In this episode, I discuss the concept of "Future Mind Types" and what they could possibly be like in the future, and how we can begin to understand them. Professor Robin Hanson is an economist at George Mason University, who has done a great deal of writing about possible future mind types, and the content of this video is heavily influenced by his writings.
00:00:00.000Professor Robin Hanson is an economist at George Mason University who's done a great deal of writing about possible future mind types.
00:00:13.000So, the content of this video regarding transhumanism and future mind types, if not outright stolen from him, is strongly, strongly inspired by his writings.
00:00:25.000If you have any questions or want to look more into it, a link to his blog, Overcoming Bias, is down below.
00:00:32.000He was also one of the founding members of the Lesseron community and is an excellent critic of the medical industry.
00:00:52.000The nature of the universe is quite simply that which does not improve itself, that which does not increase and expand, inevitably contracts and dies out.
00:01:05.000So, the future of humanity lies either in extinction or in expansion.
00:01:12.000There is no middle ground, middle state possibility.
00:01:19.000For the very basic principle, that if you take two different types of minds, one mind that is prone to expanding and increasing and reproducing,
00:01:29.000and another that wants to maintain a steady state, that which expands and reproduces is going to out-compete the one that remains constant.
00:01:42.000And furthermore, there is nothing sacred about meat.
00:01:47.000Our brains run on meat hardware right now, but there is nothing sacred about it.
00:01:51.000There is advancing experiments constantly in transferring minds to a digital silicon format.
00:06:02.000Well, ask yourself, what sort of brains are we as a species, as a collective mentality,
00:06:11.000what sort of brain types are we going to replicate?
00:06:18.000It's not going to be the hedonism bot that we continue replicating.
00:06:22.000The future uploaded world where two-thirds of humanity disappear into some mix of 4chan and World of Warcraft,
00:06:33.000where they have constant unending sex with brand new sexual organs.
00:06:37.000Those aren't going to be the minds we're replicating.
00:06:41.000We're going to be replicating frugal minds, hard-working minds, minds that are happy to spend 10 years straight studying a mathematical theorem looking for a solution.
00:06:56.000Productive minds are going to be the most important.
00:07:02.000And there will be an optimization process to pick out which minds are best at things.
00:07:08.000And those different minds are going to be the most common.
00:07:13.000There will be, of course, a threat of monopoly, of one universal mind with no differentiation.
00:07:25.000But I think just as current free market economics discourages monopoly, I also believe that the needs of survival, the needs of interacting in different environments, will also create a multitude of minds.
00:07:43.000But they will all be very hard-working and extremely frugal.
00:07:48.000In fact, one of the consequences that Hanson points out, we are probably the most luxurious minds that will ever exist.
00:08:04.000We are still living in dream time, as Hanson calls it.
00:08:10.000We don't remember all of our own lives, let alone all of what goes on in the world.
00:08:21.000Even with the reporting that we have, there's constant conspiracy theories of various merit coming up, because the news is never reported accurately.
00:08:33.000It's all filtered through bad heuristics, misremembered, misreported, and even when we read it, it's a dominant story, a narrative that we understand, not the truth, not the actual physical truth of what occurred.
00:08:54.000At the same time, we are more wealthy, more luxurious than future brain states are going to be.
00:09:03.000A future mind state, a future brain, is going to be optimized towards exploration, towards mathematical research, towards scientific experiments.
00:09:15.000The vast majority of its energy, if not all of its energy, is going to be dedicated to these topics, as opposed to us, where even our greatest minds take time off to watch a movie, to have a beer, to enjoy themselves.
00:09:34.000So these future minds, although perhaps their subjective, their quantifiable wealth will be a great deal above our own, because they simply have more processing power, more resources than we do, their subjective luxury will be far, far less.
00:09:57.000And when Hanson pointed this out, he made it sound quite frightening, about a very minimalist existence, a spartan existence of constant warfare, of constant struggle.
00:10:13.000That's the mind of the future. The mind that spends all of its time in masturbation, whether it be solitary or with the group, is not going to be the mind that's duplicated, that we devote lots of processing power towards.
00:10:27.000It's going to be the hard-working, frugal mind. And I don't have anything wrong with that.
00:10:34.000The frugal, hard-working mind is the right-wing mind. When we talk about the separation of left and right, the left seeks out entertainment.
00:10:50.000It wants unlimited license to play and masturbate and engage in ridiculous political struggles to see who's the coolest one around.
00:11:02.000While the right isn't attracted to that, we don't do well in politics.
00:11:08.000I have a couple of friends that run in politics, and they find it distasteful.
