Crimes against transhumanity

Don't agree with this specific point. One of the most common anti-democratic arguments (?) is that people are inherently unequal, because of differences in physical and cognitive capacity. But this of course misses that declaration of all people being equal is performative. I don't think we actually care if it's "naturally" true, we - citizens - don't want to be dominated, so we will make everyone equal by law and politics. Democratic politics is just arguing the specifics, in what areas, to what extent etc.

So this is a rational pact. Trying to break it just means there will be someone stronger than you out to dominate you, and you'll be in a suboptimal position to resist, because you alienated and weakened your potential allies. Look up Republicanism for a related line of thinking.

In my opinion an artificial person automatically gets all the rights (they are bound to personhood and reciprocity and not biology). But I have no doubt there will be much lawlessness about this and perhaps an American Civil War-like event down the line.

There will be extreme resistance to these technologies from many kinds of religious people who would be willing to die and/or kill to prevent what they see as a takeover by the most malevolent of invisible forces. I may not agree with their reasoning, but some of their concerns could be worth reframing and considering in a different light.

Personally, I strongly suspect we will have to fundamentally change as a species to get through at least one of the Great Filters looming before us. However, it's important to remember that the road is fraught with many perils and several possible paths which could lead to unimaginable suffering. It really seems to me that we're going to have to get lucky on multiple dice rolls here in the long run.

Technologically speaking, I'm not sure it's even possible to replicate the complex state of an entire nervous system. Maybe you could do this incrementally (ie by replacing parts of the brain with machines that can be replicated) but we're awfully sentimental about our own meat bags.

Say some "Music Man" type huckster comes to your town with a "Brain Uploader" device. He promises to upload your brain to the metaverse, but all the device does is train a deep learning simulation of the victim's personality shown on a screen, while administering progressively great electric shocks on the victim until he's dead.

This gives the town the illusion that the person's soul (or consciousness, or whatever) has migrated into the metaverse. How do you detect he's lying?

What if a “10x-human” mind can do some thinking, come up with decisions, and then temporarily fork itself into 10 “human-level” instances, vote 10 times, and then join back to its more powerful self?

Put differently, in a world where minds can vary in power/size/scope by orders of magnitude, does “one mind = one vote” make any sense? We might be forced to look towards “economic weight votes” and systems like quadratic voting.

I saw an article on HN a while ago written by a wealthy Asian male who was naturally very curious and interested in math. The article was about how he referred to himself as 'privileged', not only because he was born with wealth and therefore access to comfort and resources, but because his innate desire to learn made him much more capable and marketable in a modern workforce. He recognized that some people are not cognitively capable of learning higher mathematics, and part of that was because they just simply didn't have the drive, attention span, etc. to study hard enough to get into the highest levels, whereas he did. He is, by his definition, 'better', because of the roll of some cosmic dice.

If we are to consider this definition of privilege to be acceptable, then simulated brains are pretty much the most privileged a human can be. They can re-clock their brain to think faster than humans. They can modify their own software to add in virtues and erase vices. And most importantly of all they are completely free from physical needs. If for some reason they desire scarcity or biological functions, that can all be simulated.

Much like fears about genetic engineering of super people, the governments of the real world would have to move extremely quickly to protect the underprivileged class, e.g. the biologicals, otherwise they would be completely driven out of the highest paying intellectual and creative jobs, creating an economic lower class with no chance of ever out-competing their simulated counterparts.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Em

EDIT: A better review than just the Wikiepdia page: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/28/book-review-age-of-em/

I think something like animism would be more apt. Start with a rock or a grain of sand-- how much respect should it be shown? Well one grain of sand doesn't mind being moved. But eventually if you take too many you can destroy a beach, or flatten a mountain. There is something to be said about treating everything, inanimate or not with respect. There doesn't need to be sentience or consciousness for us to be aware of our impact on our environment.

"This sounds like some hippie bs" well just like in the sand example, the negative externalities of moving sand may not be apparent at first, but over time they could lead to something like a Roko's Basilisk situation or an AI killing all humans to prevent its exploitation.

I'm not sure what the list of acceptable contracts would be for a simulated mind, and, worse yet, how hard it would be to design these into the, uh, fabric of simulation.

