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There's a lot of writing here, but the philosophical method is more or less one of dismissing things that FEEL absurd to the writer. If you allow yourself to do

There's a lot of writing here, but the philosophical method is more or less one of dismissing things that FEEL absurd to the writer. If you allow yourself to do that, you might as well write a much shorter piece. The cosmos may be designed in such a way that our entire universe is dedicated to the production of a certain kind of moral experience which makes us delicious to beings in an enclosing master universe. We may be souls in a pickle jar on a cosmic supermarket shelf. I think it's far more likely that no one set this system up and we are merely living out the consequences of physical laws, but I can't rule out that a God of some kind set it all up for some reason that is Rational Unto Himself.

Animats 3y ago
Rational unto himself? The last line of the article reads: "Imagine a teenage fan of gross-out movies—whose all-time favorite movie scene was the chestburster segment in Alien—got access to a video game in which he could create simulated worlds populated with millions of species, many of them sentient, for his sick entertainment. Would that world look significantly different than our own?" A bit grim. Most polytheistic religions are an attempt to deal with the problem that the world isn't that tightly organized and has much built-in conflict. With what's been learned about AI in the last few years, philosophy and theology need to go back into the shop for an overhaul. Stuff which used to be pure speculation is becoming industrial strength technology. - Much of what humans think of as intelligence comes from scaling up some rather simple operations. How could brains evolve? Mostly by scaleup. Biology told us how similar nervous system components are across species, but not why bigger worked better. Now we are seeing that quantity, all by itself, yields smarter. - A lot of stuff that was thought to be uniquely human - isn't. - Munge enough data with some random inputs and creativity comes out. - Optimizing gets really effective in high-dimensional spaces. - Free will and randomness are closely related.
I_Am_Nous 3y ago
I love your pickle jar analogy, as it really underlines the fact that we are trapped in our reality, the slowly decaying echo of the big bang. We can't get outside of that no matter how hard we try. We might as well be pickles banging against the glass :)

Animats 3y ago

Rational unto himself? The last line of the article reads: "Imagine a teenage fan of gross-out movies—whose all-time favorite movie scene was the chestburster segment in Alien—got access to a video game in which he could create simulated worlds populated with millions of species, many of them sentient, for his sick entertainment. Would that world look significantly different than our own?" A bit grim. Most polytheistic religions are an attempt to deal with the problem that the world isn't that tightly organized and has much built-in conflict. With what's been learned about AI in the last few years, philosophy and theology need to go back into the shop for an overhaul. Stuff which used to be pure speculation is becoming industrial strength technology. - Much of what humans think of as intelligence comes from scaling up some rather simple operations. How could brains evolve? Mostly by scaleup. Biology told us how similar nervous system components are across species, but not why bigger worked better. Now we are seeing that quantity, all by itself, yields smarter. - A lot of stuff that was thought to be uniquely human - isn't. - Munge enough data with some random inputs and creativity comes out. - Optimizing gets really effective in high-dimensional spaces. - Free will and randomness are closely related.

I_Am_Nous 3y ago

I love your pickle jar analogy, as it really underlines the fact that we are trapped in our reality, the slowly decaying echo of the big bang. We can't get outside of that no matter how hard we try. We might as well be pickles banging against the glass :)