Continuing with the GOOD singularity series, we have two new articles up:
Criticisms of the singularity - by Michael Anissimov
and
Thinking about the future - by Roko Mijic
The latter has something of a discussion going in the comments - feel free to join in.
Over on IEET, Mark Plus comments:
I wonder if transhumanism has more legs than extropianism. A few years ago the principals at Extropy Institute said, in effect, "Poof! Extropianism doesn't exist any more." I suspect a middle-aged reality check, combined with improgression towards extropian goals in a normal life span, had something to do with the extropians' collapse of purpose. Will something similar happen to transhumanism by 2020 if we see yet another decade of drunkards' walks instead of "progress" towards transhumanist goals?
I doubt that h+ will go the same way as the extropians, rather I suspect that h+ will morph again by 2020, indeed with the changing h+ board and the breakoff of the "existential risks", "singularity" and "rationality" movements, you can already see it.
I suspect that transhumanism will undergo a significant change in favor of populism - indeed, this process has been underway for a few years now. Gone are Jupiter Brains and physical eschatology, in will be practical life extension and health tips, the right to have minor physical modifications like Oscar Pistorius' legs, and the biopolitics of popular culture. But really, this is progress: in order to appeal to millions of people, h+ has to become simple. It has to be easy to understand, practical, and something that everyone can participate in without having to put in large amounts of effort or be exceptionally intelligent.
H+ is migrating back down the future shock levels, and it seems that the drive behind this is purely organic: no-one is doing it on purpose, and I see no reason for this trend not to continue. At some point in the next few decades, we should see a point where the increasing curve of technological progress meets the decreasing curve of ambitiousness of h+ discourse: people will really be able to engage with "transhumanist" technological fixes like anti-aging therapies and simple brain-computer interfaces (better versions of the emotiv epoc) and much more immersive and high-bandwidth virtual reality. When that happens, I predict that we'll see a massive growth in popularity of the h+ memes.
This same set of comments seems to apply to the "singularity" concept: the concept originated in 1965 with I.J Good's observations about the first ultraintelligent machine. Nowadays, the casual observer might think that the word "singularity" had something to do with twitter and domestic help robots.
In all this, there is, of course, a great and subtle irony. The truth about the causal future of our time will be closer to what gets discussed at SL4 than what we see from h+ magazine. In the long run, reality will shock even those at shock level 4, and they know it. But the reality of today's futurism is determined by what the majority of people think will happen: in effect, reality is a democracy in the short run. The truth about the future has to compete for people's attention on an equal footing with every other possible form of infotainment, and in the Darwinian battle for hits, it is hardly surprising that the truth is losing out.
But, of course, there will still be a few hard-core academic futurists who push the boundary of accurate predictions about the future. The question is, will anyone listen to them?
I'm still reeling from the rather anticlimactic finish to the recent Climate Change Conference held in Copenhagen. Like so many others, I was hoping for an internationally binding deal that would, at the very least, compel and motivate the nations of the world to address the climate crisis in a meaningful and precedent setting way.
But it was not to be. The immediate reasons for the conference's failure are complex and laden with the political and economic realities of our time (e.g. settling on exact targets and incentives). But these reasons are part of a deeper malaise that is currently paralyzing the countries of our warming planet. As this crisis is revealing, our social and political institutions are ill equipped to deal with a pending catastrophe such as this.
More specifically, there are basically five 'bird's eye view' reasons that can account for the conference's failure:
1. Nation-states are far too self-serving: Countries don't like to be told what to do, and when push comes to shove it's far too easy for them to hide behind the sovereignty shield. Instead of acting proactively and with leadership, many nations (particularly those in the developed world) are 'aligning' themselves with what other countries are doing. No more and no less. And seeing as no one is doing anything....well, there you have it. Compounding this problem is the realization by some countries that they aren't going to be too negatively impacted by climate change -- a disturbing reminder that nation-states are unwilling to deal with threats that are not considered local.
2. Democracies are too ill-equipped and irresolute to deal with pending crises: A reader of mine recently complained that the people of the world were not being consulted on what they feel should be done about climate change. Well, this would only work if the 'people of the world' were universally educated about the intricacies of the issues (including scientific, economic, cultural and political considerations) and disarmed of their petty selfishness and local biases. This isn't going to happen anytime soon, and consulting the Joe the Plumbers of the world on something as multi-faceted and complex as climate change is probably not a good idea. Moreover, like the politicking politicians who supposedly represent them, the masses have shown a tremendous unwillingness to deal with a problem that has yet to show any real tangible negative effects.
3. Isolationist and avaricious China: One thing that the Copenhagen failure revealed is that China's isolationism is alive and well--even as they emerge as a global superpower. They're going to go about this whole global warming thing on their own terms, whatever that's supposed to mean. This unilateral approach is particularly disturbing considering that they're the largest manufacturing state in the world and house a massive population that will soon start to demand first-world standards of living. And exacerbating all this is the communist Chinese system itself with all its corruption and lack of accountability and due process.
4. The powerful corporatist megastructure: As the onset of last year's economic crisis so beautifully illustrated, capitalism, if left to its own devices, will eat itself. This is because corporations don't act rationally or in a way that would indicate foresight or a desire for long-term self-preservation. Moreover, corporations will never voluntarily deal with a seemingly ethereal and controversial problem, especially one that requires a dramatic reduction of profits.
