Butlerian Jihads and similar things are massively violent and messy processes, aren't they? Think how many billions of people probably would have died when suddenly there were no more computers (so no medical devices, no medical records, no accounting, no logistics, no cars or planes, etc).
Similarly, who's to say that the WAY to forge that new human spirit isn't just to play it out? Let the 80% of people have their Infinite Jest style virtual heavens, memetically tailored to be maximally stimulating, engaging, hedonistic, and satisfying. They'll literally observe your pupillary dilation, flushing, heart rate, breathing, and more and tune on-the-fly generated content to literally be maximally engaging. There will be nothing else like it! It's an entirely new art form, literally like the Infinite Jest.
But, much like today, a decent chunk of people don't let their kids use smartphones. In the future where Experience Machines exist, some people will culturally bend away from them, and do the same for their kids, and they'll continue humanity's progress and evolution. Will the losses be massive? Yes, I'd estimate around 80% of all humanity. Is 20% enough to keep going, with AI assistance and robotics? Also yes.
Would a Butlerian Jihad be better? I honestly think that might take out MORE than 80%.
Yes, I thought about footnoting the BJ comment because 1) it assumes that AI/computers are bad, which is simply an assumption and 2) the reasons you said, the BJ was an extended miserable period (and I didn't want to have to figure out a very squiggly, back-and-forth line on the graph).
Now the latter part of your comment is interesting, and other parts of my thinking can see the logic. It's like a meta-level Irenaean theodicy on a species level scale.
But I do think it's more complex than that. For example, I don't "really" care if some kid in New Zealand becomes dependent on the EM, but I would deeply care if it was my daughter. Humans have various levels of obligations (the family, the community, the nation, etc.) and there is a part of me that doesn't just want to 'write off' a large segment of humanity.
> But I do think it's more complex than that. For example, I don't "really" care if some kid in New Zealand becomes dependent on the EM, but I would deeply care if it was my daughter.
Yeah, so that's the strong argument to be the "no smartphones" type parent now, and inculcate digital skepticism and epistemics around evaluating whether the entertainment you're consuming is adversarial or not.
Culture starts with families, after all.
> Humans have various levels of obligations (the family, the community, the nation, etc.) and there is a part of me that doesn't just want to 'write off' a large segment of humanity.
Who's to say their lives would be WORSE??
Think of it - status is fixed and zero sum. Material needs are basically solved everywhere in the developed world for the great majority of people, but people are more anxious and depressed than ever, because status and relationships are what matter, not easy calories. As technologies have widened perspectives and let people see into the long tails of humanity, the average person's ability to attain "status" has been diminishing rapidly. Everyone spends 8 hours a day watching attractive millionaires live amazing lives, on TV and Tik Tok and Insta. You used to be able to be the strongest or best at woodworking in your local group or community, but now you're nobody on basically any scale.
But inside the Infinite Jests? You can be the tippy top! You can have ALL the status! If you want luxury goods, you can have new luxury goods every minute! If you want peak experiences, you can have those every minute! Relationships? The AI minds behind the people you're interacting with know and "get you" better than any human ever could! It's a strict upgrade on literally every front.
I actually wrote a post about this, which walks that fine edge between "is this a good thing, or a bad thing?"
Well, we are no smartphones parents! (Though easy for us to say now, as both of our children are under two, but I do believe this will be a hill that my wife and I proverbially die on).
To your latter point, there is an interesting tension here.
Because on one hand, what you're saying is akin to my response to the Simulation Hypothesis: So what? My ultimate ontology should be separate from the meaning that I derive from my experiences. Whether I am a simulation or a Child of God is irrelevant to the qualia of my every day experience. Playing with my daughters is just as fun either way. As Andre Malraux once said, "the deepest mystery isn't that we've found ourselves on this profusion of matter beneath the stars, but that from within ourselves, we can produce images powerful enough to deny our nothingness." (Quote might not be 100% right, was from memory).
But at the same time, I also have a base, instinctive feeling that I should be in the "base" layer of the world. I don't want to live in a simulation; I don't want to live in the metaverse. I want to be in "The World."
This probably feels like I am talking out of both sides of my mouth, and I don't know how to reconcile them.
> This probably feels like I am talking out of both sides of my mouth, and I don't know how to reconcile them.
I think my main differentiator here is "other minds," with a flagrantly species-ist twist. And it's based on metaphysics, so a castle built on sand, but ultimately I think judgments like this will always be aesthetic / metaphysical.
Let's just assume we're actually immortal, according to various religions or Tegmarkian infinity postulates. If there's some immortal, outside of space-time "you" out there, for everyone, the main reason to confine yourself to a given instantiation and mortality is probably to interact with other minds under agreed aggregate rules.
So literally the point of coming here is to find and discover and interact and impact the other minds we come across. Everyone from your friends and colleagues and family and kids, and everyone else you impact with your actions, positively and negatively.
And just personally, I think going into the EM sort of perverts that purpose. You'll be interacting with mostly artificial minds, that are tuned towards being the junk food equivalent of interactions with you. And interactions with other humans will fall off, because they're more full of friction, and don't understand you as well, and don't talk about the ideas you're interested in, in the rhetorical styles you like most, and so on. And I don't think sycophantically-tuned junk food minds really count for the purposes of "other interaction and benefit" that human minds would.
So that's my main metaphysical argument for preferring reality over EM's.
