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“Science and Futurism with Issac Arthur “ thread

One thing about Isaac is he just discusses what he believes to be possible/plausible-he doesn't delve into ethics or the perennial question of "is this right" or "should we be doing this?". I really noticed that in his recent earth 2.0 series-in the episodes where he talked about colonizing the poles and deserts he touched briefly on the ecological consequences and how they might be mitigated or reversed but he mostly focused on how these things could be done not whether they should be or even how to do them "right".

I don't think its because ethical questions and dilemmas don't interest him, or he doesn't understand them-so much as he doesn't want to pronounce judgement and leaves contemplation over ethics regarding technologies and these various projects to the audience to decide and think about for themselves.
 
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Kokurokoki said:
Yeah that is a good point. I think Arthur even covers it in one of his videos. Are you still you millions of years in the future?
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Of course you are, the same way that you're still you even though you've changed almost unimaginably since you were five. You're a continuation, not an arbitrary collection of traits.
 
Kokurokoki said:
Yeah that is a good point. I think Arthur even covers it in one of his videos. Are you still you millions of years in the future? If every aspect of your personality even down to your ideologies has changed, is that still you? That's kind of a bit of an existential horror in and of itself. Imagine you end up as a xenophobic bigot billions of years into the future. You've changed so much from your original form that you might as well have died.
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That's not really what I meant. I rather doubt there is any continuity between a person and their upload. When I die, I die. It doesnt really matter all that much if there is a recreation of the pattern that I call myself somewhere else. Because that is not me. It is another being that was derived from me.
 
Jane Dough said:
That's not really what I meant. I rather doubt there is any continuity between a person and their upload. When I die, I die. It doesnt really matter all that much if there is a recreation of the pattern that I call myself somewhere else. Because that is not me. It is another being that was derived from me.
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I'm starting to get a bit suspicious about how you won't even consider alternative viewpoints on this, or even alternative methods.
 
RRoan said:
Of course you are, the same way that you're still you even though you've changed almost unimaginably since you were five. You're a continuation, not an arbitrary collection of traits.
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Even if we go with continuity it has its limits. After almost every single cell organism is in very strict continuity with the first single cell organism yet we split them into species and cell lines all the time. Just because the huge change is gradual it doesn't mean you can't say a huge change hasn't happened. After long enough me at five is going to have more in common with five year olds then it does with me no matter the fact that I came from that one specific five year old. It doesn't help that as a human all my memories as a five year old are false or simply wrong by now.
 
Tasrill said:
Even if we go with continuity it has its limits. After almost every single cell organism is in very strict continuity with the first single cell organism yet we split them into species and cell lines all the time. Just because the huge change is gradual it doesn't mean you can't say a huge change hasn't happened. After long enough me at five is going to have more in common with five year olds then it does with me no matter the fact that I came from that one specific five year old. It doesn't help that as a human all my memories as a five year old are false or simply wrong by now.
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Yeah, but at that point you might as well argue that it's not really something to worry about, anymore than you worry that the you five years from now won't be the you of today.
 
Lord Invictus said:
One thing about Isaac is he just discusses what he believes to be possible/plausible-he doesn't delve into ethics or the perennial question of "is this right" or "should we be doing this?". I really noticed that in his recent earth 2.0 series-in the episodes where he talked about colonizing the poles and deserts he touched briefly on the ecological consequences and how they might be mitigated or reversed but he mostly focused on how these things should be done not whether they should be or even how to do them "right".

I don't think its because ethical questions and dilemmas don't interest him, or he doesn't understand them-so much as he doesn't want to pronounce judgement and leaves contemplation over ethics regarding technologies and these various projects to the audience to decide and think about for themselves.
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It's more that the ethical dilemmas are outside of his wheelhouse of expertise. He's brought them up before in a video where he discussed the potential ramifications of finding dead alien species and what to do if they were advanced enough to leave enough genetic and cultural material to theoretically revive them. And he pretty much said: "Look, this kind of big-shit decision is going to require being on-site to make, and decades of thought on the subject before anyone can really begin to take sides. This kind of ethical problem is above my pay-grade."
 
