From: J. R. Molloy (jr@shasta.com)
Date: Wed Mar 07 2001 - 01:38:00 MST
From: "Jim Fehlinger" <fehlinger@home.com>
> Perhaps,
> post Singularity, we'll all spend much of our time in a state of
> blissfully preoccupied Focus (but not all of the time --
> there will no doubt be a recognition of the need for undirected
> play and "timewasting" simply as a source of spontaneous variation
> and creativity).
Although you say "no doubt" probably out of lexical habit, scenarios of
recognizable entertainment seem doubtful to me because the evolutionary
phase transition (AKA Singularity) necessarily transforms work and play,
so that we (transitional humans) overstep toil altogether, devote all
effort to even higher transcendence and more complex evolution, and
redefine it all as a single transformation process.
As children, we wonder how it will feel to become adults; and as
(extropian) adults we understand that becoming gods makes all comparisons
unintelligible. P. D. Ouspensky reportedly told Philip Wylie that we have
to "think in other categories" in order to make sense of shattered cosmic
paradigms... shattered because we can see how naively we had constructed
them, like borrowed pieces of machinery bolted together in the childish
hope that they could provide an infinitesimal glimpse of reality as
understood by hyper-cognitive borganized humans. Then again, we may want
to become hyper-cognitive borganized humans only because we haven't yet
reached our full potential as humans who, having come to know enough about
reality to know that life expands extropically without effort, no longer
believe in producing progress in eternally recurring infinite
permutations. Perhaps once we've seen the proverbial "elephant," we no
longer want to build better technology to decide whether it's a "tree" or
a "rope." As a noted thinker has written, "We ought not try to say that
which can't be said." To which I'd add, we ought not try to divine what
only demigods-gods can know. If we should discover the many worlds of
reality recur eternally in infinite variety... well, that's nothing new.
When SI emerges, I have a hunch it will tell us that we already have what
it takes to understand that life is not a mystery to unravel... It's an
adventure to relish.
Who needs movies.
--J. R.
"Let an ultra intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far
surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since
the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra
intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then
unquestionably be an intelligence explosion, and the intelligence of man
would be left far behind. Thus the first ultra intelligent machine is the
last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is
docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control."
--I. J. Good, Advances in Computers, vol. 6, 1965 [!]
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