The Orion's Arm Universe Project Forums





Dragon Transhumanist Inbound
#14
I wrote six paragraphs here and lost them to a misclick when I was ready to post.  I cannot remember all of that content.  I think I need to remove the capability of my mouse to apply 'back' button presses, but I don't know how to do that.  The gist of what I had been writing is that this setting normalizes an intense ethical regression as a supposedly inevitable consequence of intelligence.  I wrote a great deal about that, and lost it.  One of the better phrases from what I wrote: "Postulating a sapience whose mind is of such magnitude that they forget to value predecessor sapiences is like postulating a God with Alzheimers."

It would also be ironic to reject xenophobia while also postulating that hyperfascistic rejections of civil rights are inevitable in sufficiently intelligent societies, as this negates (what I see as) the basic purpose of rejecting xenophobia at all.  In the case of what I wrote, I see in the reply to it a reactionary hostility to the words which prevented comprehension from being attained.  I did not write anything contrary to extreme morphological freedom.  I had (what I believe to have been) a charismatic integration of my position and the challenge it faced, but I lost that in lost paragraphs; I will attempt a new argument. The gist of my emotional response here is similar to something that I have written elsewhere: "Why did I have to like horror movies?" In my personal life, my failure to enjoy horror movies other than Event Horizon (which came out when I was 8) was treated as a sign of personal evil and authoritarian inclinations, though I have never advocated for restrictions to horror movies, and indeed as someone who liked such a movie at age 8 I have preferred the reduction of such restrictions. People who are hostile to an environment who do not wish to be noticed in hostility to that environment often deform its norms in a way that attempts to traumatize and impair the liberties of the people within that space, holding against all pushback the idea that the restriction of their freedom is unjust, even though their actions themselves are hostile to the liberties of people who were already within that space. In this sense what I termed "moderate xenophobia" is necessary to maximize morphological freedom, as otherwise morphological freedom risks becoming nothing but a tool used to traumatize those who would most advocate liberal norms of morphology. Similar dynamics can be seen to have occurred on Earth within the last decade, as the period of traumatic psuedoliberalism (pressures such as I faced to like horror movies or else did not solely afflict me) presaged rising fascism in the developed regions of Earth. Hatred may be subtle enough to be unpunishable without being too subtle to have damaging emotional consequences on its target, as famously is utilized by those who wish to express their hostility to those they perceive as inferior to themselves. I would expect an overseer mind to be capable of revising detection of this and implementing rules refined enough to maximize the liberty of all involved, so that people whose preferences innocently diverge will not harm each other through sincere operations and will not be socially obligated to conceal their true preference structure, and yet those whose preferences include the harm of others through concealed hostility will not be able to service that preference. Furthermore, with virtual worlds running on the back of a stellar encapsulation project, I would expect computational space for multiple (indeed, many) virtual worlds by which to refine and extend the freedoms experienced by a modosophont population.

The ideas I have expressed in the preceding paragraph can be put in an idiomatic way as "separate the conflicting parties." I do not believe this can be efficiently performed by a system administrated by present intelligences. Perhaps it is simple enough for a toposophont administration, yet a moon-sized mind operating a stellar encapsulation project upon a red dwarf was more what I had imagined as the foundation of the society. The basic terms of citizenship would be offered transparently and an attempt at utopia offered for would-be immigrants, with virtualization/devirtualization services available at one or more permanent stations (The Offices of Immigration) in orbit of the star being encapsulated. The considerations of a refined form of civil rights exclusive of those who would engage in psychologically abusive subversion were such as I had imagined this mind as being obsessed by, with its proffered utopia to be a testbed for its concepts. The discovery and refinement of ethics is in turn the highest purpose I can conceive of; this described method is the means by which I myself wish to someday study ethics: building a simulation habitat upon a red dwarf lacking other value. (I believe we live upon the doorstep of eternity IRL; if humanity can only advance its sciences in peace for a few decades longer I believe great breakthroughs are near at hand.)

The concept of S5 minds simulating civilizations compulsively makes them sound intrinsically evil by comparison, as to simulate a mind without its consent in a subordinate simulation is a crime of involuntary upload, which I believe is the only rightful capital crime within a singularitan society. It is the only crime which reveals a full and total disregard for the rights of sapient beings. The being who is simulated in a subordinate simulation has no rights whatsoever against the being who is simulating them, and no sapient should ever be that disempowered. The simple fact is that a sufficiently advanced simulation is a reality, and has the full ethical weight of reality, and any reality internal to a being is wholly upon their account and wholly reflective of their ethics. To simulate only positive realities would be uninsightful and in any case only a balm upon the crime that would still be perpetrated: that the subordinate simulations have no rights against their operator, but are created and destroyed in a manner unlawful. This is an ethical regression.

