Born to do Math 107 – Human Beings as Mathematical Structures (4)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/02/08
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s return to the original line of thinking of human beings as mathematical structures, we have a certain type of math in its own dynamics that is different than simply the physical mechanics of the snow falling, rain falling, ripples across the water. How does a mathematical structure differ in us compared to these others?
Rick Rosner: Everything has to be able to exist, to exist. Everything has to have rules of self-consistency, which means that you’ve got basic structures and patterns that emerge all over the place. They are easy. They are basic. They have easy self-consistency.
If you look at philosophizing, everything boils down to the simple principles. Biology is boiled down to physics, and so can chemistry. It doesn’t mean that there is no function fo chemistry or biology. Sometimes, it is more convenient to discuss them us as large and complicated entities.
When you talk evolutionary biology, zoology, the units in zoology are animals. You have to way out of your way to talk about animals as being built up from fundamental and subatomic particles. Philosophy, the hard sciences, the soft sciences, there is a utility in taking the right context to talk about those objects and subjects that fit into the umbrella of scale.
You can boil aesthetics down to basic principles, which we have talked about. The search for the preservation of order. It might be better to talk about aesthetics on its own terms. You may know that beauty may be built from evolutionary principles.
We think something is beautiful because of biases that have been evolved into us. We don’t need that kind of scaffolding or foundation or disclaimer for a possible discussion of aesthetics. You can discuss beautiful forms as themselves, as increasing beauty going all the way back primates on the Savannah.
It is similar to all the other areas of philosophy, or simply most of them. There may be some that are sufficiently specialized to not be. Similarly, there will be emerging areas of philosophy with the most pertinent one coming up being the ethics of dealing with powerful information processing entities that are not entirely human, or merged humans. It is humans merging with technology.
At the most pragmatic level, sometime in the next 100 years; someone will move into a non-human body, into a body that is not even human. Someone may go to court. Even though, they do not live in a human body; they still have the rights that they had when they were in a human body.
Another person will go to court to claim that AI should be able to marry a person or permit the AI to inherit stuff. That the AI person should have rights. That is a whole new area of ethics and philosophy.
That is a looking upward development of ethics with humans and the things that will eventually supersede humans. But then there is the question about the things superseding humans. There will need to be a philosophy for them on how to treat us, who will be those things inferiors.
You need the philosophy for humans to do things and for the things that we create, which will, eventually, be in charge. One is decency in both directions. Not even just decency, but it is also defining what entities own.
It is clear what an individual consciousness is now. But that will be the case 150 years from now, when consciousnesses can be merged, budded off, and there will be all sorts of different and fleeting existences of information processing entities.
It will be complicated to assign rights to those things. Having to develop philosophies with new types of consciousnesses, there will be the economics of it, of trying to figure out the economics in which information is increasingly the most valuable thing; information plus the knowledge that makes that information durable.
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