Becoming a gene machine - what should change?

You are a gene machine, but you are not merely a gene machine; you are not even 'merely' a gene machine.

Why should you act any differently at all? The day before you learned about these you valued x , y and z, the day after you still valued them. Whatever the causal source of those values you hold them all the same.

There is too much "should" in your text.

Evolution isn't intending to form creatures in a way that they preserve their genes. Evolutions knows no intentions.

The Christian god tells people what to do. Evolution doesn't tell people what to do. If you come from a Christian background it might make sense to replace the "shoulds" of Christianity with "shoulds" from Evolution. That isn't how it works.

Once you get rid of a god telling you what to do, you have to make your own decisions.

I think you may be confusing causation and purpose. With a question like "why do I exist?" it's pretty easy to miss that 'why' can have at least two meanings.

my genes ... are the only part of me that will outlive me

What about your memes? (See also: I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter.)

I don't think any of that follows. My personal change in opinion was this:

"Hm, shit, I'd better have kids." That was pretty much it.

What makes you think any of those conclusions are likely? They sound more like beliefs you already held, as suggested by the fact that all of them except for the last are, apparently, laudable, which you found reason to reinforce in genetics.

For example, animal rights. How does it follow that we should have greater empathy for other animals just because they're made of the same stuff as we are? I could see an opposing realization that animals are directly competing with us, and therefore fair game.

Well, one other way to look at it is that "you" are a self-modifying computer program who just happens to be operating on a neural net that evolved inside of biological self-replicating machine.

The fact that your body (which comes equipped with reproductive, digestive, and various locomotive and manipulating organs and appendages) happens to be running you as its operating system as opposed to running say... the mind of a dog, fish, gorilla, or stagnant vegetable simply means its survival chances are higher when it has someone intelligent at the wheel.

The body is essentially a self-replicating machines with all its immune system and digestive track and other bits to perform its needed self-replication. But alone it isn't capable of meeting its own needs without a mind (aka You) to help it maneuver through its environment. Plants have no minds because they only work through photosynthesis and absorbing nutrients from the soil, they also get eaten by herbivores en mass. Animals run primarily through instict, basically working like old-school computers on legs running some basic instinctive programming that is rather difficult to self-modify.

You are an intelligent self-aware optimization process that is currently operating on one of the best computing platforms that nature has managed to cobble together over millennial of evolution. Your basic human body, devoid of a personality and collection of acquired cultural memes, is little better than a mindless vegetable or a feral animal (sadly one devoid of claws or other natural defense mechanisms). Your body counts on YOU to help it operate its limbs and vocal chords to help it mover around and navigate an increasingly complicated world.

Fortunately, YOU are smart enough to learn about things like nutrition, exercise, medicine, and potentially various trans-human technologies that could help you maintain your body better than it could ever do on its own. If you have a heart condition that could kill you (and your body), you can find ways to cure it or get a replacement heart. If you find your condition incurable then you could potentially enact plans to prepare for your eventual death, ensure your progeny (or other humans) get the resources they need to survive, you could even donate your organs for transplant to improve the survivability of others.

Or you could invest in cryogenics to have yourself frozen and possibly revived and brought back to life later. If evolution had ever found a way for your body to reanimate itself after death then it would gladly have taken it (there are plenty of creatures who's bodies can regenerate limbs or survive freezing cold or poisons). As your bodys Operating System, it's your job to decide how to best improve both its and your own survival.

Or you could try downloading yourself into a completely new and better optimized body instead of your regular human one. If you try that... then I guess your mindless vegetative body won't complain.

You're not just a gene machine. Your gene machine is part of you. But you don't have genes for speaking English, tying your shoes, or buying food in a grocery store. Your genes are symbiotic with other replicators — cultural replicators — that provide those abilities.

(Yes, it's a symbiosis. Human genes that find themselves in machines lacking a symbiotic language replicator, don't tend to get replicated. Or, in other words, people who can't talk [or sign, etc.] don't get laid very much.)

And if your genes do get replicated, you'll probably care if your cultural replicators spread along with them. (You wouldn't want to have kids and have them raised without language or education, right?)

I've just noticed the title -- “Becoming a gene machine”? Er... Nope.

As a result of understanding how the human condition came to be, you might become less susceptible to the naturalistic fallacy. For example, I think the majority of LW takes a stronger anti-death position than most people. Possibly this is because most people have some sense that humans are somehow meant to have finite lifespans. LW tends to reject this in view of the fact that our finite lifespans result from the mindless and uncaring process of evolution. When we realize that there is no particular reason for evolution to have ordered the world the way we would want it ordered, we are free to decide whether we in fact want to reorder it.

