The possibility has occurred to me. :-)
Colin Tate-Majcher wrote:
Heheh, how do you know you didn't want to know what it was like to live
in the 2000s and work toward the Singularity. Maybe we are already
super advanced and just got bored :)
-Colin
On 4/18/07, *Richard Loosemore* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 03:54:50AM -0400, Randall wrote:
>
>> I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone who had seen the
>> elephant would choose to go back to being Mundane.
>
> The question is also whether they could, if they wanted to.
> A neanderthal wouldn't function well in today's society,
> and anything lesser would run a good chance of becoming roadkill.
>
>> If I could flip a switch and increase my _g_ by two orders of
>> magnitude, I'd never flip that switch back. Why would anybody?
>
> I wouldn't. But I wouldn't max out the knob immediately, either.
> I would just go for a slow, sustainable growth, at least as long
> nobody else is rushing ahead.
>
[META COMMENT. Is it my imagination, or have some funny things have
been happening to the AGI and/or Singularity lists recently... e.g.
delivery of messages as if they were offlist?]
I think you are looking at the possibilities through far to narrow a
prism.
Consider. Would it be interesting to find what it is like to be, say, a
tiger? A whale? A dolphin? I can think of ways to temporarily get
transferred into the form of any reasonably high-level animal, then come
back again to human later, with at least some memories of what it was
like to have been in that state.
In a future in which all these things are possible, why would people not
be interested in having this kind of fun?
Now imagine the possibility of becoming superintelligent. That could
get kind of heavy after a while. I do not necessarily think that I want
to know about all of the science in human history, for example, to such
a deep extent that it would be as if I had been teaching it for
centuries, and was bored with every last bit of it. Would you?
I would want to have fun. And the big part of having fun would be
finding out new stuff.
So, yes, I would want to become superintelligent occasionally, but it
seems to me that the more intelligent I become, the more I know about
complex problems I cannot fix, and the more that frustrates me. That's
not fun after a while. Sometimes it would be nice to go back to just
being a kid for a while.
Then there is the possibility of recreating historical situations. I
would like to be able to be one of the people who was around when none
of modern science existed, just so I could try to discover that stuff
when it was new. To do that I would have to reduce my current knowledge
by putting it on ice for a while.
And on and on.... I can think of vast numbers of reasons not to do the
boring thing of just trying to get into a high-intelligence brain.
It's not the destination, folks, its the journey.
Richard Loosemore
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