5. Weak consensus on the reason for global warming: Global warming denalists are no longer the problem. What's of great concern now is the growing legitimacy of anthropogenic climate change denialists -- those individuals who believe that global warming is a natural phenomenon. This is a particularly pernicious idea because it absolves humanity from the problem. Adherents of this view contend that human civilization is not responsible for the changes to the Earth's climate and that as a consequence we don't need to fix anything--we can keep on spewing carbon into the atmosphere with reckless abandon. This idea is particularly appealing to politicians who use it as a convenient escape hatch.
I'm inclined to think that the only way the nations of the world will band together and act decisively on this issue is if an actual climate-instigated disaster happens--one that touches all international stakeholders in a profound way. But even this isn't guaranteed as there will always be global disparities in terms of impact.
Part of the problem right now, aside from the intangibleness of it all, is that some countries will be impacted more than others, a prospect that will ultimately lead to the rise of a new geopolitical stratification: different regions (both inter- and intra-national) will experience the effects of global warming differently, whether it be coastal areas, those dealing with desertification or those having to contend with the exodus of climate refugees.
Given the failure of Copenhagen, I'm inclined to believe that semi-annual conferences are not the way to go. Instead, I'd like to see the United Nations assemble an international and permanent emergency session that is parliamentary in nature (i.e. representative and accountable) and dedicated to debating and acting on the problem of anthropogenic climate change (a sub-parliament, if you will). The decisions of this governing board would be binding and impact on all the nations of the world. The chances of outright failure (like the one in Copenhagen) would be significantly lessened. Instead of ad hoc conferences, the emergency sub-parliament would conduct a series of ongoing debates over proposed legislation that would ultimately result in internationally binding agreements.
The current climate problem has caused the emergence of another crisis, namely a crisis-of-resolution. Failure at this point is not good enough. What's required is something more respective of the dire situation we're in.
I just saw an interesting post from Depressed Metabolism on cryonics in the media:
There has been much debate about how to persuade more people to consider cryonics. Renewed efforts should be made to end misunderstanding about the following three basic points about cryonics:
1. Cryonics is not the freezing of dead people, but involves the attempt to halt decomposition of people that have been given up by contemporary medicine through the use of low temperatures. Legal death is not biological death.
2. The objective of cryonics is to protect critically ill patients against ice formation at cryogenic temperatures by replacing the blood with a cryoprotective agent. Vitrification solutions attempt to inhibit ice formation altogether.
3. Cryonics is not suspended animation and should not be evaluated as such. Expecting people to destroy their brains because suspended animation is not feasible yet is neither prudent nor caring. Our current burial and cremation practices reflect a simplistic view of death and a desire for instant gratification and closure.
I wonder how much money, in total, has been spent on marketing cryonics? If there are any billionaires out there, they might consider donating a few million to Alcor so that it can hire a modern marketing consultancy and launch a decent marketing and information campaign.
Another question is whether cryonics is inherently "yucky", or whether it is merely a matter of historical accident that it is unpopular. Would $1 million spent on marketing cryonics save hundreds of thousands of lives, or would it be money down the drain? It's almost worth buying some lottery tickets just so that in some branch of the wavefunction I get to find out.
(For a description of cryonics, see wikipedia on cryonics: Cryonics is the low-temperature preservation of humans and animals that can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine until resuscitation may be possible in the future. See also Robin Hanson on cryonics)
Over the weekend a striking analogy hit me. I've been talking to some friends and relatives, and I've faced "deathist" sentiments a fair few times. Deathism is a convenient label for the idea that the involuntary death of human beings from old age is a good thing. Some deathists go so far as to say that death is what gives life "meaning", and that human beings who did not expire of old age in the "normal" timeframe would not be human.
Deathism is surprisingly common - especially as a default view amongst people who have not thought about the issue. It seems plausible to me that this is because, until very recently, the very idea that death by aging might be curable simply had no credibility. Faced with no choice but to accept death as inevitable, people played a common psychological trick on themselves: they rationalized that death was actually a good thing. Some people placated themselves with religious fairy-tales that claim that your soul actually survives death, whilst more enlightened humanists were forced to conclude that although death really is the end, its OK. I can't say I blame us, as a society, for doing this.
Old age is terrible. It is a steady and inexorable decline in one's mental and physical faculties. Death is worse: it is the end of you, the end of your hopes, your dreams, you aspirations and your self-reflective consciousness.
Given this situation, I have been looking for arguments which might convince people of the error of their ways. Logical arguments often fall upon the ears of people who think logic is some kind of weird fetish, so I started looking for some more emotive analogies. Browsing Wikipedia, I struck gold - Battered Person Syndrome. I quote:
In lay terms, [battered person syndrome] is a reference to any person who, because of constant and severe domestic violence usually involving physical abuse by a partner, becomes depressed and unable to take any independent action that would allow him or her to escape the abuse. The condition explains why abused people often do not seek assistance from others, fight their abuser, or leave the abusive situation.
"Why would I want someone to cure death for me? Death is natural!"
Sufferers have low self-esteem, and often believe that the abuse is their fault.
"Humans are sinful so we deserve to die. Really we're like a disease on planet earth"
Such persons usually refuse to press criminal charges against their abuser, and refuse all offers of help, often becoming aggressive or abusive to others who attempt to offer assistance.
"Transhumanists are a dangerous influence on us. By curing death they threaten to de-value life - we should outlaw any technologies that might enable this"
The conclusion is that most people on the planet are suffering from battered person syndrome. Their abuser is not a violent partner, but a violent existence, condemning them to die after threescore years and ten. Go out into the world and council your friends. Let them know the truth, but don't be surprised if they are initially hostile.
