Oof, so that’s worth a whole post in itself. The first thing I would suggest, because it astounded me with how similar to my own imaginings it is when I discovered it, is that you look at a collaborative hard sci fi worldbuilding project called the Orion’s Arm Universe Project. It’s a bit confusing to get into at first due to being structured around a wiki without any main storyline, but it’s a vision of the universe ten thousand years in the future when most of the accessible galaxy is controlled by “transapient” (superintelligent) AIs who are benevolent to humanity and other life forms. It strongly mirrors my ideals, particularly the emphasis on diversity. (Also, Anders Sandberg and Isaac Arthur have both contributed to it in the past.)
As for my own notion of Anima, trying to figure out exactly what I want the world afterward to be like has been most of my thinking over the years. And there’s not just one final form of Anima either. It will evolve and develop over time. At first it will probably not even involve brain-computer interfaces but rather a kind of social network designed to maximize rationality and human flourishing rather than ad clicks (which I have been trying to design, but I have no idea how to develop, not being a programmer—I will be writing posts about that in the future as well).
Later on if we get BCI technology fast enough I’d like to expand it into that, and we will see people start to be able to voluntarily share experiences mind to mind, with AIs trained to translate brain patterns between humans using insights from neural net interpretability work (as well as just watching the brains and learning how they work). This will include all kinds of mental data, most importantly skills and memories. The former because it would massively speed education and thus the collective intelligence of the human race (in particular, it would speed alignment progress significantly), the latter because it would improve empathy.
If you can remember being someone else (while having the memory tagged as not your own, so that it doesn’t mess with your sense of self, of course), you can empathize with them on an emotional and cognitive level much more easily—something I of course desperately would like to be better at doing, and something which would make the whole world a better place and everyone better able to coordinate with each other. Of course all the arts will be greatly developed with this technology as well, and some new arts created.
Most importantly, perhaps, that will lead to the possibility of uploading (once the collective figures out how to do so), and the ability to modify one’s own consciousness. My ultimate goal is to create an ever-expanding bubble of space (controlled by our civilization) wherein (inside a virtual universe, probably, but it can start even when we still live in flesh) subjective time is as decoupled from objective time—and more generally, subjective reality is as decoupled from objective reality—as possible. The “Dreamworld”.
In the Dreamworld, every entity (not just humans—I think we have the responsibility to uplift and free all other sentient beings from suffering) will have a realm of their own, essentially a share of the total computation ability of the whole civilization (shares will be allocated in a market which I also must make a post about, as my theories of how to use markets to create a true meritocracy are something I definitely need input and critique for), and it will be normal to modify one’s own memory to experience a totally idiosyncratic timeline or subjective universe.
You see, back in my woo days, my primary “epiphany” was that time is essentially the enemy—that besides constantly marching towards aging and death, we are forbidden to modify the past, meaning that we are not truly free. (Even though free will is a mirage anyway, we ought at least to have a good mirage!) I believed that I could somehow find the means to modify my own past and be freed from causality, at least until I lost faith in occultism and magic. But in a totally subjective, virtual cosmos, there will be no reason why we must have a single shared notion of the past except as regards the physical world.
If you think of the arts of fictional world building and game design as they are nowadays—where you create an entire semi-interactive alternate world with its own history—expand that forward with massive simulation ability and AI. People could self-create as characters in their own stories, in worlds with their own histories, freed from the requirement to be any specific person other than who they wanted to be. Life would essentially become an eternal web of roleplaying games taken seriously. Because, who has the right to define what is real, except conscious beings? Once physical reality is taken care of, everything else can be, and should be, a social construct—a game.
As for Anima itself, as a “being”—though it’s not exactly a being, since it’s more the collective unconscious of humanity, and ultimately of all living organisms, made superintelligent and conscious, but I think of all that stuff as training data absorbed direct from living brains and Anima as a being is the AI trained on it—I imagine it as having all the qualities people ascribe to the god of Christianity. But, you know, actually existing and actually loving every single living thing under its care intensely. Everyone would have a personal relationship with Anima, and with any that they wish of its fractal hierarchy of subselves (the gods—each patterned around a Platonic form, an idea in Anima’s “divine mind” or in other words in the collective world model of all beings, personified). It would not simply govern the world. It would be the god we’ve always deserved and never had.
