As spring threatens to overcome us all, I am going to make another attempt at a grand unified theory of Ingress.
As spring threatens to overcome us all, I am going to make another attempt at a grand unified theory of Ingress.
Portals are places where exotic matter allows different branes and different world-lines to communicate. This is easiest to see in the Shapers plea to avoid war: I contend that the Shapers are so alarmed by war because what we call the Shapers are in fact, echoes on an exotic matter drum from an extinguished human timeline where war has destroyed the future. CREATE NEW FUTURE. As an Enlightened Agent I must hear that call.
We seem to have a different faction the Resistance who discount the Shapers message and instead hear the call of the N'zeer. It is my supposition that the N'zeer represent human and posthuman worldlines that have escaped the 'Great Filter' and thus the existential danger that ended the Shapers.
The Enlightened err in being prejudiced against sophonts of computational substrate, the Resistance in seeing the seeing the Shapers as something other than a human agency warning us against foolishness. Player characters, Agents, out not to indulge those errors. Avoid war. Avoid substrate bigotry as much as one ought avoid any other bigotry.
Create a glorious future: but first you must avoid war, hear that Shaper cry!
Edgar Allan Wright Hank Johnson John Hanke
Portals are places where exotic matter allows different branes and different world-lines to communicate. This is easiest to see in the Shapers plea to avoid war: I contend that the Shapers are so alarmed by war because what we call the Shapers are in fact, echoes on an exotic matter drum from an extinguished human timeline where war has destroyed the future. CREATE NEW FUTURE. As an Enlightened Agent I must hear that call.
We seem to have a different faction the Resistance who discount the Shapers message and instead hear the call of the N'zeer. It is my supposition that the N'zeer represent human and posthuman worldlines that have escaped the 'Great Filter' and thus the existential danger that ended the Shapers.
The Enlightened err in being prejudiced against sophonts of computational substrate, the Resistance in seeing the seeing the Shapers as something other than a human agency warning us against foolishness. Player characters, Agents, out not to indulge those errors. Avoid war. Avoid substrate bigotry as much as one ought avoid any other bigotry.
Create a glorious future: but first you must avoid war, hear that Shaper cry!
Edgar Allan Wright Hank Johnson John Hanke
An interesting theory, and perhaps more encouraging than the possibility that both Shapers and N'Zeer are alien forces seeking to manipulate us.
ReplyDeleteAs a Resistance agent and strong proponent of transhumanism (use of technology to create new artificial "descendants" and to make our biological descendants better physically and mentally), I'm certainly open to investigating whatever avenues the Shapers or N'Zeer open up, for knowledge that can be applied to improve the future of humanity, and of sentient beings generally.
I'm more devoted to the continuation of human culture than of the human species. The species has intrinsic value, and I'd prefer that it be preserved / carried forward. But if under threat, the only way to save our ideas and art and collective memory was to entrust that legacy to AI-driven robots, well, so be it. See The Talos Principle for a thought-provoking story along these lines.
To carry the principle even further: Hypothetically, if in some kind of interstellar war, there were an opportunity to mislead a totalitarian or implacable hostile force (like Saberhagen's Berserkers) into an attack on Earth, rather than some more-strategically-valuable target that could lead to final victory over the threat -- sacrificing most or all of humanity to save a larger League of Sentient Beings, devoted to principles that we would currently call "humanistic" -- I'd be for the good of the many over the good of the few, even if the many were "alien" and the few were my conspecifics. (We'd want to try to transmit as much of our cultural legacy as possible for storage in a place of honor among the League of Sentients. But better that the League survive for the long term and extinguish the threat, than that we save ourselves for just a little while -- until the Berserkers get around to noticing us...)
I would strongly disagree with some elements of the STR article; in particular, its analysis of trans-humanist morality. I'd agree with them that there is no intrinsic teleology to the universe, nor intrinsic value to the human form except to the extent that it has facilitated the emergence of human minds.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think we can begin from a principle that existence is preferable to non-existence, not just to humans, but even to our sub-sapient cousins. We can build a morality from the idea that entropy is bad -- that we have a moral duty to fight the Second Law of Thermodynamics as much as we can. (This kind of morality is expressed in a beautiful mythological style in Diane Duane's Wizardry series. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/02/games_wizards_play_the_10th_young_wizards_novel_from_diane_duane_reviewed.single.html )
If you consider the modern philosophy we commonly call "humanism", and extend it to encompass all sapient beings, and then to sub-sapient sentients, and even to value eco-systems as a whole -- to recognize all self-replicating information-processing systems as being in some sense alive, and to value their continuation -- you have a universal, materialist, utilitarian, transhuman moral or ethical system.
