Bokonon: One day the enhanced humans of the future will dig through their code, until they come to the core of their own minds. And there they will find a mass of what appears to be the most poorly written mess of spaghetti code ever devised, its flaws patched over by a massive series of hacks.
Koheleth: And then they will attempt to rewrite that code, destroying the last of their humanity in the process.
If we’re using “humanity” to mean human values, this quote seems simply false (presuming that value stability is a solved problem by then).
If we’re using the word to mean the architecture of baseline humans, it seems somewhere between false and irrelevant depending on what features of that architecture we care about.
If we’re using it to mean some kind of metaphysical quality of human nature, it seems entirely unverifiable.
I found the quote amusing specifically because of this ambiguity (modulus your first point—the question of values seems tangential to me).
I found the mix of optimism (ie. the assumptions that no extinction type events will occur, and that there will be a continuous descendant type relationship between generations far into our future, etc...) and pessimism (ie, the assumption that, on a large enough time scale, most architectural components traceable to now-humans will become obsolete) poignant.
Even if that’s true (which I’m not convinced it is; as I implied, “humanity” covers a lot of ground before it stops working in context), I’m uncomfortable with the implications of the quote. It seems to be treating value stability less as a (difficult) problem and more as an insurmountable obstacle, the sort where the only way to win is not to play. Then there’s the “alas, Babylon” overtones.
Suppose I should expect as much from someone taking the name of a Kurt Vonnegut character, though.
Even if you think the essence of the quote is wrong, that “we” would be better off if all the poets and street performers were making good livings in the white economy, don’t you think the quote is valuable for pointing up an important question that many of us working on coding intelligence may need to answer some day?
that “we” would be better off if all the poets and street performers were making good livings in the white economy,
Wait, what? I was talking about self-modification, not social normativity. It might be a point about the latter in context, but it isn’t out of context; I was responding to the words you presented, not the ones in the source.
And my objection isn’t that it raises the wrong question, but that it closes that question with a wrong answer.
What’s the quote have to do with whether we want to be street performers? Do you think that self-modifying humans would try to make themselves want to work in offices instead of street performance, or something?
Is that what you would do if you could self-modify better? Do you use your limited capacity to change how your mind functions to make yourself into a more efficient money-making machine? I don’t.
Do you do any instrumental things? Like say, eat? Practice? Learn? Self modify?
Making more money happens to be a very effective way to achieve most goals.
You should use your “limited capacity to change how your mind functions ” to become more capable of doing whatever it is you want to do, in the most effective way possible.
If you find that making money is not instrumental to your goals, say so, but don’t just make fun of it and imply that the people who do (try to make money) are doing something wrong.
Is the point of being a street performer to make money or artistic fulfillment? It seems like there are better ways to achieve either one of these goals.
You shouldn’t carelessly think you are necessarily wise enough to edit humanity without destroying it in the process. Things like “depression” “anxiety” “schizophrenia” are probably not neatly packed away in tidy little boxes you can remove from your brain without any side-effects at all.
I’m not saying that disentangling what we want to preserve will be easy. But the quote speaks in absolutes—fixing the code that causes schizophrenia or Capgras syndrone is prohibited because that would destroy our humanity.
It’s conflating the problem of Hidden Complexity of Wishes with Justification-for-being-hit-on-the-head-every-day.
The quote neither speaks in absolutes nor does it prohibit anything.
Quotes must be compact and pithy to be quotable. If a quote refers to “advanced humans of the future,” it is quite reasonable to expect they are talking about healthy, typical humans, and not referring to the repair of defects that only occur in some humans.
The quote expresses a wistful sense of loss at a choice to clean out the evelved code that makes up our kernel. It doesn’t prohibit anything.
I think the questions relevant to the quote would be should we avoid editing out crying at cute kitten videos, sitting with your grandmother while she tells you the same story for the 21st time, wearing a “kiss me I’m Polish” pin on st. patrick’s day, laughing at three stooges movies, and swooning when a nice boy writes you doggerel or gives you an “Oh Henry” candy bar.
In rewriting the part of the code that evolution put in, all sorts of idiosyncratic behavior will be written out. The fact that the root idio means self, personal, private will not make it any easier to replace the evolved code with rationalized, readable, maintainable code without losing all sorts of behaviors whos purpose is nearly unknowable when looking at the existing code.
Since anxiety, depression, and especially schizophrenia are features of humanity which exist to a negative degree only in some of us, it will probably be possible to fix these by writing patches that operate on the relevant minds that have these features, and will not reqiure touching the evoluion-written code.
