Born to do Math 87 – “We do not have a lot of respect for ants.”
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/08
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If this science fiction future produces superbeings, how much will these entities care about us, relative to their capabilities?
Rick Rosner: The superbeings of the future may not even give 1% of a crap of the feelings of cows. There are a lot of ways this stuff could go.
Jacobsen: This could be something like the distance cognitively between ants and cows, which could be the distance between the superbeings of the future and us. Why would a cow even care about a whole colony of ants?
Rosner: Yes, it will be about the degree to which the Golden Rule is operative in the dominant technologies and societies of the future. The Golden Rule, we do not have a lot of respect for ants. We do not think about them much.
Whatever their level of awareness, they do not seem able to be conscious of that much suffering. Although the colony as a whole may experience misery, that seems unlikely. I do not know if we will ever have a lot of respect for ants.
I do not know what will be the manifestation of the Golden Rule in the future when you have these beings or melded consciousnesses that are 1,500 times more powerful than regular human conscious, according to some scale of consciousness in the future.
Jacobsen: It may be a cognitive horizon too. Someone much smarter than another is not extraordinarily smarter, if given that kind of 1,500-times-more-powerful scale.
Rosner: I do not even know how that scale would work. The IQ scale is a crappy scale. It is a thing in which somebody would have an IQ of 150,000, which is a senseless idea. Although, there is a science fiction book from the 50s called Brain Wave by Poul Anderson.
It is about the Earth passing out of a region of the galaxy that is effectively dampening the brain functions. All of the sudden. Everyone has 5 times the IQ they had before. Everyone has an IQ between 500 and 800/900. I liked it when I was a kid. It is probably unreadable now.
We do not know what form vast information processing will take and how much room it will have for us.
Jacobsen: I want to take the idea of cognitive horizon seriously. If human beings can imagine some level of consciousness for ants but can only extrapolate similarly upwards in terms of what superbeings look like vis-a-vis science fiction, something super smarter than us may have a similar ability to have a wider range of consideration.
So, it may have a more fine-tuned sense of an ant life and its worth.
Rosner: Yes, they could be like hyper-decent, hyper-moral. Or it could be that it becomes so cheap to be moral that people go ahead and be moral because “Why not?” It becomes cheaper to make Fermat’s Wager for everybody.
Just give everybody an afterlife because, maybe, it is ethically good to do that if it only costs $1.50 per person.
Jacobsen: Even now, there is very sufficient evidence to say being moral is much cheaper than being immoral. Mark Twain had that quote about if you tell the truth then you do not have to remember anything.
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: In a similar way, if you are moral, you do not have to look behind your back. You can continue on in life in the comfort that you did the best you could with the resources you had at the time.
I think our reiteration with slight modification and expansion of the Golden Rule, especially with rich interconnected information-processing, is a re-envisioning in a greater robustness of it. It is a reaffirmation in modern terminology.
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