Leo D.M.J. Aurini - December 24, 2012


Transhumanism, Mind Replication, Right Wing Attitudes, & Left Wing Opulence

Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
Mentioned
Robin Hanson Lesseron Bias
Kant, FTL, and Ideaspace Manning Up

Episode Stats


Length

27 minutes

Words per minute

115.04

Word count

3,106

Sentence count

189

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

11

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Professor Robin Hanson is an economist at George Mason University who's done a great deal of writing about possible future mind types.
00:00:13.000 So, the content of this video regarding transhumanism and future mind types, if not outright stolen from him, is strongly, strongly inspired by his writings.
00:00:25.000 If you have any questions or want to look more into it, a link to his blog, Overcoming Bias, is down below.
00:00:32.000 He was also one of the founding members of the Lesseron community and is an excellent critic of the medical industry.
00:00:44.000 So, future mind types.
00:00:52.000 The 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.
00:01:05.000 So, the future of humanity lies either in extinction or in expansion.
00:01:12.000 There is no middle ground, middle state possibility.
00:01:16.000 That's not how the universe works.
00:01:19.000 For the very basic principle, that if you take two different types of minds, one mind that is prone to expanding and increasing and reproducing,
00:01:29.000 and another that wants to maintain a steady state, that which expands and reproduces is going to out-compete the one that remains constant.
00:01:42.000 And furthermore, there is nothing sacred about meat.
00:01:47.000 Our brains run on meat hardware right now, but there is nothing sacred about it.
00:01:51.000 There is advancing experiments constantly in transferring minds to a digital silicon format.
00:02:01.000 There is the Blue Brain Project.
00:02:03.000 There is a few others.
00:02:04.000 I do not know what the latest research is on it. 0.99
00:02:07.000 But sooner or later, we will either discover that we are too stupid to transfer a human brain to silicon, 0.99
00:02:14.000 in which case, we are going to go extinct, or we will do so. 0.97
00:02:20.000 So, the question becomes then, once we do upload the human brain, and presumably, hopefully, increase our intelligence,
00:02:34.000 what will minds look like in the future?
00:02:39.000 Now, an important consideration for an advanced mind, to try and understand what this mind would seem like to us base-level humans,
00:02:53.000 was a comment left on my last video.
00:02:57.000 In that video, I was talking about an intersection of physics and philosophy, and the implications that come from it.
00:03:07.000 Now, to understand our current perception of reality, our current limited perception of what reality is,
00:03:16.000 think of a chess board.
00:03:19.000 Think of a creature, a chess-playing computer, that can only conceive of reality as a chess board.
00:03:27.000 Now, chess only has a few dozen rules.
00:03:30.000 It's not an incredibly complex game to learn, but it is an impossible game to perfectly master.
00:03:37.000 There's an infinitude of different maneuvers that you can do.
00:03:42.000 Nearly. Nearly. There is nearly an infinite number of maneuvers possible in chess.
00:03:48.000 And even the computers we have now, though, they've recently become superior to the humans that play the game,
00:03:55.000 it's still a narrow margin.
00:03:57.000 And they do it, they have some very interesting algorithms that go through it.
00:04:01.000 So, compare that chess-playing computer to a human that plays chess.
00:04:09.000 And even if that computer is, in that one realm, superior,
00:04:14.000 its perceived universe is so much more limited and so much more basic than that of even a low IQ human being.
00:04:23.000 And that's the way you should think of future minds.
00:04:28.000 They are going to be so much more advanced than us that we can't really begin to understand them.
00:04:34.000 And yet, there's going to be certain consistencies.
00:04:37.000 There's certain elements of tactics and strategy that the chess-playing computer is going to employ
00:04:44.000 that are exactly the same for a human trying to navigate a complex political situation,
00:04:51.000 utterly beyond the chess-playing computer's capacity,
00:04:55.000 but the basic principles are going to remain the same.
00:05:01.000 And so, while we can't accurately describe what a future mind state is going to look like,
00:05:08.000 we can make some basic assumptions about them with a very high probability of being correct.