Thanks to David Wood, I'll be speaking at the UK h+ meetup in London. Predictably, I'm going to be talking about the Friendly AI problem, which, in my opinion, is one of the most important issues of our time. Here's the information:
Suppose that humans succeed in understanding just what it is about the human brain that makes us smart, and manage to port that over to silicon based digital computers. Suppose we succeed in creating a machine that was smarter than us.
What would it do? Would we benefit from it?
This talk will present arguments that show that there are many different ways that the creation of human-level AI could spell disaster for the human race. It will also cover how we might stave off that disaster - how we might create a superintelligence that is benevolent to the human race.
You can RSVP to the event on Facebook: the details are:
Date:
Saturday, 23 January 2010
Time:
14:00 - 16:00
Location:
Room 416, 4th floor (via main lift), Birkbeck College,
Torrington Square WC1E 7HX
City:
London, United Kingdom
You can also use the London Futurists Meetup group.
An uplifting message as we enter the new year, quoted from Edge.org:
We're Not Insignificant After All
Max Tegmark, Physicist, MIT
When gazing up on a clear night, it's easy to feel insignificant. Since our earliest ancestors admired the stars, our human egos have suffered a series of blows. For starters, we're smaller than we thought. Eratosthenes showed that Earth was larger than millions of humans, and his Hellenic compatriots realized that the solar system was thousands of times larger still. Yet for all its grandeur, our Sun turned out to be merely one rather ordinary star among hundreds of billions in a galaxy that in turn is merely one of billions in our observable universe, the spherical region from which light has had time to reach us during the 14 billion years since our big bang. Then there are probably more (perhaps infinitely many) such regions. Our lives are small temporally as well as spatially: if this 14 billion year cosmic history were scaled to one year, then 100,000 years of human history would be 4 minutes and a 100 year life would be 0.2 seconds. Further deflating our hubris, we've learned that we're not that special either. Darwin taught us that we're animals, Freud taught us that we're irrational, machines now outpower us, and just last month, Deep Fritz outsmarted our Chess champion Vladimir Kramnik. Adding insult to injury, cosmologists have found that we're not even made out of the majority substance.
The more I learned about this, the less significant I felt. Yet in recent years, I've suddenly turned more optimistic about our cosmic significance. I've come to believe that advanced evolved life is very rare, yet has huge growth potential, making our place in space and time remarkably significant.
The nature of life and consciousness is of course a hotly debated subject. My guess is that these phenomena can exist much more generally that in the carbon-based examples we know of.
I believe that consciousness is, essentially, the way information feels when being processed. Since matter can be arranged to process information in numerous ways of vastly varying complexity, this implies a rich variety of levels and types of consciousness. The particular type of consciousness that we subjectively know is then a phenomenon that arises in certain highly complex physical systems that input, process, store and output information. Clearly, if atoms can be assembled to make humans, the laws of physics also permit the construction of vastly more advanced forms of sentient life. Yet such advanced beings can probably only come about in a two-step process: first intelligent beings evolve through natural selection, then they choose to pass on the torch of life by building more advanced consciousness that can further improve itself.
Unshackled by the limitations of our human bodies, such advanced life could rise up and eventually inhabit much of our observable universe. Science fiction writers, AI-aficionados and transhumanist thinkers have long explored this idea, and to me the question isn't if it can happen, but if it will happen.
My guess is that evolved life as advanced as ours is very rare. Our universe contains countless other solar systems, many of which are billions of years older than ours. Enrico Fermi pointed out that if advanced civilizations have evolved in many of them, then some have a vast head start on us — so where are they? I don't buy the explanation that they're all choosing to keep a low profile: natural selection operates on all scales, and as soon as one life form adopts expansionism (sending off rogue self-replicating interstellar nanoprobes, say), others can't afford to ignore it. My personal guess is that we're the only life form in our entire observable universe that has advanced to the point of building telescopes, so let's explore that hypothesis. It was the cosmic vastness that made me feel insignificant to start with. Yet those galaxies are visible and beautiful to us — and only us. It is only we who give them any meaning, making our small planet the most significant place in our observable universe.
Moreover, this brief century of ours is arguably the most significant one in the history of our universe: the one when its meaningful future gets decided. We'll have the technology to either self-destruct or to seed our cosmos with life. The situation is so unstable that I doubt that we can dwell at this fork in the road for more than another century. If we end up going the life route rather than the death route, then in a distant future, our cosmos will be teeming with life that all traces back to what we do here and now. I have no idea how we'll be thought of, but I'm sure that we won't be remembered as insignificant.
A few thoughts: when considering the heavy skepticism that the singularity hypothesis receives, it is important to remember that there is a much weaker hypothesis, highlighted here by Tegmark, that still has extremely counter-intuitive implications about our place in spacetime; one might call it the bottleneck hypothesis - the hypothesis that 21st century humanity occupies a pivotal place in the evolution of the universe, simply because we may well be a part of the small space/time window during which it is decided whether earth-originating life will colonize the universe or not.
The bottleneck hypothesis is weaker than the singularity hypothesis - we can be at the bottleneck even if smarter-than-human AI is impossible or extremely impractical, but if smarter-than-human AI is possible and reasonably practical, then we are surely at the bottleneck of the universe. The bottleneck hypothesis is based upon less controversial science than the singularity hypothesis, and is robust to different assumptions about what is feasible in an engineering sense (AI/no AI, ems/no ems, nuclear rockets/generation ships/cryonics advances, etc) so might be accepted by a larger number of people.
Related is Hanson's "Dream Time" idea.
(This post is cross-posted at Less Wrong. Please comment on it there!)
