From: hal@finney.org
Date: Sat Aug 14 1999 - 18:34:50 MDT
"Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@www.aeiveos.com> writes:
> I think we are back to my question of a month+ ago that
> may have gotten lost in the M-brain discussions:
>
> Do "ultrahumanists" have to confront and eliminate one of the
> two "prime directives" -- self-preservation & reproduction?
I've seen claims that neither of these prime directives actually exists
in this bald form.
Nick Szabo (I think it was Nick) argued that people had no instinct for
reproduction as such. Rather, they have drives that indirectly lead to
the effect of reproduction. Their main instinct and desire is for sexual
pleasure. There is also an instinctive enjoyment of babies, but that is
less common. The first is much more powerful. He pointed out how many
songs are about "getting it on" versus how few are about the pitter-patter
of little feet. He actually suggested that with perfect birth control
we might expect to see significant rates of population decrease.
Marvin Minsky argued that people have no instinct for self-preservation,
and in fact no animals do. Our desire for self-preservation is actually
an instinct to avoid pain, plus an intelligence-based, rational fear
of the loss of consciousness that would occur with death. He claimed
that animals have no instinctive fear of death as such, as they cannot
understand death in the way that we do. Hence we have not inherited an
instinct for self-preservation, and much of what seems to us to be such
an instinct is actually cultural.
Hal
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