Chat Exchange:
<BJKlein> Did you recieve my email about the ImmInst Book Project? <Eliezer> Whenever I attempt to write a book chapter it always takes at least a month, usually much more. <BJKlein> what about your speech.. <Eliezer> you may include it if so desired <BJKlein> i'll let the editing team know.. <BJKlein> i suspect it will be warmly received <BJKlein> would you happen to have a finalized draft available? <Eliezer> you don't have it? <BJKlein> just wondering if you may have made any changes.. <Eliezer> I sent you the most recent draft I have .. <BJKlein> Thanks, I'll let the editing team know
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I once heard a friend of mine by the name of Lionel talking to a newcomer to transhumanism, and this person had remarked that he wasn't afraid of dying. And Lionel said: "Well, you hear a lot about overcoming your fear of death, but how many people have tried to overcome their fear of living forever?"
As transhumanists, I expect that most of us at some point have had to deal with the rationalizations that people develop to suppress their fear of death - the idea that "Death gives meaning to life" and other comforting lies. Personally, I do believe that the fear of death should be counted as a personal flaw. Choosing to live does not require that I be afraid to die; it requires only that I value life. But resolving that philosophical question is not an urgent matter; the important thing is making sure we have at least a billion years in which to argue about it.
Now living for a billion years is a scary thought. It's not as scary as the thought of living forever, which may or may not be permitted by physical law, but even a mere thousand years is a scary thought if you really think about what that would mean for you as a person. Even if you keep all the neurons in the brain alive, the human mind is not designed to handle a thousand years of memories. You cannot stay a child even for so much as a thousand years; you must, in that time, at least begin to grow up. But if life is a good thing, should we get scared at the prospect of a huge amount of life?
What distinguishes transhumanism as a philosophy is that it wholeheartedly embraces the goal of success instead of making excuses for failure. There are many philosophical explanations for why life must suck in order to be meaningful; why all the pain and death and catastrophe, and the minor annoyances that drain your life force, are, somehow, "necessary". All the standard excuses have a strained, forced quality to them, like a theory stretched to explain evidence that just doesn't fit. Now transhumanism, transhumanism just says: "This sucks, let's fix it." That's all. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.
Life is better than death, health is better than sickness, happiness is better than pain, knowledge is better than ignorance, and when you see something wrong, you don't rationalize it, you fix it. This is all very straightforward, so what's so special about transhumanism? Actually, there is nothing special about transhumanism! Presently most philosophies have a special additional clause that causes them to react oddly to advanced technologies, as if, for example, anything that involves genes is scary. For example, there's the possibly apocryphal story about the person who was warned not to eat a tomato "because it has genes in it". In transhumanism this special yuck reaction is missing, and such technologies are just an ordinary part of the natural universe. Since this is the case, if you can use tissue screening to save a four-year-old child's life or golden wheat to prevent blindness, why on Earth wouldn't you? This choice does not require a special enthusiasm for technology, only that the usual sense of future shock be missing.
Similarly, ordinary humanist philosophies will say that life extension is good up to age eighty or whatever, but if you talk about living to the age of two hundred, suddenly there's this special reaction of surprise, of future shock, because the philosopher hasn't considered that possibility before. While a transhumanist will just say, sure, life extension to eighty is good, life extension to two hundred is better, life extension to a thousand is better yet, and so on. It does not require a special drive toward immortality to say this, just self-consistency. Wanting to live to be a thousand is not a special and unusual desire that needs explaining; it is just ordinary common sense after the future shock has been stripped out. So transhumanism is just the philosophy that says that life is good, happiness is good, knowledge and freedom and intelligence and beauty are good, and this does not change for arbitrarily large amounts of life and beauty. Transhumanism is not a philosophy with a special adoration of technology; it is just the philosophy which says that technology is a normal way of achieving our aspirations, and this does not change even when you are talking about extremely advanced technology - biotech, nanotech, whatever; there's nothing exciting about it, it's just an ordinary part of the natural universe.
