@Recovering irrationalist, good points, thank you - I just wanted to save time and space by linking to relevant stuff on my blog without repeating myself over and over. My apologies for overdoing it. I guess I feel like talking to a wall or being deliberately ignored due to the lack of feedback. I shall curb my enthusiasm and let things take its course. You know where to find me.
@TGGP: This forum really is not the right place to get into details. It would not be fair towards Eliezer and that I posted something at all is an embarrassing revelation in regards to my intellectual vanity. Mea culpa.
@Tiiba, trust me - I am quite certain that I do, but this is not the right forum - PM me if you want to continue off this blog.
logicnazi, he is making progress ;-)
Humans certainly aren't perfect at imagining. In fact if you ask most people to imagine a heavy object and a much heavier object falling they will predict the much heavier object hits first and I can give a host of other examples of the same thing.
When you ask someone to imagine something he is controlling his imagination which is equivalent to conscious though. What one can think of however is controlled by ones beliefs - what is skewed in humans is their beliefs, not their imagination. Once beliefs are being controlled...
Caledonian, sorry - do you mean that humanity needs to be superseded?
Gray Area, did you read my paper on friendly AI yet? I must be sounding like a broken record by now ;-)
I justify my statement 'that is good what increases fitness' with the axiomatic belief of 'to exist is preferable over not to exist'
The phenomena created by evolution that seem like horrors to us (parasitic wasps) must be that particular wasp's pinnacle of joy. It is a matter of perspective. I am not saying: eat crap - millions of flies can't be wrong! I am taking the human perspective -...
Caledonian, yes - I agree 100% - the tricky part is getting to post humanity - avoiding a non-friendly AI. That would be a future where we have a place in the sense that we will have evolved further.
gutzperson, today you are gutzperson - tomorrow you are post-gutzperson yesterday - ensuring your continued existence in that sense will lead to your eventual transcendence. Same for everyone else - just don't extinguish that strand.
Aaron Luchko, I argue that morality can be universally defined. You can find my thoughts in my paper on friendly AI theory? Would love to hear your comments.
Somehow the links in my earlier comment got messed up.
For the link behind 'cognitive evolution' see: http://www.jame5.com/?p=23 For the link behind 'make sure we will have a place' see: http://www.jame5.com/?p=17
gutzperson: good points - it is all about increasing fitness and social control. You will find reading the following paper quite interesting: Selection of Organization at the Social level: obstacles and facilitators of metasystem transitions. Particularly chapter four: Social Control Mechanisms.
Evolution does not stop on the genetic level but continues on the <a href="a href="http://www.jame5.com/?p=23">cognitive level allowing for a far higher complexity and speed. As a result group selection becomes intuitively obvious although on the cognitive level members of weaker groups have of cause in principle the chance to change their minds aka evolve their beliefs before physical annihilation.
"If we can't see clearly the result of a single monotone optimization criterion"
We can project where ever increasing fitness lead...
The very fact that a religious person would be afraid of God withdrawing Its threat to punish them for committing murder, shows that they have a revulsion of murder which is independent of whether God punishes murder or not. If they had no sense that murder was wrong independently of divine retribution, the prospect of God not punishing murder would be no more existentially horrifying than the prospect of God not punishing sneezing.
What a religious person realizes with such a fear is that truth matters – just not in a sense one would assume intuitively.
Phi...
Great to see more thoughts on evolution from you Eliezer - good stuff.
Nick, truly fascinating read. Thank you. Although I have not read Bostrom's paper prior to today I am glad to find that we come to largely identical conclusions. My core claim 'What is good is what increases fitness' does not mean that I argue for the replacement of humanity with non eudaemonic fitness maximizing agents as Bostrom calls them.
There are two paths to maximizing an individual's fitness:
A) Change an indiidual's genetic/memetic makeup to increase it's fitness in a given environment B) Change an individual's environment to increase it's genetic/memetic fitness
In my AI friendliness theory I argue for option B) using a friendly AGI in which in essence represents Bostrom's singleton.
Elizier: It is pure Judeo-Christian-Islamic exceptionalism, I regret to inform you, to think that failing to believe in the Bible God signifies anything more than failing to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
This is plain wrong - the former belief increases fitness while the later does not. Look at religion in the light of rational choice aka game theory instead of plainly true or false. Big difference.
Benoit: Stefan Pernar, you are right, christianity is fitter than atheism in an evolutionary kind of way. It's members reproduce, spread, divide and c...