From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Tue Sep 24 2002 - 12:13:21 MDT
Robin Hanson sent me this note:
> forthcoming in Exploring the Matrix, ed. Glenn Yeffeth, BenBella Books, 2003.
> http://hanson.gmu.edu/matrix.html
>
> The Matrix is Real, But Few Want to Leave
> by Robin Hanson, Sept. 2002
>
> The Matrix is a story of AIs who keep humans as slaves, by keeping them
> in a dream world, and of rebels who fight to teach people this truth
> and destroy this dream world. But we humans are today slaves to alien
> hyper-rational entities who care little about us, and who distract us
> with a dream world. We do not want to know this truth, and if anything
> fight to preserve our dream world. Go figure.
Robin draws an analogy between the humans living in the dream-world
of The Matrix, controlled by alien entities, and our own situtation,
living with minds that are controlled by selfish genes and which lie to
us and mislead us about our true motivations and desires.
It's similar in spirit to Robin's earlier articles which Peter McCluskey
referred to in another thread:
: I found these increased my understanding:
: http://hanson.gmu.edu/deceive.pdf
: http://hanson.gmu.edu/showcare.pdf
: But if your goal is beliefs that will make you happy, I recommend ignoring
: these papers.
All of these articles have a common thread which is quite difficult to
accept: namely, that we lie to ourselves about our motivations. We don't
really care about truth, or science, or art, or being compassionate
towards others; rather, we really want to show off to others, especially
potential mates, that we care about these things and that we are good
at them. This is based both on evolutionary analysis which predicts some
details of how our caring about these subjects would manifest itself;
and also psychological studies which reveal an underlying degree of
hypocrisy in our claims.
However I can't believe that this is universally true; I think there are
at least some people who truly do care about these things. It may well be
that the evolutionary reason they care is so that they are more successful
at reproduction, but that doesn't change the fact that they truly care.
They are not deceiving themselves. They would pursue science or art
even if no one else existed in the world, because evolution has so fully
internalized their motivations. But maybe these people are the exception.
I also suggested to Robin another analogy between our situation and
that of The Matrix. In the movie, humans had made a big mistake in
creating AIs, because the AIs turned against them and eventually took
over the world. In the same way, genes have in a sense made a big
mistake in creating large brains. The brains are going to take over the
world and make the genes irrelevant. At best the genes have set us on
a developmental path, and similarly no doubt the humans set the AIs on
some particular trajectory through their own development space. But
ultimately the genes have lost control; the shape of the future will
be determined by brains.
Hal
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