The question then becomes: What beautiful and worthwhile occupations can you find to fill the next million years? This question, of course, is the province of Fun Theory. Fun Theory is the branch of science, or rather, wild speculation, that we use to answer questions such as: How much fun is there in the universe? Will we ever run out of fun? Are we having fun yet? Could we be having more fun? Is fun scalable? Does it require an exponentially greater amount of computation to support a linear increase in fun?
I am not going to present a rigorous theory of fun. This presentation is too short to present a rigorous theory of fun; they only give you 20 minutes. Very unfair. Also, I don't have a rigorous theory of fun. So instead let's look at some things that are fun. For example, why is being in love fun? This question was recently answered when scientists discovered that being in love stimulates the same brain centers that are activated by chocolate. So this would be one possible answer to the question of "What is fun?" - we could say that fun involves a certain kind of brain chemistry. I do not think this is a good answer, or if you select this as an answer, then you are leaving out something important, whether or not you call it "fun". Why? Well, suppose that we ran a little wire into one of the brain's pleasure centers, and hooked the wire up to a button, and gave you that button, and then you spent the next million years pressing that button - just that, doing nothing else, because no matter what else you did, it didn't deliver as much pleasure. I consider this to be a highly dystopian scenario - a sterile, dead end. It seems more like counterfeit fun than the genuine article. Having your pleasure centers artificially stimulated, "wireheading" as Larry Niven called it, is not philosophically acceptable fun. That's what we're looking for; not just "fun", however we end up defining that, but philosophically acceptable fun. To have good, clean fun, or even wicked, dirty fun, it seems like you need to be doing something and getting somewhere.
What about eating cookies? Why do we eat cookies? It's certainly not because we're hungry. We eat cookies because fifty thousand years ago before the invention of agriculture, sugar and fat were the limiting resources. So we evolved to prefer sugar and fat, and we still prefer sugar and fat today, in modern times, when people are dying from too many calories instead of too few, because evolution hasn't had time to catch up. So are "fun" activities just those activities that your ancestors performed, the way that men watch football games because it involves competing tribes throwing things at each other? Is personal fulfillment to be found in harmony with your ancestral environment? It would explain why new, modern-day jobs such as accounting have the annoying property of draining people's life force. Of course this will only remain true of humans who retain their ancestral neurology; if twenty-first century civilization stayed around for a couple of million years, humans would eventually evolve to find personal fulfillment in doing income tax forms. This also strikes me as a dystopia, although it is less dystopian than eating pringles and watching football.
Okay, what about the Rubik's Cube? Why is solving the Rubik's Cube fun? It's not an ancestral activity and it does not directly mess with your brain chemistry, so why do we find it fun? The Cube doesn't deliver any kind of sensual reward when you solve it. It isn't even a competitive game. It's just pure math, group theory embodied in a physical cube. And we, as humans, can have fun playing with that. It's something to be proud of.
But the Rubik's Cube contains only a limited amount of fun. You use it up, and then it's gone. At first solving the Cube is fun, then it is boring. What changes? Does the Cube itself change? Do they ship Rubik's Cubes from the factory containing only a limited amount of fun, so that you have to buy a new one every three months? No; the Cube is a mathematical concept and it is eternal. The Cube does not change. You change. The person who finishes solving the Cube is not the same person who started it. The person who picked up the Cube for the first time may have known nothing about this class of puzzle, or about transformations that move only a few cubes around and leave the rest constant. When you finish the Cube you have not only learned something about the Cube, you have learned something about how to solve this kind of problem - you may even have learned something about learning. Once you have learned what the Cube has to teach you, solving the Cube becomes easy - so easy that it isn't fun anymore. In having fun with the Cube, you outgrow it, and outgrowing the Cube is part of the fun.