Russell Blackford is a guest blogger for Sentient Developments.
Introduction
The current (December 2009) issue of The Journal of Medical Ethics contains my paper: "Moral pluralism versus the total view: why Singer is wrong about radical life extension." There, I critique an early 1990s paper by Peter Singer, which argues that we should not proceed to develop a hypothetical life-extension drug, based on a scenario where developing the drug would fail to achieve the greatest sum of universal happiness over time. I respond that this is the wrong test. If we ask, more simply, which policy would be more benevolent, we reach a different conclusion from Singer's: even given his questionable scenario, development of the drug should go ahead. A more pluralistic account of the nature of morality than used by Singer reaches a benevolent recommendation on life-extension technology.
My paper is intended not merely to offer a better solution to the conundrums raised in Singer's original piece, but also to suggest a methodology of much wider value in applied moral philosophy.
The scenario
Singer's argument employs an imaginary scenario in which life extension would not increase, and would actually reduce, the universal sum of happiness or welfare (henceforth, I will refer simply to "happiness") over time. Singer describes a scenario in which an anti-ageing, or life-extension, pill would more-or-less double human lifespans, but the level of happiness enjoyed in the second half of a typical individual's life would be lowered to some (relatively small) extent. He also stipulates that it would be necessary to ensure that fewer people came into existence over time if the life-extending pill were developed and used. Given this scenario, he thinks, we should not go ahead with developmental work on the hypothetical life-extension pill.
More specifically, Singer imagines a scenario in which those who take the drug experience no effect during their early decades of life. However, when they reach middle age, the drug retards further ageing so dramatically as to extend an average life span from about 75 years to about 150 years. During her additional years of life, an individual's health will not be restored to youthful levels, but it will be good enough for a very worthwhile quality of life (similar to the health of people in their sixties or seventies today). An individual may find that life has lost some of its experienced "freshness", and the combination of this (should it happen) with somewhat reduced health will make her additional years less happy than her first 70 or 80 years of life - but not greatly so.
Mark Walker has questioned this scenario elsewhere, suggesting that it is unrealistic to assume that the first 70 or 80 years would typically be happier than the second for those with what he calls "superlongevity". My own approach is more fundamental, as I conclude that Singer gives the wrong recommendation even if we accept all of his stipulated facts.
A further stipulation made by Singer is that resource limitations will require population controls, whether or not the drug becomes generally available, but they will need to be more severe if the pill is developed. Fortunately, Singer tells us, the pill will allow for an increase in average child-bearing age and a lower fertility rate. Nothing in his analysis depends on the exact ingredients of a population policy; rather, his essential point is that it will be necessary to devise an appropriate policy to ensure that only half as many people are born if the life-extension drug is available. I.e., he has in mind a scenario in which the total number of people who will be born and live out their lives over a large number of years will be half what it would have been without the drug. (The fairly simple calculations involved are discussed in my article; suffice to say that Singer is more or less right here, if we adopt all his basic assumptions.)
It is easy to demonstrate that, if we adopt all these assumptions - which Singer evidently regards as constituting a plausible scenario - the total sum of happiness, over a set period of time, is greater in a society without the life-extension pill than a society with the life extension pill. Moreover, the average society-wide happiness at any given moment is higher in the society without the life-extension pill. On the other hand, typical individuals of the future will have better lives in the society with the life-extension pill than in the society without it. This may seem paradoxical, but it is actually quite easy to demonstrate that it is true so long as we make some plausible assumptions. In that case, should we go ahead with developing the drug or not?
Recommendations: Singer's ... and mine
Singer argues that should not develop the drug; I disagree. But here the argument gets complex, and I cannot, in a relatively brief blog post, do justice to the complex issues that I needed a 7000-word article to tease out properly. I agree with Singer that we should take into account the interests of future generations, not just the interests of people who are alive now, but what follows from this?
It appears that Singer wants to maximise what we could call total future happiness-years (I hope the meaning of this is transparent: in any event, it involves multiplying the number of future people by the average number of years they live, and then by their average level of happiness across an entire life). He wants to do this at all costs, even if the people who come into existence have worse lives than the smaller number of longer-lived of people who would have come into existence under a different policy. I find that very implausible. Although Singer offers thought experiments to support his approach to the question, I find them unconvincing (my article explains why in some detail).
We should, I suggest, adopt the more benevolent policy, and we should not think of benevolence as a matter of maximising total happiness-years. In a situation such as the one that concerns us, the choice of the pro-pill and anti-pill versions of Singer's life-extension scenario, we should not try to maximise the overall number of happiness-years. We should try to produce the most fortunate lives.
Moral theories
It may be that utilitarians, such as Peter Singer, are inevitably pushed toward "total-view" thinking - which attempts to maximise the total amount of happiness in the universe - rather than toward a view that we should ensure the best possible lives for those people who will come to exist in the future. As a result utilitarians can, again paradoxically given the sympathies that underly their moral theory, can make policy recommendations that are not the most benevolent available.
Unfortunately, all utilitarian theories developed to date contain paradoxes or involve counterintuitive implications. If, however, we take a more pluralistic approach to the sources of our morality, such difficulties vanish. I expect that a considerable diversity of values underpins our actual moral thinking. We care, for example, about the reduction of suffering, about the lives of others going well, and about people being able to live with a certain spontaneity. We value wilderness, art and culture, the quest for knowledge, the existence of complex, creative cultures … and many other things. To at least some extent, we value all these for themselves, not solely because of their further utilitarian effects.