Reproduce as much as possible. A quick hack to this in the present day, if you're male, is donating as much sperm as possible. My UK experiences in this thread. For females, I understand egg donation is rather more fraught and there's actually a lot less demand, but I have only anecdote to this effect.

they are the only part of me that will outlive me

Physically, atoms are part of you and will outlive you. As patterns of information (like genes), books and LW posts you write, memories you create in other minds, photographs you make of yourself, will all outlive you. Lots of other examples might be given. You also have the power to make your genes not outlive you. Why single out genes or care about them?

I am simply a machine built to ensure the preservation of my genes, and that they are the only part of me that will outlive me.

Some hold that we are not just genetic propagators, but memetic propagators as well. That link also talks about how technology may be the third replicator. Eg, technology is literally evolving. Memes aren't good or bad, they just are.

If you hold that humans are not just genetic propagators, but memetic propagators (and technological propagators), then the what will remain of you isn't just your genes. The memes you use/invent and the technology you use/invent will outlive you as well. Acting in a way to promote the replication of one of the replicators is no more important than promoting any of the other replicators. An idea or a technology being born from you is just as much an immortalization as a child. It just doesn't feel that way because genes have a billion year hold on you and grab you at an instinctual level.

Keep in mind, if the singularity hits then 'outliving you' becomes a hard prospect when 'you' can outlive stars. Should you upload, your genes will live on only in they way they affected your personality. When that happens, the only part of you to remain and reproduce will be your memes. I feel like this is far more pure a replication than any crude duplication with DNA or RNA could ever be.

Just because you were originally built to be a machine to replicate genes doesn't mean that is all that you will ever be.

In my case, awareness of evolutionary psychology has made me more skeptical of morality, of "should" as a moral command. I know whatever else is going on that I feel most of my "shoulds" because my ancestors who didn't were not as successful at reproducing as my ancestors who didn't. If aliens enslaved us and set about efficiently breeding us to meet their purposes, we would not likely internalize their goals as our goals. Until they managed to selectively breed that tendency in to us. So instead of aliens, we have been enslaved by a mindless natural selection, why internalize its goals?

I am less likely to feel depressed or guilty about percieved lack of success. This constant striving is a feature that natural selection likes, but it sorta sucks for the individual. Sure, you drive yourself mercilessly and you get more done and in the past that was the difference between almost surviving and thriving. But if I can survive without that grinding internal demand to do better, I'll shut the damn thing off with medication and be personally better off for it.

Its extremely interesting to contemplate whether what makes you different is a feature or a bug. Is it something natural selection would be "wise" (in its mindless way) to include in future generations, or is it, as is much more likely statistically, something that reduces human's fitness if generalized?

We know from the selfish gene and the moral animal that human social connection is a primary driver of our fitness ( a lone human or pair of humans is not a successful animal in the wild). Much, perhaps all of what we call morality has to do with internalized rules for how to interact with other humans. Knowing these evolved, I consider it educational to contemplate how the various rules helped us survive. How did they improve cooperation, or at least the kind of cooperation that was useful?

Natural selection is dumb, there is no reason to think it is looking for a "uniform" human genome which is optimized for survival if replicated. Indeed, we have the obvious man-woman split. Maybe other variations are features of the survival of the whole of us (and therefore the survival of our selfish genes). Maybe we need a few sociopaths to run big companies and countries without the survival-sapping restraints that the rest of us, who make great followers and cannon fodder, have. Maybe the optimum physicist, general, politician, and businessman really are genetically different from each other, and a human genome which becomes too homogeneous will be out-competed by groups of humans that stay more varied.

It is also fascinating to contemplate "gaming the system." The dodo bird lays its eggs in another bird's nest and its chicks are raised by the other birds as their own. What do our genes tell us about adultery? Rape? Dishonesty for seduction? Cuckoldry? I have read that leaders of many countries and companies are sometimes psychopaths. Maybe a society of 100% psychopaths would fail. But would a society of 1% psychopaths have any advantages over one with 0%? Do we need immoral leaders, unconstrained by conventional concerns for their fellow humans, to organize a group of humans and allow that group to compete in a less restrained way against the other groups?

The "shoulds" I take from evolutionary psychology are 1) there often is a survival reason something is a certain way, even if I find that something morally odious, 2) don't "worship" your moral tendencies or beliefs: they didn't come from god they were just what worked better than available alternatives, 3) when there is a feature of the world you hate, this may be a map-territory problem: genetics had to optimize you by giving you a simple map for a complex world, and that map may not work all the places you try to use it.