Nilsi

He is a interesting character. I listened to his conversation with Lex. I barely study these days. If I need insight into something, I just go for a walk. When worst comes to worst I ask Chat-GPT. Everything else is way too slow and muddy.

This is fine. Things can be infinitely more complex and nuanced than I could ever comprehend. What I talk about holds though. You can not contemplate your way to health, money and power. And those are infinitely valuable. They give you maximum optionality in life. Contemplation only simulates this. AI and synthetic biology will only make this more obvious. While you contemplate this stuff, I will use it to increase my power and optionality even more. This is evolution. Survival of the fittest. Those dynamics will always exist. The only question is whether you want to ascend or be left in the dust.

I hate to bring him up again, but there is actually quite some wisdom in Andrew Tate using "geek" and "nerd" as a slur. Its men of action that end up being rewarded by life with health, looks, riches and a great (genetic) legacy. This goes for all great human achievements, of course - be they artisitc, politic, literary, etc. Even Hegel spent a good chunk of his life in action, fighting the creative battle to immortalize his ideas (as anti-action as they may be).

In my humble opinion, all this contemplative and spiritual work is a necessary station one has to pass to actualize ones highest potential - but I dont see it as the destination (anymore). Nowadays Im so immersed in life, metaphysical questions dont even arise. I live a life of action and I have never been more fulfilled. But still, I wouldnt be able to live life on such a high level had I not done all the thinking, reading and exploring first. Aliens, gene-splicing and artificial intelligence are just some novel artifacts of our age. They dont change the fundamental dynamics of life.

The problem is way deeper than being biased toward some one ontological system or scientific model. Colletcively we have probably explored the whole possibility space of human thought and philosophy up to this point in history and look where it lead us... arguing endlessly over whether other people are real or not There is a time and place for contemplation. When it becomes the main event though, it turns on intself and chips away at the roots that once gave it life in the first place.

Fair, although that is just the logical conclusion of idealism. The same way materialism makes you question your own free will. Metaphysical rumination itself is the symptom of a sick mind, if you ask me. Nothing good ever came out of it. Not 2.000 years ago and not today.

Yeah, I didnt think so lol This place is way too sterile for anything new and worthwhile to emerge. Actualized.org has become an idealist cul de sac. I could leave for 10 years and I wouldnt miss anything.

If you were "blissed out" all the time, there would be no reason to go to work on a monday morning. Who cares, if your boss fires you, when youre gonna be blissed out anyways? Who cares if you shave, or take a shower? Why even bother standing up and walking to the toilet, when you can just shit your pants and be blissed out? This of course applies to every motivation and instinct you currently possess. In this Buddhist fantasy, life and culture would deteriorate quite quickly into a homogenous soup of indifference - which is exactly what you will experience, when you actually transcend the distinction of pain and pleasure in some peak (or permanent, if you insist) meditation/psychedelic/etc. experience.

This is the epitome of whats wrong with modern "psychology." A healthy psyche is not cultivated in the library. Thats where you go to reflect and strategize, but the bulk of the work happens in the field. Every psychology book worth its salt will conclude this in some way or another, which makes this even more ironic. The same thing happens in university. They tell you all the fancy science and research on "mental health"... while taking your most vital and formative years from you, weakening your spirit and spitting you out with a piece of paper and a crushed soul.

I flunked out after a week lol I felt more pressure to check YouTube/news etc. than I felt to cum The internet is so interwoven into the contemporary mind, it craves it more than biological reproduction.

Why do you assume that a post-work world with AGI will bring out the lowest angels of our nature? I think that liberating people from a lifetime of anxiety, stress, poor health, and poverty would be very liberating and beautiful, probably resembling Burning Man rather than The Matrix. Evolution sure is a ruthless force - but somehow we managed to survive 70+ years of the bomb without blowing ourselves up, so there must be some good reason why the universe has kept us around (hopefully more than just serving as bootloaders for the AI overlord).

An AI cant be a human, by definition. There are always tradeoffs - we know that from developmental psychology. A construct-aware philosopher can not experience the innocent naivete of a pre-conventional fundamentalist.

Humans create art, start families, appreciate a beautiful sunset, fall in love... Is that not a valid job? "O great star! What would your happiness be, if you had not those for whom you shine!"

How can you talk so authoritatively about economics and not know about that image And I have no idea what youre talking about.

Even if that were sensible, there is no way that it's going to happen. Good luck convincing the most capable humans on earth to simply stop working on what they perceive to be the most important endeavor in all of human history. Even if you were to bomb or hack all the AI labs in the world, pissing off these mad scientists is a recipe for disaster. Furthermore, we absolutely need AI to address climate change and other catastrophic risks, so there is no way out of this.

That seems to be the consensus among AI experts though. The definition of AGI is, that it can do everything a human does, just better and way more efficient (including emotional intelligence etc.) I dont see why this would devalue human life. You will still be around to explore all the new possibilities and to live more aligned with your intrinisic values. Also, lets not kid ourselves - its only a matter of time until these machines will exceed human capabilities, so we better have a reason to stick around.

Musk would be without a job, in a world with AGI (as would any human). We could set up some decentralized Blockhain type fund, that pays out every human once a month.

It can figure out new stuff, it hasn't been programmed to do. For example, some version of GPT was only trained on English data and at some point randomly taught itself Persian. And GPT-4 is apparently better at chemistry than any human now, although it was never formally taught that. I guess we will have to see a lot more stuff like that, but that at least shows me, that were heading in the direction of AGI. I find the "intelligence explosion" hypothesis rather compelling - it's already virtually impossible to follow the advancements and breakthroughs, unless you skim the literature on it everyday. Once it figures out how to rewrite it's own code and stuff like that, were in for one hell of a trip.

Why would you not want to care?

Then I have some news for you: there is massive economic inequality in northern Europe.

How would that work in practice? You would have to take away all property rights to level the playing field - it's almost like that has been tried somewhere before...

This is how stealmanning postmodernism feels like

You're just grounding reality in some arbitrary paradigm again. This is no different from quantum physics, or linguistics, or Psychoanalysis, or whatever it is. In fact, the whole point of postmodernism is, that you can ground reality in any paradigm you want - and thus create your reality any which way you like. All you're saying with "psychological development is beyond postmodernism" is, that this is the particular pet theory, you're subscribing to.