But what do you do when you've outgrown the Cube? Well, you can find, online, a Java applet that implements a fourth-dimensional version of the Rubik's Cube - a Rubik's Tesseract. I do not understand this puzzle. I am still trying to figure out how the pieces move. If I had not already learned the principles involved in the Rubik's Cube, the Rubik's Tesseract would be completely incomprehensible. So you solve one problem, outgrow it, and then that gives you the abilities to move on to the next problem. And when you've solved every possible form the Rubik's Cube can take, generalized on a level where the entire class of problems becomes uninteresting, then what? Then you move on to the next class of problems at a higher level of complexity. The smarter you are, the faster you generalize, and the faster you become bored with any given problem. Yes! The smarter you are, the faster you get bored; that is how it works. But when you get smarter, you can perceive new areas of the problem space that would have been incomprehensible to you before. Humans would get bored with chimpanzee fun extremely fast, but the space of human fun is enormously larger than the space of chimpanzee fun. If you have ten bits, you have a thousand possibilities; if you have twenty bits, you have a million possibilities; if you have thirty bits, you have a billion possibilities. I conjecture that the size of Fun Space grows roughly exponentially as the amount of intelligence.
So there is an immense amount of fun out there to be had. Even for humans, the size of human Fun Space is so large that no one individual could possibly succeed in experiencing all the possible kinds of human fun. One person cannot fulfill more than a tiny, infinitesimal fraction of the human space of possibilities. Why? Because one person's lifespan is too short? Of course not. I plan to still be alive after the last star in the Milky Way is dead. But even if you live forever, you will not be able to explore more than a tiny fraction of human fun space before you outgrow it. And that, of course, is the scary part - growing up.
Right now, we are each of us growing old. Not growing up. Growing old. We are all very slowly dying. Not our bodies. Us. We lose neurons as we grow old, instead of adding on new capacity. We lose vitality, creativity, flexibility, energy, even personal health as we age. This is not a feature; it is a bug. It is a very unnatural thing to lose neurons as you age. We should be adding on more and more brain capacity as we grow up, to hold more and more experiences and more and more complex skills. To shrink as we age borders on the perverted. This is not the way things are supposed to be, and at some point we shall have do a little rearranging. Once that bug is fixed, however, once we are truly growing up instead of growing old, there will only be so much time you can remain human. If every day you learn something new, there will come a time, after a sufficiently large number of days, when you have learned so much that you can pick up a Rubik's Tesseract and see it as a small, trivial thing, to be solved with a few flicks and cast aside. And if that prospect does not scare you, you must have a very well-integrated personality.
This leads us to the fear of growing up. The fear of growing up is the third major cause of the fear of living forever, after the repressed fear of death and the fear of boredom. In our time, the fear of growing up is actually a minor academic fad, except that it is not called the fear of growing up; it is called the fear of posthumanity.
The funny thing is that transhumanists were using the word "posthuman" long before folks like Francis Fukuyama tried to make it into a scare word. We were not particularly scared by it, even though we were using the word "posthuman" to indicate people who had grown up into Jupiter Brains - that is, people whose minds are so large that they have to run themselves on computers the size of Jupiter. This, generally speaking, is what old-time transhumanists mean by "posthuman". Francis Fukuyama seems to use the term "posthuman" to indicate someone with a couple of minor genetic hacks, which by our standards is such a tiny alteration as to not be worth noticing. And yet Fukuyama is scared of his posthumans. One wonders what he would think of ours.
Not every change is an improvement. But every improvement is, necessarily, a change. To move forward you must move. The road goes on forever, and there is no ending to it. Are you ashamed to be a postchild or a postchimpanzee? When Fukuyama reinvented the word "posthuman", he imbued it with an intellectual sleight-of-hand; the good old naturalistic fallacy, that "is" implies "ought". Human nature is a mix of light and darkness. Hitler was not an inhuman monster, he was a human monster; the Library of Alexandria was built, and burned, by one and the same species. Only by judging myself, by not being content to rest where I am, can I move forward; and these rules are not suspended when I judge parts of myself that are a part of universal human nature. Here again it is transhumanism that is the simpler case; it is a philosophy that contains no special exemption from moral judgment for evils that are embedded in human nature. I am not going to stop debugging myself when I run across bugs that are part of human nature. I guess that makes me a posthumanist.
Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change. Not every form of posthumanity is a nice place to live, but all sufficiently nice places to live are necessarily posthuman. Let's make the future a nice place to live.