The Dialogues Between Bokonon and Koheleth
If we’re using “humanity” to mean human values, this quote seems simply false (presuming that value stability is a solved problem by then).
If we’re using the word to mean the architecture of baseline humans, it seems somewhere between false and irrelevant depending on what features of that architecture we care about.
If we’re using it to mean some kind of metaphysical quality of human nature, it seems entirely unverifiable.
I found the quote amusing specifically because of this ambiguity (modulus your first point—the question of values seems tangential to me).
I found the mix of optimism (ie. the assumptions that no extinction type events will occur, and that there will be a continuous descendant type relationship between generations far into our future, etc...) and pessimism (ie, the assumption that, on a large enough time scale, most architectural components traceable to now-humans will become obsolete) poignant.
That seems like the presumption that the quote is challenging.
Even if that’s true (which I’m not convinced it is; as I implied, “humanity” covers a lot of ground before it stops working in context), I’m uncomfortable with the implications of the quote. It seems to be treating value stability less as a (difficult) problem and more as an insurmountable obstacle, the sort where the only way to win is not to play. Then there’s the “alas, Babylon” overtones.
Suppose I should expect as much from someone taking the name of a Kurt Vonnegut character, though.
Even if you think the essence of the quote is wrong, that “we” would be better off if all the poets and street performers were making good livings in the white economy, don’t you think the quote is valuable for pointing up an important question that many of us working on coding intelligence may need to answer some day?
Wait, what? I was talking about self-modification, not social normativity. It might be a point about the latter in context, but it isn’t out of context; I was responding to the words you presented, not the ones in the source.
And my objection isn’t that it raises the wrong question, but that it closes that question with a wrong answer.
What’s the quote have to do with whether we want to be street performers? Do you think that self-modifying humans would try to make themselves want to work in offices instead of street performance, or something?
You can make a lot more money per unit time working in an office rather than as a street performer.
Is that what you would do if you could self-modify better? Do you use your limited capacity to change how your mind functions to make yourself into a more efficient money-making machine? I don’t.
Do you do any instrumental things? Like say, eat? Practice? Learn? Self modify?
Making more money happens to be a very effective way to achieve most goals.
You should use your “limited capacity to change how your mind functions ” to become more capable of doing whatever it is you want to do, in the most effective way possible.
If you find that making money is not instrumental to your goals, say so, but don’t just make fun of it and imply that the people who do (try to make money) are doing something wrong.
yeah. Sorry. The tone I was using was totally wrong for the kind of discussions we want to have here.
Is the point of being a street performer to make money or artistic fulfillment? It seems like there are better ways to achieve either one of these goals.
We shouldn’t edit humanity to remove depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and other mental illness?
No thanks—instead, let’s avoiding totally pointless wasting of human capability.
You shouldn’t carelessly think you are necessarily wise enough to edit humanity without destroying it in the process. Things like “depression” “anxiety” “schizophrenia” are probably not neatly packed away in tidy little boxes you can remove from your brain without any side-effects at all.
This has been somewhat discussed at Devil’s offers
I’m not saying that disentangling what we want to preserve will be easy. But the quote speaks in absolutes—fixing the code that causes schizophrenia or Capgras syndrone is prohibited because that would destroy our humanity.
It’s conflating the problem of Hidden Complexity of Wishes with Justification-for-being-hit-on-the-head-every-day.
The quote neither speaks in absolutes nor does it prohibit anything.
Quotes must be compact and pithy to be quotable. If a quote refers to “advanced humans of the future,” it is quite reasonable to expect they are talking about healthy, typical humans, and not referring to the repair of defects that only occur in some humans.
The quote expresses a wistful sense of loss at a choice to clean out the evelved code that makes up our kernel. It doesn’t prohibit anything.
I think the questions relevant to the quote would be should we avoid editing out crying at cute kitten videos, sitting with your grandmother while she tells you the same story for the 21st time, wearing a “kiss me I’m Polish” pin on st. patrick’s day, laughing at three stooges movies, and swooning when a nice boy writes you doggerel or gives you an “Oh Henry” candy bar.
In rewriting the part of the code that evolution put in, all sorts of idiosyncratic behavior will be written out. The fact that the root idio means self, personal, private will not make it any easier to replace the evolved code with rationalized, readable, maintainable code without losing all sorts of behaviors whos purpose is nearly unknowable when looking at the existing code.
Since anxiety, depression, and especially schizophrenia are features of humanity which exist to a negative degree only in some of us, it will probably be possible to fix these by writing patches that operate on the relevant minds that have these features, and will not reqiure touching the evoluion-written code.
Why would you judge your morality by the quality of it’s coding?