Are you seriously suggesting he created some sort of basilisk hack or something? That seems rather dubious to me; what exactly was it that he came up with?
By the way, I doubt it’ll seriously alter my belief structures; I already believe an eternity to torture in Hell is better than ceasing to exist (though of course an eternity of happiness is much better), so I could totally see a Friendly AI coming to the same conclusion.
I already believe an eternity [of] torture in Hell is better than ceasing to exist
The idea that literally anything is better than dying is a piece of psychological falseness that I’ve run across before. Strange7 here says it, the blogger Hopefully Anonymous says it, no doubt thousands of people throughout history also said it. It’s the will to live triumphing over the will to truth.
Any professional torturer could make you choose death fairly quickly. I’m thinking of how North Korea tortured the crew of the American spy ship USS Pueblo. As I recall, one elementary torture involved being struck across the face with a metal bar or maybe a heavy block of wood, hard enough to knock out teeth, and I remember reading of how one crewman shook with fear as their captors prepared to strike him again. I may have the details wrong but that’s irrelevant. If you are forced to experience something really unbearable often enough, eventually you will want to die, just to make it stop.
Evolved creatures should rarely want to die . There are a few circumstances. If they can give their resources to their offspring, and that’s the only way to do it. Some spiders do this by letting their offspring eat them—and there’s the Praying Mantis. Or if they are infected with a plague that will kill everyone they meet—but that’s hardly a common occurance.
Torture would not normally be expected to be enough—the creatures should normally still feel the ecstacy of being alive—and prefer that to dying. While there’s life there’s hope.
Actually wanting to die—as opposed to just executing a behavior which leads to your death—requires that you have the concept of your own death. Is there any evidence that any other species even has that concept?
The idea of personally dying—the knowledge of death, not just as a phenomenon occurring to those external beings that aren’t you, but as something that you, the subject of experience, can undergo—is one of hundreds of psychological and cognitive potentialities that apparently all came to the human race in a bundle, as a result of our extra intelligence or consciousness or whatever it is that made the difference. I strongly doubt that selection has had an opportunity to finetune the elements of that bundle, specifically so as to strengthen the conscious will to live or the ecstasy of being alive. There’s certainly been memetic selection within historical times, but these higher complexities of subjectivity are so many, so multigenic in their origin, and so ambiguous in their effects, that I just don’t see a sharp selective gradient.
I would similarly assert that it’s unlikely that there has been genetic selection driven by the advantage of having a consciously pro-natal attitude in the human race (except perhaps in historical time, as an adjunct to the much more obvious memetic selection in favor of reproduction; i.e. populations who are genetically more apt to host pro-natal memes should find their genes favored, though that might result from factors other than conscious life-affirmation). The superficial attractions which get young males and young females together, and the addictive pleasure of sex, look more like the work of selection. Those are traits where enhancement is clearly reproductively advantageous, and where it should be relatively easy for a mutation to affect their strength. Even if “degree of joy in life” were as easily re-set by simple mutation as those other traits, I don’t think there has been remotely comparable opportunity for selection to act upon it. It sounds like a trait that matters most under conditions of civilization and a society of highly self-aware individuals, for whom abstract reflections can affect whether they breed, and whether they live or die. If we imagine instead two groups of hominids, scarcely even at a hunter-gatherer stage, and imagine one group zesty and the other group glum, it’s not at all clear that zestiness beats glumness. The glum ones might be more thoughtful and thus better problem-solvers.
Actually wanting to die—as opposed to just executing a behavior which leads
to your death—requires that you have the concept of your own death. Is there
any evidence that any other species even has that concept?
That seems pretty obvious to me—animals are not stupid—but I don’t really know what type of evidence you would accept.
Anyway the premise seems wrong. By “wanting to die” all I meant was that the organsm engages in behaviour that leads to death. I wasn’t suggesting spiders and praying mantis exhibited very much abstract thought. A plant can “want to die”—in that sense of the word. However, it is non-biological idea—something we don’t expect to see much—and in fact don’t see much.
I doubt that. In my utility function as it is now, both eternal torture and ceasing to exist are at negative infinity, but the negative infinity of ceasing to exist is to that of eternal torture as the set of real numbers is to the set of integers.
Of course, that’s all besides the point from my original question.
This “utility function” is just an intellectual construct—I could even call it an ideological construct, the ideology being “I must not die, and I must not believe anything which might make me accept death, under any circumstances”—and has nothing to do with how you would actually choose under such harsh conditions. For that matter, the whole idea of literally never dying is not in any way evidence-based, it is pure existential determination.
I doubt that. In my utility function as it is now, both eternal torture and ceasing to exist are at negative infinity, but the negative infinity of ceasing to exist is to that of eternal torture as the set of real numbers is to the set of integers.
I don’t think that’s meaningful. How’s that work mathematically?
I don’t think doing this with cardinality works. One could however has a system where one did have incomparable levels of utility using the surreal number system. One could for example use this to deal with the torture v. dust specs. However, this seems to lead to essentially smuggling in deontological moral claims into a utilitarian system.
