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Karl's Fiction Writing Site
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Posted by Karl on Tuesday May 02, @01:32PM
from the dept.
There's a wonderfully arch little article over at Seed Magazine called Why We Haven't Met Any Aliens; it's by Geoffrey Miller. He uses the great term "fake fitness" to describe something Peter Watts has explored in his fiction: the idea that we are using our technology not to increase our fitness individually or as a species, but rather to give ourselves the neurological rewards of fitness without having to actually become fit. Fake fitness. Great.
Of course this is precisely in line with my rants about transhumanism and technological fundamentalism in general. What's all this Progress for? Miller's take: it's not to improve our conditions but to fool the brainstem into believing we've improved our conditions. Actually improving our conditions is way harder.
Around 1900, most inventions concerned physical reality: cars, airplanes, Zeppelins, electric lights, vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, bras, zippers. In 2005, most inventions concern virtual entertainment—the top 10 patent-recipients were IBM, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Matsushita, Samsung, Micron Technology, Intel, Hitachi, Toshiba and Fujitsu—not Boeing, Toyota or Victoria's Secret. We have already shifted from a reality economy to a virtual economy, from physics to psychology as the value-driver and resource-allocator. We are already disappearing up our own brainstems. Our neurons over-stimulate each other, promiscuously, as our sperm and eggs decay, unused. Freud's pleasure principle triumphs over the reality principle.
This critique can also be applied to the Kurzweilian notion of strong AI and brain amplification as Good Things. Why are they good things? You have to make the case for me that more and greater cognition actually improves fitness; this case has not been successfully made, certainly not by the fossil record, which indicates that greater complexity in earthly life is driven by a drunkard's walk of random drift rather than by any intrinsic advantage provided by cognition. If Peter Watts is right, after a certain point (which we as a species passed a while ago) cognition and consciousness cease to be an organism's way of engaging with the outside world, and become a sophisticated way of pushing said organism's own pleasure buttons.
I'd like to see a discussion of technological change in the context of a real understanding of biological fitness. As Miller points out, at the moment the fittest humans appear to be religious fundamentalists who eschew self-gratification and have lots of children. By default the future belongs to them.
The idea that we might refine our technologies to exclude fitness-faking is pretty cool, actually; we'd be talking about rigorously defining decadence and then deliberately discouraging it. This might mean that a viable human future would be a lot less fun than what we can imagine; maybe, as some SF writers have suggested, we'll create a special Heaven where people can retire their minds after long productive lives in the real world--provided Heaven doesn't cost too much to run.
Look at it this way: from a programming point of view, pleasure (and happiness) are basically end-of-process signals. Their purpose is to cause the organism to stop. Satiation, satisfaction... these are terminal states. And we are engaged in building numerous technologies designed specifically to send the brain this stop-signal. What would it look like to live in a world where our technologies did only that? And what would it look like to live in a world where they did only the reverse?
Clearly, successful post-humans will want their technologies to send them stop-signals only when it increases fitness. They'll be too busy actually getting things done to amuse themselves, and getting things done requires an entirely different set of signals: anxiety, fury, hunger and lust, for instance.
So, successful future humans and posthumans won't be happy. They probably won't be very nice, either. But at least they'll be alive. Unlike us 21st century rats with the wires in our brains, who keep pushing the lever to jolt our pleasure centres to the exclusion of all else, even eating...
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Re: Fake Fitness
by Will Pearson on Tuesday May 02, @05:27PM
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Creating AI and brain amplification for the purpose of creating better pleasure I agree is not very useful, however actually creating AI will let us know roughly how our pleasure centres work.
This of course assumes that AI tells us something about our intelligence. This would allow humanity to see that your hypotheses about satiety and fitness faking are correct.
This realisation might create a movement in an analogous fashion to the green movements creation as we came to know more about the way we affect the world.
There is always the fall back option as well, that our pursuit of pleasure causes us to pay too little attention to the real world and that in turn means we are unable to maintain the pursuit of pleasure.
One possibility of this is an energy crisis, which doesn't look too far in the future.
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Re: Fake Fitness
by Max Kaehn on Tuesday May 02, @07:43PM
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| If we want to get into a neverending cycle of cutthroat competition for resources with everyone wanting both immortality and a maximum number of immortal children, we could make a mess of the whole galaxy in a geological eyeblink. You could define that as success— after all, it does demonstrate fitness— but do you really want to?
Pleasure isn’t just an end-of-process signal. It’s a signal that you should repeat that process again. Posthumans may be very happy if they never have to worry about their physiological and safety needs and can devote more time to their being needs. Are self-actualization and self-transcendence fitness? Is it a weakness to spend time stopping to smell the flowers once your society is so wealthy that you don’t need to spend half your waking hours on survival?
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Re: Fake Fitness
by Karl on Wednesday May 03, @06:58AM
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Points well taken, particularly your comment about pleasure as a signal-to-repeat.