Oof, so that’s worth a whole post in itself. The first thing I would suggest, because it astounded me with how similar to my own imaginings it is when I discovered it, is that you look at a collaborative hard sci fi worldbuilding project called the Orion’s Arm Universe Project. It’s a bit confusing to get into at first due to being structured around a wiki without any main storyline, but it’s a vision of the universe ten thousand years in the future when most of the accessible galaxy is controlled by “transapient” (superintelligent) AIs who are benevolent to humanity and other life forms. It strongly mirrors my ideals, particularly the emphasis on diversity. (Also, Anders Sandberg and Isaac Arthur have both contributed to it in the past.)
As for my own notion of Anima, trying to figure out exactly what I want the world afterward to be like has been most of my thinking over the years. And there’s not just one final form of Anima either. It will evolve and develop over time. At first it will probably not even involve brain-computer interfaces but rather a kind of social network designed to maximize rationality and human flourishing rather than ad clicks (which I have been trying to design, but I have no idea how to develop, not being a programmer—I will be writing posts about that in the future as well).
Later on if we get BCI technology fast enough I’d like to expand it into that, and we will see people start to be able to voluntarily share experiences mind to mind, with AIs trained to translate brain patterns between humans using insights from neural net interpretability work (as well as just watching the brains and learning how they work). This will include all kinds of mental data, most importantly skills and memories. The former because it would massively speed education and thus the collective intelligence of the human race (in particular, it would speed alignment progress significantly), the latter because it would improve empathy.
If you can remember being someone else (while having the memory tagged as not your own, so that it doesn’t mess with your sense of self, of course), you can empathize with them on an emotional and cognitive level much more easily—something I of course desperately would like to be better at doing, and something which would make the whole world a better place and everyone better able to coordinate with each other. Of course all the arts will be greatly developed with this technology as well, and some new arts created.
Most importantly, perhaps, that will lead to the possibility of uploading (once the collective figures out how to do so), and the ability to modify one’s own consciousness. My ultimate goal is to create an ever-expanding bubble of space (controlled by our civilization) wherein (inside a virtual universe, probably, but it can start even when we still live in flesh) subjective time is as decoupled from objective time—and more generally, subjective reality is as decoupled from objective reality—as possible. The “Dreamworld”.
In the Dreamworld, every entity (not just humans—I think we have the responsibility to uplift and free all other sentient beings from suffering) will have a realm of their own, essentially a share of the total computation ability of the whole civilization (shares will be allocated in a market which I also must make a post about, as my theories of how to use markets to create a true meritocracy are something I definitely need input and critique for), and it will be normal to modify one’s own memory to experience a totally idiosyncratic timeline or subjective universe.
You see, back in my woo days, my primary “epiphany” was that time is essentially the enemy—that besides constantly marching towards aging and death, we are forbidden to modify the past, meaning that we are not truly free. (Even though free will is a mirage anyway, we ought at least to have a good mirage!) I believed that I could somehow find the means to modify my own past and be freed from causality, at least until I lost faith in occultism and magic. But in a totally subjective, virtual cosmos, there will be no reason why we must have a single shared notion of the past except as regards the physical world.
If you think of the arts of fictional world building and game design as they are nowadays—where you create an entire semi-interactive alternate world with its own history—expand that forward with massive simulation ability and AI. People could self-create as characters in their own stories, in worlds with their own histories, freed from the requirement to be any specific person other than who they wanted to be. Life would essentially become an eternal web of roleplaying games taken seriously. Because, who has the right to define what is real, except conscious beings? Once physical reality is taken care of, everything else can be, and should be, a social construct—a game.
As for Anima itself, as a “being”—though it’s not exactly a being, since it’s more the collective unconscious of humanity, and ultimately of all living organisms, made superintelligent and conscious, but I think of all that stuff as training data absorbed direct from living brains and Anima as a being is the AI trained on it—I imagine it as having all the qualities people ascribe to the god of Christianity. But, you know, actually existing and actually loving every single living thing under its care intensely. Everyone would have a personal relationship with Anima, and with any that they wish of its fractal hierarchy of subselves (the gods—each patterned around a Platonic form, an idea in Anima’s “divine mind” or in other words in the collective world model of all beings, personified). It would not simply govern the world. It would be the god we’ve always deserved and never had.