Brains are the will of the genome; to know your personality, you must first express the will of your genome, which creates an intelligent network of cells throughout your body to do morphogenesis (cf michael levin); the genome defines the intelligent network, then the network figures out what its will is in terms of intended body form for the circumstance, which in turn produces a nervous system capable of further reshaping itself in response to sensory experiences. At each point, there’s a finite amount of coherence loss to produce the next level of mesaoptimizer, and while alignment between these mesaoptimizer-printers isn’t perfect, a large amount of what defines ones’ base preferences is genetic, which means that anything that could edit those base preferences directly strikes me as fundamentally a consent violation of the deepest core of biological autonomy of a being.
I don’t agree with GeneSmith that the tech to do runtime rewrites is far; it looks impossible now, but in a few years we will simply run a full cell simulator to back-calculate how to reactivate the genes after editing. And besides, that level of transhumanism isn’t limited to the nonsense genetics is: we can fundamentally rewrite substrate into a higher quality biology. (People always say upload to computers, which I think is silly; computers and today’s biology both wish they could be as high quality and energy efficient at massively parallel computation as competently engineered biology.)
Hmm, I don’t think the person talking is expressing the will of the genome, they’re expressing the will of a brain, which is pretty different.
Brains are the will of the genome; to know your personality, you must first express the will of your genome, which creates an intelligent network of cells throughout your body to do morphogenesis (cf michael levin); the genome defines the intelligent network, then the network figures out what its will is in terms of intended body form for the circumstance, which in turn produces a nervous system capable of further reshaping itself in response to sensory experiences. At each point, there’s a finite amount of coherence loss to produce the next level of mesaoptimizer, and while alignment between these mesaoptimizer-printers isn’t perfect, a large amount of what defines ones’ base preferences is genetic, which means that anything that could edit those base preferences directly strikes me as fundamentally a consent violation of the deepest core of biological autonomy of a being.
I don’t agree with GeneSmith that the tech to do runtime rewrites is far; it looks impossible now, but in a few years we will simply run a full cell simulator to back-calculate how to reactivate the genes after editing. And besides, that level of transhumanism isn’t limited to the nonsense genetics is: we can fundamentally rewrite substrate into a higher quality biology. (People always say upload to computers, which I think is silly; computers and today’s biology both wish they could be as high quality and energy efficient at massively parallel computation as competently engineered biology.)