14 KiB
Talking to God...[RT]
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Author: u/trifith Man plans, god laughs. Like the ant and the grasshopper.*
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Score: 10
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Created: 2014-02-06T19:24:50
Post:
Comments:
u/FeepingCreature [+8] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (5 hours later)
You manipulate matter, which requires enormous amounts of energy. We manipulate energy, which requires none.
Eesh, this is the problem with writing a God. (Or even a Superintelligence.)
u/darvistad [+8] (20 hours later)
So, God is a sex maniac who has almost no consideration of how many beings and civilizations suffer and die on the path towards His next aeons-long orgasm, and none of the advanced civilizations that have escaped His seemingly endless series of Great Filters have the decency to spare their less advanced neighbors from these dangers. This story uses the language of futurism and transhumanism, but it all boils down to the same old crap about pain and death serving some higher purpose.
u/Jinoc [+4] (22 hours later)
but it all boils down to the same old crap about pain and death serving some higher purpose.
Not entirely. It actually boils down to social darwinism, where pain and death are just the fruits of failure.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
social darwinism, where pain and death are just the fruits of failure.
So... just like much of real life, then?
u/Jinoc [+2] (a day later)
Well one would hope that in God's position, you'd be a little more helpful.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
There's quite a damn lot I would do in God's position. But it depends: am I constrained in how little I can intervene to do good, and am I bound by physics or can I override it to create miracles?
u/Paladin_Neph [+1] Knights of Slaanesh (2 days later)
let us imagine our race post-singularity. in the latest part of "stage 1" described here- where we have AI, and have decoded genetics to the point where it's basically just another programming language.
now, I don't know about you, but I'm not entirely satisfied with this body. I'd definitely want an intelligence upgrade, and also changes to make me stronger, faster, more difficult to kill, etc. but also cosmetic changes. in fact, I think I should be changing bodies like most people change clothes.
imagine most people took a similar route. maybe not to the extremes of cosmetics, as I intend to, but at least in terms of intelligence. one must keep up with the joneses, after all. at this point, death is extremely rare, but it happens. mostly on accident.
now let's fast-forward a stupid amount of time. because death is rare, but it still happens, our population is dwindling. because none of us have fully human bodies anymore, normal reproduction is dicey. we could, of course, bio-engineer a child, but what would be the difference between that and an AI? more to the point, would it really be human?
and so we have our "god's" problem- we want a natural child, not an artificial one. sure! we absolutely could interfere, make the child come out exactly as we wished, save the potential lives of millions of sperm by bringing them all to maturity, or any number of other things... but what would be the point? it would not bring us closer to our goal of creating a being we consider to be similar to ourselves.
in case you missed it, I mentioned sperm because that's exactly how this "god" views humans- billions of consciousnesses, many of them being destroyed, and all for the goal of creating one.
u/None [+2] (2 days later)
we could, of course, bio-engineer a child, but what would be the difference between that and an AI?
If you knew more about AI, you would know there's quite an immense difference. The mind-design differences alone between a human being (no matter how upgraded), a semi-intelligent service agent operating a kebab truck, and a rational agent capable of maximizing utilities over human-Friendly terminal goals and all necessary subgoals are... humongous.
at this point, death is extremely rare, but it happens.
Yes, I suppose some people would have written in their living will, "In case of bodyloss without appropriate backup, please allow me to remain dead. I think it's really badass." The numbers of such people will dwindle quickly.
more to the point, would it really be human?
Surely we'd have backed-up copies of baseline human genomes, or some "standard" set of transhuman upgrades that can be applied as we are creating a fetus. Controlled amounts of randomness can be introduced in order to ensure that the child is more natural than engineered.
but what would be the point? it would not bring us closer to our goal of creating a being we consider to be similar to ourselves.
If I managed to go full transhuman, I wouldn't want to create a child as a baseline human. Screw that! I've had bloody well enough of Nature's harsh genetic whims for one lifetime! Make the child post-human from the start.
IMHO, one of the greatest things a transhuman parent could say to the child who is already their pride and joy is, "You'll have the privilege of growing up as whole as we always wished to be."
You, sir, are keeping your ideas trapped firmly at the biological level of survival, reproduction and selection rather than considering higher ideals.
u/Paladin_Neph [+1] Knights of Slaanesh (3 days later)
If you knew more about AI, you would know there's quite an immense difference.
obviously there are different flavors of AI, ranging from "food-truck vendor" to "as close to a human brain-pattern as it gets" to "optimization engine" but they all have the same two things that label them as Artificial Intelligences. ...they are artificial. ...and intelligent XP so... is this bio-engineered, lab-gown child intelligent? obviously. but is he artificial?
"In case of bodyloss without appropriate backup, please allow me to remain dead. I think it's really badass."
see, now this I don't know about. maybe its to do with my... set? of posthuman. I'm of the "so long as the brainwave stays mostly the same, it's OK" camp. in such a camp, you need a backup of some sort. and backups can (and by Murphy's law, will) fail.
Controlled amounts of randomness can be introduced in order to ensure that the child is more natural than engineered
if randomness is controlled, is it random? admittedly, biologic processes are themselves only pseudo-random, but that's kind of the point. we could undoubtedly mimic, but probably not exactly duplicate that specific algorithm of pseudo-random.
