I’m not sure this response is actually coherent. “Force our own values on the evolutionary process” is probably impossible in principle, as is “decouple ourselves from evolution entirely”; uploading would still result in creatures that would make imperfect imitations of themselves, which would mean still more selection, and even faster than before.
“Consider something a disease if it tends to move us further away from the condition of being composed of a tenuous gas of photons and leptons”… I do not see a real question here, because nothing can tend to move us further away from that condition. We are always moving toward that condition. In fact when we do things that seem better to us, we are usually moving towards it faster, by expending more energy.
“Force our own values on the evolutionary process” is probably impossible in principle
Really? Consider, for a particularly clear-cut instance which I am not especially endorsing, eugenics.
(I don’t mean to imply that we could hope to force all our values on the evolutionary process. Any more than evolution can reasonably be said to have, as it were, opinions on most questions of value.)
nothing can tend to move us further away from that condition
We could move towards it faster or slower. Obviously we should blow ourselves up as violently as possible, in order to be more in tune with the Values of the Universe.
I disagree that blowing ourselves up violently would be in tune with the Values of the Universe in the sense we are talking about, for the reason I suggested at the end: if we build Dyson spheres we will generate entropy at a far higher rate and therefore progress far faster towards the tenuous gas. Blowing ourselves up is slow; the high tech things we might really want to do would be fast.
I’m not sure this response is actually coherent. “Force our own values on the evolutionary process” is probably impossible in principle, as is “decouple ourselves from evolution entirely”; uploading would still result in creatures that would make imperfect imitations of themselves, which would mean still more selection, and even faster than before.
“Consider something a disease if it tends to move us further away from the condition of being composed of a tenuous gas of photons and leptons”… I do not see a real question here, because nothing can tend to move us further away from that condition. We are always moving toward that condition. In fact when we do things that seem better to us, we are usually moving towards it faster, by expending more energy.
Really? Consider, for a particularly clear-cut instance which I am not especially endorsing, eugenics.
(I don’t mean to imply that we could hope to force all our values on the evolutionary process. Any more than evolution can reasonably be said to have, as it were, opinions on most questions of value.)
We could move towards it faster or slower. Obviously we should blow ourselves up as violently as possible, in order to be more in tune with the Values of the Universe.
I disagree that blowing ourselves up violently would be in tune with the Values of the Universe in the sense we are talking about, for the reason I suggested at the end: if we build Dyson spheres we will generate entropy at a far higher rate and therefore progress far faster towards the tenuous gas. Blowing ourselves up is slow; the high tech things we might really want to do would be fast.