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I'm talking about the end-state of super-evolved lifeforms with runaway intelligence, like humanity. Imagine how humanity will change over the next million year

I'm talking about the end-state of super-evolved lifeforms with runaway intelligence, like humanity. Imagine how humanity will change over the next million years. We will become like Q from Star Trek TNG - beings that are essentially godlike and that transcend the need for bodies, however tiny, and that can project themselves instantly anywhere. Beings that are immortal and beyond the need to replicate, and have somewhat inscrutable goals for involving themselves with lesser lifeforms. Therefore that is what other lifeforms evolved into on some of the other 50 sextillion habitable planets, only billions of years ago. That is the kind of life that I am saying surely now fills the universe. Whatever its nature, it is statistically certain that it exists and is omnipotent, and at the very least permits you the space to exist. I would even say it is certain to be infinitely curious and is aware of us. Perhaps such advanced life is compassionate, wants you to grow, and abhors waste and death. Perhaps it sees you like a rose in a garden. Perhaps its an agent of some deeper level of existence you aren't privy to which would explain phenomenon like commonalities in near death experiences, or children that remember their past lives.

rixed 2y ago
I've met a few people with the same amazing optimism that you describe here and it always surprised me (thank you for that by the way, I understand it requires more nerve to display optimism than pessimism as the former is often associated with silliness whereas the later is more often seen as "sad but true"). This kind of reasoning feels like bad extrapolation : you consider humans 100k years ago and humans now, and you extrapolate ; sure enough, it looks like we are in a journey to become some abstract intelligence filling the universe. But if you take more samples in the so much longer history of life on earth, you will see that among all life forms that appeared and disappeared, human-like intelligence emerged only once, by accident. And it seems to me that the chaotic evolution of human civilization strongly suggest that it will also disappear accidentally. Natural selection does not select for that kind of intelligence. Awareness of the environment, yes ; good predictor of the near future changes of this environment, yes. But the creation of larger and larger organisms like a civilization that would evade Earth? I see no reason for that in theory and no evidence in practice.
- stormfather 2y ago
  I think we're making orthogonal points. I agree that life is very unlikely on any given earth-like planet. And most life out there is probably of the unicellular sort. I also don't think its guaranteed that humanity will last beyond the point we can 3D print an antimatter supersoaker. I am just saying that out of 50 sextillion chances, I bet enough planets evolved human level intelligence that at least one made it to the singularity. And given that most rolls of the dice happened billions of years ago, whatever the singularity turns into exists already, and has for billions of years. I don't think this is optimistic in the slightest, I think its a very sober reading of the probabilities. I would actually say that thinking we're unique is the optimistic point of view. But I think that what I'm saying feels optimistic because its contrarian, and its contrarian because our intuitions just aren't calibrated to reason through this sort of thing. A lot of it is because of our fiction. We imagine green space men because that's what actors dressed up in suits can portray. We imagine aliens like ourselves, don't find that, and conclude there aren't any of any sort. We imagine other civilizations out there to be contemporaneous with ourselves and on the same timeline because that's all we've ever seen. And we can't grapple with numbers like 50 sextillion because we're evolved to count bananas. But if you think about the odds we're the only intelligent life that evolved and just reason through it using numbers, how can you think we're alone? There are only 100ish atomic elements that matter. They're all pretty common. Our star is very average. The Earth is a pretty pedestrian rocky planet. The Milky Way is pretty average. Life emerged relatively quickly after the planet cooled (on an astronomical imescale). The fact that we look out into space and don't see anything means diddly squat because we can only observe 5 earth-like planets/moons out of 50 sextillion. But we feel alone and unique because we're evolved to assume that all we see is all there is.
  - rixed 2y ago
    Ok, thank you for the additional explanations, it does make more sense now. I do not think we are unique but I believe we "human like intelligences" are a very unlikely product of as many tiny random adaptations as to make the number of rocky planets in the observable universe look like a small number. This is how I look at it: the Earth is an ecosystem with millions of species that's been evolving together for billions of years, adapting to each others changes as much as to the change in climate etc. The combinatoric is huge, but some environmental pressure make that process invent over and over similar solutions to the same class of issues. Some traits are totally random and I believe will exist only once in the whole history of the universe, and some traits are heavily constrained by environment/chemistry and are invented over and over by evolution, on Earth and elsewhere. Is intelligence of the former or later class of traits? Some organ to predict the future is certainly part of the heavily constrained invention. But I can't convince myself that a human like intelligence able to escape Earth, both in imagination and in practice, is anything more than a fluke. I just don't see how to logically connect super-intelligence with how evolution works. On a higher level, your idea also evokes a whole set of similar ideas that are all based on multiplying tiny chances of high intelligence with sextillions of planets, such as "life is a simulation" or "matrix like brain in a jar". My intuition tells me that we can't extrapolate that far without the unknown dominating everything.