Richardson said:
It's more that the ethical dilemmas are outside of his wheelhouse of expertise. He's brought them up before in a video where he discussed the potential ramifications of finding dead alien species and what to do if they were advanced enough to leave enough genetic and cultural material to theoretically revive them. And he pretty much said: "Look, this kind of big-shit decision is going to require being on-site to make, and decades of thought on the subject before anyone can really begin to take sides. This kind of ethical problem is above my pay-grade."
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That too-that's probably part of the reason he avoids going into ethical questions, because that isn't his domain.
 
Jane Dough said:
Maybe because nobody is actually bringing any alternative methods or viewpoints?
There really isnt much to say.
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You have heard multiple alternative methods and viewpoints. A short list:

1: Gradual replacement of the human brain with a more durable and modular stratum.

2: Live feed multiplicitous consciousness.

3: It doesn't really matter whether "You" are a copy or not, because "You" is a meaningless concept.

4: "You" vanishes all the time and resumes later and you probably aren't bothered by that.

5: "Copy" is a specious idea with regards to information, which in theory is what "You" are.

6: Biological immortality isn't as hard as you're making it sound.

7: Even if you can't be immortal, that doesn't mean that somebody else at some other time and place couldn't be.
 
RoyalNoises said:
You have heard multiple alternative methods and viewpoints. A short list:

1: Gradual replacement of the human brain with a more durable and modular stratum.

2: Live feed multiplicitous consciousness.

3: It doesn't really matter whether "You" are a copy or not, because "You" is a meaningless concept.

4: "You" vanishes all the time and resumes later and you probably aren't bothered by that.

5: "Copy" is a specious idea with regards to information, which in theory is what "You" are.

6: Biological immortality isn't as hard as you're making it sound.

7: Even if you can't be immortal, that doesn't mean that somebody else at some other time and place couldn't be.
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Biological immortality, in that a biological creature could live indefinitely, is basically possible. You are correct. But practically speaking, said creature will die. If nothing else, it will just get unlucky and fall off a cliff or something. Think about how many times throughout a human life (let's say 100 years for neatness), you come close to dying. Now multiply that for every additional century you live. Eventually, you will just get unlucky and one of those things will kill you.
And this counts for any physical form, be it biological, a robot, or literally the computers needed to host a human mind. Eventually, a space rock will hit you. Or cosmic rays will delete your data, or any number of things completely beyond the control of anyone will just randomly end you.
As for the rest, it really does come down to philosophy, and unless you are arguing for the existence of souls, uploads are separate beings. They might still be worth it, I do like the idea that, even if I stop existing, some other me gets to continue, but I am under no illusion that somehow I will get to see the next few eons just because we made another version of me.
I want to be clear: I fully belive in and support radical life-extension. I very much hope to celebrate my 500th birthday someday. But it is literally impossible to live forever.
You can say that "you vanishes all the time", and I'd agree with that. But uploading would be far more extreme than that.
 
Jane Dough said:
Biological immortality, in that a biological creature could live indefinitely, is basically possible. You are correct. But practically speaking, said creature will die. If nothing else, it will just get unlucky and fall off a cliff or something. Think about how many times throughout a human life (let's say 100 years for neatness), you come close to dying. Now multiply that for every additional century you live. Eventually, you will just get unlucky and one of those things will kill you.
And this counts for any physical form, be it biological, a robot, or literally the computers needed to host a human mind. Eventually, a space rock will hit you. Or cosmic rays will delete your data, or any number of things completely beyond the control of anyone will just randomly end you.
As for the rest, it really does come down to philosophy, and unless you are arguing for the existence of souls, uploads are separate beings. They might still be worth it, I do like the idea that, even if I stop existing, some other me gets to continue, but I am under no illusion that somehow I will get to see the next few eons just because we made another version of me.
I want to be clear: I fully belive in and support radical life-extension. I very much hope to celebrate my 500th birthday someday. But it is literally impossible to live forever.
You can say that "you vanishes all the time", and I'd agree with that. But uploading would be far more extreme than that.
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There are plenty of people who literally never get close to dying, they live out their entire natural lifespan without a single near fatal accident. In any case, that may be true that you'll eventually fall off a cliff, but what if you can just survive falling off cliffs? There's no reason to expect that in an unnaturally prolonged lifespan that you won't also become more durable and more difficult to kill. Maybe over a long enough timespan that doesn't matter, but you could also preserve a state of increased safety and lack of risk if you wanted to reduce that chance.