Butlerian Jihads and similar things are massively violent and messy processes, aren't they? Think how many billions of people probably would have died when suddenly there were no more computers (so no medical devices, no medical records, no accounting, no logistics, no cars or planes, etc).
Similarly, who's to say that the WAY to forge that new human spirit isn't just to play it out? Let the 80% of people have their Infinite Jest style virtual heavens, memetically tailored to be maximally stimulating, engaging, hedonistic, and satisfying. They'll literally observe your pupillary dilation, flushing, heart rate, breathing, and more and tune on-the-fly generated content to literally be maximally engaging. There will be nothing else like it! It's an entirely new art form, literally like the Infinite Jest.
But, much like today, a decent chunk of people don't let their kids use smartphones. In the future where Experience Machines exist, some people will culturally bend away from them, and do the same for their kids, and they'll continue humanity's progress and evolution. Will the losses be massive? Yes, I'd estimate around 80% of all humanity. Is 20% enough to keep going, with AI assistance and robotics? Also yes.
Would a Butlerian Jihad be better? I honestly think that might take out MORE than 80%.
Yes, I thought about footnoting the BJ comment because 1) it assumes that AI/computers are bad, which is simply an assumption and 2) the reasons you said, the BJ was an extended miserable period (and I didn't want to have to figure out a very squiggly, back-and-forth line on the graph).
Now the latter part of your comment is interesting, and other parts of my thinking can see the logic. It's like a meta-level Irenaean theodicy on a species level scale.
But I do think it's more complex than that. For example, I don't "really" care if some kid in New Zealand becomes dependent on the EM, but I would deeply care if it was my daughter. Humans have various levels of obligations (the family, the community, the nation, etc.) and there is a part of me that doesn't just want to 'write off' a large segment of humanity.
> But I do think it's more complex than that. For example, I don't "really" care if some kid in New Zealand becomes dependent on the EM, but I would deeply care if it was my daughter.
Yeah, so that's the strong argument to be the "no smartphones" type parent now, and inculcate digital skepticism and epistemics around evaluating whether the entertainment you're consuming is adversarial or not.
Culture starts with families, after all.
> Humans have various levels of obligations (the family, the community, the nation, etc.) and there is a part of me that doesn't just want to 'write off' a large segment of humanity.
Who's to say their lives would be WORSE??
Think of it - status is fixed and zero sum. Material needs are basically solved everywhere in the developed world for the great majority of people, but people are more anxious and depressed than ever, because status and relationships are what matter, not easy calories. As technologies have widened perspectives and let people see into the long tails of humanity, the average person's ability to attain "status" has been diminishing rapidly. Everyone spends 8 hours a day watching attractive millionaires live amazing lives, on TV and Tik Tok and Insta. You used to be able to be the strongest or best at woodworking in your local group or community, but now you're nobody on basically any scale.
But inside the Infinite Jests? You can be the tippy top! You can have ALL the status! If you want luxury goods, you can have new luxury goods every minute! If you want peak experiences, you can have those every minute! Relationships? The AI minds behind the people you're interacting with know and "get you" better than any human ever could! It's a strict upgrade on literally every front.
I actually wrote a post about this, which walks that fine edge between "is this a good thing, or a bad thing?"
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/the-view-from-inside-the-80?r=17hw9h
Well, we are no smartphones parents! (Though easy for us to say now, as both of our children are under two, but I do believe this will be a hill that my wife and I proverbially die on).
To your latter point, there is an interesting tension here.
Because on one hand, what you're saying is akin to my response to the Simulation Hypothesis: So what? My ultimate ontology should be separate from the meaning that I derive from my experiences. Whether I am a simulation or a Child of God is irrelevant to the qualia of my every day experience. Playing with my daughters is just as fun either way. As Andre Malraux once said, "the deepest mystery isn't that we've found ourselves on this profusion of matter beneath the stars, but that from within ourselves, we can produce images powerful enough to deny our nothingness." (Quote might not be 100% right, was from memory).
But at the same time, I also have a base, instinctive feeling that I should be in the "base" layer of the world. I don't want to live in a simulation; I don't want to live in the metaverse. I want to be in "The World."
This probably feels like I am talking out of both sides of my mouth, and I don't know how to reconcile them.
> This probably feels like I am talking out of both sides of my mouth, and I don't know how to reconcile them.
I think my main differentiator here is "other minds," with a flagrantly species-ist twist. And it's based on metaphysics, so a castle built on sand, but ultimately I think judgments like this will always be aesthetic / metaphysical.
Let's just assume we're actually immortal, according to various religions or Tegmarkian infinity postulates. If there's some immortal, outside of space-time "you" out there, for everyone, the main reason to confine yourself to a given instantiation and mortality is probably to interact with other minds under agreed aggregate rules.
So literally the point of coming here is to find and discover and interact and impact the other minds we come across. Everyone from your friends and colleagues and family and kids, and everyone else you impact with your actions, positively and negatively.
And just personally, I think going into the EM sort of perverts that purpose. You'll be interacting with mostly artificial minds, that are tuned towards being the junk food equivalent of interactions with you. And interactions with other humans will fall off, because they're more full of friction, and don't understand you as well, and don't talk about the ideas you're interested in, in the rhetorical styles you like most, and so on. And I don't think sycophantically-tuned junk food minds really count for the purposes of "other interaction and benefit" that human minds would.
So that's my main metaphysical argument for preferring reality over EM's.