I believe in “supernatural phenomena” due to many anecdotal experiences I personally had. I do acknowledge they may all be me incorrectly evaluating ordinary natural phenomena or mental processes due to psychological quirks of mine. Hence, I make a constant effort to no let them interfere in anything I’m dealing with that has clear scientific consensus and/or hard data, or in my ethical, social, and political standings, preferring to keep both sides well separated. In short, to use LW terminology, I willfully compartmentalize.
However, I do not believe in separate magisteria. I’m confident that eventually either the mechanisms behind those experiences I have had will be well known, solving the confusion in a definite way, or those phenomena will be consistently observed, studied, scientifically understood, incorporated into physics, and turned into useful technologies.
Funnily, I’d have preferred not to have had those experiences, as I really like transhumanism and its projected future possibilities, such as cryonics-based resurrection, cognitive reengineering, uploading, mind splitting/remerging/backing up/restoring, and others, all of which becomes from extremely unlikely to impossible if what I’ve experienced is real. As such I don’t see these, all things considered, as a net positive.
I don’t follow the last bit. If ghosts were real, the first-order news would be amazing: maybe humanity wouldn’t have truly lost the brain-information of any human, ever!
Yes, but that would (does?) also means a strict limit in how much cognitive abilities, including emotional amplitude, can be engineered. Neural engineering would has as its task improving a human body’s brain up to that limit, but not beyond, as after a point it would be (is?) incompatible with “human souls”.
So, the first-order news would be good, in that 42 billion or so human souls would be intact (barring something able to kill souls). The second-order news, however, is that the trillions to quadrillions of human beings that will still come to exist will all be, well, basically this, just spread around. So, for me, if those quadrillions of future human beings could have been orders or magnitude more at the price of all human beings so far existing not having a continuity into that future, the utility thus gained would also be orders of magnitude higher.
Sure current engineering wouldn’t have any idea, but discovering a new subtrate that humans exist on has also the promise of engineering that subtrate. If we discover a new field effecting muon g-factor we don’t mourn for physics having an upper limit we rejoice of inclusion of new exotic stuff.
True, and I do think that’d be quite exciting. My point is that humanity not being able to develop the option of, e.g., reloading a backup of oneself, or several then merging the results into a new integrated self, would be limiting. I do enjoy science fiction dealing on those topics after all, from Friendship is Optimal all the way to Iain M. Bank’s Culture series, passing through Star Trek’s endless transporter accidents, I find the idea of “identity as data” quite appealing. Having it tied to some kind of substratum is comparatively a kinda meh proposition, even if said substratum were to be shown to have quite interesting properties in other respects.
If human souls are generated by the human brain, which seems as likely as any other mechanism of creating them, then perhaps an upgraded brain will generate upgraded souls.
Selection effects are computationally prohibitive to back out of data. If you have a very large combinatorial space and a sufficiently permissive filter one in a million things are happening constantly.
I investigated this by wielding it with intention as a teenager. I would choose something to notice and treat as meaningful, and then watch the rest of the system pattern match adjacent things a lot (synchronicity).
I believe in “supernatural phenomena” due to many anecdotal experiences I personally had. I do acknowledge they may all be me incorrectly evaluating ordinary natural phenomena or mental processes due to psychological quirks of mine. Hence, I make a constant effort to no let them interfere in anything I’m dealing with that has clear scientific consensus and/or hard data, or in my ethical, social, and political standings, preferring to keep both sides well separated. In short, to use LW terminology, I willfully compartmentalize.
However, I do not believe in separate magisteria. I’m confident that eventually either the mechanisms behind those experiences I have had will be well known, solving the confusion in a definite way, or those phenomena will be consistently observed, studied, scientifically understood, incorporated into physics, and turned into useful technologies.
Funnily, I’d have preferred not to have had those experiences, as I really like transhumanism and its projected future possibilities, such as cryonics-based resurrection, cognitive reengineering, uploading, mind splitting/remerging/backing up/restoring, and others, all of which becomes from extremely unlikely to impossible if what I’ve experienced is real. As such I don’t see these, all things considered, as a net positive.
I don’t follow the last bit. If ghosts were real, the first-order news would be amazing: maybe humanity wouldn’t have truly lost the brain-information of any human, ever!
Yes, but that would (does?) also means a strict limit in how much cognitive abilities, including emotional amplitude, can be engineered. Neural engineering would has as its task improving a human body’s brain up to that limit, but not beyond, as after a point it would be (is?) incompatible with “human souls”.
So, the first-order news would be good, in that 42 billion or so human souls would be intact (barring something able to kill souls). The second-order news, however, is that the trillions to quadrillions of human beings that will still come to exist will all be, well, basically this, just spread around. So, for me, if those quadrillions of future human beings could have been orders or magnitude more at the price of all human beings so far existing not having a continuity into that future, the utility thus gained would also be orders of magnitude higher.
Sure current engineering wouldn’t have any idea, but discovering a new subtrate that humans exist on has also the promise of engineering that subtrate. If we discover a new field effecting muon g-factor we don’t mourn for physics having an upper limit we rejoice of inclusion of new exotic stuff.
True, and I do think that’d be quite exciting. My point is that humanity not being able to develop the option of, e.g., reloading a backup of oneself, or several then merging the results into a new integrated self, would be limiting. I do enjoy science fiction dealing on those topics after all, from Friendship is Optimal all the way to Iain M. Bank’s Culture series, passing through Star Trek’s endless transporter accidents, I find the idea of “identity as data” quite appealing. Having it tied to some kind of substratum is comparatively a kinda meh proposition, even if said substratum were to be shown to have quite interesting properties in other respects.
If human souls are generated by the human brain, which seems as likely as any other mechanism of creating them, then perhaps an upgraded brain will generate upgraded souls.
A significant set of possible models of such phenomena result in them being irreducibly personal and subjective, hampering detailed analysis.
Selection effects are computationally prohibitive to back out of data. If you have a very large combinatorial space and a sufficiently permissive filter one in a million things are happening constantly.
I investigated this by wielding it with intention as a teenager. I would choose something to notice and treat as meaningful, and then watch the rest of the system pattern match adjacent things a lot (synchronicity).