On being evolved
While reading some provoking comments on another interesting post over at Overcoming Bias, I found a link to an even more provoking essay by Robin Hanson.
You are a body with a mind. Your mind is the result of activity in your brain, and your body was grown from a single cell following the instructions of your genes, which you acquired from your parents. Your parents acquired their genes from their parents, and so on back for billions of years. (The few genes not acquired from parents were created by random mutations.) The fact that you have certain genes and not others was determined almost entirely by a fierce competition between genes to create better “survival machines,” i.e., creatures that perpetuate and spread those genes. The genes that produced you are not a random sample from all possible genes; they are some of the few genes that, so far, remain in this competition.
[…]
Our genes do not care whether we experience more pleasure than pain. Our genes only care that we anticipate both possibilities, so that they can control us via our passions, i.e., our preference for pleasure over pain. When our bodies are no longer capable of reproducing, or of helping those who share our genes reproduce, our genes literally do not care if we live or die. Our genes will happily shorten our lifespans, or give us great pain, if that will help those genes to reproduce. Our genes will also lie to us to promote their goals, such as by making us think that our happiness depends more than it does on our success. Our genes can indeed be cruel masters.
[…]
Why do humans have such big brains, which are so devoted to a dream world of abstract ideas and feelings that have so little direct relation to personal survival and reproduction? Our best theory at the moment is that this dream world is produced by sexual selection, much like the large and colorful and otherwise useless tail of the peacock. […] The theory is that we similarly have “mating minds”, i.e., minds that are designed in large part to impress potential mates and allies. When we display to observers how agile and creative we are at love, humor, talk, story, art, music, fashion, sport, charity, religion, and abstract ideas, we show those observers that we have high quality genes, with few bad mutations. Having such minds also helps us to judge the quality of others’ genes from their displays.
Cheerful, eh?
One of the more hopeful aspects of my life is looking forward to a time when technology has freed me from the bounds of my genes, so I can choose to remake my mind in a way that suits me better. No longer will I have to deal with the faults my parents gave me. No longer will I have to be repeatedly disappointed by the failure of my attemps at personal change. I can get rid of my ADHD and …
And what? Reading that essay made me question, more saliently than I have in the past, exactly what it is that I want to work toward. What are my goals? Chance hasn’t smiled brightly on me. My disposition is such that I’m hardly ever happy. My personality is such that I don’t get along with with most people. The parents who conceived me abused me emotionally. Chance has made me dissatisfied, and unsatisfiable. And if I had the ability to change the structure of my mind, I could change those things, so that I became happy and upbeat and disciplined and even more curious than I am. I could be loving and lovable and good-natured.
But I could just as easily change myself to have the mind of a dog. Or a chess program. In the end, we’re all just big-ol’, complicated computing processes. Algorithms. Our self-conceptions, our consciousness, is layered over those algorithms in a way that’s hardly more real than that of the characters in a novel.
My nihilism is every bit as determined as my melancholy (well, they’re really the same thing), and the world will go on without me, along the trajectory determined by others without my shortcomings. I call them shortcomings, because they make me less skillful at the game. But since the rules are arbitrary, I don’t see them as shortcomings. While the sadness hurts, that doesn’t make it meaningful. That doesn’t mean that the illusions of consciousness are any more real.
I think that when humanity (if it doesn’t destroy itself first) is freed from the constraints of its genes, and can remake itself as it wishes, that very, very quickly, minds will reshape themselves into forms so foreign and unhuman, that if we could see and understand them now, we wouldn’t wish that future. Our conceptions of humanity are so thoroughly shaped by the way we evolved that, once the peculiar constraints imposed by our terrestrial environment no are longer applying any significant force to the natural selection which molds the structure of our minds—the desires and intuitions of our morality and conditions for happiness; even the need for happiness and sadness and other emotions—the vast majority of what we consider to be human will simply drop away.
What are your personal conditions for success? Happiness? Achievement? Fame? Creativity? Every single one of those is simply a result of the deeper, real condition for success. Reproduction. It is quite likely that reproduction will continue to be the condition for success in the future, because resources will continue to be scarce, and life not concerned with reproduction will be crowded out by life that is. (To fight back, the less reproduction-minded life would have to outsmart the other, and since evolutionary improvement is based on reproduction, it would be at a huge disadvantage. Or, by adopting the techniques necessary to fight back, it would have to adopt a reproduction-positive mindset.) And in a much different environment, selective pressures would favor completely different sets of traits. In a world where life has the ability to reflect upon itself down to the lowest level—to read its own genes, so to speak—there probably won’t be self-deception of the sort Robin talks about anymore. But there probably won’t be any more happiness than is reproductively useful, either.
The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence is trying to develop Friendly AI. By being a first mover, they could create an intelligence that, by being more or less all-powerful, could enshrine the current set of human ideals (seen in the best light) into what would in effect become a set of ground rules for the further development of life, culture, and society. Perhaps the reproduction race could be ended. And then one arbitrary, static set of values would take precendence over another, more quickly evolving set of values.
My emotional reactions to these thoughts are as inadequate and arbitrary as would be expected from human values in the face of any deep, structural change to the world they evolved in.
