.