Some parts of your anthropic argument don’t seem right… and it’s lead me to a related thought
It seems likely that an expanding civilization would capture much more anthropic measure than what exists on earth. Billions of times more. So, why should we find ourselves here where the cosmic body of life is still so small? Why weren’t we born hundreds of thousands of years later in the heavenly gardens of an alien diaspora?
What if… Siblings Are Dangerous: What if most life-supporting universes have in common a dynamic where technology significantly increases the danger of coexisting with other living things. Creating new life on a grand scale is made unviable, our gardens will tend to evolve competitors who will eventually kill everything around them until only they are left, or until nothing is left. The theory is that life is at its most numerous when it is too dumb and too weak to pose much of a threat to itself, as we are.
I’d guess that expanding one’s own mind into well-controlled slave cortexes would capture similar amounts of new anthropic measure.. but maybe once you go over a certain scale, having those be independent minds, sufficient to observe their own existence, maybe it just isn’t possible to keep that many star-sized consciousnesses under control.
(You might ask why anthropic measure should be tied to independently-intelligent minds. I don’t know. It just seems to be. I don’t make the rules.)
It sounds like in the first part of your post you’re disagreeing with my choice of reference class when using SSA? That’s reasonable. My intuition is that if one ends up using a reference class-dependent anthropic principle (like SSA) that transhumans would not be part of our reference class, but I suppose I don’t have much reason to trust this intuition.
On anthropic measure being tied to independently-intelligent minds, what is the difference between an independently- and dependently-intelligent mind? What makes you think the mind needs to be specifically independently-intelligent?
Mm. I think I oppose that intuition. It’s hard to see how there can be much of a distinction between existing at low measure and simply existing less, or being less likely to have occurred, or to have been observed. So, for a garden to be considered successful I would expect its caretakers to at least try to ensure that its occupants have high anthropic measure, and at least some of the time they would succeed.
Incisive question… All I can think of is… human organizations are often a lot more conscious- behaviorally- than any individual pretends to be, and I find that I am an individual rather than an organization. I am immersed the sensory experience of one human sitting at one terminal, rather than the immense, abstract sensory experience of, say, wikipedia, or the US intelligence community. It’s conceivable that organizations with tightly integrated knowledge-bases and decisionmaking processes do have a lot of anthropic measure, but maybe there just aren’t very many of them yet.
I’m trying to imagine speaking to some representative of the state of knowledge of a highly integrated organization, and hearing it explain that its subjective experience anthropic measure prior for organizations is higher than its anthropic measure for individuals (multiplied by the number of individuals), but I don’t know what a hive-mind representative would even act like, at what point does it stop saying “we” and start saying “I”? Humans’ orgs are more like ant colonies than brains, at this point, there is collective intelligence but there’s no head to talk to.
This was really interesting. I’ve thought of this comment on-and-off for the last month.
You raised an interesting reason for thinking that transhumans would have high anthropic measure. But if you have a reference-class based anthropic theory, couldn’t transhumans have a lot of anthropic measure, but not be in our reference class (that is, for SSA, we shouldn’t reason as if we were selected from a class containing all humans and transhumans)?
Even if we think that the reference class should contain transhumans, do we have positive reasons for thinking that it should contain organisations?
One thought is that you might reject reference classes in anthropic reasoning (even under SSA). Is that the case?
Some parts of your anthropic argument don’t seem right… and it’s lead me to a related thought
It seems likely that an expanding civilization would capture much more anthropic measure than what exists on earth. Billions of times more. So, why should we find ourselves here where the cosmic body of life is still so small? Why weren’t we born hundreds of thousands of years later in the heavenly gardens of an alien diaspora?
What if… Siblings Are Dangerous: What if most life-supporting universes have in common a dynamic where technology significantly increases the danger of coexisting with other living things. Creating new life on a grand scale is made unviable, our gardens will tend to evolve competitors who will eventually kill everything around them until only they are left, or until nothing is left. The theory is that life is at its most numerous when it is too dumb and too weak to pose much of a threat to itself, as we are.
I’d guess that expanding one’s own mind into well-controlled slave cortexes would capture similar amounts of new anthropic measure.. but maybe once you go over a certain scale, having those be independent minds, sufficient to observe their own existence, maybe it just isn’t possible to keep that many star-sized consciousnesses under control.
(You might ask why anthropic measure should be tied to independently-intelligent minds. I don’t know. It just seems to be. I don’t make the rules.)
Any late filter would explain it, though.
It sounds like in the first part of your post you’re disagreeing with my choice of reference class when using SSA? That’s reasonable. My intuition is that if one ends up using a reference class-dependent anthropic principle (like SSA) that transhumans would not be part of our reference class, but I suppose I don’t have much reason to trust this intuition.
On anthropic measure being tied to independently-intelligent minds, what is the difference between an independently- and dependently-intelligent mind? What makes you think the mind needs to be specifically independently-intelligent?
Mm. I think I oppose that intuition. It’s hard to see how there can be much of a distinction between existing at low measure and simply existing less, or being less likely to have occurred, or to have been observed. So, for a garden to be considered successful I would expect its caretakers to at least try to ensure that its occupants have high anthropic measure, and at least some of the time they would succeed.
Incisive question… All I can think of is… human organizations are often a lot more conscious- behaviorally- than any individual pretends to be, and I find that I am an individual rather than an organization. I am immersed the sensory experience of one human sitting at one terminal, rather than the immense, abstract sensory experience of, say, wikipedia, or the US intelligence community. It’s conceivable that organizations with tightly integrated knowledge-bases and decisionmaking processes do have a lot of anthropic measure, but maybe there just aren’t very many of them yet.
I’m trying to imagine speaking to some representative of the state of knowledge of a highly integrated organization, and hearing it explain that its subjective experience anthropic measure prior for organizations is higher than its anthropic measure for individuals (multiplied by the number of individuals), but I don’t know what a hive-mind representative would even act like, at what point does it stop saying “we” and start saying “I”? Humans’ orgs are more like ant colonies than brains, at this point, there is collective intelligence but there’s no head to talk to.
This was really interesting. I’ve thought of this comment on-and-off for the last month.
You raised an interesting reason for thinking that transhumans would have high anthropic measure. But if you have a reference-class based anthropic theory, couldn’t transhumans have a lot of anthropic measure, but not be in our reference class (that is, for SSA, we shouldn’t reason as if we were selected from a class containing all humans and transhumans)?
Even if we think that the reference class should contain transhumans, do we have positive reasons for thinking that it should contain organisations?
One thought is that you might reject reference classes in anthropic reasoning (even under SSA). Is that the case?