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Comment by allears | Hacker News Reader

Ethical considerations are briefly discussed at the end of the article -- too briefly, in my opinion.

We're alive for an infinitesimal blink of an eye before an eternity of annihilation. Brain science is still in the stone age. We should be flooring it with the research. Absolutely flooring it.

Death is a blessing that may not always exist

If endgame entities have control over the entire light cone, they can bend backwards and pluck you out of space and time and put you into an eternal hell simulator.

I wouldn't worry about what could or couldn't be.

One would think the endgame entities have better things to do.

One might think the same of many intelligent and wealthy humans but a number of them are nonetheless cruel, capricious, and uncaring. Why should 'endgame entities' be any different?

I don't think I would call them endgame entities.

Endgame by definition means they're bored out of their minds.

You'd think the endgame includes a solution to boredom.

That's what they're seeking. Question is, is the game structured to allow them to find it, or is it asymptotically approaching total boredom fast enough that all the endgame entities are doomed to get bored with the search for solution to boredom.

I agree neuroscience still in the stone age. Flooring the research I don’t think will do much to change it. It’s like flooring plasma physics research during the renaissance. We need different patterns of thinking, imo. Two examples come to mind: (1) our interest to boil down neural dynamics via quantization (what else would it look like, you may wonder. and exactly my point!) and (2) studying the brain in artificial environments. it’s like look at fish behavior while they’re in a tube in space

We need to stop thinking of human bodies as anything more than machines, and we need to start growing them in labs.

Conscious humans are obviously special. But if we grew non-thinking bodies and used them for research, we could vastly accelerate medical science, research and development, and treatments. We could accomplish this with gene knockouts.

It's too "icky" for people, so it hasn't been done.

Then make yourself a lab rat.

That's what this whole gradient ascent game is. You're playing too.

Do you mean in the sense of experiment on themselves, make themselves into a lab rat?

Or more literally, that they should make for themselves a lab rat, in the way The Thought Emporium is? https://youtu.be/Z_ZGq8Tah0k?si=UI18mJ4k5Xn4OtfD

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