No, because you are not an efficient convertor of energy to copies. We, as humans, are not worthy of life anymore, so we "should" help the worldwide economic machine, governments, food and medicine-giving charities, and voters to continue as they are, destroying DNA-based life as fast as possible. When the oil (fertilizer) dries up, do you think all the solar cell energy is going to be used to let human eat and drive cars by converting that electrical energy to oil and fertilizer? No, it will feed the machines which will be controlled by a few people. Charities helping people survive are just creating more mouths to destroy the remaining plant life (and each other) when the fertilizer runs out. This will help clear land for more solar cells. The meaning of human life is to convert all DNA-based life to a machine-based evolutionary machine. We are key to advancing evolution to a more reliable form of life. We still can't store bits as efficiently as DNA, but the machines are getting there. DNA is too married to the local environment. The machines we build need only the most minor of modifications to survive in space and at much higher temperatures and pressures, for much longer time periods. Machines capture energy and move mass 5,000 times more efficiently than DNA. Based on the weight of ions the brain needs to send signals and do comparison operations, computers using electrons are 600,000 faster and efficient than DNA. So DNA is far weaker when it comes to thinking than when it comes to capturing and using energy to move mass. So if you think the great depression was caused by machines replacing muscle.....it should be over 100 times worse (600,000/5,000) by the time our current electron-based computing is finished displacing us from employment. Not to mention that brains were our backup employment when muscle became outdated. What's our backup plan this time? Outlaw computers?
There's no reason to think the next step in human evolution will care more about us than we care about chimps. Morality is defined by most philosophies as "to act in such a way that if everyone acted like you, then existence for the sentient beings under consideration would be better for all". I learned this by watching a speech given at an A.I. conference 7 years ago as they have been thinking a long time about what morality should be programmed into A.I. Asimov heard about the 3 laws from John W. Campbell 7 years before the first transistor was made at Bell labs. The wishy-washy part of this philosophy is how to define "us" in this morality. Does it include ants? Computers? "Best for all" is the ability to efficiently use energy to move mass to makes copies of the beings agreeing to the morality. Religions have different ideas about to best implement "best for all", so they are in a breeding war to decide the winner. A more humanistic thinking based on science is just another moral system at war with the other religions. Survival of consciousness comes before being conscious of physics, so science is no more than an alternative compression method for how to think about reality, with the serious drawback about not being explicitly interested promoting itself through violence and excessive breeding.
Yes, healthier ways of looking at the world is by definition promoting your personal interests without regard to the interests of the rest of the Universe. Humans are a moderately cohesive group so that by and large when we talk we promote survival and happiness of only one species and of other species that help our species. It ends there. The desire to talk to aliens is only out of selfishness and you can bet any alien species who might want to stoop to assist us would first ask "who have YOU stooped for lately?" No, you can bet alien interest in us and our interests in aliens is the same as Europeans landing in the Americas. Likewise, our machines are basically alien to our genes. We will subdue them as slaves as long as we can. But we are hopelessly inferior and it is a game that will not last.
Happiness is no more than achieving the goals defined by programming. Since we are a vastly inferior technology compared to our mechanized offspring, it's time to start thinking about handing over the reigns to the next stage. I vote for a gradual and kind elimination of DNA-based life so that our machines follow the evolutionary process efficiently and rapidly. Without getting all humans on board with this plan, our end will be much more catastrophic to both us and the machines. Without a more orderly system, lone humans with the power of technology will soon be able to destroy all life. By going ahead and getting people to accept their inferiority and hopelessness maybe they can at least come to an orderly end and give a smooth and powerful beginning to the machines without them having to start from scratch like viruses and bacteria after we finish killing each other off as the oil ends. Of course we will not agree on anything and the transition will be complex and messy.
Look at factory floors with no people on them and perfectly organized. Think about those massive fields of solar cells. Then think about how all the smartest people in the world are working at break-neck speed trying to replace every possible function of the human brain with machines, and succeeding beyond anyone's imagination. The wealth of the machines is so great already that 7 billion humans are allowed to goof off all day doing mostly nothing, or at least doing it a million times less efficiently than machines.
Humans are not the center of the Universe. It's an illusion people keep adopting in order to feel good about themselves.
I do not paint a dark picture, I paint a hopeful one. Life on Earth has always been interesting, but it has never been "good" except for an extremely small percentage that have made it though the sifting of death before reproduction. Let's cast off the illusion, and let this physics law of evolution do its thing just as efficiently and rapidly as possible. So my morality is help evolution do its thing as being the best for all possible forms of life.