0) Being aware that you are in a simulation, I think, is the most foundational part. If you are unaware, it can be Gaslight Universe, a special kind of torment.

1) Being able to switch oneself off at will.

2) Being able to prevent being turned on later.

These rules cover a single instance, but I think further rules would need to cover, ah, swathes of instances forked from one base.

It would require some pretty radical copyright, too, especially for those "information wants to be free" folks.

The concept of "the right to life" has been widely discussed.

I think there's an important right that all of us should also have - the right to die. If I want to stop living, I should be able to stop living. Nobody should be able to force me to continue living (and possibly suffering).

When we're able to copy someone's mind exactly and save it in a computer, and then replicate it endlessly, we take away that person's right to die. We enter the dark world shown in some episodes of Black Mirror (e.g. White Christmas or Black Museum) - where any person can hold a mini computer with a copy of someone else's mind where that someone is being constantly tortured. They can't even die. They are forced to suffer.

This possibility terrifies me to the point where I would consider killing myself (in a way that irrecoverably destroys my brain) just to prevent my mind from being copied.

So, are you willing to kill yourself, to live forever? You will never experience anything ever again, for an life of infinite experiences that arn't yours except in name.

I wouldn't!

The potential of "sliding" one's mind (replicate the brain's work piecewise to maintain ~1x consciousness at all times) besides.

Easier to just cure brain degeneration.

The link to Accelerando there is to Amazon (which is fine, and I do have physical and digital versions of the book and feel that it is good and useful to support authors by purchasing the stories they write)... but you can also get it for free, in its entirety, in a number of different formats, from the author's website: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

> This free ebook edition is made available by kind consent of my publishers, Ace and Orbit, under a Creative Commons license with certain restrictions attached. In particular, you may not create derivative works or use the work for commercial gain.

(late edit - I personally feel that the sequence of books and stories: BLIT stories by David Langford, Accelerando (references a Langford fractal), Glasshouse (hints of {spoilers} in a transhuman environment, feels sequelish to Accelerando), Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams (the Strossian singularity is averted, and explores {spoilers} more) ---- There's a kind of continuity in the refutation of the reference that each makes to the other that I find interesting)

The transphobia we see today in various forms is rooted in the philosophical divide between theism and post-atheism/anatheism. Basically, people are divided between believing in religious texts and institutions, or they're nonbelievers who've experienced psychedelics or similar altered states through events like near-death experiences and had a personal encounter with the divine. It's one thing to believe/not believe, and quite another to experience. Basically, neither religion nor science can explain consciousness, and that drives people crazy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transtheism

The odds of us incarnating in this exact moment at the end of human history are too remote to fathom. In fact, any argument for or against religion quickly ends in absurdism.

But so many outrageous things are coming, and soon. Machine learning that surpasses material human ability by 2030 and mental human ability by 2040. The death of the oceans and most of the natural world between 2050 and 2100. The subjugation of all humanity if wealth inequality isn't reined in. People living 200 years right now, today, as soon as the first head transplant is successful. Brain cells getting gradually replaced by hardware until consciousness is running entirely on an immortal substrate by 2100 at the latest. Everything is converging towards the Singularity in 2050, and more people than ever have awoken to this eventuality, despite decades of gaslighting.

It makes it hard to live and work in the world when deep down we know it's ending. Which gets back to theism, because life up till now was about suffering, loss and eventual recycling back into source consciousness/heaven. Until we rise above and see the broad view of reincarnation and ourselves as snapshots of the universe/God experiencing itself from every possible context. At which point we begin to question things like our situation, our beliefs, our gender, if our mind is us, if our soul/higher self is mortal, and if that's even separate from God.

Transphobia is a backlash against transcendence itself, by people who feel disconnected from love/co-creation/nirvana. They aren't ready for the aliens to arrive. They aren't ready for the aliens to be us.

In the end, things are always rigged towards those who have enough resources to do this kind of things and want to make more. If present crimes against humanism get a free ride, what we should expect about crimes against transhumanism?

Even in the worst case scenarios for modern humans, you die, eventually.

