Anders Sandberg on transhumanism
Anders Sandberg characterises the essence of transhumanism as:
Questioning the necessity and optimality of the current human condition, as well as suggesting that methods to improve it might be both feasible and desirable. If we were living in a fantasy world transhumanists would no doubt argue in favor of using cutting edge magic to improve life.
Sandberg notes that, in contrast, Nick Bostrom sometimes emphasises “the desire to explore the posthuman realm, the states of being that are currently unavailable to us”.
But:
In practice there [are] plenty of transhumanists who are not terribly interested in becoming radically posthuman - a few extra centuries in comfort with enhanced minds and bodies is all right with them. They want to personally explore the nicer reaches of the human modes of being and maybe some near posthuman modes. But the common theme is that they do not see the current limitations as desirable, and think (with varying levels of confidence and evidence) that there are or will be ways of overcoming them.
Elsewhere, Sandberg writes:
All things considered, the human condition has many things going for it. Unfortunately, there are some problems. The need to sleep. Hangovers. Pain. Forgetfulness. Bad judgement. Cruelty. Depression. Ageing. Mortality. To name a few.
One approach is to try to accept these limitations and pains. Learning to live with adversity can sometimes be good for a person—it might teach them perseverance or humility . . . Unfortunately, adversity can also numb, harden, or crush us—and surely we should not just accept cruelty or ignorance as a fact of life.
Another approach is to try to fix our limitations and problems. This is the goal of human enhancement: if we are forgetful, maybe we can improve our brains to forget less, for example by taking drugs that increase neural plasticity. To counteract ageing we might use gene therapy to increase production of enzymes that decline with age, remove aged and ill cells, or add fresh stem cells.
Human enhancement is all around us. The morning coffee or tea contains stimulating caffeine that counteracts sleepiness. Vaccines are a form of collective, global immunity against illnesses we may have never encountered. Less invasively, most of us live our lives with smartphones connecting us to a sizeable fraction of humanity and its knowledge. We are never alone, never lost, never bored, able to record anything. Our medieval ancestors would find our (long, healthy, rich) lives superhuman.
Robin Hanson on world government and collective suicide
If your mood changes every month, and if you die in any month where your mood turns to suicide, then to live 83 years you need to have one thousand months in a row where your mood doesn’t turn to suicide. Your ability to do this is aided by the fact that your mind is internally divided; while in many months part of you wants to commit suicide, it is quite rare for a majority coalition of your mind to support such an action.
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When there are powers large enough that their suicide could take down civilization, then the risk of power suicide becomes a risk of civilization suicide. Even if the risk is low in any one year, over the long run this becomes a serious risk.
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Alas, central power risks central suicide, either done directly on purpose or as an indirect consequence of other broken thinking. In contrast, in a sufficiently decentralized world when one power commits suicide, its place and resources tend to be taken by other powers who have not committed suicide. Competition and selection is a robust long-term solution to suicide, in a way that centralized governance is not.
This is my tentative best guess for the largest future filter that we face, and that other alien civilizations have faced. The temptation to form central governments and other governance mechanisms is strong, to solve immediate coordination problems, to help powerful interests gain advantages via the capture of such central powers, and to sake the ambition thirst of those who would lead such powers. Over long periods this will seem to have been a wise choice, until suicide ends it all and no one is left to say “I told you so.”
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/11/world-government-risks-collective-suicide.html
Future filters could result from either too little or too much coordination. To prevent future filters, I don’t know if it is better to have more or less world government.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/05/two-types-of-future-filters.html
Joe Carlsmith on non-naturalist realism vs anti-realism
Utopia, for [the non-naturalist realist], was always the promise of something more than e.g. joy, love, creativity, understanding — it was the promise of those things, with an extra non-natural sauce on top. A Utopia with no sauce is an empty shell, the ethical analog of a phenomenal zombie. It looks right, but the crucial, invisible ingredient is missing.
How one reacts here is ultimately a question of psychology, not metaphysics. Some robots are envelope-ranking-maximizers, and they won’t change their goals just because the envelope probably doesn’t exist. But I think we should be wary of assuming too quickly that we’re like this.
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[On the anti-realist picture] it’s clearer to me what I’m doing, in deciding whether to help the deer, create Utopia, etc, given the posited metaphysical clarity. I feel somehow more grounded, more like a creature in the real, raw, beautiful world, with my eyes open, taking full responsibility for my actions, and less like I’m somehow playing pretend, seeking guidance from some further realm or set of facts that I secretly suspect does not exist.
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To me, what this currently looks like is a place where the choice about what sort of world to create is in a deep way on us. Just as there is no theistic God to tell us what to do, so there is no further realm of normative facts to tell us, either. We have to choose for ourselves. We have to be, as it were, adults. To stand together, and sometimes alone, amidst the beauty and horror and confusion of the world; to look each other and ourselves in the eye; to try to see as clearly as possible what’s really going on, what our actions really involve and imply and create, what it is we really do, when we do something; and then, to choose.
This isn’t to say we can’t mess up: we can — deeply, terribly, irreparably. But messing up will come down to some failure to understand our actions, ourselves, and each other, and to act on that understanding; some veil between us and the real world we inhabit; not some failure to track, in our decisions, the True Values hidden in some further realm. And when we don’t mess up — when we actually find and build and experience what it is we would seek if we saw with full clarity — what we will get isn’t the world, and therefore something else, the “goodness” or “value” of that world, according to the True Values beyond the world. It will be just the world, just what we and others chose to do, or to try to do, with this extraordinary and strange and fleeting chance, this glimpse of whatever it is that’s going on.
https://handsandcities.com/2021/01/03/the-despair-of-normative-realism-bot/
Bernard Williams on Sidgwick and the ambitions of ethics
My own view is that no ethical theory can render a coherent account of its own relation to practice: it will always run into some version of the fundamental difficulty that the practice of life, and hence also an adequate theory of that practice, will require the recognition of what I have called deep dispositions; but at the same time the abstract and impersonal view that is required if the theory is to be genuinely a theory cannot be satisfactorily understood in relation to the depth and necessity of those dispositions. Thus the theory will remain, in one way or another, in an incoherent relation to practice.
Making Sense of Humanity (1995), “The point of view of the universe: Sidgwick and the Ambitions of Ethics”
John Maynard Keynes on Sidgwick
He never did anything but wonder whether Christianity was true and prove that it wasn’t and hope that it was.
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There is no doubt about his moral goodness. And yet it is all so dreadfully depressing- no intimacy, no clear-cut crisp boldness. Oh, I suppose he was intimate but he didn’t seem to have anything to be intimate about except his religious doubts. And he really ought to have got over that a little sooner; because he knew that the thing wasn’t true perfectly well from the beginning.