00:05:17.000 There are certain ways that the universe moves which are consistent,
00:05:22.000 even if they get very, very complex and incomprehensible at the higher levels.
00:05:28.000 So, first of all, it's important to realize that mind duplication will no longer be a problem.
00:05:39.000 Right now, we're locked into the hardware.
00:05:42.000 Your brain is your mind.
00:05:45.000 But in the future, when we move to a silicone base or any sort of electronic medium,
00:05:51.000 it's going to be possible to duplicate brains.
00:05:55.000 It's going to be possible to duplicate them temporarily.
00:05:59.000 And so, these duplicate brains.
00:06:02.000 Well, ask yourself, what sort of brains are we as a species, as a collective mentality,
00:06:11.000 what sort of brain types are we going to replicate?
00:06:18.000 It's not going to be the hedonism bot that we continue replicating.
00:06:22.000 The future uploaded world where two-thirds of humanity disappear into some mix of 4chan and World of Warcraft, 0.94
00:06:33.000 where they have constant unending sex with brand new sexual organs. 0.76
00:06:37.000 Those aren't going to be the minds we're replicating.
00:06:41.000 We'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.
00:06:56.000 Productive minds are going to be the most important.
00:07:02.000 And there will be an optimization process to pick out which minds are best at things.
00:07:08.000 And those different minds are going to be the most common.
00:07:13.000 There will be, of course, a threat of monopoly, of one universal mind with no differentiation.
00:07:25.000 But 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.
00:07:43.000 But they will all be very hard-working and extremely frugal.
00:07:48.000 In fact, one of the consequences that Hanson points out, we are probably the most luxurious minds that will ever exist.
00:08:04.000 We are still living in dream time, as Hanson calls it.
00:08:10.000 We don't remember all of our own lives, let alone all of what goes on in the world.
00:08:21.000 Even with the reporting that we have, there's constant conspiracy theories of various merit coming up, because the news is never reported accurately.
00:08:33.000 It'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.
00:08:54.000 At the same time, we are more wealthy, more luxurious than future brain states are going to be.
00:09:03.000 A future mind state, a future brain, is going to be optimized towards exploration, towards mathematical research, towards scientific experiments.
00:09:15.000 The 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.
00:09:34.000 So 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.
00:09:57.000 And 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.
00:10:13.000 That'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.
00:10:27.000 It's going to be the hard-working, frugal mind. And I don't have anything wrong with that.
00:10:34.000 The frugal, hard-working mind is the right-wing mind. When we talk about the separation of left and right, the left seeks out entertainment.
00:10:50.000 It wants unlimited license to play and masturbate and engage in ridiculous political struggles to see who's the coolest one around. 1.00
00:11:02.000 While the right isn't attracted to that, we don't do well in politics. 0.96
00:11:08.000 I have a couple of friends that run in politics, and they find it distasteful.
00:11:14.000 They 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. 0.64
00:11:22.000 But they don't like the game. It pains them to do it.
00:11:27.000 Whereas for the liberal, nothing could be more natural than trying to fit in, trying to manipulate the discourse, to get into popularity contests.
00:11:36.000 That's how they think. 0.99
00:11:38.000 They are the bonobo masturbation society. 0.98
00:11:41.000 We are the builders and the planners. 0.96
00:11:44.000 And 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.
00:11:59.000 Certainly, when I joined the military, the military is a Spartan, hard working, stark organization like that.
00:12:07.000 You don't get a lot of pleasure.
00:12:09.000 Pleasure 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.
00:12:22.000 That's the height of pleasure in the military.
00:12:26.000 As opposed to going to some fancy bar with $50 steaks and plush leather seating.
00:12:36.000 And so there's always that question.
00:12:39.000 Am I up to this challenge?
00:12:43.000 And 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.
00:12:52.000 We're still half monkey ourselves.
00:12:55.000 We...
00:12:57.000 How 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?
00:13:11.000 Or watch a TV show?
00:13:15.000 Or something else that's equally non-productive.
00:13:19.000 It's inevitable with our race, with our species.