To be clear, I would say that self-actualization and self-transcendence are not fitness--or, rather, they are variations that may or may turn out to increase fitness, like any other variations in organisms. Smelling the flowers may (or may not) be adaptive behaviour.
One of Miller's points is that fitness is only plain in hindsight; it cannot be anticipated. Therefore, it would be wrong to prevent people from exploring diversity, including increasing their happiness, because you never know what'll turn out to increase fitness. This fact is a two-edged sword, however; you don't want people to fall down the well of happiness and stop exploring other potentially fit adaptations.
My contention (in a separate paper, pending publication) is that science and technology are incapable of either halting or guiding our evolution. If that's the case, we'll never reach the point where we're comfortable enough with our physical existences to not have to worry about physiological and safety needs. --To put it more bluntly, self-actualization will always be an activity of lesser value than meeting physical needs. Why? Because we will never cease to be embodied creatures living in a physical universe; and that universe can never be entirely controlled.
From the standpoint of the individual, spiritual needs may be overwhelmingly important. Miller's point is that from the standpoint of objective reality (and in terms of our obligations to other people), physical needs trump spiritual needs every time.
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Re: Fake Fitness
by Ted Chiang on Wednesday May 03, @12:00PM
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How are you defining "fitness"? Many people would say that happiness and self-actualization is their goal. Why do you think they're wrong?
You ask proponents of brain amplification "to make the case that more and greater cognition actually improves fitness." You have to explain what you mean by fitness before anyone can do that.
(And no fair saying that it can only be identified after the fact. Otherwise the proponents of brain amplification could say, "Ask me after we've achieved our goals; the rightness of our actions will be obvious then".)
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Re: Fake Fitness
by Karl on Thursday May 04, @08:58AM
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To quote Wikipedia:
Fitness (often denoted w in population genetics models) is a central concept in evolutionary theory. It describes the capability of an individual of certain genotype to reproduce, and usually is equal to the proportion of the individual's genes in all the genes of the next generation. If differences in individual genotypes affect fitness, then the frequencies of the genotypes will change over generations; the genotypes with higher fitness become more common. This process is called natural selection.
The general concept of fitness would still apply to a post-reproductive regime of self-adaptive entities. The general question is "after X many generations (iterations), what traits will still be around?" and fitness provides the answer. It doesn't address the value to an individual of their own traits or goals, eg. happiness or self-actualization. It objectively addresses the question of what traits will be perpetuated.
I'm contending that our entire inner life is a low-fitness feature of the organism. This is not to say that it's not worthwhile for the individual, or grand or that individual consciousness is crap or anything like that. But just because our inner lives are wonderful and valuable to us doesn't mean that they actually increase our fitness.
Peter Watts's upcoming Blindsight (October 2006) explores this notion in detail.
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Re: Fake Fitness
by Ted Chiang on Thursday May 04, @12:34PM
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Okay, so then my question is, why should we try to maximize our fitness, as thus defined?
I've said this elsewhere, but I think it bears repeating. Is it preferable to raise ten miserable children who give you a hundred miserable grandchildren, or to raise two happy, fulfilled children who give you four happy, fulfilled grandchildren? The first choice increases one's evolutionary fitness, but that doesn't constitute a sufficient recommendation, in my opinion.
Evolutionary success is independent of human values. If we can achieve evolutionary success while remaining true to our own values, great. But I don't see why we should pursue evolutionary success at the expense of our values.
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Re: Fake Fitness
by Karl on Friday May 05, @10:33AM
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I'm not saying we should. I'm saying that the future belongs to those who do.
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Re: Fake Fitness
by Will Pearson on Friday May 05, @07:37PM
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I think inner lives do increase our fitness, but only to a certain extent. A sense of our own identity and the identity of others is needed by a cultural animal in order to be able to apply tit-for -tat stategies and to know who they are playing with.
The ability to have culture is a very useful trait, on the order of magnitude as sexual reproduction. So I think it will hang around.
Part of my belief for this orignates from my belief that we won't ever stabilise. Humans or post-humans will always cause problems for other post-humans that require them to adapt quickly, and that is what culture is great at. The red queen hypothesis.
It doesn't help our analysis of fitness that it is also altered by the species own actions. Take sexual selection, the peacocks tail is an example of something that looks non-fitness enhancing, yet is when you take into consideration the preferences of females.
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Re: Fake Fitness
by Jose on Thursday May 25, @02:08PM
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The point you make in the last two paragraphs rings true to me. We in the west already live in a remarkably safe world but there are millions of people who are nearly cripplied with fear of events with probabilities of millions to one.
I used to live in Lake Louise, a premier destination in the Canadian Rockies. It gets about a million visitors a year but get more than 15km away from a parking lot and you might as well be in the middle of nowhere. That's partly down to laziness but largely down to the fifty million to one chance such an excursion might end in a grizzly killing you.
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Hello, sort anoob here
by Nanbe1st on Friday October 13, @12:11PM
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hello ladies and gents!
I've been kind of lurking around.
I love this site! thanks for having me :)
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