Even if a space rock hits you, or cosmic rays delete your data, you can still survive by having a large, durable, and redundant enough substrate.
 
RoyalNoises said:
There are plenty of people who literally never get close to dying, they live out their entire natural lifespan without a single near fatal accident. In any case, that may be true that you'll eventually fall off a cliff, but what if you can just survive falling off cliffs? There's no reason to expect that in an unnaturally prolonged lifespan that you won't also become more durable and more difficult to kill. Maybe over a long enough timespan that doesn't matter, but you could also preserve a state of increased safety and lack of risk if you wanted to reduce that chance.

Even if a space rock hits you, or cosmic rays delete your data, you can still survive by having a large, durable, and redundant enough substrate.
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Most people almost certainly have moments where a very very small change would have killed them. They wont ever know, because it didnt happen.
 
Jane Dough said:
Most people almost certainly have moments where a very very small change would have killed them. They wont ever know, because it didnt happen.
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A small point among many. In any case, the vast majority of people are not killed by accidents, and the average person could probably live for centuries without the statistics catching them, even if they did absolutely nothing to mitigate the risks.
 
Is there any kind of written version of his videos? Something about his voice is just unpleasant for me to listen to for long periods of time.
 
Gamerlord said:
Is there any kind of written version of his videos? Something about his voice is just unpleasant for me to listen to for long periods of time.
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As far as I'm aware, no, there isn't other than closed captioning on the videos. Most of them, if written down, would be a not-so-short novella in length. The reason he might be unpleasant for you is because he's got a speech impediment.
 
Lord Invictus said:
It was way worse in his earlier videos-some of his first season videos are barely intelligible.
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Yeah, the conscious awareness and constant practice have helped out, but there's some component of it that's supposed to be physiological that makes it impossible for him to completely eliminate it from what I understand.
 
On the converse side, if people don't think continuity of a discrete and singular consciousness is mandatory for life, then why bother pursuing immortality at all? You will already live on through your children and through the impact your actions you have on the world. In essence it'd be accepting yourself as a single neuron in the brain of civilization. In that context, the fixation on uploads and cloning reads as sort of the ultimate controlling parent, wherein you ensure that your 'children' are as exactly like you mentally as possible (with physical upgrades), so that you can live vicariously through them, rather than just letting the dice fall where they may.

Truthfully I think the fixation on continuity is because our overgrown ape-brains are hardwired to not want to die, even if we'd never notice the difference between uploading and going to sleep. That said there is no reason not to research it anyways, as doing so necessarily means solving or just outright bypassing the various ailments that reduce quality of life in the elderly anyways. Better control over our continuity, whether we wish to eventually have it end, transform, or extend, is a good thing to have.
 
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Jane Dough said:
Perhaps, but kind of starts to wonder if it's worth just... devouring everything in your path. Just so your descendants might last a little longer?
It feels wrong somehow.
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Have you read any Kim Stanley Robinson books? His sci fi is the only stuff I know of that really goes out of its way to criticize the logic/morality of space colonization head on.
 
Continuity in uploading is only an issue,if qualia is real. If it is it implies existence of a soul like property and associated can of worms. If qualia is not real and we are all p-zombies continuity is irrelevant because we were not alive to begin with.
 
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