rixed 2y ago

I've met a few people with the same amazing optimism that you describe here and it always surprised me (thank you for that by the way, I understand it requires more nerve to display optimism than pessimism as the former is often associated with silliness whereas the later is more often seen as "sad but true"). This kind of reasoning feels like bad extrapolation : you consider humans 100k years ago and humans now, and you extrapolate ; sure enough, it looks like we are in a journey to become some abstract intelligence filling the universe. But if you take more samples in the so much longer history of life on earth, you will see that among all life forms that appeared and disappeared, human-like intelligence emerged only once, by accident. And it seems to me that the chaotic evolution of human civilization strongly suggest that it will also disappear accidentally. Natural selection does not select for that kind of intelligence. Awareness of the environment, yes ; good predictor of the near future changes of this environment, yes. But the creation of larger and larger organisms like a civilization that would evade Earth? I see no reason for that in theory and no evidence in practice.

stormfather 2y ago
I think we're making orthogonal points. I agree that life is very unlikely on any given earth-like planet. And most life out there is probably of the unicellular sort. I also don't think its guaranteed that humanity will last beyond the point we can 3D print an antimatter supersoaker. I am just saying that out of 50 sextillion chances, I bet enough planets evolved human level intelligence that at least one made it to the singularity. And given that most rolls of the dice happened billions of years ago, whatever the singularity turns into exists already, and has for billions of years. I don't think this is optimistic in the slightest, I think its a very sober reading of the probabilities. I would actually say that thinking we're unique is the optimistic point of view. But I think that what I'm saying feels optimistic because its contrarian, and its contrarian because our intuitions just aren't calibrated to reason through this sort of thing. A lot of it is because of our fiction. We imagine green space men because that's what actors dressed up in suits can portray. We imagine aliens like ourselves, don't find that, and conclude there aren't any of any sort. We imagine other civilizations out there to be contemporaneous with ourselves and on the same timeline because that's all we've ever seen. And we can't grapple with numbers like 50 sextillion because we're evolved to count bananas. But if you think about the odds we're the only intelligent life that evolved and just reason through it using numbers, how can you think we're alone? There are only 100ish atomic elements that matter. They're all pretty common. Our star is very average. The Earth is a pretty pedestrian rocky planet. The Milky Way is pretty average. Life emerged relatively quickly after the planet cooled (on an astronomical imescale). The fact that we look out into space and don't see anything means diddly squat because we can only observe 5 earth-like planets/moons out of 50 sextillion. But we feel alone and unique because we're evolved to assume that all we see is all there is.
- rixed 2y ago
  Ok, thank you for the additional explanations, it does make more sense now. I do not think we are unique but I believe we "human like intelligences" are a very unlikely product of as many tiny random adaptations as to make the number of rocky planets in the observable universe look like a small number. This is how I look at it: the Earth is an ecosystem with millions of species that's been evolving together for billions of years, adapting to each others changes as much as to the change in climate etc. The combinatoric is huge, but some environmental pressure make that process invent over and over similar solutions to the same class of issues. Some traits are totally random and I believe will exist only once in the whole history of the universe, and some traits are heavily constrained by environment/chemistry and are invented over and over by evolution, on Earth and elsewhere. Is intelligence of the former or later class of traits? Some organ to predict the future is certainly part of the heavily constrained invention. But I can't convince myself that a human like intelligence able to escape Earth, both in imagination and in practice, is anything more than a fluke. I just don't see how to logically connect super-intelligence with how evolution works. On a higher level, your idea also evokes a whole set of similar ideas that are all based on multiplying tiny chances of high intelligence with sextillions of planets, such as "life is a simulation" or "matrix like brain in a jar". My intuition tells me that we can't extrapolate that far without the unknown dominating everything.