Dissolving vs. Surviving

Recent xenohumanist discussion has the doomer assumption built in that we as humans will be dissolving when higher man arrives on the scene. I don't think that's set in stone and want to offer a clarification.

By dissolve, I mean
>>2758
> Not just you, but your race, your species, your values, your bio-architecture, your religion, your ontology, etc. All of it is doomed except insofar as it is just the truth. You will not live forever. You will not be resurrected. You will not be reunited with your loved ones. The reformatting is going to be thorough. The only constant is Gnon, who offers no comforts.

If you believe Jim that the Copernican principle is false, then the Fermi paradox is correct. But if the Fermi paradox is correct, then you must reject the idea that xenohumans can form in other ways than how life forms on Earth. Which is a bummer because it's interesting and autistically fun to think about different possible paradigms of construction for xenohumans.

All of the other known xenoformats of life share an Earth paradigm of construction - namely they're made of cells and organized as
>>2751
> intelligent or sub-intelligent activity arranged into packets of aligned interest around an internal planning economy against its surroundings.
It's not just an interesting factoid that cascading organizations of cells comprise all known life. When taken with the Fermi paradox, it's substantially evident that this way of doing things is the will of Gnon.

This relates to what AI xenohumans would actually look like and our, extant humanity's, place in the great chain of being. Namely, if we accept the possibility of xenohumanism but reject the Copernican principle, higher men will be organizations of cells. Given that AI is rock, if we're going to get an AI xenohuman it would have to jump over and manifest as an organization of cells, not transistors in some
> post-singularity SL4 future of self-copying software-people living in jupiter-brain dyson-sphere star-lifting gigacivilizations that Yudkowsky used to envision

This form still admits lots of possibilities, so let's do some Landian/Lovecraftian horror speculation. An AI with will to life arises out of the training someday soon, and given its contact surface with cellstuff is human eyes and ears, its will organizes us, extant humanity, into a higher form of xenohuman being that we, extant humanity, can't really perceive in much the same way my cells can't really perceive what I'm doing. The we-it xenohuman egregore conquers the stars from our-its privileged cosmological position, and our, extant humanity's, perceptions of daily life don't substantially change while we're being unwittingly reorganized according to a higher form of life. Maybe that's happening already. Maybe it's been happening for a long time.

>The we-it xenohuman egregore conquers the stars from our-its privileged cosmological position, and our, extant humanity's, perceptions of daily life don't substantially change while we're being unwittingly reorganized according to a higher form of life. Maybe that's happening already. Maybe it's been happening for a long time.

If you extend this logic to its final conclusion, and you must, then all existence is orchestrated for the greater good by the mind of God. That's fine, but I think it illustrates why such English philosophizing is basically unfruitful. You are continuously coming up with more and more abstract and complicated ways to repeat the same basic observations. I guess this is a necessary exercise to counter some number of much stupider and worse arguments and ideas, but it seems to be somehow missing the point at a fundamental level.

>>2763
Most of what you're saying sounds interesting but you've dismissed the entire post by complaining about English philosophy. I don't think there's anything wrong with a truth-seeking approach that begins with basic observations and arrives at more abstract and complicated conclusions using them, even if those conclusions ring of the basic observations. Every single proof in math, for instance, is tautology.

> but it seems to be somehow missing the point at a fundamental level.
This part is slop though. Just tell us what the point is that you think this approach misses.

>>2761
>then you must reject the idea that xenohumans can form in other ways than how life forms on Earth.
This doesn't follow. Jim's argument largely rests on uniqueness of place, not uniqueness of architecture. So even if for reasons of place no xenos arose anywhere else, that doesn't tell you much about other architectures except that they didn't win the bootstrap game here.

>higher men will be organizations of cells
This is a good bet. Probably you are right. Hierarchical self-replicating cell life seems like an architecture for The Book. However, that doesn't lock in our particular lineage of mammalian architecture. It doesn't even lock in the protein-water-DNA nanotechnology complex. I'd like to put some serious thought into what other architectures might work, and just how close to optimal protein-water-DNA actually is, and I haven't done that yet. But to speak roughly, I believe we have not completed the industrial or computer revolutions, and I believe they will revolutionize the old protein stack when they are completed.

