True Optimisation
Hello less wrong community! This is my first post here, so I know that my brain has not (obviously) been optimised to its fullest, but I’ve decided to give posting a try.
Recently, someone very close to me has unfortunately passed away, leading to the invitable inner dilemma about death. I don’t know how many of you are fans of HPMOR, but the way that Harry’s dark side feels about death? Pretty much me around death, dying, etc. however, I’ve decided to push that to the side for the time being, because that is not a useful of efficient way to think.
I was raised by a religious family, but from the age of about 11 stopped believing in deities and religious services. However, I’ve always clung to the idea of an afterlife for people, mainly because my brain seems incapable of handling the idea of ceasing to exist. I know that we as a scientific community know that thoughts are electrical impulses, so is there any way of storing them outside of brain matter? Can they exist freely out of brain matter, or could they be stored in a computer chip or AI?
The conflict lies here: is immortality or mortality rational?
Every fibre in my being tells me that death is irrational and wrong. It is irrational for humanity to not try and prevent death. It is irrational for people to not try and bring back people who have died. Because of this, we have lost some of the greatest minds, scientific and artistic, that will probably ever exist. Although the worlds number of talented and intelligent people does not appear to be finite, I find it hard to live in a world where so muh knowledge is being lost every day.
but on the other hand, how would we feed all those people? What if the world’s resources run out? As a transhumanist, I believe that we can use science to prevent things like death, but nature wasn’t designed to support a population like that.
How do we truly optimise the world: no death and without destruction of the planet?
Hi there; welcome to LessWrong! If you haven’t done so already, I recommend reading the post on Applause Lights. You might also want to make a top-level comment in the current welcome thread.
At a glance, the thrust of this post is a bit too vague to be a Discussion post in and of itself—I think that it would be better suited to an Open Thread. I’m aware that I’m likely not being clear enough to bridge the inferential gap here, but I hope that the pointer is better than nothing. With that, I’m tapping out.
Hi! Thanks for the welcome. Is it possible to move this thread to the Open Thread forum?
No, since that’s a discussion post and not a distinct.. well, we’re running the Reddit codebase, somewhat modified. It’s not a separate subreddit.
Just copy and paste.
If we enter an era where we’re able to put a stop to the aging process, we’ll mostly also be in a massively more affluent time, where concerns about resources running out etc would be much less relevant.
Are there other ways of extending life? What if we were able to prevent death, but not ageing? So we were able to control mortality, but not time? Your point is well taken, though. To add to my question-is there a way to recover the “essence” of a person after death? So when we learn how to stop it, we can resurrect people?
“Preventing death but not ageing” is not carving reality at its joints, when the main cause of death is ageing.
The scenario you’re painting is intuitively plausible, which goes mostly to show why intuition is sometimes a poor guide. Any attempt to defeat death must necessarily make people healthier and keep them young.
Which is not to say it’s impossible, but it’d almost have to be deliberate...
We arguably already do that too much.
There is almost certainly no way to bring back most people who have died. With the destruction of their brains, the information that makes up their memory is probably nowhere we can retrieve it. Maybe for example something different is happening in a worm’s digestive system because it ate through a memory that was one way instead of another. But that’s shortly after the brain is eaten by the worm (and other stuff). You’d have to capture the worm and take it apart impossibly delicately to even have a chance of getting the information back. You’d have to have enough information about the prior state of the worm and its surroundings to know how the insides of the worm would be different depending on the state of the memory before it being eaten. The things you would have to know to track down each bit of information explode outward as more things happen to the worm and its surroundings, etc. I’m pretty sure this is something not even a superintelligence could do.
It might be possible to bring back a little bit of someone who has been dead short enough that they still have lots living friends, acquaintances, and detailed records of things related to their thoughts. Though there should be lots of little hidden internal details that can’t be inferred from their external behavior, which couldn’t be reconstructed.
There’s also cryonics, though it can’t help most people who are already dead and probably won’t be able to help most people who have yet to die.
Plus, to be clear, the chance that cryonics works is (as far as I can tell) low.
It’s not a pascal’s wager—the number is low, but not that low, maybe 1-20% - and even if it isn’t good enough for that, it’d still probably help an AI that’s trying to “bring back a little bit” of a person, so it’s definitely worthwhile. Just not a sure thing.
In an infinite universe everything has already happened, is happening now (here and elsewhere) and will happen again later. This includes the reassembly of you with a memory of all your past reassemblings. In a universe that is merely large, not infinite, you still have a chance of this happening.
Some things are true or false no matter what my preference or needs might be. I never prosper by dwelling on these things overly. Better to visit a sick friend in the hospital than to weep about the sun exploding in my distant future.
I don’t think (1) is a useful way to think. It’s probably true, in some sense, but most of the same arguments against apply as for quantum suicide.
Worse, any random reassembly effects are probably dominated by deliberate ones.
For the overpopulation problem: stop having kids.
We’re going to be facing a big underpopulation problem in the next century or so.
I haven’t heard much about that. Links?
Google.
Scientists and transhumanists are still groping in the dark when they make theories about what a thought is or what a person is. In particular, the more they insist on limiting their theories to our current understanding of matter and the brain, the more wooden and false those theories become. You are probably better off thinking that a person is an energy vortex in the quantum fields of the brain, and that a thought is produced in the vortex by those electrical impulses—and even better if you can think of that as just a science fiction image of something we don’t understand yet, rather than the literal truth.
One virtue of this “vortex” picture is that it pictures a person as a single whole. If a person is to live, the vortex has to survive. Maybe you could record brain activity, then start up a new vortex (however that is done) and induce similar experiences and thoughts by playing back the recording; but if you go by physical continuity, that is a new person, not the old one.
Outer space is the traditional transhumanist answer to the tension between infinite life extension and a finite Earth. But no death, ever, is a very tall order. Things break in the physical world. In the short term, our experiments in imitating and rejuvenating human beings are likely to produce entities that are more brittle than natural humans, and that will exhibit a disturbing deficit of humanness in some way. And there will even be technological subcultures that embrace that less-than-humanness as “good enough”—so strong is the desire for more life. Just as you have clung to the idea of an afterlife, others will cling to a particular technology or philosophy.
Life is tragic and mysterious, but the idea that death makes it genuinely unbearable is rare, and rarely sticks around in a person’s mind. The will to survive keeps people at their jobs (with a lot of moaning and bitching), and the desire for sex and for children keeps them reproducing, and apparently that’s enough to have kept the human show on the road. It’s not as if we’re all still here because someone once figured out an actual reason why it makes sense to keep going, or someone seriously calculated that the good of continuing outweighs the bad. Perhaps it will all resolve, a little further down the line; we’ll have the power to change things, and the knowledge to know what we’re doing. Or perhaps that hope will be dashed too.