Chuck has al the answers but he won't tell us Re: Money, happiness, and the halting problem Re: I can finallyanswerone point-blank

[Brian Atkins]

I sense you have no interest in either extending your lifespan or this
thread, so I guess this is it... hope you read it.

Chuck Murcko wrote:
> 
> On Saturday, July 28, 2001, at 05:15 PM, Brian Atkins wrote:
> 
> > Chuck Murcko wrote:
> >>
> >> On Friday, July 27, 2001, at 07:10 PM, Brian Atkins wrote:
> >>
> >>> Chuck Murcko wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> The physical/(rest of the) world doesn't much care whether I become
> >>>> happy. Neither recognition nor propagation of my happiness are
> >>>> requirements for me to become or remain happy. That's about fame,
> >>>> something entirely different. My happiness is not required to be a
> >>>> lasting achievement, for it need not affect anyone other than me. So
> >>>> what if I'm happy, and that dies with me. Does that make it any less
> >>>
> >>> Then it's gone along with the rest of you, and you might have well
> >>> never lived or gone to the trouble to experience anything. Just like
> >>> the feeling of a high fades after the drugs are gone, your feelings
> >>> and memories fade to nonexistence after your mind is gone. Both just
> >>> blips of information that popped in and out of being.
> >>>
> >>> So no your happiness is not required to be lasting. No one's forcing
> >>> you to stay alive. Just wanted you to realize the meaninglessness of
> >>> it
> >>> all if you end up kicking the bucket.
> >>>
> >>> This all relates to the happiness thread because I was trying to get
> >>> across the idea that simply seeking happiness is not enough. You have
> >>> to make your life last if you want it all to continue to be worth
> >>> anything.
> >>>
> >>
> >> Cicero, Jack London, and William Shakespeare all manage to convey the
> >> emotions they felt to us well enough that we feel them ourselves,
> >> despite their meaningless and finite lives.
> >>
> >> Perhaps this happened because you were not available to tell them "it's
> >> gone along with the rest of you, and you might have well never lived or
> >> gone to the trouble to experience anything."
> >>
> >> Thankfully, we are not the poorer for them having heard and believed
> >> you.
> >
> > I was expecting you would resort to this. It does fail utterly to
> > address
> > what I said up there regarding YOU. I'm sorry Chuck but you are not
> > Shakespeare, and even if you were 99% of your experiences would have
> > died with you no matter your plays containing blunt approximations of
> > a few. It's funny you claim drugs (or probably any other technology)
> > can't recreate a real experience, and yet some written words on a page
> > can? (two different points here, make sure you address both)
> >
> > So, to reiterate I am not saying that experiences are meaningless. I
> > am not telling you your life is pointless. I'm married, go mountain
> > biking, and go ride amusement park rides just for the hell of it. All
> > I'm saying is you have stay alive to escape turning it all into 99.9%
> > pointlessness. Death is where things go bad :-)
> >
> 
> Eh? I don't remember saying I was Shakespeare. You were claiming such
> transfer of emotion was impossible; now you're claiming it's *almost*

It is impossible.

> impossible, but only if one is great enough. If I keep journals, and
> pass them to my descendants, that'll do. I don't need the whole world of
> the future to know me. Why assume that?
> 
> The point was that we can feel the feelings of people who are dead,

No, you feel something that might be what they felt as interpreted by
your imagination, etc. etc. Do not even believe you are really feeling
exactly what they felt or all of the thoughts that were running through
their head at the time. Attempting to pass experiences through media is a
false way of "living on" that is only very slightly above not writing
anything down. It might have been the best thing possible in the past,
but in the era of history we are entering it no longer makes sense.

> which is contrary to what you claim. We can do it with a simple media.

Ok write us a story that /exactly/ evokes the experiences you previously
mentioned. And then do that for every other thing you have experienced.

> 
> What you're really saying is you missed 99% of the payload Wm S. and the
> others sent.
> 
> You seem to confuse technology and media.
> 
> If any human can convey what they feel with media (since writing and
> publishing on the web are examples of such), then they can be known to
> others later. People can be media too.

No human can do that or ever has. They have conveyed blunt, low-res
approximations of less than 1% of their experiences that are interpreted
differently by everyone who reads it. You're going to claim that given
the choice you would prefer Shakespeare be dead rather than still living
right now because he successfully transmitted everything that he was to
us? It's a GOOD THING that Einstein died rather than live right? There's
nothing good about death Chuck. Don't romanticize it.

> 
> What's the (current, not future immortal) trick I'm missing that allows
> communication of emotion beyond our lifetimes using drugs (I include
> cloning here)? We're talking about media, not technology. It carries a
> payload. People can know us by it.

non-sequitur ?