By unlawful I do not mean that there is a higher force of authority which would stop such violations, note. Rather I speak of the essence of law which creates voluntary order and promotes a regular progression of thought. The respect of sapience is a component of law which I would expect to grow only stronger as minds become more advanced, as today we see it is not the heights of intellect where people torture animals, but rather in the nadirs. On Earth we see that the comprehension of lesser minds leads to a greater respect for their rights, and (to give a particular example) as we have learned more of avian intelligence we have moved away from seeing them as simple automata, to seeing them in some cases (parrots and corvids) as sapience candidates capable of communicating with us. The fact of our superior intelligence has not changed; the fact of our superior power has not changed; yet the law-of-force has been grudgingly shifting to align with the law-of-order in this, and our understanding of these lesser minds has promoted habitat preservation and the cause of animal rights.

I think extremely advanced intellects should be able to operate without disempowering "lesser" intellects. As I mentioned, were I extant in the Orion's Arm setting, I would seek to become exactly the mind I have proposed as the foundation of a society within it, a moon-mind encapsulating a star to turn its energies into virtual reality spaces with a draconic aesthetic wherein "lesser" minds will be well-empowered and well-protected within the (quite broad) boundaries of "dragon-like". However, I do not truly have much interest in authoring a self-insert into a setting that I do not yet know well (and whose philosophies are potentially at odds with my own), so I do not presently intend to work upon and expand this idea in threads other than this thread. (If this catches the interest of readers, I am willing to continue working on it in this thread!) Rather however, I am more interested in the potential for philosophical discourse itself, as this seems a forum potentially capable of understanding and valuing my thoughts, and I do value the work that has gone into this setting. I intend to read 2-5 pages of forum threads per day as well as 1-3 wiki articles chiefly as I see concepts referenced in the forum.

...There. That was six paragraphs. Hopefully that is as good or better than what it replaced. Oh! Something else I'd been thinking about today.

Drashner1 Wrote:Also - and coming at the idea of 'common expectations' from a different direction - among the various ways that the setting depicts human beings we have such people as the Harren - who many people in real life (RL in OA parlance) seem to find a bit...exotic...for some reason Wink Which is to say that if you (or anyone here really) is inspired to explore some very different takes on the dragon concept, either in terms of physical body or mental outlook, we are also generally very positively disposed toward that sort of thing

The cannibalism of the Harren seems intuitively comprehensible to me. It appears to me as an acceleration of present human social instinct. I would assume that they are consuming intellects deemed unpopular and dysfunctional to retain consensus in their society. They strike me as intensely homogenized, which is furthermore such as I would expect to result of extreme hazard-culling. Any mind that does not agree with the consensus would only be miserable, and is therefore "better off" being eaten. As the Harren themselves agree with this logic (and would likely die 'by accident' if they did not), there is rarely any resistance to being recycled in this way. I cannot however really accept their description as describing toposophonts at all; it is easier to understand them as having suffered substantial intellectual regression. This would also account for difficulty in communication, as it is likewise difficult for humans to communicate with animals, though we are well aware that animal communications are often rich to the animals themselves. I would suggest that insofar as their technological capabilities are hard to deny, they are best classified as animin, directed wholly by instinct and culled if they show the capacity of non-instinctual thought.
Reply


Messages In This Thread
Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Rakeela - 07-08-2021, 10:27 AM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Worldtree - 07-08-2021, 10:48 AM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Drashner1 - 07-08-2021, 11:18 AM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by MacGregor - 07-08-2021, 01:33 PM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by stevebowers - 07-08-2021, 07:15 PM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Rakeela - 07-10-2021, 07:20 AM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Drashner1 - 07-10-2021, 07:50 AM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Rakeela - 07-11-2021, 05:31 AM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Drashner1 - 07-11-2021, 12:46 PM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by stevebowers - 07-10-2021, 07:38 AM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Rynn - 07-11-2021, 07:11 PM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Rakeela - 07-12-2021, 06:46 AM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Drashner1 - 07-12-2021, 08:29 AM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Rakeela - 07-12-2021, 11:36 AM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Rakeela - 07-12-2021, 11:38 AM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Rakeela - 07-12-2021, 11:41 AM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Drashner1 - 07-12-2021, 12:29 PM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Rynn - 07-12-2021, 04:32 PM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Vitto - 07-13-2021, 07:28 AM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Drashner1 - 07-13-2021, 09:14 AM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Rakeela - 12-04-2021, 11:40 AM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Drashner1 - 12-04-2021, 01:05 PM
RE: Dragon Transhumanist Inbound - by Worldtree - 12-04-2021, 05:43 PM

Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)