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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36339 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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I’ll agree that brain modification could lead to some nasty outcomes, but overall I think the benefits outweigh the risks as with most technologies. I trust us to use it at least relatively wisely.

What's your conception of the consequences if, in fact, we do not use it responsibly?

From the previous link:

The million dollar question is really one of what happens once that shared neurophysiology begins to fragment, and sharing imperatives becomes a matter of coincidence. It has to be madness, one that will creep upon us by technological degrees.

Why does it have to be madness? Because we define madness according what our brains normally do. Once we begin personalizing our brains, ‘normally do’ will become less and less meaningful. ‘Insanity’ will simply be what one tribe calls another, and from our antiquated perspective, it will all look like insanity.

It’s hard to imagine, I admit, but you have to look at all the biologically fixed aspects of your conscious experience like distinct paints on a palette. Once the human brain falls into our manipulative purview, anything becomes possible. Certain colours, like suffering and fear, will likely be wiped away. Other colours, like carnal pleasure or epiphany, will be smeared across everything. And this is just the easy stuff: willing might be mixed with hearing, so that everytime a dog barks, you have the senstation of willing all creation into existence. Love might be mutated, pressed in experiential directions we cannot fathom, until it becomes something indistinguishable from cruelty. Reason could be married to vision, so that everything you see resounds with Truth. The combinatorial possibilities are as infinite as are the possibilities for creating some genuinely new…

And where does the slow and static ‘human’ fit into all this? Nowhere I can see.

And why should any human want to embrace this, when they are the ladder that will be kicked away? How could reasons be offered, when rationality finds itself on the chopping block with everything else. How do you argue for madness?

Perhaps our only recourse will be some kind of return to State coercion, this time with a toybox filled with new tools for omnipresent surveillance and utter oppression. A world where a given neurophysiology is the State Religion, and super-intelligent tweakers are hunted like animals in the streets.

Maybe that should be my next standalone: a novel called Semantica… I could set it up as a standard freedom-fighter tale, then let the sideways norms slowly trickle in, until the reader begins rooting for totalitarian oppression.

Every method of conflict resolution other than naked, merciless force is founded on the idea that the core nature of Us and Them is in fact fundamentally similar, that at some point we find common ground in our values. You are talking here about technology that could very easily render this idea empirically false. Merely calling this assumption into question in the last century caused a drastic increase in the concentration and intensity of human misery. It is hard to imagine how definitively falsifying it would work out better.

What's your conception of the consequences if, in fact, we do not use it responsibly?

The most dangerous consequence is basic wireheading. I suspect that most of humanity will fall prey to this unfortunately, which I see as somewhat inevitable. I'd argue that the majority of Westerners are essentially in a wirehead-lite version of life already with junk food, porn, entertainment, etc.

To respond to your quote, I think that's far too optimistic in terms of how we can change our brains. We have zero clue how to do it right now, and I think that if we play our cards right we'll slowly learn to live with the technology and adapt it into our society.

There will always be casualties. The millions of people who are obese are a casualty of cheap and tasty food. I still think that creating the abundance which allows them to exist is worth the cost. I hope we can find solutions like semaglutide which will help stem the negative effects while keeping the positives.

In your worst case scenario where we do get a fast takeoff of brain manipulation, I'd imagine the vast majority, as I mentioned above, will wirehead themselves. A small group of those with the willpower or interest in resisting that fate will hopefully persist, reproduce, and become the vanguard of the next society. With over 7 billion human beings on the planet, I'd be shocked if we all succumbed to this sort of problem through a social contagion, although I admit it's possible.

To respond to your quote, I think that's far too optimistic in terms of how we can change our brains.

More optimistic than full-brain uploads or functional immortality?

There will always be casualties. The millions of people who are obese are a casualty of cheap and tasty food.

If they become "casualties" in the sense that they put themselves in an early grave via choices freely made, that seems like something to try to ameliorate, but ultimately an acceptable outcome. What seems very questionable to me is the idea that, in a scenario that comes anywhere close to fitting the definition of "transhumanism", they do this before tech enables the sort of fragmentation Bakker is pointing out.

In your worst case scenario where we do get a fast takeoff of brain manipulation, I'd imagine the vast majority, as I mentioned above, will wirehead themselves. A small group of those with the willpower or interest in resisting that fate will hopefully persist, reproduce, and become the vanguard of the next society.

Of those who resist wireheading, what's your basis for supposing that they will be able to get along in any way? Why one society, and not two or five or five million? What's the force that's going to cohere them together into a unified, cooperative whole, as opposed to simply fragmenting into a bloody swamp of fratricide and predation?

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