“I don’t understand the uncertainty. What’s there to know?”
The uncertainty is wether these memes are “alive” or not, as you claim in your post. You support the belief that they are. I’m just re-inforcing the fact that it can only be a belief with current knowledge.
Maybe entity wasn’t the best choice of a word by me, since after googling the definition it can refer to things without a will of their own / awareness / aliveness, like institutions. So, what I really meant was, whether these things are alive or not. By alive, I mean it in the animal sense, i.e. having awareness/sentience, just to be clear.
“Although in practice most human efforts like this serve delusion. They’re not nearly as helpful as they seem. They’re usually anti-helpful.”
I disagree. If it wasn’t for remarkable individuals (aka heroes) we wouldn’t have half the social advances that we have today (humanitarian, technological, etc). Now, more than ever, it’s time for heros. You might doubt the heroicness of sanguine revolutionaries, or world-dividing prophets (it’s hard to weight the total result of their actions in bad vs good) but there’s no doubt about the positive impact of peaceful activism, which happens to be the way forward here.
(Of course some efforts turn out to be anti-helpful, but we’ll never get any helpful ones if we don’t try, and to think that our efforts are usually anti-helpful, aka most of them, is quite cynical specially considering peaceful activism AND probably even more importantly the stakes, which have never been this high.)
By alive, I mean it in the animal sense, i.e. having awareness/sentience, just to be clear.
Alas, that’s not clear to me.
How do you know something has awareness/sentience?
And in terms of egregores, what new thing would you learn in discovering they have awareness/sentience that you don’t already know?
And how would that discovery be relevant to what I discuss in the OP?
Something doesn’t need awareness or sentience to be an unFriendly superintelligence.
That’s core to the whole point of AI risk to begin with.
If it wasn’t for remarkable individuals (aka heroes) we wouldn’t have half the social advances that we have today…
Most people aren’t remarkable individuals in this sense. Most people’s attempts to try come from the pain of stupefaction, not from the clarity of insight.
I’m not doubting the relevance of heroes. I’m not even challenging whether most people could be heroes. I’m saying most people aren’t, and their attempts to act heroically usually do more harm than good.
Alright… Then, again, just to be absolutely clear, let me pick a new word instead of alive: having agency. Your claim is that they are alive. And, fair enough, there are things that are alive that don’t have awareness (the most primitive life forms). But, for something to be considered alive, it must at least have a will of its own! Do you agree?
Therefore, it’s impossible to know if these egregores have a will of their own (the way you seem to paint them, as Gods, definitely suggests even more than that, definitely suggests sentience as well, but let’s forget that by now). They may simply be human tendencies. Tendencies don’t have a will of their own, don’t have agency. They are a result of something, a consequence of something, not something that can act by itself. That’s all I’m trying to say.
That’s why I advocate a more of pragmatic approach. We should listen more to what we know for sure. Instead of trying to align ourselves with the egregore Gods of rationality as a primary focus, maybe our primary focus should consist more of real world actions. You can try to align yourself with the right egregore Gods as much as you want, but if you don’t act in real-world ways, nothing will ever get accomplished, SPECIALLY in critical times like these.
On heroes, not everyone needs to be one. Maybe for some people being aware is enough. Heroes themselves can do little without the help of aware masses. Again, if we don’t strive for coordination in a real-world sense, with the right amount of heroes and aware masses, we won’t achieve anything. We may fail, but it’s our only chance, given, as a said, that these are critical times where time runs quite short.
In other words: if you don’t scare the hell out of people with the real possibilities of this, and at the same time build a way more cooperative and humanistic world community, there is no chance. Aligning one’s self with the egregore God of rationality (aka taking care of one’s own garden first) could perhaps be the way if AGI was for sure centuries off, but it might be just one or two decades.
“I don’t understand the uncertainty. What’s there to know?”
The uncertainty is wether these memes are “alive” or not, as you claim in your post. You support the belief that they are. I’m just re-inforcing the fact that it can only be a belief with current knowledge.
Maybe entity wasn’t the best choice of a word by me, since after googling the definition it can refer to things without a will of their own / awareness / aliveness, like institutions. So, what I really meant was, whether these things are alive or not. By alive, I mean it in the animal sense, i.e. having awareness/sentience, just to be clear.
“Although in practice most human efforts like this serve delusion. They’re not nearly as helpful as they seem. They’re usually anti-helpful.”
I disagree. If it wasn’t for remarkable individuals (aka heroes) we wouldn’t have half the social advances that we have today (humanitarian, technological, etc). Now, more than ever, it’s time for heros. You might doubt the heroicness of sanguine revolutionaries, or world-dividing prophets (it’s hard to weight the total result of their actions in bad vs good) but there’s no doubt about the positive impact of peaceful activism, which happens to be the way forward here.
(Of course some efforts turn out to be anti-helpful, but we’ll never get any helpful ones if we don’t try, and to think that our efforts are usually anti-helpful, aka most of them, is quite cynical specially considering peaceful activism AND probably even more importantly the stakes, which have never been this high.)
Alas, that’s not clear to me.
How do you know something has awareness/sentience?
And in terms of egregores, what new thing would you learn in discovering they have awareness/sentience that you don’t already know?
And how would that discovery be relevant to what I discuss in the OP?
Something doesn’t need awareness or sentience to be an unFriendly superintelligence.
That’s core to the whole point of AI risk to begin with.
Most people aren’t remarkable individuals in this sense. Most people’s attempts to try come from the pain of stupefaction, not from the clarity of insight.
I’m not doubting the relevance of heroes. I’m not even challenging whether most people could be heroes. I’m saying most people aren’t, and their attempts to act heroically usually do more harm than good.
Alright… Then, again, just to be absolutely clear, let me pick a new word instead of alive: having agency. Your claim is that they are alive. And, fair enough, there are things that are alive that don’t have awareness (the most primitive life forms). But, for something to be considered alive, it must at least have a will of its own! Do you agree?
Therefore, it’s impossible to know if these egregores have a will of their own (the way you seem to paint them, as Gods, definitely suggests even more than that, definitely suggests sentience as well, but let’s forget that by now). They may simply be human tendencies. Tendencies don’t have a will of their own, don’t have agency. They are a result of something, a consequence of something, not something that can act by itself. That’s all I’m trying to say.
That’s why I advocate a more of pragmatic approach. We should listen more to what we know for sure. Instead of trying to align ourselves with the egregore Gods of rationality as a primary focus, maybe our primary focus should consist more of real world actions. You can try to align yourself with the right egregore Gods as much as you want, but if you don’t act in real-world ways, nothing will ever get accomplished, SPECIALLY in critical times like these.
On heroes, not everyone needs to be one. Maybe for some people being aware is enough. Heroes themselves can do little without the help of aware masses. Again, if we don’t strive for coordination in a real-world sense, with the right amount of heroes and aware masses, we won’t achieve anything. We may fail, but it’s our only chance, given, as a said, that these are critical times where time runs quite short.
In other words: if you don’t scare the hell out of people with the real possibilities of this, and at the same time build a way more cooperative and humanistic world community, there is no chance. Aligning one’s self with the egregore God of rationality (aka taking care of one’s own garden first) could perhaps be the way if AGI was for sure centuries off, but it might be just one or two decades.