Evaporative cooling could lead to a nuclear explosion. Imagine uraneous ore, dissolved in a fluid medium, surrounded by a potential barrier, and heated. Non-uranium particles escape first, followed by lighter isotopes. The end result would be a tight concentration of the heaviest available isotope: critical mass.
Strange7
Karma: 2,127
The masochists that I know seem to value suffering either for interpersonal reasons (as a demonstration of control—beyond that I’m insufficiently informed to speculate), or to establish a baseline against which pleasurable experiences seem more meaningful.
There are far fewer available anecdotes of explorers who persisted in using an incorrect map, became even more lost, and were never heard from again. I suspect this is a matter of selection bias.
A human who locates some bunnies, considers them cute, and domesticates them, will ultimately get more bunny-meat with less effort than one who simply kills and eats bunnies on sight.
What if it’s a flag for imprintability?
A cute, unattended creature is a potential investment, with the hardest part (childbirth) already taken care of. Large eyes, brains, and paws relative to the rest of the body is a physiological consequence of incomplete development, and most mammals have some potential use or other to whoever they recognize as ‘parent.’
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2242217.html
If this happened in the wild, that momma pig would eventually have adult tigers ready to fight alongside her legitimate offspring, which could conceivably help to defend them from predators. At the same time, adopted tigers won’t compete with the other piglets for root vegetables as a food supply. Combined-arms tactics, almost.
“Most mammals” are made of meat; if all else fails, they’re edible. “The few species we domesticate anyway” were low-hanging fruit in terms of suitability for domestication, and also happen to be cuter than many non-domesticated species, which I doubt is a coincidence.
The correct decision is to eat that mammal now.
Unless you’ve got a surplus of highly-perishable food, a surplus which will end as surely as winter follows after fall. In that case, the mammal in question acts as a convenient storage device, a bank which will often follow you around of it’s own volition rather than needing to be carried.
Even if there’s overlap between human and potential-pet diets, that doesn’t mean they’re in direct competition. Dogs, for example, will happily eat the same fresh meat a human would, but can also survive on gristle and partially spoiled meat that human stomachs violently reject.
Plausible. How often do people eat most or all of their tame animals in late autumn, and adopt new animal babies in spring, instead of maintaining bigger herds of tame animals that can reproduce to replace the ones eaten? I remember hearing about something of the kind, but can’t recall the details...
Not exactly the environment we evolved for, but it’s solid evidence of feasibility.
It had never been my intention to suggest a slaughter of all available tame animals; only enough to cover the shortage. The strategy I spoke of is based on preservation, and living animals tend to stay fresh longer than dead ones.
I second the suspicious feeling. It boils down to one question: if Kiva is such a great option, why is it not more popular?
I, for one, am willing to consider the values of species other than my own… say, canids, or ocean-dwelling photosynthetic microorganisms. Compromise is possible as part of the process of establishing a mutually-beneficial relationship.
The only downside of this approach I can see is that an upload-triggered Unfriendly singularity may cause more suffering than an Unfriendly AI singularity; sociopaths may be presumed to have more interest in torture of people than a paperclip-optimizing AI would have.
What about those of us who would prefer indefinite human-directed torture to instantaneous cessation of existence? I have no personal plans to explore masochism in that sort of depth, particularly in a context without the generally-accepted safety measures, but it’s not the worst thing I can imagine. I’d find ways to deal with it, in the same sense that if I were stranded on a desert island I would be more willing to gag down whatever noxious variety of canned fermented fish was available, and eventually learn to like it, rather than starve to death.
By ‘death’ I assume you mean the usual process of organ failure, tissue necrosis, having what’s left of me dressed up and put in a fancy box, followed by chemical preservation, decomposition, and/or cremation? Considering the long-term recovery prospects, no, I don’t think I can imagine a form of torture worse than that, except perhaps dragging it out over a longer period of time or otherwise embellishing on it somehow.
This may be a simple matter of differing personal preferences. Could you please specify some form of torture, real or imagined, which you would consider worse than death?
First, the scenario you describe explicitly includes death, and as such falls under the ‘embellishments’ exception.
Second, thanks to the hedonic treadmill, any randomly-selected form of torture repeated indefinitely would eventually become tolerable, then boring. As you said,
The type isn’t really important, at that point.
Third, if I ever run out of other active goals to pursue, I could always fall back on “defeat/destroy the eternal tormetor of all mankind.” Even with negligible chance of success, some genuinely heroic quest like that makes for a far better waste of my time and resources than, say, lottery tickets.
There have been people who wanted to die for one reason or another, or claimed to at the time with apparent sincerity, and yet went on to achieve useful or at least interesting things. The same cannot be said of those who actually did die.
Actual death constitutes a more lasting type of harm than anything I’ve heard described as torture.
Elementary education might include things like this.
Admittedly, my personal definition isn’t particularly rigorous. An invention or achievement is useful if it makes other people more able to accomplish their existing goals, or maybe if it gives them something to do when they’d otherwise be bored. It’s interesting (but not necessarily useful) if it makes people happy, is regarded as having artistic value, etc.
Relevant examples: Emperor Norton’s peaceful dispersal of a race riot was useful. His proposal to construct a suspension bridge across San Francisco Bay would have been useful, had it been carried out. Sylvia Plath’s work is less obviously useful, but definitely interesting.
Yes, I’ve considered the possibility of things like inducement of anteriograde amnesia combined with application of procedure 110-Montauk, and done my best to consider nameless horrors beyond even that.
As I understand it, a superintelligence derived from a sadistic, sociopathic human upload would have some interest in me as a person capable of suffering, while a superintelligence with strictly artificial psychology and goals would more likely be interested in me as a potential resource, a poorly-defended pile of damp organic chemistry. Neither of those is anywhere near my ideal outcome, of course, but in the former, I’ll almost certainly be kept alive for some perceptible length of time. As far as I’m concerned, while I’m dead, my utility function is stuck at 0, but while I’m alive my utility function is equal to or greater than zero.
Furthermore, even a nigh-omnipotent sociopath might be persuaded to torture on a strictly consensual basis by appealing to exploitable weaknesses in the legacy software. The same cannot be said of a superintelligence deliberately constructed without such security flaws, or one which wipes out humanity before it’s flaws can be discovered.
Neither of these options is actually good, but the human-upload ‘bad end’ is at least, from my perspective, less bad. That’s all I’m asserting.
A superintelligence based on an uploaded human mind might retain exploits like ‘pre-existing honorable agreements’ or even ‘mercy’ because it considers them part of it’s own essential personality. Recursive self-improvement doesn’t just mean punching some magical enhance button exponentially fast.
If you knew you were going to die tomorrow,
My preferences would be less relevant, given the limited time and resources I’d have with which to act on them. They wouldn’t be significantly changed, though. I would, in short, want the universe to continue containing nice places for myself and those people I love to live in, and for as many of us as possible to continue living in such places. I would also hope that I was wrong about my own imminent demise, or at least the inevitability thereof.
Is your thought-reading ability equally effective against strangers, or people whose presence you’re aware of but who you can’t make eye contact with? If eye contact is required (or helpful), what about looking at the other person through a narrow opening, such as a mail slot, so that only their eyes are visible?
Could it be used to determine the presence or absence of a person on the opposite side of an opaque, soundproofed barrier?