We do not value the largest possible sum of happiness over time ... which can, in principle, be gained by multiplying the number of sentient beings (so long as they have lives that are at least worth living). What we value, rather, is that whatever actual lives come into being should go well. Other things being equal, we value the outcomes that would be chosen, among those possible, by a benevolent decision-maker, not by a decision-maker committed to total-view utilitarianism. As shwon by the way Singer has set up his life-extension scenario, these two kinds of outcomes can diverge.
Conclusion
It is clear to me that I should vote to go ahead and develop the life-extension pill - and so, after reflection, should you, and so should Singer. No plausible values are violated by this action; quite the opposite. Far from feeling guilt or regret at having adversely affected another person, or having destroyed or damaged anything precious, an individual who votes to develop the life-extension pill has every reason to feel virtuous. She will have helped to create a world in which lives go better than (more and different) lives would otherwise have.
I am, however, conscious that some readers will find this very truncated version of the argument unconvincing. That may, of course, be because I am wrong! However, it may also be because the issues become quite complicated, and that I really do need the considerably greater length of the full article in The Journal of Medical Ethics to explain them properly. If you have library access, I suggest you look up the original article and the other works cited there.
Otherwise, I can only promise that I will return to similar issues in future writings, perhaps here, but certainly in my own blog over at Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
Russell Blackford is a guest blogger for Sentient Developments. This post is cross-posted at Sentient Developments and Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
I'm currently reading a book that has been sitting on my shelves, unbroached as far as I can recall, for too many years: The Proud Knowledge: Poetry, Insight and the Self, 1620-1920, by John Holloway (London: Routledge, 1977).
The Proud Knowledge has certain annoying features. One is a generally disdainful or arrogant attitude on the part of the author. He dismisses Robert Southey's then-enormously popular but now-almost-unread narrative poems, The Curse of Kehama and Thelaba the Destroyer, as "ridiculous works" (p. 94) and almost valueless, despite their influence on the likes of Keats and Shelley. Well - perhaps so. I can't say otherwise, since I, like most people these days, have never read them. Perhaps they really are dreadful. But Holloway rather loses my sympathy when he faintly praises Southey's occasional descriptive passages of merit, facility for prosody, and varied style (pp. 102-103), then adds:
But in the main, those two poems more or less fulfilled for their time the function fulfilled in recent times by films in gorgeous technicolour of the Orient, and by science fiction and possibly by a novel like The Lord of the Rings. Scenery, romantic affairs, fantastic travel, cosmic warfare, other grandiose but trifling thrills, make their stock in trade. (p. 103)
Despite its haughty tone, this passage actually makes The Curse of Kehama and Thelaba the Destroyer sound pretty interesting! Maybe their popularity, including with Keats and Shelley, wasn't just an aberration of literary taste. As I read Holloway's description, I start to wonder whether Southey's narratives really are as bad as is commonly assumed - whether they might not, in fact, be pretty good and just waiting to be rediscovered (perhaps by Hollywood screenwriters). Southey was, of course, rendered a ridiculous figure by Byron's satirical attacks (as was Thomas Shadwell by Dryden's at an earlier time). He is best known as a radical-turned-conservative and a literary dunce ... but surely anything worth being compared to science fiction and The Lord of the Rings must at least have suspense and entertainment value.
Nearly as annoying is Holloway's assumption that anyone reading his scholarly work must be fluent not only in English but also French, Latin, and ancient Greek. His pages are peppered with quotations in these languages - without translations. Now, anybody who has read widely in the history of ideas is likely to have picked up some useful Greek and Latin words and phrases, while my French is at least good enough for me to cope easily with many of the shorter quotations. But I am not inclined to struggle, my Babelfish in hand, with solid blocks of literary French whose full significance might well elude a sophisticated native of Paris. I realise that Holloway's attitude was still common in the 1970s among British literary academics, so the book is a product of its time, but it's nonetheless annoying to be told, in effect, that you are not wanted as a reader unless your fluency in foreign languages matches the author's. If Holloway finds it so easy, why not provide his own translations and potentially expand his readership?
All that said, the book is worth a reading. Holloway is dealing with the solitary quest for deep knowledge, undertaken by so many of the English poets from the sixteenth century through to the time of the high Modernists (and perhaps beyond). He offers the insight, obvious once pointed out, that this was simply not a theme in English poetry before the modern period. Instead, the lyric meditations of Donne and his predecessors tended to fall back on a body of generally-available cultural wisdom, associated with Christian doctrine. By Milton's time, this is becoming problematic (even though Milton does attempt to justify the ways of God to Man), and by the time of the Romantics we see great poets such as Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley embarking on their own far-flung intellectual quests. Even when the wisdom they bring back resembles conventional religious reassurances, it is hard won through individual experience and insight - often involving epiphanic moments. Objects and events are now observed with a new intensity, by poets attempting to understand them for themselves, rather than being analogised to aspects of the traditional, commonly-available wisdom. The Romantic poets achieve, or affect to achieve, a special knowledge unavailable to more prosaic or city-bound souls - or in some cases they come to see the proud, solitary quest as essentially destructive, as chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that leads only to despair or desolation.
In literary terms, of course, much has been gained by our culture - namely the mighty works of the Romantics and those who followed (among them, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Hardy, Yeats, and Eliot).
