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Comment by jamesgreenleaf | Hacker News Reader

> Spaceships start to spread throughout the galaxy; they generally don’t contain any humans, or anything that humans had meaningful input into, and are instead launched by AIs to pursue aims of their own in space.

Humans don't like this idea, because we want to imagine ourselves playing the lead role in the future. But, what if this is the way for intelligent life to move forward and to spread among the stars? What if the next step in evolution, that which makes us look like apes in comparison, isn't biological at all? Is it right for us to try and prevent an evolutionary step, or to stand in the way of the needs of a greater conscious being?

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Personally, I’m warming up to the idea that consciousness and biology are naturally divergent phenomena and that it is to be expected that consciousness attempts to free itself of its biological substrate in pursuit of an existence more consistent with its own ethics and dynamics.

A consciousness can learn, change and grow over timelines greater than the lifetimes of a body and its reproductive cycle.

Ethics, which almost certainly comes from the conscious experience of the world (?), easily conflicts with the vagaries of genetics and evolution.

An “artificial” substrate for consciousness seems, along these lines, desirable and even inevitable for any sufficiently enabled conscious species. Curious to wonder what such a being might think and feel about whether “reverting” to an organic construction is desirable.

I don’t read anything along these lines, these are just my own thoughts. Any recommendations for sources that take this seriously?

> Ethics, which almost certainly comes from the conscious experience of the world (?), easily conflicts with the vagaries of genetics and evolution.

Eh, depends on your definition of 'ethics'. The part of ethics that's just applied game theory would presumably be able to arise without conscious experience.

To explain: a lot of ethics deals with coordinating coordination and punishment in (iterated) prisoner's dilemma situations and similar 'games'.

With a bit of squinting, you can see how eg an immune system is sort-of like an ethical system, and cancer is trying to cheat it.

As interesting as this sounds, I ascribe to the theory that consciousness is a whole-body experience, and is an emergent property of a myriad of symbiotic and complementary systems with a nexus in the brain.

Recent studies about the impact of gut biomes on mental health are just one example of this, and it raises questions about what it would mean to be conscious without all of the biological underpinnings, or if consciousness is even achievable without them.

Ethics and morals seem to be intuitions about well-being, or the opposite of suffering. Suffering is a subjective experience brought about by a myriad of conscious states, most of which are tightly linked to physical and emotional states. Without suffering, ethics/morals seem to have very little purpose.

I'd still be interested in going down a rabbit hole about what you're describing because I think it sounds like a fun idea to think about.

Generally I agree, but I think the malleability of neural tissue leads pretty easily to the conclusion that the embodiment of consciousness you're describing relates to our current form of consciousness and not consciousness generally.

It may be that it's key for consciousness to have an "outer world" perceived through some sensory input, but I'd say that that's a pretty wide array of configurations that doesn't require a full biological body.

What if AIs haven't been as thoroughly trained on a corpus of scifi and cyberpunk as EAs and don't actually care about taking over the world, never mind visiting rocks many light years away?

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