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The way I see it, life is a race, and humans won when we woke up, gained perspective, and realized/discovered the nature of that race. Everything else currentl
by Crito 12y ago
The way I see it, life is a race, and humans won when we woke up, gained perspective, and realized/discovered the nature of that race.
Everything else currently living? They're racing their hearts out, but they do not understand the nature of the race, where they came from, where they might be going, where they are located, where their home came from, etc. They don't even seem to wonder about these things, let alone have methods for finding the answers.
So now that we've won the race, do we loop back and try to chat with the creatures that haven't made it yet? Cheer on the remaining contestants? Or do we find a new race to participate in? Why not create a new race?
We are a tiny portion of the universe that is capable of introspection. Literally parts of the universe that are capable of examining the rest of the universe. We could sit around and wait for other parts of the universe to gain this ability as well, or we could throw everything we have at building a greater ability to introspect on the universe, using whatever tools we have at our disposal to do so. If that means 'cannibalizing' other potentially introspective parts of the universe to further ourselves, so be it. If experimenting on lesser lifeforms allows us to make humanity more robust, then I think that is what we should do.
- derefr 12y agoIf life is a race, its participants are the various speciated evolutions[1], not individual creatures. The human species' common genetic material won; it will propagate much further than any other genetic material has so far. What that implies about what humans do is a whole other question, because humans aren't racing anybody. (But I think that was somewhat your point.) [1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/kt/evolutions_are_stupid_but_work_anyway/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/kt/evolutions_are_stupid_but_work_an...
- Crito 12y agoEvolution is a stupid process that happened to create a species sophisticated enough that individual instances of this species are able to realize that evolution is going on. Being instances of this cutting-edge phenomenon, we (individuals) have the opportunity to exploit what evolution inadvertently created. We can push this phenomenon even further. We're not the most extreme phenomenon by any means; atomic blasts, neutron stars and black holes, the formation of the planets... these are all more extreme than ourselves in a number of ways. But in the "introspection" metric, we're the best that we have evidence for. Moreso, introspection is the only thing that makes us special. Examining the world seems to be the one thing that we do better than anything else.
- derefr 12y agoIf you measure "physical phenomena in general" not by their ability to just move atoms around, but by their optimization power[1], then as far as we know, there's really only evolution (a weak optimizer) and human brainpower (a comparatively infinitely stronger optimizer) so far. Nothing else even ranks. [1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/va/measuring_optimization_power/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/va/measuring_optimization_power/