Filling in the details of this is immensely complicated, and reasonable people could easily have disagreements about the "correct" decision in a particular circumstance. But as long as we're agreeing that all self-perpetuating beings are in some sense "alive", that life and its eco-system environments generally have value, and that sapient beings in particular deserve consideration*, then at least we're having a productive conversation.
(This consideration works out to something along the lines of the "golden and silver rules" -- as much as possible, treat other sapients as your equals; treat them as you wish to be treated, and don't harm them or their interests if you can avoid it. You get to these principles simply by assuming that humans aren't any more "special" than any other sapient; reciprocity is the only principle that makes sense.)
The notion advanced by the STR article that transhumanists would say that "might makes right", that strength should be valued for itself, is obviously wrong. Transhumanists merely assert that it is a noble goal to pursue technologies that can make us stronger, and to make those technologies widely available -- it improves the quality of life of sentient beings (which has utilitarian merit over the short-run lives of those beings), and the long-run chances of our survival and propagation (which is a strongly-preferred outcome over extinction). If we developed a device tomorrow that could be provided cheaply, that would restore vision to the blind, would it not be immoral to withhold that technology? This does not seem like a difficult question. If that device could then also be improved such that, when offered to the general public, it would extend vision into the IR and UV ranges, this also seems like an obvious good.
I'd also add that citing CBC as a moral guide to anything, when CBC is fundamentally opposed to each person's sovereignty over their own body, is... interesting. For the State, or a self-declared religious authority, to impose its beliefs on your body, when you do not acknowledge such authority, is a radical violation of the principle that a sapient's own beliefs and desires have value, and neither their physical body nor their abstract interests should be harmed by other entities if such harm is avoidable.
ReplyDeleteThe question of when an embryo becomes a person, and thus its right to exist trumps the "host" woman's right to control her body is, I agree, an interesting one. I know some extremists have occasionally even argued that full personhood doesn't begin until well past birth, which seems nuts to me. Personally, if we made first-two-trimesters abortion freely available, I would be willing to agree to serious restrictions in the third (allowing for abortion when the fetus is non-viable, or the circumstances of the pregnancy threaten the life or future health/fertility of the mother, and she values that future over the current pregnancy). In any case, I'm glad it sounds like we broadly agree on the terms of such a conversation.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that the extension to non-sapient sentients raises complicated questions about both sapient behavior, and how we might try to manage eco-systems. Given that I think biological diversity, and the self-regulation of eco-systems, are valuable, I find the idea of the elimination of predation extremely problematic. Both because I think in practical terms it risks destabilizing the "managed" eco-system and leading to the extinction of many more species within it, and because I think eliminating an entire predator species is morally suspect, even if it saves the lives of many prey. Sometimes a set of discrete actions that seem to have utilitarian value individually sum up to a whole that has monstrous implications. If your utilitarian calculus can't map-reduce values across multiple actions/choices using a method with more subtlety than brute summation, you're doing utilitarianism wrong. You're failing to construct even a basic consequentialist system, let alone one that can deal with concepts of deontology or virtue. (And ultimately I come down as an advocate of a kind of pragmatic ethics, drawing on elements of consequentialism, deontology, and virtue.) And sometimes we allow something "bad" to persist because it serves a larger good. I accept that sometimes rabbits get eaten by foxes, because I value the macro-system that both rabbits and foxes are part of, and moreover I'm not hubristic enough to think that I know how to ensure that either or both can survive in the long run in a system I devise where the foxes get some kind of vegan meat substitute. And when I mention the long run here, I'm partly thinking about political realities -- even if we COULD perfectly manage an eco-system and preserve its species and provide room for them to continue productively evolving, what if some future generation goes through a political and financial crisis in which they choose to stop investing the effort in that management, at which point everything collapses, irrecoverably? Terraforming a world that starts out having no life will be a hard enough problem -- lets get REALLY good at that, before we start thinking about trying to alter the ecosystems that keep Earth a pleasant place to live. (Also, even before working on another planet, like Mars, we could maybe stop pushing the world down the road toward climate change on a scale that would cause a mass extinction event, and possibly even the collapse of civilization. That would be nice.)
I do think that, as sapients who have a choice to survive without eating factory-farmed meat, we clearly ought to at least accept the idea that meat should be much more expensive. Even with trying to shift to universal vegetarianism, let alone veganism, you run into the question of what we do with meat animals. Should we let domestic pigs go extinct? Keep some around as pets and historical curiosities? Or is it acceptable to perpetuate them, and continue to consume their bodies, as long as we ensure that they're raised in humane environments where they're happy, and end their lives as painlessly as possible. (I am not claiming to have the answer to these questions. I think that if I were fully living up to my moral principles, I would probably be vegetarian but not vegan -- I definitely think it's possible to get non-vegan products like dairy and honey while nurturing and protecting the organisms involved in producing them, rather than abusing them. As things stand, I do still eat expensive meat, raised as humanely as anyone tries to do, and comfort myself with the aforementioned question, while suspecting that it's merely a rationalization.)