00:13:22.000 It's...
00:13:23.000 We are still monkeys on the inside, even if we've managed to overcome the worst of those traits.
00:13:30.000 Certainly, I try and discipline myself to reading and watching and enjoying media that have some cathartic value to them.
00:13:42.000 But, 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.
00:13:53.000 Hard work and dedication help.
00:13:56.000 You can train yourself to be more productive.
00:13:59.000 And you will get more productive as you age.
00:14:01.000 But, ultimately, I wish I could be that productive right now, rather than having to reprogram my brain in such an inefficient manner.
00:14:10.000 Us on the right should not be afraid of the emulation world, of the future brain states of transhumanism.
00:14:21.000 It is the planners and the doers and the builders and the warriors that are going to succeed long term.
00:14:29.000 We are men of war, men of reality.
00:14:39.000 We can survive without creature comforts.
00:14:42.000 And, quite frankly, we tend to like ourselves a lot better when we aren't surrounded by soft plushness.
00:14:54.000 Now, 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?
00:15:12.000 And there is an answer for that.
00:15:17.000 As I said, we live in the richest, most wealthy time that has ever existed in history.
00:15:26.000 We are the richest, most opulent human beings that have ever lived. 0.86
00:15:32.000 All 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.
00:15:48.000 That 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.
00:16:02.000 We all have the internet.
00:16:04.000 And people, your average person probably spends more time on a porn site than they do on Wikipedia.
00:16:10.000 Now, a part of this wealth is the zero-scarcity economy.
00:16:22.000 Because it's so easy to transmit media, it's basically free to transmit media, most media has become zero-scarcity.
00:16:33.000 Music is zero-scarcity.
00:16:36.000 Every 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.
00:16:51.000 The sort of guy that had a leather chair designed for a pair of giant headphones.
00:17:00.000 We have more music than that guy did.
00:17:04.000 Because music is zero-scarcity.
00:17:08.000 TV, movies, and, sad to say, writing is largely zero-scarcity, again.
00:17:18.000 These videos, it used to be you had to have a theater, you used to have a TV station to transmit ideas like this.
00:17:30.000 You 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.
00:17:41.000 Whereas nowadays, I can do this for basically free.
00:17:45.000 All I need is a laptop, which is not that expensive.
00:17:49.000 And I can do these videos.
00:17:56.000 So part of our wealth is zero-scarcity.
00:18:00.000 That technology is so powerful that it only takes the flick of a finger to move something as massive as an automobile.
00:18:12.000 But the automobile doesn't work on technology alone.
00:18:19.000 A huge factor in our present wealth is fossil fuels.
00:18:25.000 In fact, we're probably going to have more fossil fuels in the very near future, and energy is going to get even cheaper.
00:18:40.000 This energy is an accelerant upon the economy.
00:18:44.000 And in fact, it causes massive problems.
00:18:47.000 There's a blog post I'm going to be writing, going into a bit more detail about that in the near future.
00:18:53.000 But essentially, a great deal of our modern economy is artificial.
00:18:57.000 We ship all of our manufacturing over to third world countries where they're still industrializing.
00:19:03.000 As a consequence, starting up your own business, doing something physical and productive,
00:19:10.000 you might offer a better product than China.
00:19:12.000 But when it costs $5 over there, and you charge $50 just to be viable, no one's going to buy.
00:19:18.000 We have this energy accelerant, vastly increasing our wealth and opulence levels.
00:19:31.000 And yet, while being opulent, we are oddly some of the poorest people who ever existed.
00:19:38.000 We are utterly dependent upon our corporate jobs, upon the economy not changing.
00:19:43.000 A sudden shock to this economy is going to put lots and lots of people out on the streets.
00:19:49.000 We live paycheck to paycheck, vainly buying new clothing every month to try and keep up with our social peers.
00:19:58.000 So desperate to appear wealthy that we have no savings in the bank.
00:20:08.000 No equity.
00:20:15.000 So the beautiful, horrible contradiction of our modern times.
00:20:22.000 The most opulent people who have ever existed, and the most desperately poor.
00:20:27.000 A farmer may not be rich, but he knows his farm is going to make food next year.
