14 Comments

What is "em"? 

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The forager/ farmer concept is like the Village People with only only two of them left.What happened to the Indian chief and the policeman?

Ems are like John Madden Football 500 years from now.

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Loyalty within an em-clone clan may depend a great deal on how difficult it is to transfer information between members. If it is much easier between members of a clone compared to outside the clone, it would likely make for very strong loyalty.

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Em loyalty to their Em-clone clan seems less likely to me than Em jealousy and competition. Unless their survival depends on it.

Maybe it's just me.

Em morality and attitudes towards sex will mirror that of the original human.

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To create world wars with large institutions, yes, it'd probably take more (although I don't know of any evidence that says so).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

But to create small-scale clan warfare all you'd need is a disagreement and a sense of honor.

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I usually focus on an early em era when such mixing of mind parts is infeasible. I suspect a lot will happen in that era.

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Whether ems would have "liberal" attitudes about "sex" might depend on the prevalent IP laws. I am using the quotation marks to hint that ems are likely to diverge from humans psychologically at an astounding (to us) rate, and what would pass of sex among them could be quite different than what it is among humans. Human sex evolved as a way of assuring access to the most useful available genetic information encoded in other individuals, under conditions (constant but variable survival threats such as parasites) which strongly favored such exchange. If ems have strong IP laws regarding parts of their minds, and a need to exchange structural information, they will have something analogous to human sex, with limited access to or by specific individuals. If IP protection turns out not be favored by the evolution of the legal system, they may have exchanges more similar to bacterial conjugation or DNA uptake, a kind of more or less random take up and incorporation of snippets of other ems' minds. Whether the term "liberal" would have a recognizable analogue I find hard to predict.

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It takes a lot more than loyalty to create war.

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The capacities were certainly evolved long ago. I'm saying that farmers amplified their use relative to foragers.

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Except, unlike modern liberals, foragers are highly religious or at least supernaturalistic and, while farmers may have selected even more strongly for them, the three conservative moral foundations almost certainly evolved while we were foragers.

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"... except as a possible way to waste too much time. ... And they’d probably feel strong clan loyalty, even beyond what farmers feel, to the clan of copies of the same original human."

One possible (frightening) interpretation of these facts is that ems could use their spare time to conduct constant war between clans. This would mitigate the large em population and limited resources per capita (providing motivation). There is the conservative/farmer pro-war stance (not implying just or unjust here) leaning in this direction as well.

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The forager/farmer moral structure you describe is just a historical artifact, not to mention a false dichotomy, and there's little value in applying it to future scenarios. We adapt to serve our self-interest within our given circumstances, period, and our strategy of moral attack is an outgrowth of the same. Since it's incredibly unlikely that any imaginable future will resemble either of the previous era's, why approach the problem this way? The two concepts are far too confining.

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