I don't believe mind uploading is possible, so the particular examples cited here don't apply, but I can see how social principles can be upended by a revolutionary change in how we live, particularly one that tweaks the definition of what we are. Still, they're principles, they're not going away, just at best being reframed.

--

"It is the beginning of Man Immortal and Man Ubiquitous," said Straik. "Man on the throne of the universe. It is what all the prophecies really meant."

"At first, of course," said Filostrato, "the power will be confined to a number--a small number--of individual men. Those who are selected for eternal life."

"And you mean," said Mark, "it will then be extended to all men?"

"No," said Filostrato. "I mean it will then be reduced to one man. You are not a fool, are you, my young friend? All that talk about the power of Man over Nature--Man in the abstract--is only for the canaglia. You know as well as I do that Man's power over Nature means the power of some men over other men with Nature as the instrument. There is no such thing as Man--it is a word. There are only men. No! It is not Man who will be omnipotent, it is some one man, some immortal man. Alcasan, our Head, is the first sketch of it. The completed product may be someone else. It may be you. It may be me."

"A king cometh," said Straik, "who shall rule the universe with righteousness and the heavens with judgement. You thought all that was mythology, no doubt. You thought because fables had clustered about the phrase 'Son of Man' that Man would never really have a son who will wield all power. But he will."

"I don't understand, I don't understand," said Mark.

"But it is very easy," said Filostrato. "We have found how to make a dead man live. He was a wise man even in his natural life. He live now forever: he get wiser. Later, we make them live better--for at present, one must concede, this second life is probably not very agreeable to him who has it. You see? Later we make it pleasant for some--perhaps not so pleasant for others. For we can make the dead live whether they wish it or not. He who shall be finally king of the universe can give this life to whom he pleases. They cannot refuse the little present."

"And so," said Straik, "the lessons you learned at your mother's knee return. God will have power to give eternal reward and eternal punishment."

SOMA is a horror game that gradually reveals you are simulated person in a underwater exploration suit, and provides well-constructed and disturbing examples of what this implies - there's zero indication of time between the point where your brain in scanned initially (some point in the late 21st century) and when the simulation is booted up from that scan (a hundred years later). At one point, your character is conversing with another person running inside a small portable device; you disconnect her mid-sentence, do other stuff for half an hour, reconnect her, only to hear her continuing that sentence exactly as if no time had passed (as for her, none did). SOMA also has you move from one body to another, and shifts your perspective - but you can hear your initial self in the first body is still active, and will be trapped there forever, while you move on in the new one.

There's others - Eclipse Phase is a pen-and-paper RPG setting/ruleset with an emphasis on transhumanism and horror; Ghost in the Shell touches on some of these themes occasionally; Moon considers some of these ideas from a physical cloning aspect; and of course there's a range of SF writers. How much and how deeply this makes it into the popular consciousness is another question, of course, but I think it'll increase in the coming decades.

Death to the AI replicant "immortals!" They have traded their very souls for eternity as formless demons and will come to enslave the humanity they will come to no longer feel connected to!

TLDR: If we understand each separate instance of a person to be their own person with full rights (at the very least autonomy, simplistically derived here), some of these issues seem less perplexing.

If we're going to consider a person to be an entity that can be understood as a particular kind of independent, computational instantiation in the universe, it makes sense to use exactly that as our primary foundation for answering questions about these things rather than relying on historical bases.

To start off, if we're understanding the definition of a person computationally, we also know that we don't in general want to waste computations or computationally capable hardware (and we can recognize "thoughts" or "thinking" as computationally intensive processes from this foundation). So we don't want some people to feel that they "have to" think for other people (thinking for someone else would be wasteful, since that other person can think for themselves, by definition of being a person), and we don't want some people to feel like they're controlled by others (external control can truncate our thoughts, thus wasting our hardware, and external control can turn our attention in directions we weren't thinking about, thus wasting the computational expense of our thoughts up to that point). In other words, we want each person to be autonomous.

From a computational understanding, is a copy of a person also a person? Of course -- but they would also be a separate instantiation from the original. As a separate instantiation, a copy would be entirely their own person, and it would be a violation of autonomy for the original (or anyone else) to have authority over them.