At one point, early in his book, Holloway lucidly expresses what was lost - if "loss" is the best way to describe the subversion of false certainties. Discussing Henry Vaughan's "Cock-Crowing", he observes:
In these facts about the task undertaken by the poem, I see signs of two great convictions which have lain at the heart of civilization over long periods in the past, but do so no longer. The first is, that man [sic] was the primary entity in the cosmos, and that the other orders of creation were secondary entities of which the significance was in the end derivative. The second, that the great and essential truths which map out the human situation do not await discovery, or even constant re-discovery, but have been established long ago, and once for all. The poet's task is therefore to present truth rather than explore it; and the quality of attention which he brings to his experience reflects that guiding fact. (p. 57)
Exactly right. By the time of the Metaphysical poets, these convictions are coming under pressure, but even John Donne (so it seems to me, and evidently to Holloway) is always quick to grasp the traditional, culturally-available knowledge, however much he may rely upon new forms of learning for his ingenious figures of speech. Writing during the Enlightenment, the great Augustans seem to me (though Holloway might not agree with this formulation) almost reactionary figures, attempting to hold on to old certainties and values, despite the drift of the times. In any event, the traditional, culturally-available knowledge is losing its prestige throughout the Enlightenment and appears to require defence, restatement, qualification, and some kind of harmonisation with the down-to-earth knowledge of the politically ascendant bourgeoisie.
But of course, it is the Romantics who first valorise the enterprise of poetry as a lonely quest for unique insights: insights possibly reaffirming the traditional dogma, in some ways - or to some extent - but quite possibly antithetical to it. Even in moments when they opposed the moods of their times, the Romantics were products of a breakdown in the long-accepted synthesis of ideas in Christian Europe - as, of course, are we. What's more, there is no going back; and why would we want to, when the new era has produced extraordinary beauties of its own? Without the breakdown of the traditional wisdom - most prominent, perhaps, in the seventeenth century - we would have nothing remotely like Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley (or Mary Shelley!), Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, Hardy, Yeats, or poor, nostalgic T.S. Eliot - much less Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, or Ted Hughes ... or even Milton, Dryden, and Pope. This is even before we step beyond the canon of English poetry, into other cultures, other literary domains (such as the science fiction that Holloway evidently scorns), or other artforms.
What comes next remains to be seen. Holloway seems to apprehend the impending close of our era of quests for "proud knowledge" - and he may even be correct, though the arguments need to be made out and examined. Most certainly, however, we cannot return, like contrite runaway children, to a time when ideas of human exceptionalism and received wisdom were unchallenged. "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" as Eliot asked. However we answer, we can only go forward, and there's no good reason that I can see to do so in a chastened or bleak spirit. We have learned much, and we can continue with a fitting optimism.
Robin has an article up on Overcoming Bias titled "Meh, Transhumanism", claiming that transhumanism is
"a clever appropriation of the reigning academic storyline of defending minorities oppressed by a reigning majority. Here the minority is not an ethnicity or sexual orientation, but imagined future tech-modified people. Conservatives who accepted other kinds of diversity could be goaded into opposing this kind, allowing advocates to heroically defend against such prejudice, and get tenure in the process. Rah disliked future folk."
Is this what h+ has turned into - defending (or asserting?) people's right to modify themselves with technology? A quick look at the h+ declaration confirms that there is a passage about the "right to enhance" in there:
(8) We favour allowing individuals wide personal choice over how they enable their lives. This includes use of techniques that may be developed to assist memory, concentration, and mental energy; life extension therapies; reproductive choice technologies; cryonics procedures; and many other possible human modification and enhancement technologies.
I personally think that the core of the h+ vision is best described by these earlier items on the h+ declaration:
(1) Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future. We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.
(2) We believe that humanity's potential is still mostly unrealized. There are possible scenarios that lead to wonderful and exceedingly worthwhile enhanced human conditions.
(3) We recognize that humanity faces serious risks, especially from the misuse of new technologies. There are possible realistic scenarios that lead to the loss of most, or even all, of what we hold valuable. Some ofthese scenarios are drastic, others are subtle. Although all progress is change, not all change is progress.
(4) Research effort needs to be invested into understanding these prospects. We need to carefully deliberate how best to reduce risks and expedite beneficial applications. We also need forums where people can constructively discuss what should be done, and a social order where responsible decisions can be implemented.
(5) Reduction of existential risks, and development of means for the preservation of life and health, the alleviation of grave suffering, and the improvement of human foresight and wisdom should be pursued as urgent priorities, and heavily funded.
Vladimir Nesov on Facebook:
Atheism (not believing in fairies) and transhumanism (not believing that you should do what's bad for you) are good sense about how to live our lives in general, part of what you aptly termed rationality+
Vladimir introduces a different way of thinking about h+: rather than as an addition, a cherry on top of human life, we should think of it as the absence of a specific set of mental disorders that cause people to strive for things that are ultimately bad for them.
Offering unusually good philanthropic returns — meaning greater odds of a positive Singularity and lesser odds of human extinction — the Singularity Institute has launched a new challenge campaign. The sponsors, Edwin Evans, Rolf Nelson, Henrik Jonsson, Jason Joachim, and Robert Lecnik, have generously put up $100,000 of matching funds, so that every donation you make until February 28th will be matched dollar for dollar. If the campaign is successful, it will raise a full $200,000 to fund SIAI's 2010 activities.
Clearly these are important topics, and overwhelmingly deserve to be funded. Definitely worth a look.
Great science fiction films are few and far between, so it was with great anticipation that I went to see Avatar on opening night.
I had been looking forward to this film since 2006 when James Cameron began working on the script. My expectations were significantly heightened after learning that Cameron, the director of Aliens, the first two Terminator movies and Titantic, was drawing inspiration from Japan -- namely through such directors as Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) and Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away).
