I don’t think this will matter much as we enter the age of AGI.
AGI is immortal by default, so that reframes the question to one where mortality must have some significant advantage. I do think the steelmanned version of your innovation-via-death argument has some merit—namely in that there is value in exploring new hyperparam rollouts of mindspace. But AGI will be able to do that without mortality (by training up entire new version of brain modules from scratch, and integrating slowly), so it becomes a moot point.
In other words, AGI (and by extension, posthuman uploads) will be able to arbitrarily regain childlike cognitive flexibility—existing in a state of continuous rebirth, so to speak.
Ok, but this only works with “posthuman uploads” not with bodily humans. A large portion of the current work for eliminating dead is focussed on keeping our bodies healthy. And, as far as I have seen, many people seem to support eliminating dead by keeping our bodies healthy.
So, it may not be strange that the disjunction is not spoken about when the debate is explicitly about eliminating dead by uploading human brains or the like, but not in a general setting, right?
I don’t think this will matter much as we enter the age of AGI.
AGI is immortal by default, so that reframes the question to one where mortality must have some significant advantage. I do think the steelmanned version of your innovation-via-death argument has some merit—namely in that there is value in exploring new hyperparam rollouts of mindspace. But AGI will be able to do that without mortality (by training up entire new version of brain modules from scratch, and integrating slowly), so it becomes a moot point.
In other words, AGI (and by extension, posthuman uploads) will be able to arbitrarily regain childlike cognitive flexibility—existing in a state of continuous rebirth, so to speak.
(sorry for the late reply)
Ok, but this only works with “posthuman uploads” not with bodily humans. A large portion of the current work for eliminating dead is focussed on keeping our bodies healthy. And, as far as I have seen, many people seem to support eliminating dead by keeping our bodies healthy.
So, it may not be strange that the disjunction is not spoken about when the debate is explicitly about eliminating dead by uploading human brains or the like, but not in a general setting, right?
In any case, thanks for engaging.