00:20:33.000 Whereas we, without our jobs, without that fiat currency flowing through our banks,
00:20:40.000 without that low interest rate, without all that credit card debt,
00:20:44.000 we'd be out on the streets.
00:20:47.000 This great wealth that we have right now, in the form of free energy,
00:20:57.000 this energy coming out of the ground and acting like a tide lifting all boats,
00:21:03.000 is what empowers the liberal.
00:21:06.000 liberalism is predicated upon the African savannah, upon the never-ending summer,
00:21:16.000 upon the abundant fruit, the abundant food, and a world where you don't need to work to earn a living.
00:21:24.000 What you need to do is be the coolest one, or else you don't breed. 0.54
00:21:28.000 And it's this free energy that makes this environment available.
00:21:35.000 So, of course the liberal dominates in this world.
00:21:41.000 And when the liberal dominates, they go out of their way to make it difficult, nigh on impossible,
00:21:48.000 for the productive right-wing member to survive in society.
00:21:56.000 Earlier I said that free market capitalism tends to be opposed to monopolies.
00:22:05.000 Standard Oil was falling apart long before the antitrust legislation was passed,
00:22:11.000 and OPEC only lasted for about 15-20 years before becoming irrelevant.
00:22:18.000 The nature of the free market is that it's very opposed to cartels.
00:22:24.000 It's very opposed to monopolies.
00:22:27.000 The only way you can maintain a monopoly on the free market
00:22:30.000 is by providing extremely high-quality goods at cheap prices.
00:22:36.000 If you're doing it better than any potential competitor could do it,
00:22:40.000 then you'll keep the monopoly.
00:22:43.000 The instant you start abusing that privilege,
00:22:45.000 a competitor will arise and destroy you.
00:22:52.000 And yet we have nothing but monopolies nowadays.
00:22:55.000 We have companies like Walmart shutting down everybody else.
00:22:59.000 And it's not because they're better or wiser at using the free market to be productive.
00:23:09.000 Companies like Walmart, they just happened to luck into a loosening of trade regulations,
00:23:18.000 an elimination of protectionism.
00:23:20.000 They were the right company at the right time to benefit from a random occurrence.
00:23:26.000 But with others, it's protectionism.
00:23:31.000 It's the union of government force and corporate wealth that causes these monopolies.
00:23:40.000 Certainly anybody starting up a small business will see this.
00:23:44.000 That to start your business, you need to be approved, for almost all of them,
00:23:48.000 by some trade association that's backed up by government.
00:23:52.000 We have all these government unions choking the life out of companies that are not a free market union,
00:24:00.000 but that are government mandated.
00:24:03.000 The big controversy right now in the United States is whether you should be forced at government gunpoint
00:24:10.000 to join a union when you work for a company.
00:24:15.000 These violent thug liberals are assaulting people over the principle that they can force you to live this way. 0.93
00:24:24.000 It's the wealth that creates this world, this liberal, degenerate, left-wing world.
00:24:39.000 And although none of us enjoy privation, none of us particularly want to be poorer than we are right now,
00:24:51.000 I would suggest that a hard economic reset, while it is going to be painful,
00:24:58.000 will ultimately be a world that the right wing will survive in. 0.54
00:25:03.000 Where all of a sudden, our ability to plan, our ability to work hard, our love of hard work, accomplishment, and knowledge,
00:25:14.000 above pornography, masturbation, and status-seeking in empty social circles, will see us through.
00:25:30.000 In a real world, in a real economy, where starvation is a very real threat,
00:25:41.000 you will see the hard-working right-wing mind survive.
00:25:45.000 In a post-human, transhumanist reality, you will see brilliant, hard-working, and intellectually curious minds surviving.
00:25:57.000 Instead of an unlimited amount of candy for culture, we will have the occasional Swiss chocolate.
00:26:09.000 Instead of pornography and cheap sitcom, reality TV, television, we will have actual deep dramas that require investment and study to understand.
00:26:26.000 Instead of bubblegum pop music that's nothing but a driving drumbeat that goes straight to the loin, we'll have complex, mathematically challenging music.
00:26:39.000 We just have to survive through these dark, dysgenic times ahead.
00:26:48.000 Keep strong, brothers, and zig when they zag.
00:26:53.000 Irini out.
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