My BloggingHeads discussion with Will Wilkinson was posted today. We talked about overcoming bias, cryonics, social status, self-deception, disagreement, and more. I obviously need a better camera setup and more reliable phone line. Oddly I guess, an hour seems a short time to talk – I could enjoy going on like that for a whole day.
I think online chat (IRC or similar) would be the ideal medium for this sort of thing. They used to do that at imminst.org, but that was with everyone talking to one guest instead of two guests talking to each other.
I don't consider my brain to be the "essence" of me. I do not think that I am my mind. Rather, my mind is a tool constructed by my genes to deal with variable environments.
If the environment didn't vary behaviour could be hard-wired in - and there would be no need or room for the mistakes of a trial-and-error-based learning system.
If it is working correctly, the brain can be expected to compensate for unusual aspects of the environment, and still promote the underlying interests of the genes that constructed it - since its primary function in living systems is to do exactly that.
As potentially-immortal essences go, the brain has pretty poor potential. The scope of the engineering project required to allow it to live forever is enormous - and it is not clear why people would devote much in the way of funds to it once we have AI.
What do qualify as potentially-immortal essences are ideas. Most of these are not bound up with brains. They can already replicate themselves independently of the minds that originated them - and appear to be doing so in enormous numbers.
Re: I want to examine your reasons to care about preserving your genes, one by one
Right. But the comments to Robin's blog post are not really a good place. I have an essay on the topic. At least one of your questions is answered in its associated FAQ. Have you perused that?
Re: Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers
Have you read my comments to that blog post? If you have any criticism of them, perhaps present it there? Otherwise I am not clear on the point of citing it.
Re: If there's a potentially immortal essence it's the mind
Genetic information has lasted pretty well so far. Some may survive for extended periods yet. No mind has ever lasted more than a few hundred years.
Re: the only hope for preserving it is in the sort of technology that transhumanists are hopeful about.
Right - good luck with that. I give low odds of success for any individual human. IMHO, most of the information in the brains of most living humans that can't escape via their mouth or fingers is extremely likely to die with them.
I think this is quite important, so I want to examine your reasons to care about preserving your genes, one by one:
1. Because they built you to do that.
This makes it sound like you've no choice in the matter, as if you had an innate instinct to preserve them. But there's no such instinct. There are instead various proxy instincts like surviving, eating, finding a mate, and so on.
You can't avoid having those proxy instincts, but making the leap to explicitly caring about your genes can only be a conscious choice.
2. Because that's what all life does.
Why should you care about what all life does? You're not obligated to do what other members of your class of entity are doing.
3. Because a failure to do so means you are helping to map out the space of failed organisms, not the space of successful ones.
This sounds like a strange sort of pride: if I don't reproduce my DNA then I will have "failed" as a life form. But so what? This failure doesn't affect me.
4. Because few creatures want to see their potentially-immortal essences ground into the dust.
It's odd to see your genes as your "immortal essence" when so much of who you are is not innate but learnt, and when so much of what is innate is shared among all humans.
If there's a potentially immortal essence it's the mind, but the only hope for preserving it is in the sort of technology that transhumanists are hopeful about.
Re: why care about preserving your genes - it's an odd question. Because they built you to do that. Because that's what all life does. Because a failure to do so means you are helping to map out the space of failed organisms, not the space of successful ones. Because few creatures want to see their potentially-immortal essences ground into the dust.
I find this attitude bizarre. Your genes aren't you. Having offspring doesn't make you immortal.
What would be really interesting is a head-to-head like this between Robin and Eliezer, debating their major rationalist disagreements (such as disagreement between rationalists).
Re: Your justification for aging as adaptive is based on group selection
That is not true - see the section of the essay starting:
Antagonistic pleiotropy suggests that failure to turn off developmental processes may be partially responsible for senescence.
The widely-accepted disposable soma theory suggests that aging is the result of an economic tradeoff between maintenance and reproduction. Maintenance processes are actively downregulated in favour of reproductive ones, due to their associated economic costs.
Your justification for aging as adaptive is based on group selection, which as dawkins and others have pointed out, is very weak effect, since selfish individuals (so long as they can reproduce) will always subvert the group.
Non-reproducing entities like infertile ants and bees can be adaptively altruistic since they are infertile and they protect their genes by serving the reproducing entities. (queen and drones)
Aging is the accumulation of metabolic damage which, over a certain threshold, causes pathologies. Diseases.
If you fix that damage before it reaches that threshold, the pathologies won't appear. You cure those diseases.
