From: Richard Steven Hack (richardhack@pcmagic.net)
Date: Fri Mar 08 2002 - 00:38:24 MST
At 03:21 PM 3/2/02 -0800, Phil Osborn wrote:
>My original piece on this mentioned but failed to emphasize the importance
>re uploading and related technologies. The "rights" of lower animals and
>infants or other humans of limited or diminished capacity obviously has
>implications with respect to any discussion of the rights of uploads,
>including their temporary clones or agents. Uploads will be much less
>similar in capacity than biological humans today. The more processing
>power and memory you can afford, the more intelligent you become, ceteris
>parabus. Imagine the Bill Gates of uploads vs. ghetto teenager Bob.
>
>Even at the same or similar technology level, where MIPs and GigaRAM is a
>commodity on the net, some uploads will be VERY powerful and virtually
>invulnerable, with stakes in every pie, and some will diminish to zero,
>potentially. I.e., DEATH!
>
>But suppose you spin off a temporary clone upload - or perhaps a
>non-conscious agent that is convinced it is the original??
>
>Perhaps we can just kick back on the assumption that the SIs we hopefully
>will become will solve this trivial problem for us. It might be better to
>at least try to make sense of it now.
I'm not convinced uploading has any value except as an emergency measure to
stave off physical destruction while one still has a biological body.
Uploading by definition means that you are confined to a system which is
less than the physical universe and subject to the effects of the physical
universe, i.e., you do not have the freedom to move around in space-time or
access the physical resources of the universe. Even if you assume that the
system you are in has widely-spread nodes across star systems or whatever,
and can access physical resources via telepresence or robotic agents, you
are still metaphysically limited. This is not the situation a Transhuman
wants to be in.
I suspect that a lot of people like the notion because it is the
"scientific" equivalent of "Heaven"...
Now, once a Transhuman has achieve some Omega end-point in development, if
such exists, and has nothing better to do than create alternative universes
and explore those ad infinitum, then maybe the "temporary" immersion in
such a system would be understandable - so long as they have the option to
get out if threatened - assuming it is possible to threaten such an entity...
>***** ON RIGHTS IN GENERAL *****
>
>Sustainable social systems manage to maintain an overall level of positive
>justice. People more often than not get what they deserve. When social
>systems degenerate into kleptocracies or class parasitism, then
>productivity diminishes with incentive to produce, and there is a downward
>spiral.
How long in time is sustainable? Care to point to such in history? Agree
(I think) about the "class parasitism", if I understand what you mean.
>Valid "rights" are based on justice.
"Justice" - another useless term...
> You can claim a property "right" - that you can ethically forbid anyone
> else using something or preventing you from using it - when the existence
> or value of that thing resulted from your actions in creating it, or
> trading something for it that you had a valid claim to. You can't just
> arbitrarily claim things you had no role in creating, like the great view
> out to the horizon, just because you enjoy them and are using them.
The argument here is "property rights" vrs "property use rights" - I won't
go into it here since I don't remember the details. Most such situations
in societies are solved via one form of "social contract" or another
(including coercive ones) and they are in constant flux based on the
economic and social realities. "Justice" has almost no bearing on the result.
I personally think that the notion of "property use rights" i.e.,
I control the property I am *using*, with some acceptable social notion
of use, is better than the notion that I control property that I *claim*
and perhaps even property that I "create" - the latter is hard to apply to
simple unimproved land...
> The principle of justice gets lost in that case, and if you tried to
> make a general principle out of your claim, then anyone could claim
> virtually anything and the end result would be the complete loss of any
> use to the concept.
Much as you see in the world around you...
>************* SPAMMING ALIENS *****************
>
>So imagine that the real answer to the Fermi paradox is that they ARE out
>there - all of them - but the entire physical universe has been claimed as
>property by various SIs long, long ago. Our little corner of it just
>happens to be lieing fallow because of some property dispute - over
>Galactic distances, these things take time to resolve.
>
>So then we pop out of nowhere and disrupt the whole Galactic
>communications locally with I Love Lucy rebroadcasts.... What can we
>expect their response to be???
The SubGenius "believe" that the Earth is a rented planet - and humans are
not listed on the lease. We have the status of household mildew... This
actually agrees with my theory of UFOs as a Transhuman civilization
existing co-existent with us. THEY are the dominant civilization on this
planet - not us... They do what they want - and we don't even notice it
most of the time...
Professor Michio Kaku said on Art Bell one night that our relationship to a
true galactic civilization would be like an ant colony next to a four-lane
highway - we wouldn't even recognize it...
>*******
>
>Then there's the MacDonald's St Pat's promo, with the Unicorn song - and
>people sighing in anger over the little girl that was kidnapped and killed
>locally - how many little girls did GOD KILL with Noahs flood???
Well, you know, humans have to demonstrate socially that they are morally
superior to everyone else by paying lip service to the "human" values of
compassion, etc. Meanwhile, subsconsciously, it's a case of "better her
than me" and "one less competitor for the attention of the gods"... As a
Transhuman, I do not care how many humans die or how so long as humans
which are of value or potential value to me are not included.
>Find the best deals on the web at AltaVista Shopping!
>http://www.shopping.altavista.com
What is it with this AltaVista thing with you? - :-}
Richard Steven Hack
richardhack@pcmagic.net
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