I was particularly interested to see if Cameron could pull of the Miyazaki. As fans of his films know, there's nothing quite like a Miyazaki picture; they are as delightful, provocative and as imaginative as they come. Not since the early days of Disney have animated films been so good. Miyazaki weaves a magical touch that has eluded Hollywood since their Golden Age (think Pinocchio and Snow White).
After watching Avatar, I can honestly say that Cameron gave it a good shot. The Pandoran jungle was as atmospheric and alive as anything that Miyazaki has ever produced. The 3D element added an immersive and visceral component that was particularly powerful; there were times when I truly felt lost in the jungle alongside Jake and Neytiri. The bioluminescent forest was truly jaw dropping.
Further, the tastefulness and care with which Cameron added the CG elements is unparalleled (with a tip of the hat to Lord of the Rings). This is the kind of film that George Lucas could watch but not have the slightest clue as to why Cameron's CG works and his does not. Cameron, unlike Lucas, has learned to weave the fabric of all on-screen elements into context such that nothing is superfluous and everything adds to the entire composition and story. Where Lucas works to bash viewers over the head with a 'look what I can do!' approach to movie making, Cameron has taken a more thoughtful and artistic course.
Take, for example, the floating seeds that land on Jake when he first meets Neytiri. I was genuinely moved by the delicacy and beauty of each tiny seedling as it floated through the air. Moreover, my feelings were heightened after learning about the sacred status of the seeds and the implication to the story. This is exactly the kind of aesthetic moment I imagined when I thought about the potential for CGI back when it was first introduced so many years ago.
Spoilers follow.
In addition to the visual elements borrowed from Japan, Cameron also dipped heavily into one of Miyazaki's most famous films, Princess Mononoke. Indeed, one could say that he borrowed perhaps a bit too greedily. Rarely does imitation of this sort lead to anything deeper or superior than what was provided by the original.
Specifically, both films feature a majestic and beautiful forest teeming with a life that's intimately interconnected with itself and an ethereal spiritual realm. And both feature a nature that is under threat. The balance of the natural worlds are in jeopardy from greedy miners who are consuming its resources at an alarming rate. The miners are in turn threatened by an outsider who, after learning the ways of the forest, has come to protect and preserve it at all costs. Ultimately, the creatures of the natural world are forced to band together and deal directly with the parasitic elements. Even the character of Neytiri is a close parallel to San; both are deeply connected to the natural world, borderline feral and ride on the backs of wolves.
Interestingly, Princess Mononoke was Japan's top grossing movie until Cameron's Titanic usurped it from that position in 1999. This certainly looks like a case where if you can beat them, you should still join them.
Princess Mononoke wasn't the only story co-opted by Cameron; aside from the Miyazaki touches (both graphically and narratively), Avatar closely resembles another classic story, Frank Herbert's Dune. In fact, Avatar is essentially Dune -- Cameron simply replaced the desert planet with a jungle and removed all the depth, complexity and profundity that made Dune the classic science fiction story that it is.
Again, the comparisons: A young man arrives on a strange and inhospitable planet occupied by hostile natives -- natives who are perfectly adapted to the planet and live in harmony with it. The young man's civilization is there to exploit the planet for a precious resource and at the expense of the planet's ecological balance. Our hero, awkward at first, learns the ways of the locals and eventually 'goes native.' He finds a girlfriend among his new clan and is accepted and revered by the natives on account of signs that point to his unique purpose and status. The hero-messiah then starts to exceed the abilities of his new comrades -- there's even a test of manhood involving the taming and riding of a dangerous animal. In the end, the hero leads a charge against the outsiders by banding together natural resources and the local population. They eventually win and drive the outsiders out.
Now, while this certainly describes the general plot of both stories, Herbert's universe is filled with intelligent and provocative commentary that touches upon such themes as ecology, evolution, commerce, politics, religion, technological advancement and even social Darwinism. The best that can be said of Cameron's adaptation is that he got the environmental message across. But where Herbert's discourse on the environment was treated with subtly and complexity (including the issue of terraforming), Cameron chose to bang his audience over the head with a blatantly overt, simplistic and ridiculously biased sledge hammer.
In Avatar, Cameron rekindled the tired and cliched "noble savage" myth and set it in space. It was an effort that seemingly attempted to romanticize Stone Age culture and promote a Gainist agenda. The film was anti-technology, anti-corporatist, anti-progress, and dare I say anti-human.
Gainism in space? Really, Cameron? That was the best story you could come up with on a $237,000,000 budget?
Okay, some credit where credit is due. Given that the story is, whether I liked it or not, a Gainist treatise, I did appreciate how Cameron achieved the sense of interconnectedness between the characters and Pandora. The ability of the Na'vi to link with other animals in a symbiotic fusion was very cool, as was the ability to upload conscious thought through the very fabric of the planet (a nice interplay on the high-tech/lo-tech theme knowing that the humans were also dabbling in mind transfer). I also liked how the humans could not breath the air of the planet, a strong hint that they truly had no business being on Pandora. The natives, on the other hand, were at complete peace with their environment.
So, overall some very mixed feelings about Avatar. The graphical and aesthetic achievements were certainly impressive, and for that it's a must-see film. And for those with a pronounced environmentalist bent, you will likely swoon over this movie. But if you're looking for a story with depth, complex characters and some challenging commentary, you're going to have to look elsewhere. And in this sense, the movie is a significant let down. One that I'll gladly watch over and over again.
– Nick Bostrom, Letter from Utopia.
