posted on May 30, 2021 02:58 AM by
u/ProphetOfTime
35
u/vistandsforwaifu29 pointsat 1622363017.000000
Academic biologists are seriously dropping the ball. Not even a
chapter in their books about the inevitability of all organic life in
the universe getting replaced by robotic copies of me, Robin Hanson.
There's a faction in Endless Space that are literally all clones of one guy (Horatio) and intend to make the entire universe into Horatio, since Horatio is obviously The Best Thing There Is.
They're bioclones though, not robots.
Definitely a sinister taboo handed down by the wizened elders of the
Academy and definitely, definitely not a result of specialists being
unwilling to speculate on areas outside their narrow field of
expertise.
Or:
“Waaah, these people’s wild mass guessing and speculation disagrees
with my pet speculation and make-em-ups!”
You can also argue that (intelligent) life would have to be pretty similar to us because there are (maybe) limited evolutionary mechanisms that produce it. For instance, it's hard (for me) to imagine how you get an intelligence arms race without some sort of pack or tribe dynamic.
I mean obviously we could just not be imagining well enough, but I'd say there's arguments for why life might be similar to us besides just anthropomorphizing.
Well there are such arguments, and plenty of people have made them. My point is that there’s another whole subset of very popular ideas which don’t address the question at all.
I don’t remember tbh, didn’t pay too much attention. I vaguely recall that he does some dabbling in actual stats (right or wrong) and makes some novel projections of his own (in the sense that because he’s not writing a novel he isn’t constrained by the need for a protagonist or arc, so we don’t have any Neos a la *The Matrix*). But to be honest I mostly read about it with respect to Hanson’s personal politics, rather than for the sci-fi stuff.
I didn't read the full Age of Em, but the short version is full of interesting ideas and insights. I normally hate futurology but Hanson is definitely better than most sci-fi.
I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on our treatment of dolphins, but perhaps when you're not hungover.
I think we could understand some things a lion said, but not others. For example, if a lion told us it's hungry, I bet we could figure out what it meant. After all, my literal housecat can tell me it's hungry. Dogs can tell us when they need to go out to pee. This is done without "language" (setting aside the complexity of what language is). If they had language, I don't see how the task gets harder.
There would probably be "lion stuff" we couldn't understand. That said, perhaps we could understand the boundaries between what we could understand and what we could not.
It's like being trans and explaining gender feels to cis people. They probably can't totally get it, but they can understand that it's something they don't understand.
(Yes I just compared trans folks to lions, but the pope once compared us to nuclear armageddon, so both are pretty metal.)
The question of course becomes "If intelligent life is truly so different from us that we would not recognize it as intelligent, is it intelligent?" Like, intelligence is after all a human idea largely used to talk about humans and the extent to which other things are like humans.
EDIT: Basically, if it was doing weird things but wasn't intelligent in a way we could relate to we'd call it something else.
Academic biologists are seriously dropping the ball. Not even a chapter in their books about the inevitability of all organic life in the universe getting replaced by robotic copies of me, Robin Hanson.
Definitely a sinister taboo handed down by the wizened elders of the Academy and definitely, definitely not a result of specialists being unwilling to speculate on areas outside their narrow field of expertise.
Or:
“Waaah, these people’s wild mass guessing and speculation disagrees with my pet speculation and make-em-ups!”
[deleted]