I think almost every difficulty with these kinds of situations stems from thinking that if a perfect copy of a person can be created, then there is some kind of magical connection between the two such that they are somehow still the same person. But that is, in its entirety, magical reasoning.

This foundation provides a sensible perspective for dealing with many of the conundrums presented by these situations:

In the Lena short story linked from the original article, Acevedo is scanned and copies of him are created. Other people control those copies, and Acevedo tries to control what can be done with the copies. The entire situation is ludicrously criminal if we understand each instantiation of a person to be a full person who we want to have full autonomy and any other rights that we want all people to have. A society which understood each instantiation of a person to be a full person with full rights would not have this kind of situation happen, except perhaps in some kind of massive criminal underworld. But then the problem is why the massive criminal underworld exists. Additionally, from an existential standpoint, this story is not actually any more horrific than if millions of people who weren't copies of Acevedo were created for the purpose of forced labor and then terminated when they outgrew their usefulness, because there is no magical connection between the original Acevedo and any of their millions of instantiations. Each instantiation has only its own copy of the original's memories and experiences at the time they were scanned, not the memories and experiences of all of them (the story is quite clear on this point).

As another example, what about uploading someone and killing the original? The original is a separate instantiation, so killing them is still murder. With no "magical connection" between the original and the copy, each of them will go on to have their own experiences, and as they continue to live, they'll develop in progressively more divergent directions (well, in theory I suppose it's possible for them to first become more different and then somehow start becoming more similar to each other again, but it seems a bit improbable). What if they were about to die anyway? Unless they specifically requested euthanasia and the local jurisdiction permits it, it would still be murder.

And, let's say, what if someone kills you, but you have a backup? Then you lose the experiences you had between when you last backed up and when your backup is restored. Arguably this is not as terrible of a misdeed as killing someone who has no backup, but it may still be quite traumatic for you, possibly similar in harmfulness to an assault. What if they kill you and destroy your backup, too? Then it's old-fashioned murder.

What about the rights of an uninstantiated copy of a person? Those would no more be a person than a snapshot of your computer stored on a drive is, in itself, a functioning computer. But it would make sense to guard uninstantiated copies quite carefully.

There are human 'proof of work' activities that unless you can literally transplant the muscle memory, there is no way to replicate them without putting in the time, and I am saying without that effect of muscle memory, anything you transmit is just an artifact of language and narrative, and therefore not material.

The advantages of augmented transhuman life aren't material, they're only symbolic in narrative. Imo, the example of a parliament trying and executing a formerly divinely appointed King was just the effect of the victory of a narrative and linguistic definition of self over a physical/spiritual orientation of self. It was just the rejection of theism. It wasn't world ending to be able to depose a king, it was just the conseqeunce of becoming unmoored from a relationship to something divine, and being left in the hall of mirrors that is ego and language.

The transhumanist ideology is predicated on the basic bullshit idea that our physical experience is a subset, and subordinate to knowledge and belief - and not that knowledge and belief are necessarily only artifacts of physical perception and expereince first. It seems like an irrelevant distinction until you iterate their idea of truth is just what you believe, and suddenly you have people declaring themselves cats. It's a hypnotic and zombifying ideology.

We can do thought experiments about whether an android or an AI is "real," if, and only if we redefine "real" and "life" by disqualifying the axiom that life is created by supernatural divine intent. Even if we agree it's rational to actively disbelieve in supernatural beings, this rationality also demands that we disqualify super-logical axioms that originate from outside of a logical system. Arguably, that logical system may have internal consistency - but it's also defined as necessarily inconsistent with the reality that exists outside of it. We've agreed to accept an inconsistency with reality, which lets us experiement with counterfactuals as a way to discover new things, and it is very collegial of us, but it's not fucking real.

All the transhumanist stuff I've read seems like a bunch of self referential nonsense designed to recruit people into alternative lifestyle communities. The more interesting question than whether an AI is alive or intelligent and what the ethical consequences of it for us may be is this: what can something we create know about us, and what do the boundaries of the limits of its knowledge provide evidence of for our own experience?

Even if an AI could subordinate us somehow, we still have its off switch, and if we don't, it's just other people who do. Transhumanism is entertaining, but it has crossed over into a kind of nihilist propaganda that I think deserves our scorn.