Ask A Genius 769: Hopelessly Divided Consciousness
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/07/27
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You wanted to talk about consciousness in two different kinds of contexts. What do you think about it?
Rick Rosner: All right. So, I just got done talking about our hopelessly divided country which includes a third of the country being persuaded to believe that any fertilized human egg deserves protection, deserves the right to develop into a human which is a stance that life begins at conception; the protected life begins at conception which has been of a minority point of view for all of history, that most civilizations, most places at most times including places run by the Catholic Church allowed abortion until the quickening, which is until you can feel the fetus move. 20% of all pregnancies are lost to miscarriages and women are being prosecuted in some states for miscarrying. It’s one of the least logical stances on human gestation and abortion. There’s no logic and the people who are anti-abortion under all circumstances or almost all circumstances believe with no basis, I think, that this is always been the policy of righteous civilizations throughout history which is not the case at all. It’s a very dumb point of view.
It shouldn’t be as big an issue as it is. It’s been made into a big issue by people who like to exploit dumb and gullible people as we’ve talked about a million times. And it’s disheartening as I’ve said before because if we can’t solve this issue, then there are harder issues with regard to consciousness, AI, machine learning, augmented humans, and resurrected humans coming down the pike which will be impossible to solve in a population where one third of the people are just so gullible and stupid. And it makes me wonder if the solution is a horrible solution because it involves religion, to try to establish a religion that worships consciousness itself because there’s a trend in moral justice that the Arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. Bending towards justice often involves acknowledging the humanity of previously denigrated or excluded parts of the population; minorities, women, people with different sexual orientations, and now animals in some contexts.
Certainly that article have to bend towards other forms of Apex consciousness as we begin to build more sophisticated conscious systems or augment our own or replicate our own. It just makes me wonder if one of the ways to make that happen more effectively is for people to… some people who embrace it to eventually worship consciousness itself. Much of the sense of wonder we experience about ourselves and about other people and about other beings in the world is a sense of wonder at their ability to think to experience the world. Maybe that’ll provide some kind of bull work against stupidity until it goes too far and gets to hide bound the way religions do and starts causing more problems than it fixes.
[Recording End]
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