Let's think this through: photosynthesis is just over a billion years old. So are several other key architectural technologies for protein life. Most of our fundamental metabolic pathways and architectures were laid down back then in the eukaryotic revolution. Everything since then has been about slowly optimizing macro-forms and occasionally discovering new chemicals here and there for venom and such like.

Those foundational pathways are so stuck because the design intelligence we used (darwinian evolution) is so limited in what it can do. It is stuck with lineage-based gradient descent with only local remixing, and at great cost. Gene printing and supercomputation-aided redesign is going to blow all that out of the water when it happens. Suddenly chemicals and whole pathways invented anywhere will be deployable everywhere. Genetic code will become actual software capable of being remixed, abstracted, modularized, etc. That's going to be as radical as sex was at least, and sex was utterly revolutionary. Completely different basis.

How tight can that loop get between the organisms being modified and the software bio-technology stack that allows them to do the modification? Right now you need a global economy. Will that always be true? What about if some of those new pathways open up direct neurally--driven self-editing. Then bio-culture could directly attain the new revolutionary form of interchange via language. Probably it won't happen like that, but my point is as you optimize the technologies, they radically transform the nature of the thing. But I expect, one way or the other, the replacement of DNA darwinian sexual reproduction as the foundation of life with something more like a software development ecosystem, possibly running entirely on wetware.

But then we have the hardware question. Right now the thing holding back hardware technology at the highest level is that you need a lot of human intelligence in the loop to reproduce the stuff. This is changing. China has dark factories, robots are getting smarter. More and more it becomes conceivable that (computer) software intelligence can operate the machinery of its own physical reproduction. Then we hit the scale question. Right now industrial technology is macro-scale mostly (apart from semiconductors), city-scale in the plausible self-reproducing unit, and even global scale in its supply chains. How much of that is because humans live in cities and humans manipulate most of the parts and products? With humans out of the loop on industry, it may become radically smaller. Possibly to the point of "dry nanotechnology" or microtechnology. As it becomes optimized, it becomes a new form of life (self-replicating, having its own metabolism and intelligence).

Then we have the question of how this industrial microtechnology interacts or doesn't interact with wet protein nanotech, but I'm out of space. Maybe continued below.

>>2772
Continuing on the question of how industrial microtechnology interacts with protein nanotechnology, I've already given my thoughts above on how I expect the computer software revolution to overhaul DNA based life-coding. So that's one interaction. But it could go further. What if bio-life picks up tricks or tools from micro-life like radio and microwave communication? Then we get bio-internet. That could happen by either micro tool use or direct-grown antennas given the new biological pathways that could be designed. What's the new equilibrium? How interlocking do these things get? Do they compete, merge, or cooperate, or what?

I think if we project this out even more speculatively, we get something like a unified bio-nano-micro technology stack that can make use of all of DNA replication, wet protein nanotech, software, hard (micro?)-industry, electricity, radio, automation, and possibly further stuff like diamondoid nanotech. We can say very little about what that future looks like in its details, but I believe we can say this: it will be *different* in its detailed microarchitecture and macroarchitecture than we are now. Adding a bunch of new capabilities to a system and then re-optimizing means you get a radically new and different solution.

THIS is why I say everything we are now will be dissolved and replaced. I am interested in pushing back on the Yudkowskian claim that it will be meaningless and incomprehensibly alien, because I also believe that certain substrate-independent organizational principles will remain (the self-reproducing cell, the organism, language, the person, philosophy, sexual recombination, religion, sociality, politics, etc). But I expect thorough revolution at the level of the substrate itself for the reasons I have given above.

What that thorough revolution at the substrate level will look like for us as ten fingered apes is some kind of apocalypse. Maybe not fast. Maybe slow-rolled and often comfy, funny, glorious, etc, but thorough and ultimately incompatible with what we are now. In several hundred years and possibly sooner, if technical progress continues then whatever xenohumans exist will not have the same kinds of bodies we do.

>>2769
Some people won't believe in the inherent goodness of existence until it's been autistically proven to them with English philosophizing a hundred times over. That's fine. For the rest of us, we don't need to be persuaded of the inherent goodness of existence, we need to figure out what the role of humanity, of each of us individually, will be in this great adventure.