Not so long ago, all humans died before those particular diseases could kill us, because other things killed us first. If you think aging is a good thing, why don't you think those other things that killed us in our 20s and 30s were good things? And why isn't it a bad thing for us to have overcome those?
Now you can define "disease" in a way that excludes all that, I don't care. Point is, aging is ghastly, causes suffering in the people who age and their loved ones, and wastes tremendous human potential. People should have a choice; if like you they think it's fine, no prob. Don't us the anti-aging therapies. But others like me will.
Those interested in the subject should check Aubrey de Grey's TED Talk, and if that piques their curiosity, get his book "Ending Aging". Then make up your own mind after having read the arguments against aging.
Towards the beginning of the diavlog, Prof. Hanson says something along the lines that if people were not biased they would never knowingly disagree. At the risk of revealing my ignorance on the subject, could someone explain why this is supposed to be so?
Re: why do lots of sick eighty year olds use expensive hospitals, while only a few signed up for cryonics.
I've given my resoning for few cryonics sign-ups. Why do old people spend money on expensive hospitals, rather than giving it to their relatives (assuming an inclusive fitness argument suggests that)? Probably many reasons: they are in the habit of surviving, and don't know when it's time to quit; they are old, and poorly equiped for making complex decisions; they are sick, and may not be behaving rationally; they are facing a situation which they are unfamiliar with, and so get confused; their genetic program gives them little guidance - because few of their ancesors died rich. Probably other reasons, also.
Re: why care about preserving your genes - it's an odd question. Because they built you to do that. Because that's what all life does. Because a failure to do so means you are helping to map out the space of failed organisms, not the space of successful ones. Because few creatures want to see their potentially-immortal essences ground into the dust.
Re: curing aging - aging is not a disease. IMO, what we need to do is to create a hardware/software divide in organisms. Attempts to fix human aging strike me as a misguided waste of energy. But let's not discuss "curing aging" here: that's not a topic in Robin's diavlog.
I think online chat (IRC or similar) would be the ideal medium for this sort of thing. They used to do that at imminst.org, but that was with everyone talking to one guest instead of two guests talking to each other.
I don't consider my brain to be the "essence" of me. I do not think that I am my mind. Rather, my mind is a tool constructed by my genes to deal with variable environments.
If the environment didn't vary behaviour could be hard-wired in - and there would be no need or room for the mistakes of a trial-and-error-based learning system.
If it is working correctly, the brain can be expected to compensate for unusual aspects of the environment, and still promote the underlying interests of the genes that constructed it - since its primary function in living systems is to do exactly that.
As potentially-immortal essences go, the brain has pretty poor potential. The scope of the engineering project required to allow it to live forever is enormous - and it is not clear why people would devote much in the way of funds to it once we have AI.
What do qualify as potentially-immortal essences are ideas. Most of these are not bound up with brains. They can already replicate themselves independently of the minds that originated them - and appear to be doing so in enormous numbers.
Yeah, I'm happy to continue the discussion on the other thread. One thing:
[Allan]: If there's a potentially immortal essence it's the mind
[Tim]: Genetic information has lasted pretty well so far.
I meant an immortal essence of you. Your genes are "immortal" in a sense, but I don't consider them the essence of you.
Re: I want to examine your reasons to care about preserving your genes, one by one
Right. But the comments to Robin's blog post are not really a good place. I have an essay on the topic. At least one of your questions is answered in its associated FAQ. Have you perused that?
Re: Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers
Have you read my comments to that blog post? If you have any criticism of them, perhaps present it there? Otherwise I am not clear on the point of citing it.
Re: If there's a potentially immortal essence it's the mind
Genetic information has lasted pretty well so far. Some may survive for extended periods yet. No mind has ever lasted more than a few hundred years.
Re: the only hope for preserving it is in the sort of technology that transhumanists are hopeful about.
Right - good luck with that. I give low odds of success for any individual human. IMHO, most of the information in the brains of most living humans that can't escape via their mouth or fingers is extremely likely to die with them.
"What would be really interesting is a head-to-head like this between Robin and Eliezer,"
I would like to second that. It doesn't even need to be a debate. I'm sure just a chat would lead to interesting places.
I like Will Wilkinson, but I'd like to see a Robin Hanson and Tyler Cowen talking heads.
I think this is quite important, so I want to examine your reasons to care about preserving your genes, one by one:
1. Because they built you to do that.
This makes it sound like you've no choice in the matter, as if you had an innate instinct to preserve them. But there's no such instinct. There are instead various proxy instincts like surviving, eating, finding a mate, and so on.