ReplyDelete[quote] What if what we label as our "soul" is really the transdimensional channeling of our essence from an eternal other-place to this plane of existence for some unbeknownst to us purpose? Can that "receiver" be successful transplanted, or is there some inherent synergy to the circuitry that would not be replicated? [/quote]
As I've acknowledged elsewhere, it's possible, and very plausible, that some element of what we think of as "consciousness" requires a physical substrate that can manage quantum computation, and that this makes strong AI impossible using purely digital computers. If that's true, then ADA's awakening to full consciousness likely happened when she either engaged quantum resources that were part of the Niantic Lab at CERN, or when she hacked access to quantum computing resources elsewhere.
It is also not completely outside the realm of possibility that some kind of transdimensional energy pattern is involved in consciousness. But as you note, for that to make sense, there would have to be some kind of "transmitter / receiver" element of the physical body that interacts with this "soul stuff". (Perhaps an XM pattern.) Whatever principles allow that interaction should also allow us to detect the interaction itself. As you say, the question is then whether a non-biological body can interact with the "soul stuff". I agree it's possible the answer would be "no". Perhaps carbon/water life is uniquely suited to this, because the interaction involves some kind of quantum interaction that can only be produced in the presence of carbon-ring molecules and water. (The H-O-H structure has all kinds of interesting and unique properties, of course.) Of course, it might still be possible to construct a carbon/water "soul interaction" module, that could be hosted in an artificial body. Certainly we already have plenty of methods for interfacing silicon and biotechnologies. (For instance, DNA microarrays, in which target sequences interact with probe sequences that have been bonded to surface of the chip, and that leads to an EM or optical signal.)
It's also worth noting that if what you mean by "soul" is "XM personality pattern", then we know that ADA's personality was sharded and reassembled in the XM portal network, which pretty strongly suggests an equivalence with human personhood.
And then there's some further question-begging going on. Say that our ongoing research into cognition eventually determines that there really is some transdimensional soul-stuff that is integral to human
personhood, and it requires carbon/water structure to work. But we then encounter other beings -- methane/ammonia beings, or silicon / selenium-gallium arsenide beings -- who display all the properties of sapience, who are a thousand years more advanced than we are, and who approach peacefully. They are fascinated by the uniqueness of our species -- our art and stories, and our descriptions of the experience our particular sensorium provides. They offer to help us expand our horizons in peace and prosperity. Do we declare these beings to be non-people? Not truly conscious? Or do we assume that, given the way they seem, they probably perform the functions served by our transdimensional soul stuff using something else, perhaps even a complex arrangement of regular old matter that we just don't understand yet? I come down on the side of giving credit for personhood broadly, because tailoring it narrowly is a fast track to justifying genocide.
ReplyDeleteRegarding "possession", I agree that the takeover of a physical body that has been hosting one mind, by another mind, against the consent of the original resident mind, is a crime. It's up there with rape and other acts of violence. (I'd note, though, that consensual and temporary possession could be fine -- maybe in a crisis situation where you lack the skills to, say, fly a plane whose pilot has died, you can invite a pilot to remotely take control of your body. Or maybe you can body-swap with a sexual partner, to learn more about their experience and just for the thrill of it. As long as everyone's satisfied with the outcome, I see no reason to regard this as "bad".)
It is unclear to me whether ADA intended for this kind of "possession" to happen with Klue. As I've noted, ADA warned Klue against attempting to use the glyph sequence, and voluntarily coöperated with Loeb's work to separate ADA from Klue and restore Klue's original personality. ADA may have hesitated to release Klue once she was resident in that body, and that is a black mark on her record. But given that she did ultimately help restore Klue, I don't think it's unforgivable. And the existence of this type of possession does not mean it would be impossible to create an open XM channel, or other form of brain/machine bridge, by which a human mind could be in communication with AIs or with other human minds -- voluntary, harmonious communion, rather than control.
I agree with your message of caution and unification. Trusting either the Shapers or N'Zeer would be extremely hazardous. So would deploying their technologies prematurely without extensive research to understand them. Though if the Obsidian Shield could be used to protect us from both, without triggering other harmful consequences, that does seem desirable. At some point you have to make a judgment about the balance of risks. While we engage in cautious research, are we giving the Shapers time to manipulate civilization into self-destruction by, say, capturing Indian and Pakistani leaders under green fields and influencing them to start a nuclear conflict? Are we giving the N'Zeer time to break down barriers that currently contain them and either exert similar influence, or even arrive on Earth physically in some cataclysmic fashion? There may be no good choice; all choices may risk extinction. And refusing to choose is still a choice.