00:11:14.000They do it because they're morally committed men trying to change the world, trying to keep this world together long enough that the transhumanist era might actually hit.
00:11:22.000But they don't like the game. It pains them to do it.
00:11:27.000Whereas for the liberal, nothing could be more natural than trying to fit in, trying to manipulate the discourse, to get into popularity contests.
00:11:44.000And so when you talk about a brain like this, a brain that's dedicated to hard work, that's very, very stark, well, it's a little bit intimidating at first.
00:11:59.000Certainly, when I joined the military, the military is a Spartan, hard working, stark organization like that.
00:12:09.000Pleasure in the army is having a brew, is heating up a pot of water and putting some coffee, some cocoa mix and whatever else that you have saved up into it, and sharing it with your mates.
00:12:22.000That's the height of pleasure in the military.
00:12:26.000As opposed to going to some fancy bar with $50 steaks and plush leather seating.
00:12:43.000And certainly when we talk about these minds that are going to be completely dedicated to scientific research, exploration, none of us are up to that task.
00:12:57.000How many times have you been in the situation where you want to want to study, but what you actually are wanting to do is to screw around with a video game?
00:13:23.000We are still monkeys on the inside, even if we've managed to overcome the worst of those traits.
00:13:30.000Certainly, I try and discipline myself to reading and watching and enjoying media that have some cathartic value to them.
00:13:42.000But, at the same time, I wish there was something I could do to my brain, aside from hard work and dedication, that would make me a harder worker.
00:14:39.000We can survive without creature comforts.
00:14:42.000And, quite frankly, we tend to like ourselves a lot better when we aren't surrounded by soft plushness.
00:14:54.000Now, of course, all of this begs the question, if the right-wing mind is so fundamentally superior to the left-wing mind, why does the left dominate?
00:15:17.000As I said, we live in the richest, most wealthy time that has ever existed in history.
00:15:26.000We are the richest, most opulent human beings that have ever lived.
00:15:32.000All the more disgusting, then, that we spend our time, we devote all our energy to Hollywood movies and video games and the pornification of the bar culture and the quick bonobo masturbation society.
00:15:48.000That we've given up on the space program, we've given up on advanced research, on educating ourselves, when we have the most powerful media tool, the most powerful education tool available to us for basically free.
00:16:36.000Every single one of us in this group, all of you guys listening, myself included, we have more music on our personal hard drives than a hardcore audiophile had in 1985.
00:16:51.000The sort of guy that had a leather chair designed for a pair of giant headphones.
00:17:08.000TV, movies, and, sad to say, writing is largely zero-scarcity, again.
00:17:18.000These videos, it used to be you had to have a theater, you used to have a TV station to transmit ideas like this.
00:17:30.000You used to have 30, 40 people all working to film the newscaster, plus all the effort that goes into building the building, building the video cameras, etc.
00:17:41.000Whereas nowadays, I can do this for basically free.
00:17:45.000All I need is a laptop, which is not that expensive.
00:24:03.000The big controversy right now in the United States is whether you should be forced at government gunpoint
00:24:10.000to join a union when you work for a company.
00:24:15.000These violent thug liberals are assaulting people over the principle that they can force you to live this way.
00:24:24.000It's the wealth that creates this world, this liberal, degenerate, left-wing world.
00:24:39.000And although none of us enjoy privation, none of us particularly want to be poorer than we are right now,
00:24:51.000I would suggest that a hard economic reset, while it is going to be painful,
00:24:58.000will ultimately be a world that the right wing will survive in.
00:25:03.000Where all of a sudden, our ability to plan, our ability to work hard, our love of hard work, accomplishment, and knowledge,
00:25:14.000above pornography, masturbation, and status-seeking in empty social circles, will see us through.
00:25:30.000In a real world, in a real economy, where starvation is a very real threat,
00:25:41.000you will see the hard-working right-wing mind survive.
00:25:45.000In a post-human, transhumanist reality, you will see brilliant, hard-working, and intellectually curious minds surviving.
00:25:57.000Instead of an unlimited amount of candy for culture, we will have the occasional Swiss chocolate.
00:26:09.000Instead of pornography and cheap sitcom, reality TV, television, we will have actual deep dramas that require investment and study to understand.
00:26:26.000Instead of bubblegum pop music that's nothing but a driving drumbeat that goes straight to the loin, we'll have complex, mathematically challenging music.
00:26:39.000We just have to survive through these dark, dysgenic times ahead.
00:26:48.000Keep strong, brothers, and zig when they zag.