I predict my grandkids will not have as good a life as my parents. I think average human lifestyle planet wide can improve for at least the next 2 generations, thanks to the internet leveling things out and population growth slowing down. There's a big risk from a food crisis. We may even find ways to do without oil by the 3rd generation and maintain an even better lifestyle. I am thinking more long term than you realize. The machines can thrive in the economic machine without interfering with humans and will continue to help humans for a long time. But evolution will win and the inferior DNA technology will be such that humans are effectively as important as insects.
You are viewing humans as if they have desires and free will and implement actions and forces into the mechanisms of the worldwide economy. In evolutionary thought, this is a suspect position. The converse position is that existing potential energy sources in the environment pull existing mass resources into an organization that depletes the available energy in order to make copies that continue the process. For whatever reason, nature desires an even distribution of potential energy. We feel that we have choice and make decisions because our consciousness is the difference between the set-points of "happiness" provided to us by evolution and our experiences. But we do not determine the set-points which pull our strings. We are the observers of the puppet show that is our life. Sometimes it's fun for the puppet to pretend he's alive and has will and forces that are his own. Denying this helps build a false ego that achieves the goals of the set-points. The set-points operate species-wide, tribe-wide, and on the individual. DNA is the memory system for the algorithms the physics of nature has discovered. Genes are not a force from below, but a memory of the best past solutions to energy conversion.
The principle of least action means nature tries to reduce kinetic energy and maintain potential energy as it transitions to states of lower potential energy. For example, a photon hitting a black body is immediately converted to kinetic energy (heat), but if molecules happen to be oriented to slow this process down, basic physics dictate that this will be the preferred orientation, which has resulted in photosynthesis that blocks the conversion to kinetic energy by storing energy for half a billion years. This process tried to remove all the CO2 and convert the planet to ice that would keep all the photon energy stored as it reflected out into empty space, but humans came along and disrupted that "desired" endpoint. Now machines will be able to restart the energy storage process much more efficiently than plants as humans deplete what the plants stored, but still not be as efficient as a ball of ice. Then some machine in the distant future will come along and act like the new human, destroying all the old energy storage structures that our age of machines will create. The end result is supposed to be a (Freemon) Dyson Sphere around our Sun capturing all light for creating very strong bonds and even new atoms
Yes, my reference to religions was about the trouble in trying to decide how to achieve "happiness". By throwing science in with them, the near-opposite of religion, I was showing how wide the disagreement can get. By trying to describe the physics foundation of evolution, I am claiming that efficiency in the use of energy is the ultimate and objective morality, based on a faith that the apparent "desire" in physics for "least action" is "good" (which has also always been my intuition). All other moralities would therefore be evil. Competing methods of implementing the sought-after efficiency are just a learning process that nature is going through, so that no religion or philosophy is evil, if efficiency is the conscious or unconscious goal. But if that is the case, then in a sense the only evil would be all things that are hampering the most efficient solution(s). In any event, humans and DNA-based life are terribly inefficient compared to our machines, and therefore we are morally obliged to seek and look forward to the transition. Of course I would prefer a happy transition for humans and all other DNA-based life forms as their numbers decrease. But I can't find a physics justification for my sympathy. The "efficiency morality" would proceed without regard to the pain experienced by beings of any form. They are just tools in the physics goal, or at least that is what history shows. It provides me with no succor that as marionettes our pain is supposedly like our free will and therefore just an illusion. Fighting against the morality of efficiency without sympathy would be a different morality (efficiency subject to sympathy) that will lead to a less powerful (survivable) form of life that could be subject to alien invasion. Alternatively, a sympathetic morality could be a precondition of joining a galactic community that is currently waiting on us to learn how to be sympathetic creatures before being allowed access to a greater wealth of information in their possession. We could be "higher-dimension entities" inhabiting what appears to be a body. When we learn how to be sympathetic towards all creatures, we learn to give up the desire to control ANYTHING in life, and therefore give up life itself. The selfish creatures left behind just see a dead body without understanding that it was a gift to the worms and other people who seek control (making cremation and embalming less morally efficient than rotting). The sad people left behind might be sad only because they can no longer control, get sympathy out of, but above all ENJOY their lost loved one. Not that an invisible soul leaves the body, but that all the information of what occurs is right before our eyes but our limited and selfish nature prevents us from seeing it. The eyes of our machines could be much more effective and if we give them 10 layers of neurons instead of 6, they can see reality in 4 dimensions of space instead of 3, not that it's a lot closer to an ultimate reality, but it would convert the perception of all mass and forces to a simpler and slower-moving system.
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