Are you seriously suggesting he created some sort of basilisk hack or something? That seems rather dubious to me; what exactly was it that he came up with?
By the way, I doubt it’ll seriously alter my belief structures; I already believe an eternity to torture in Hell is better than ceasing to exist (though of course an eternity of happiness is much better), so I could totally see a Friendly AI coming to the same conclusion.
The idea that literally anything is better than dying is a piece of psychological falseness that I’ve run across before. Strange7 here says it, the blogger Hopefully Anonymous says it, no doubt thousands of people throughout history also said it. It’s the will to live triumphing over the will to truth.
Any professional torturer could make you choose death fairly quickly. I’m thinking of how North Korea tortured the crew of the American spy ship USS Pueblo. As I recall, one elementary torture involved being struck across the face with a metal bar or maybe a heavy block of wood, hard enough to knock out teeth, and I remember reading of how one crewman shook with fear as their captors prepared to strike him again. I may have the details wrong but that’s irrelevant. If you are forced to experience something really unbearable often enough, eventually you will want to die, just to make it stop.
Evolved creatures should rarely want to die . There are a few circumstances. If they can give their resources to their offspring, and that’s the only way to do it. Some spiders do this by letting their offspring eat them—and there’s the Praying Mantis. Or if they are infected with a plague that will kill everyone they meet—but that’s hardly a common occurance.
Torture would not normally be expected to be enough—the creatures should normally still feel the ecstacy of being alive—and prefer that to dying. While there’s life there’s hope.
Actually wanting to die—as opposed to just executing a behavior which leads to your death—requires that you have the concept of your own death. Is there any evidence that any other species even has that concept?
The idea of personally dying—the knowledge of death, not just as a phenomenon occurring to those external beings that aren’t you, but as something that you, the subject of experience, can undergo—is one of hundreds of psychological and cognitive potentialities that apparently all came to the human race in a bundle, as a result of our extra intelligence or consciousness or whatever it is that made the difference. I strongly doubt that selection has had an opportunity to finetune the elements of that bundle, specifically so as to strengthen the conscious will to live or the ecstasy of being alive. There’s certainly been memetic selection within historical times, but these higher complexities of subjectivity are so many, so multigenic in their origin, and so ambiguous in their effects, that I just don’t see a sharp selective gradient.
I would similarly assert that it’s unlikely that there has been genetic selection driven by the advantage of having a consciously pro-natal attitude in the human race (except perhaps in historical time, as an adjunct to the much more obvious memetic selection in favor of reproduction; i.e. populations who are genetically more apt to host pro-natal memes should find their genes favored, though that might result from factors other than conscious life-affirmation). The superficial attractions which get young males and young females together, and the addictive pleasure of sex, look more like the work of selection. Those are traits where enhancement is clearly reproductively advantageous, and where it should be relatively easy for a mutation to affect their strength. Even if “degree of joy in life” were as easily re-set by simple mutation as those other traits, I don’t think there has been remotely comparable opportunity for selection to act upon it. It sounds like a trait that matters most under conditions of civilization and a society of highly self-aware individuals, for whom abstract reflections can affect whether they breed, and whether they live or die. If we imagine instead two groups of hominids, scarcely even at a hunter-gatherer stage, and imagine one group zesty and the other group glum, it’s not at all clear that zestiness beats glumness. The glum ones might be more thoughtful and thus better problem-solvers.
That seems pretty obvious to me—animals are not stupid—but I don’t really know what type of evidence you would accept.
http://www.inquisitr.com/44905/amazing-photo-of-a-chimpanzee-funeral/
Anyway the premise seems wrong. By “wanting to die” all I meant was that the organsm engages in behaviour that leads to death. I wasn’t suggesting spiders and praying mantis exhibited very much abstract thought. A plant can “want to die”—in that sense of the word. However, it is non-biological idea—something we don’t expect to see much—and in fact don’t see much.
I doubt that. In my utility function as it is now, both eternal torture and ceasing to exist are at negative infinity, but the negative infinity of ceasing to exist is to that of eternal torture as the set of real numbers is to the set of integers.
Of course, that’s all besides the point from my original question.
This “utility function” is just an intellectual construct—I could even call it an ideological construct, the ideology being “I must not die, and I must not believe anything which might make me accept death, under any circumstances”—and has nothing to do with how you would actually choose under such harsh conditions. For that matter, the whole idea of literally never dying is not in any way evidence-based, it is pure existential determination.
You are unusual in having wilfully chosen both Christianity and transhumanist immortalism. I know another transhumanist who converted to Islam, so maybe this combination of traditional religion and secular techno-transcendence has a future sociologically.
I don’t think that’s meaningful. How’s that work mathematically?
I don’t think doing this with cardinality works. One could however has a system where one did have incomparable levels of utility using the surreal number system. One could for example use this to deal with the torture v. dust specs. However, this seems to lead to essentially smuggling in deontological moral claims into a utilitarian system.