Why should you care about the singularity when studies show that material possessions and technology beyond a certain point don’t actually make people any happier? Two weeks ago, I spoke about the possibility of giving a superintelligent AI the goal of doing whatever the human race would, after careful consideration, decide was best. This is known as the CEV algorithm. The outcome of this process would be very much unlike the technology, gadgets, and consumerism of today.
As Nick Bostrom has so eloquently reminded us, humanity’s biggest problems aren’t what we think they are: the most insidious and hard to notice, according to Bostrom, is that life is not nearly as good as it could be. This problem is really difficult for us to see; what could possibly be substantially better about our lives, even here in the developed world?
To start with, one has to realize that we’re not built for our own good. Evolution built us caring only about our ability to pass our genes on. We are easier to hurt than to pleasure, and we have been built with happiness set-points that are near impossible to significantly move away from without altering our biology. Studies have shown that giving a person $1,000,000 doesn’t actually make them happier in the long run, because of the hedonic treadmill effect: The human brain gets “used to” your circumstances, so that if your circumstances improve, your happiness goes up at first, but then returns to average. Our genes “calculate” that our bodies are worth keeping in good shape for 50 or so years, but after that, we are of little use, so our genes allow us to fall apart.
The society around us is also not built entirely for our benefit; it is a set of self-sustaining institutions that are, to a lesser or greater degree, influenced by the whims of a capricious electorate. Corporations can survive by hiring marketing departments to make us want things that we don‘t really need, and by hiring lobbying departments to make sure that the democratic process doesn‘t get in the way (see, for example, the tobacco industry). The challenges that work presents to us are often stifling and tedious; working in an office is not the natural human environment, which is why so many people ask for (and never get) a job that involves being outdoors.
Perhaps most importantly, the social dynamics that emerge from the interaction of many people who are each individually seeking status, power, and happiness often results in zero and negative-sum interactions. People are mean to each other, argue, fight, cheat, lie, and frequently make each others’ lives a misery—and this is ultimately a result of our evolved psychology, which was designed to deal with situations in which humans were forced by scarcity to kill each other in order to survive.
A world fashioned by the CEV algorithm would, at the very least, fix all of these fairly obvious flaws. Human psychology and biology could be altered to make us kinder, happier, healthier, and free from involuntary death or aging, and to remove the hedonic treadmill effect. New and better institutions could be developed from the ground up, and complex yet nourishing intellectual and physical challenges could be designed to replace what we today call “work.”
Iain Banks has described such a world in his science-fiction books about a future society called “The Culture”: enhanced humans live for thousands of years, and do exactly what they want with their time; they create art and science, they socialize, they enjoy a selection of customized virtual reality and real-world experiences and safe recreational drugs. They are all permanently young and attractive, with bodies and brains that have been altered in beneficial ways, they rarely argue with each other or have significant or prolonged negative interactions, and they have lots of sex.
If we consider all the possible ways that the universe could be arranged, and rank them in terms of how good they would be, Banks’ utopia certainly gets a very high rank. But it seems unlikely that it is the very best—or even close to the best. Banks’ utopia represents the limit of good experiences that we can currently think of and realize are good according to our complex values. Just how much better could it get?
In order to really make an accurate guess about the limits of goodness of the world, one must think about the problem indirectly or by analogy, because there are some states that are both so good and so complex that we cannot even imagine them yet. For example, what are the limits of goodness of subjective experience? What is the limit of the level and degree of mutual respect, friendship, passion or love that is possible?
At the risk of severely embarrassing myself forever over the internet, I’ll illustrate this with a personal example. Before I had ever kissed anyone, I didn’t actually know that the subjective experience of a passionate kiss was possible. I knew that kissing was possible, but not what it would feel like, or even that feelings that good were possible. Not only was I missing out, but I was unaware that I was missing out.
Humanity as a whole may have the same problem. We haven’t realized that a level of life that far surpasses what we currently experience might be possible. Imagine a human raised by animals who did not have the ability to speak, or the very real South American Indian tribe who are unable to learn, even when given food incentives, to count up to 10. Imagine a person who spent their entire life without experiencing romantic love, imagine a human who had neither hearing nor sight. These impoverished human beings are to us as we are to humans living in a post-positive singularity world: There are very probably intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional enhancements that would put their recipients as far beyond the citizens of The Culture as we are beyond a blind, solitary ignoramus.
A benevolent superintelligent AI would drastically and precisely alter the world, but do so in a direction that was dictated by your preferences. It would be like a new physical force that consistently pushed life towards our wisest utopian ideal. This ideal, or something very close to it, really is attainable. The laws of physics do not forbid it. It is attainable whether we feel that it is “unreasonable” that life could get that good, whether we shy away from it for fear of sounding religious, whether we want to close our eyes to the possibility because it scares us to believe that there is something greater out there, but we might let it slip through our fingers.
And indeed we might. As Carl Sagan puts it, “Our descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds throughout the solar system and beyond, will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of raw potential once was, how perilous our infancy”
From the four corners of the web:
Here are my favorite Sentient Developments articles from the past year:
A hearty thank you goes out to all the guest bloggers who contributed to Sentient Developments in 2009. Here are my favorite of their articles from the past year:
"Yes, I want to know," said Brennan.
"Know what, exactly?" whispered the figure.
Brennan's face scrunched up in concentration, trying to visualize the game to its end, and hoping he hadn't blown it already; until finally he fell back on the first and last resort, which is the truth:
"It doesn't matter," said Brennan, "the answer is still yes."
A little meditation on intellectual honesty: whatever is true is true, and I want to know the truth no matter how unpleasant it seems to my primate brain.
I have a new article up at GOOD magazine,
