Except that, as you say later, you have confidence about what those supposedly incomprehensible values would or wouldn't contain.
More specifically, I have confidence only about one specific thing that these values would not contain. I have no idea what the values would contain; this still renders them incomprehensible, as far as I'm concerned, since the potential search space is vast (if not infinite).
I suspect that if I remembered having been an insect and then later becoming a human being...
I am not entirely convinced that a vastly augmented mind would remember being a regular human in the same way that we humans remember what we had for lunch yesterday. The situation may be more analogous to remembering what it was like being a newborn.
Most people don't remember what being a newborn baby was like; but even if you could recall it with perfect clarity, how much of that information would you find really useful ? A newborn's senses are dull; his mind is mostly empty of anything but basic desires; his ability to affect the world is negligible. There's not much there that is even worth remembering... and, IMO, there's a good chance that a transhuman intelligence would feel the same way about its past humanity.
... and I believed that was a reliably repeatable process, both my emotional stance with respect to the intrinsic value of insect lives and my pragmatic stance with respect to their instrumental value would be radically different than they are now and far more strongly weighted in the insects' favor.
I agree with your later statement:
OT4H, I see no reason to expect any of that to survive what we're calling "intelligence augmentation", as I don't actually think my cognitive design allows my values and my intelligence (ie my optimize-environment-for-my-values) to be separated cleanly.
To expand upon it a bit:
I agree with you regarding the pragmatic stance, but disagree about the "intrinsic value" part. As an adult human, you care about babies primarily because you have a strong built-in evolutionary drive to do so. And yet, even that powerful drive is insufficient to overcome many people's minds; they choose to distance themselves from babies in general, and refuse to have any of their own, specifically. I am not convinced that an augmented human would retain such a built-in drive at all (only targeted at unaugmented humans instead/in addition to infants), and even if they did, I see no reason to believe that it would have a stronger hold over transhumans than over ordinary humans.
Like you, I am unconvinced that a "sufficiently augmented" human would continue to value unaugmented humans, or infants.
Unlike you, I am also unconvinced it would cease to value unaugmented humans, or infants.
Similarly, I am unconvinced that it would continue to value its own existence, or, well, anything at all. It might turn out that all "sufficiently augmented" human minds promptly turn themselves off. It might turn out that they value unaugmented humans more than anything else in the universe. Or insects. Or protozoa. Or crystal ...
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A list of some posts that are pretty awesome
I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:
More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.
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Note from orthonormal: MBlume and other contributors wrote the original version of this welcome post, and I've edited it a fair bit. If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post. Finally, once this gets past 500 comments, anyone is welcome to copy and edit this intro to start the next welcome thread.