From: Jacques Du Pasquier (jacques@dtext.com)
Date: Wed Apr 03 2002 - 08:36:00 MST
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote (2.4.2002/20:34) :
> Jared Diamond asks whether agriculture was worth it:
>
> http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/anthro/learning/lifeways/hg_ag/worst_mistake.html
>
> From my perspective, of course, it doesn't matter much whether agriculture
> was worth it; the history of life on Earth is divided into pre- and
> post-Singularity, not pre- and post- agriculture; you have to expect that
> life on pre-Singularity Earth is going to suck. Others may accuse Jared of
> Luddism, but like it or not, we're waaaay out of our ancestral environment;
> and regardless of whether it's worth it from a personal perspective (it is
> from mine; I like knowing stuff), things are going to be weird around here
> until we ditch the hunter-gatherer phenotype. (After that it gets *really*
> weird, but we'll be able to cope.)
Indeed. The problem regarding agriculture is not a good or bad choice,
it is that, made the way we are, with the desires we were given as
guides, we were bound to embrace the changes and technologies we
perceived as useful.
By doing this we progressively modified our environment, but as we
didn't modify ourselves (biological evolution being too slow), we
became ill adapted to our environment, and thus started to explore a
new variety of problems and suffering, from the lack of vitamins and
exercise to the lack of scenery change.
Of course our most obvious desires were matched more and more -- this
is precisely the criterion on which we progressively embraced each new
technology after all. But desire is just an artifical guide devised by
evolution; there's no inherent truth to it.
You can kill yourself by following your desire, if the environment is
not the one for which your desire evolved. Birds do so when they crash
on windows, for example.
I think that Ted Kaczynski made the point of this ineluctable
dis-adaptation through cultural development quite well, and I've not
yet understood if most of the people here have thought this through,
or have simply repressed it or neglected it.
Eliezer makes two points in passing :
1) that from a personal perspective, he values knowledge enough to be
happy with cultural development, despite its problems
2) that when we start changing ourselves, thus readapting to whatever
our environment becomes, we'll solve that ongoing mess
I personaly feel very close to the first point, and probably many of
us do (we're a sociologically weird bunch).
The second point is of course the unknown. Will we make it ? Will we
not be too ignorant to change ourselves meaningfully early enough, and
so will we not be smashed by our technology, à la Kaczynski ?
(Self-destruction is really a particular case of dis-adaptation.)
The standard, no-risk, easiest answer is: We have to try anyway, as we
are ineluctably going in that direction at full speed and there's no
going back.
A politically incorrect but sincere (in many cases) answer would be:
Life being quite pointless right now, I think I want to know. (Though
politically incorrect, I think the number of people who can
potentially share it is very large.)
A more modest one, content with life as it is now would be: No. So
let's regulate as much as possible and delay the chaos as long as
possible. (Fukuyama)
Jacques
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:13:13 MST