True Optimisation

Hi there; welcome to LessWrong! If you haven't done so already, I recommend reading the post on Applause Lights. You might also want to make a top-level comment in the current welcome thread.

At a glance, the thrust of this post is a bit too vague to be a Discussion post in and of itself -- I think that it would be better suited to an Open Thread. I'm aware that I'm likely not being clear enough to bridge the inferential gap here, but I hope that the pointer is better than nothing. With that, I'm tapping out.

but on the other hand, how would we feed all those people? What if the world's resources run out? As a transhumanist, I believe that we can use science to prevent things like death, but nature wasn't designed to support a population like that.

If we enter an era where we're able to put a stop to the aging process, we'll mostly also be in a massively more affluent time, where concerns about resources running out etc would be much less relevant.

1. In an infinite universe everything has already happened, is happening now (here and elsewhere) and will happen again later. This includes the reassembly of you with a memory of all your past reassemblings. In a universe that is merely large, not infinite, you still have a chance of this happening.

2. Some things are true or false no matter what my preference or needs might be. I never prosper by dwelling on these things overly. Better to visit a sick friend in the hospital than to weep about the sun exploding in my distant future.

For the overpopulation problem: stop having kids.

Scientists and transhumanists are still groping in the dark when they make theories about what a thought is or what a person is. In particular, the more they insist on limiting their theories to our current understanding of matter and the brain, the more wooden and false those theories become. You are probably better off thinking that a person is an energy vortex in the quantum fields of the brain, and that a thought is produced in the vortex by those electrical impulses - and even better if you can think of that as just a science fiction image of something we don't understand yet, rather than the literal truth.

One virtue of this "vortex" picture is that it pictures a person as a single whole. If a person is to live, the vortex has to survive. Maybe you could record brain activity, then start up a new vortex (however that is done) and induce similar experiences and thoughts by playing back the recording; but if you go by physical continuity, that is a new person, not the old one.

Outer space is the traditional transhumanist answer to the tension between infinite life extension and a finite Earth. But no death, ever, is a very tall order. Things break in the physical world. In the short term, our experiments in imitating and rejuvenating human beings are likely to produce entities that are more brittle than natural humans, and that will exhibit a disturbing deficit of humanness in some way. And there will even be technological subcultures that embrace that less-than-humanness as "good enough" - so strong is the desire for more life. Just as you have clung to the idea of an afterlife, others will cling to a particular technology or philosophy.

Life is tragic and mysterious, but the idea that death makes it genuinely unbearable is rare, and rarely sticks around in a person's mind. The will to survive keeps people at their jobs (with a lot of moaning and bitching), and the desire for sex and for children keeps them reproducing, and apparently that's enough to have kept the human show on the road. It's not as if we're all still here because someone once figured out an actual reason why it makes sense to keep going, or someone seriously calculated that the good of continuing outweighs the bad. Perhaps it will all resolve, a little further down the line; we'll have the power to change things, and the knowledge to know what we're doing. Or perhaps that hope will be dashed too.