You can't avoid having those proxy instincts, but making the leap to explicitly caring about your genes can only be a conscious choice.
2. Because that's what all life does.
Why should you care about what all life does? You're not obligated to do what other members of your class of entity are doing.
3. Because a failure to do so means you are helping to map out the space of failed organisms, not the space of successful ones.
This sounds like a strange sort of pride: if I don't reproduce my DNA then I will have "failed" as a life form. But so what? This failure doesn't affect me.
4. Because few creatures want to see their potentially-immortal essences ground into the dust.
It's odd to see your genes as your "immortal essence" when so much of who you are is not innate but learnt, and when so much of what is innate is shared among all humans.
If there's a potentially immortal essence it's the mind, but the only hope for preserving it is in the sort of technology that transhumanists are hopeful about.
Re: why care about preserving your genes - it's an odd question. Because they built you to do that. Because that's what all life does. Because a failure to do so means you are helping to map out the space of failed organisms, not the space of successful ones. Because few creatures want to see their potentially-immortal essences ground into the dust.
I find this attitude bizarre. Your genes aren't you. Having offspring doesn't make you immortal.
What would be really interesting is a head-to-head like this between Robin and Eliezer, debating their major rationalist disagreements (such as disagreement between rationalists).
Re: Your justification for aging as adaptive is based on group selection
That is not true - see the section of the essay starting:
Antagonistic pleiotropy suggests that failure to turn off developmental processes may be partially responsible for senescence.
The widely-accepted disposable soma theory suggests that aging is the result of an economic tradeoff between maintenance and reproduction. Maintenance processes are actively downregulated in favour of reproductive ones, due to their associated economic costs.
@Tim Tyler:
Your justification for aging as adaptive is based on group selection, which as dawkins and others have pointed out, is very weak effect, since selfish individuals (so long as they can reproduce) will always subvert the group.
Non-reproducing entities like infertile ants and bees can be adaptively altruistic since they are infertile and they protect their genes by serving the reproducing entities. (queen and drones)
"aging is not a disease."
Aging is the accumulation of metabolic damage which, over a certain threshold, causes pathologies. Diseases.
If you fix that damage before it reaches that threshold, the pathologies won't appear. You cure those diseases.
Not so long ago, all humans died before those particular diseases could kill us, because other things killed us first. If you think aging is a good thing, why don't you think those other things that killed us in our 20s and 30s were good things? And why isn't it a bad thing for us to have overcome those?
Now you can define "disease" in a way that excludes all that, I don't care. Point is, aging is ghastly, causes suffering in the people who age and their loved ones, and wastes tremendous human potential. People should have a choice; if like you they think it's fine, no prob. Don't us the anti-aging therapies. But others like me will.
Those interested in the subject should check Aubrey de Grey's TED Talk, and if that piques their curiosity, get his book "Ending Aging". Then make up your own mind after having read the arguments against aging.
dontlike, to shine I really need a conversation partner.
Black, start here.
Towards the beginning of the diavlog, Prof. Hanson says something along the lines that if people were not biased they would never knowingly disagree. At the risk of revealing my ignorance on the subject, could someone explain why this is supposed to be so?
Re: why do lots of sick eighty year olds use expensive hospitals, while only a few signed up for cryonics.
I've given my resoning for few cryonics sign-ups. Why do old people spend money on expensive hospitals, rather than giving it to their relatives (assuming an inclusive fitness argument suggests that)? Probably many reasons: they are in the habit of surviving, and don't know when it's time to quit; they are old, and poorly equiped for making complex decisions; they are sick, and may not be behaving rationally; they are facing a situation which they are unfamiliar with, and so get confused; their genetic program gives them little guidance - because few of their ancesors died rich. Probably other reasons, also.
Re: why care about preserving your genes - it's an odd question. Because they built you to do that. Because that's what all life does. Because a failure to do so means you are helping to map out the space of failed organisms, not the space of successful ones. Because few creatures want to see their potentially-immortal essences ground into the dust.
Re: curing aging - aging is not a disease. IMO, what we need to do is to create a hardware/software divide in organisms. Attempts to fix human aging strike me as a misguided waste of energy. But let's not discuss "curing aging" here: that's not a topic in Robin's diavlog.
"Goddammit". I'd rather just have Robin Hanson talking by himself. Will Wilkinson gets on my nerves. A lot.