I wouldn't want to create a child as a baseline human
this is, again, displaying our differences in transhuman belief systems. there is something... special? about having an originally natural human thought-pattern. maybe it's just the instinct to propagate the species talking, but I, and therefore some later faction, would require some assurance that the child is naturally human.
u/None [+1] (3 days later)
if randomness is controlled, is it random? admittedly, biologic processes are themselves only pseudo-random, but that's kind of the point.
Yes. Anyone who has taken courses in stochastic anything knows the answer is yes. Randomness with a known or learned distribution is still random; just because a normally-distributed variable is usually closer to its mean than to its tails doesn't mean the sampling isn't actually random.
...they are artificial. ...and intelligent XP so... is this bio-engineered, lab-gown child intelligent? obviously. but is he artificial?
Plant the child in a real live womb if you like. Whatever.
Or rather, who says you're not artificial? I'm not going to be one of those "oh, where do we draw the line" hippies, but you're the one implying you've already uplifted yourself far beyond what we currently call a natural, baseline human. In some sense, nothing you create can possibly be natural; even a nature reserve for baseline humans is a nature reserve rather than actual nature. Actual nature, after all, suffers destructive crises quite frequently, whereas nature reserves have their ecosystems kept balanced.
this is, again, displaying our differences in transhuman belief systems. there is something... special? about having an originally natural human thought-pattern.
I think the fracture line here is our definitions of "human". I think of "transhuman" to mean, "Start with a basically human architecture, find the parameters we'd like to tweak, and tweak them." From that standpoint, it can easily be said that a child made with a human architecture, but having "scores" like Intelligence, Wisdom, Empathy or Charisma "preset" in some sense (including by randomly mixing sampled scores from the parents in deliberately mimicry of gamete mixing), is very much a human being.
(That is, a human being with high levels in cool skills and low levels in detrimental attributes is still human.)
You, on the other hand, think of it as shifting yourself completely away from a human architecture, and then wanting to create a human being out of sheer nostalgia, who is to be raised to repeat your journey from human to not-human.
u/VaqueroGalactico [+7] (9 hours later)
Definitely could have used a question like "factor this randomly generated 1000 digit number, and wait while I check the answer", or a similar question that's hard to find the correct answer to, but relatively easy to check for correctness. That would provide strong evidence against telepathy if "God" got that one right.
u/None [+3] (22 hours later)
Rather, it would imply telepathy plus enough computing power to calculate that answer efficiently.
u/VaqueroGalactico [+5] (23 hours later)
I should have said "would provide strong evidence against just telepathy...".
u/None [+5] (7 hours later)
It takes carrying your young to promote the development of emotional attachment to other animals.
Which explains why the deity only allowed hermaphrodites to become the dominant species on Earth.
u/Anakiri [+2] (8 hours later)
He could have been a true telepath. No documented evidence exists of anyone ever having such profound abilities to date but it was a possibility. It would have explained how he could know my best-kept secrets. The problem with that is that it doesn’t explain anything else! In particular it doesn’t account for the answers he proceeded to give to my later questions.
I read the whole thing, even when the grammar started falling apart, and I'm not sure which "later questions" that hypothesis doesn't account for.
u/tvcgrid [+5] (9 hours later)
Yeah, I mean if this guy is an actual telepath with a very good understanding of the author's mind, he'd know the things to say to convince the author.
Honestly, the probability I'd assign such a guy being a telepath wouldn't be so high as the author's. Imagine writing a program to simulate that hypothesis. You'd have to completely describe telepathy (reading an incredibly high amount of information, the physics that allows for the actual transmission of thought, accounting for one brain to completely model both its own mind and the target mind, or whatever other craziness is necessary). And then you'd have to account for the rest of the situation. That'd be far longer of a program than one that assumes no telepathy and only relies on things like cold reading, mental health record access, standard old manipulation, suggestion techniques, and even life-long stalking.
So, it seems to me even the telepathy hypothesis isn't really necessary.
u/None [+1] (2 days later)
Considering how complex it is to compute our actual, factual real-world physics, I don't really call that much of an argumentation.
Then again, I'm not Juergen Schmidhuber, and maybe you are, so I don't necessarily believe the "all computable universes" hypothesis.
u/tvcgrid [+1] (2 days later)
Well, I was attempting to think about this in terms of comparing Kolmogorov complexity of the two explanations. I think it's ok to compare complexity (length of the shortest Turing machine which outputs the expected pattern) of the two explanations because it's simply a stricter expression of the two explanations that make obvious the latent assumptions that they are making. Saying "he was a telepath" requires more evidence than "he knew the author in extreme detail and manipulated him using ordinary techniques", and by thinking about the Turing machines that would describe the two scenarios, we get a firm grasp on the nitty gritty background details and evidence-requirements of the two explanations.
u/None [+1] (2 days later)
Well hold on. The thing about Kolmogorov Complexity is that it's only semi-computable, and depends on the "language" we use for writing down the "program".
u/tvcgrid [+1] (3 days later)
Yeah, there is that. Would language choice really determine the comparison of these two explanations' K-complexity? That would be odd. I mean, we're talking about freaking telepathy.
Related: is using Occam's Razor like this useful? It works very well in general.