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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35430 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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This means, in brief, the belief in the common cosmic endowment of humanity, the moral imperative – Great Common Task – to overcome bodily death (and, ideally, reverse as many past deaths as possible by technical means, redeeming human history, regathering «particles of our fathers»), and the notion that institutions, cultures, techniques and weapons or warfare ought to be pointed away from our kin and aimed against the lethal force of nature.

Your vision seems techno-utopian and apolitical. It's fundamentally Christian- culminating in the resurrection of the dead, the lion laying down with the lamb, redemption from original sin, and a kingdom with no end.

We already have the promise of life after death. Our essence lives on in our children and our extended kin groups. Any ideology or project that neglects that, like promising personal salvation in the form of eternal life, from whatever divine source - celestial or technological - distracts from our real avenue for achieving life after death.

And a commitment to our progeny, in hopes that they are like us but better in every way: smarter, healthier, more beautiful, is intrinsically a political project and always has been; it's not a utopian vision that presupposes solving the political.

We already have the promise of life after death. Our essence lives on in our children and our extended kin groups. Any ideology or project that neglects that, like promising personal salvation in the form of eternal life, from whatever divine source - celestial or technological - distracts from our real avenue for achieving life after death.

...And so the AGI worked, endlessly tiling the universe over with genotronium - the most compact and durable representation of the AI engineer's genome possible. For the engineer did not care about continuity, and he did not care about the medium, and he did not care about the memes (for memes were, by his reasoning, wholly downstream from genes). As long as the essence was there, he reasoned, it was good enough.

It is all nice and well to care about creating new lives. "Us but better", "us but better off" and all that. The visceral hormonal joy of parenting and the spiritual enjoyment of legacy. What's pitiful and disgusting is to not only settle for it but regard it as the only way. I must be frank, as immortalities go procreation is a mocking cope handed down by the blind idiot god of evolution as an afterthought. As for settling for "us but worse off", I cannot find epithets strong enough to describe that.

As for settling for "us but worse off"

Who wants to settle for "us but worse off?" I do not. But that's a political project, it's not a global humanitarian utopia or deus ex machina. It's civilization.

What's pitiful and disgusting is to not only settle for it but regard it as the only way. I must be frank, as immortalities go procreation is a mocking cope handed down by the blind idiot god of evolution as an afterthought.

How else are you going to achieve your immortality? Are you going to pray to Yahweh? Receive the eucharist? Or study machine learning in joyful hope for the coming of robot-Jesus Christ? All of those aspirational dreams are fine in their own, but if they are distracting you from realizing the actual potential of your own immortality, however limited, (or worse, if they are actively inspiring behavior that ensures the decline of your progeny) then that is what I would call pitiful and disgusting.

How else are you going to achieve your immortality?

It's a false assumption that procreation can even be called immortality. It's further from immortality than masturbation is from sex.

I agree with this. I like the idea of having kids for my own reasons but I find the idea that it's immortality as strange as people's claims that they wouldn't want immortality even with an escape clause if they eventually desired it. I can only model it as cope, trying to get into the head of someone who genuinely believes it is impossible for me.

I was riffing on your tongue-in-cheek reference reference to reproduction as a cheap immortality. I suppose it's more similar to reincarnation. In religious myth, the quality of your reincarnation is determined by your deeds in the current life. The same applies to reproduction. Breeding habits and mate selection have either beautiful or disastrous consequences based on how society is organized and how we behave on an individual basis.

Are you suggesting that anyone who cannot guarantee that his children are better off than himself should not have any?

There are no guarantees in life, and most people hope for the best. But if you have no hope for the better, and still go through - you're just making another sacrifice to Moloch.

Why is your standard of living the decision boundary? Your model can't handle civilizational cycles that are seen all throughout history. You would end your own line at the first hint of decline rather than engage in a multi-generational contest for civilizational rejuvenation? Your ancestors made it through decline. They weren't sacrificing their progeny to Moloch. They lived on, and those who thought like you are long dead, in the most real sense of the term.

"Your thoughts do not produce children" is a circular argument when I'm arguing against the fundamental value of procreating in the first place.

those who thought like you are long dead

This does not match my experience. At the least, like you yourself said, the vision is fundamentally Christian - so it's hard to argue that universal resurrection and ascension into eternal paradise has no ideological staying power.

It's not the ideological staying power I question, it's that utopian visions of post-political, universal cooperation for personal salvation are a false god. It distracts from the real concerns of the here and now, the political, and our only actual hope for salvation: our children.

Ilforte is upset Anatoly Karlin, who shares his secular religion (I do not mean that as an insult, the creation of a secular religion is the greatest challenge of our time and I also think AI will have a place in that endeavor) is choosing Putin over cosmism. But what is Ilforte more upset about? Is he upset that Karlin is choosing Russian nationalism over Cosmism in general? Or is it only because the cause itself is lost and counter-productive to Russian nationalism?

Let's say that Putin were actually an extremely good leader for the Russian people and played his cards perfectly, and Russia stood to imminently gain from this conflict. If the strategic approach to realizing those gains for the Russian nation came into conflict with Ilforte's cosmist values, which would he pick? I know which Karlin would pick.

This can be taken to the extreme. You can ask a Christian: "Would you be OK with 100% of Europe being replaced by Africans, if all of the Africans were Christians?" The Karlin would say that this is not acceptable, but the good Christian who doesn't place nationalism before his religion would be more likely to consider this a worthy tradeoff. That's due to the staying power of the ideology. True. But it's not a good thing.

our only actual hope for salvation: our children.

I for one am expecting a technological singularity in a few years.

Is he upset that Karlin is choosing Russian nationalism over Cosmism in general? Or is it only because the cause itself is lost and counter-productive to Russian nationalism?

I think it's a sentiment of "damn it, you had it! you had the right view!"

"Would you be OK with 100% of Europe being replaced by Africans, if all of the Africans were Christians?"

Are Christians Christianity-maximizers? I'm genuinely not sure the religion leads to that conclusion.

I for one am expecting a technological singularity in a few years.

Are you willing to bet money on it? I could use some money.

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