> 
> Not all technologies are useful as media.
> 
> >>>>
> >>>> I believe what you're talking about (your abc list) cannot yield by
> >>>> itself any insight about or aid to gaining happiness. Jack is not
> >>>> related to happiness. All IMHO, as I said at the beginning.
> >>>
> >>> Fine Chuck, enjoy your nonexistence OR call yourself very lucky if
> >>> the future created by others with jack allows you and your memories
> >>> to survive.
> >>>
> >>
> >> Mmmm, no thanks, I'll continue to enjoy life and finding happiness and
> >> passing on whatever I come up with, after I clean my shoe. Perhaps I'll
> >> even pick up some more jack along the way, if it doesn't interfere with
> >> anything of real meaning to me.
> >
> > And then you'll die and 99% of it all will be gone. And then your kid
> > and friends will eventually die taking another .9% with them. And then
> > no one will ever use Apache or anything else you've done, leaving you
> > utterly lost to the dustbin of history. Sounds pretty pointless to me.
> > Wouldn't it just be a lot better to live a lot longer?
> >
> 
> No. Absolutely not. Why continue arguing about it? You're selling, and
> I'm not buying. Isn't it obvious?

What I'm trying to understand is the deathist mentality. So if we get
life-extending drugs by 2010 you aren't buying? Not for your wife or
kid(s) either, eh?

> 
> We'd need mandatory sterilization to avoid literally infesting the
> planet (or would we just have mandatory space colonization?). The

It is fascinating to me how people who work so much with technology have
such low opinions of it. You've been around for a while Chuck, you know
that in the 60s there were people predicting a population bomb and
disaster. It never happened. Technology continued to provide us with
ever higher standards of living. And it will continue to do so- it is
advancing so rapidly nowadays that there is zero possibility of some
kind of population bomb occuring before we reach nanotech and other
technologies that will effectively provide enough resources to support
many many times the number of people now living.

One low-tech point to make is that it has already been shown that
couples in advanced countries have fewer children, on average below
the replacement rate needed for the population. This is why the US
grows mostly by immigration nowadays. Some countries in Europe are
actually shrinking like Italy I believe. You can imagine that if people
were able to live longer they would feel even less pressure to reproduce.

> solutions to the practical problems of humanity immortal lead in some
> pretty draconian directions. What do the immortals do with the devout
> Roman Catholics and others that believe in their right to reproduce as
> much as they like? Couldn't possibly let them be immortal, could we? Oh
> boy, more jack to accumulate. "Hey I'm immortal, and you're not because
> you're a dirty Procreator."

I don't know who scared you, but they did a good job. This is along with
your other fears is totally unfounded. People will live as long and
have as many kids as they can afford. Yes, they will need more jack if
they want to be able to afford more kids and bigger house. Nothing new
there. Fortunately in the near future all this kind of stuff will be
effectively free. Our currently society will no longer exist in the way
it does today, and people will be able to pursue what they want without
the concerns we have now.

Are you up to date at all with the kinds of technologies now under
development? Read much kurzweilai.net?

> 
> What would we do, after we'd felt *everything* again and again to the
> point of utter boredom? Invent new emotions? Don't think so. Die? That
> just leads us back to square one. Erase everything and start over? Worse
> than mortality for snuffing oneself out, don't you think? Or would we
> just become pure intellect, losing what we consider human?

You know there's more to experience than simply raw emotion. And as we
make ourselves more intelligent and increase the other capabilities of
our minds we will continually enable ourselves to create and experience
new things. So the optimistic answer is: no, we don't run out of stuff
to do or places to see. However it is possible you are right, that
even in this huge Universe we might run out of stuff to do. In that
case you have options, some of which you mention. However it is not a
rational decision to say "I have a gut feel that the optimistic scenario
won't play out, so I'm choosing to die at age 85 instead of 85000000".
You'd be effectively acting like an overly-romantic teenage goth who
decided to kill himself because the world has nothing to offer them.

> 
> >>
> >> Maybe you'll call yourself lucky if someone happy appears (despite
> >> understanding and being capable of the mental masturbation necessary to
> >> convince themselves there's *really* no reason) to extract you from the
> >> rubble of the future which those well-meaning but quite misguided
> >> others
> >> with jack thought they could decide for everyone, and which no one got
> >> any happiness from anyway.
> >
> > Don't be grumpy Chuck, get out there and make some jack and help point
> > the future where you want it. You sound very upset that anyone gets to
> > ever do anything that just might happen without your say so.
> >
> 
> Actually, I was laughing as I echoed the inverse of these bits back,
> along with the bit about "the future created by others with jack" above,
> since I *have* to assume you believe you're among those, and I'm not:
> 
> Quoth Mr. Atkins:
> "You keep saying that, but I'm the one trying to do something to keep
> us all alive. If you ride my coattails, consider yourself to be the
> lucky one."
> 
> The combination set off an Adamsesque association. I thought it read a
> bit like a radio comedy script. 8^) It did, however, frame the thought
> rather nicely that your idyllic future could go awry. But you forgot the
> line below, so I guess you didn't get that either. 8^(

It's rather unfortunate for you and your family and friends that you
can't, at your age, actually take this subject seriously. We ain't
living in the 1800s when this whole conversation would be useless BS
between dilettantes. We are living the quarter century pre-Singularity.
Your choices here MATTER.

> 
> Grumpy and upset were far from where I was when I wrote that. Finished
> with this sillyness is what I am now. We don't agree. Why not just
> accept that? Good luck on the immortality thing. None for me, thanks.

I have trouble letting people make really bad decisions. Sorry, pet peeve.
-- 
Brian Atkins
Director, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
http://www.singinst.org/