Since a lot of people who support physicalism don’t consider an intelligence explosion to be that likely, this seems to be unhelpful. Note also that one could also easily not be a physicalist and still consider an intelligence explosion to be likely. For example, one could consistently believe that humans have non-physical souls (whatever that means) and also think that there could be physical extremely efficient self-optimizing agents. This would be a weird position, but it mainly seems weird simply because they aren’t ideas that commonly go together, not because there is any logical problem.
None of this changes the fact that if a theologian decides to defend the argument I outlined, he or she might end up doing useful work. I’m not assuming premise #1 but saying it needs to be argued for.
I highly doubt you’d get anything useful out of a theologian, even if they did try to defend the argument. You’re much more likely to get pointless rhetoric like an argument that an intelligence explosion is impossible because God created man in his image—and thus human intelligence is the upper bound of what’s possible, since nothing can be more intelligent than the image of God than God himself.
Since a lot of people who support physicalism don’t consider an intelligence explosion to be that likely, this seems to be unhelpful. Note also that one could also easily not be a physicalist and still consider an intelligence explosion to be likely. For example, one could consistently believe that humans have non-physical souls (whatever that means) and also think that there could be physical extremely efficient self-optimizing agents. This would be a weird position, but it mainly seems weird simply because they aren’t ideas that commonly go together, not because there is any logical problem.
None of this changes the fact that if a theologian decides to defend the argument I outlined, he or she might end up doing useful work. I’m not assuming premise #1 but saying it needs to be argued for.
What’s the argument, summarised?
Edit: The argument is self-summarising, it seems. Worthy to cross-post. Edit2: If it were sufficiently clever, that is. It’s not.
I highly doubt you’d get anything useful out of a theologian, even if they did try to defend the argument. You’re much more likely to get pointless rhetoric like an argument that an intelligence explosion is impossible because God created man in his image—and thus human intelligence is the upper bound of what’s possible, since nothing can be more intelligent than the image of God than God himself.