The plasticity of the human brain with regard to what it finds meaningful has already been conclusively demonstrated: depressed people often find "everyday activities" unfulfilling and then find these activities fulfilling again following pharmacological treatment. Yet the treated and untreated individual are the same person: usually, even the depressed individual has a sense that things could "seem" subjectively fulfilling or meaningful, and this can be a motivation for treatment.
If a very long-lived person becomes bored, they could presumably be compelled to seek treatment in the same manner as a present-day depressed person might. That is, when given the choice between a treatment that could help them find meaning in things again, and eternal nonexistence / oblivion, would most people honestly choose the eternal oblivion?
There is more information and variety in most things and activities than most people realize.
Some people might already be "primed" for superlongevity in that they don't tend to classify experiences together as readily as others. That is, a person susceptible to superlongevity-ennui might be the sort of person who tends to, for instance, never desire to watch the same movie or read the same book more than once.
Such people probably do NOT tend to get "all the information" or all intrinsic potential joy out of these activities after experiencing them only once -- that is, they don't memorize every book they read and exhaust all the minutiae of possible philosophical implications of what they have read. Rather, they have a tendency to classify experiences and environmental stimuli according to high-level concepts and generalities. These people will therefore bore much more quickly than people who fixate on and notice details. Details make experiences "more different", so long as you're looking at them or looking for them.
For a boredom-prone person, going to France once might be enough, since after that trip they'll say something like, "Well, now I've seen France, what's next?" However, for a detail-oriented perceiver (the type of person less likely to get bored), France will be a different experience depending on all sorts of variables: season, time of day, etc. This sort of person would probably also be likely to go back to the same place repeatedly after a number of years, to see how things may have changed over time.
And again, as long as time is passing, things WILL change, both through the conscious effort of beings and through chance. I don't see how the Universe could possibly run out of novelty so long as time is passing. No moment is identical to any other moment, after all.
15 comments:
Good post! Also note that the number of new nations, cultures, trends, and philosophies sure to be developed by posthumanity will greatly outclass the current menu.
This definitely is a good post, Anne.
. . . they have a tendency to classify experiences and environmental stimuli according to high-level concepts and generalities.
I understand what you mean here. Those kinds of people you're referring to probably overgeneralize a lot, but I'd argue that their concepts probably aren't very high-level, in that they're not heuristically iterative or recursive per se. I expect mathematicians (e.g. superintelligent recursively self-enhancing mathematicians/engineers (perhaps what we should all expect to become as an intimately networked team (when you're superintelligent, being friends with a logarithmically high quantity of minds is subjectively like being human with her/his three or four life-long confidants))) will be able to keep busy probably forever, or until reality is switched off. Also, irreducible first-person human observation is by default already very general, so what you probably could mean is that the more randomly overgeneral the more inefficient/ineffective/pointless the observer states, with which I'd totally agree. But having chunk-processing modalities will probably always be indispensable, just always more sophisticated.
So that is to say, I think your use of and propositional attitude about the concept 'general' was overgeneral! :p
(Indeed that was some horrific prose, golly.)
Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that the freezing of musical tastes offers a window on when the human brain begins to reject novelty. Funny, I don't care to listen to the music I heard during my teens in the Seventies.
(And of course I was speaking of my own crap!)
michael a. said: Also note that the number of new nations, cultures, trends, and philosophies sure to be developed by posthumanity will greatly outclass the current menu.
Noted and acknowledged. It's pretty easy to see this happening already just from observing how the Internet is transforming culture and resulting in the proliferation of new subcultures.
nate b.: Your prose is fine...you seem to share my predilection for parenthetical clarifications, which is something that actually makes people's writing easier for me to read (most of the time!).
Though I'll admit I've never before run across anyone who actually uses nested parentheses in something other than a long formula in a spreadsheet, or in a block of program code. :P
As far as your notion of "superintelligent networked teams" goes, I imagine that could certainly keep a whole slew of people busy nearly indefinitely -- so long as the minds involved maintain some degree of autonomy.
But having chunk-processing modalities will probably always be indispensable, just always more sophisticated.
Could you clarify here what you mean by "chunk"? Is a chunk a large or small quanity? It's difficult to figure out the relative meaning from context here, in part because I think value exists in macroscopic and microscopic (in a manner of speaking)-level processing; the two modalities (and I realize there's actually a modality-spectrum here and that the extrema on both ends will likely shift in both directions over time) are perhaps applicable to different facets of existence and perception (though it's interesting to note how different people apply microfocus to some things that others apply "macrofocus" to; this is part of the diversity of minds that will likely assist in keeping the future interesting).
mark: Interesting article -- I was actually listening to a podcast today (I think it was, "The Future And You") wherein the host discussed the possibility that novelty-seeking is in some ways being selected for in humans; the evidence for this being the fact that people seem to be entering adulthood more and more these days without actually "maturing".
This was speculated to potentially be related to the theory that humans are a neonatal variation of ape -- humans already have a protracted period of morphological development as compared to our closest ape ancestors.
But that's a bit of a tangent.
Back to actually responding to the article, the author seems to be making statements that refute the supposition that infinite novelty is a prequalification for wanting to continue to exist.
When I attempt to imagine a mind persisting over the very long term, I conceive of a mind that must necessarily maintain cognitive flexibility (and this seems to be something amenable to practice, and barring that, possibly pharmacology at some point in the future), but not a mind that relentlessly seeks novelty for its own sake.
New things are interesting and desirable not just because they are new, but because they hold some value for the individual. The same goes for familiar things; I bet that if the music you'd encountered in the 70s had been what you considered to be mind-blowingly awesome, you'd still seek it out regularly.
In response to this quote in the article:
There may even be some advantage for social groups if their aging members become protective archivists of their cultural inheritance, instead of constantly jettisoning the old in order to soak up the new.
My impression of an imaginary Happy Posthuman allows for a far more balanced existence; maintaining a memory-archive (though finite storage space will probably result in a selective pruning of less-significant memories over time - posthuman memory storage is a fascinating area of research / discussion in and of itself) while at the same time scanning for valuable new things and experiences.
The rate at which new things are adopted will likely be spread out over far greater spans of time, particularly for individuals motivated to seek superlongevity on the basis of wanting to engage in long-term detailed study projects.
A "chunk-processing modality" (perhaps bad terminology) is like recognizing a bit even though the bit itself isn't necessarily represented by an actual, buckstoppingly physical bit, or recognizing a byte when its constituent bits would otherwise be meaningless, all the way on up the hypothetical tree of being able to impute useful/pleasant knowledge/experiences on structures, superstructures, etc. as their reducibles would tend to be necessary but not always sufficient toward recognizing ever-so valuable patterns (and even non-valuable ones that rationally had expected potential).
The modality-spectrum you invoke would almost be like the dynamic range of this hypothetical tree. Eventually, at bottom, there might be situations where it's actually important through means of the superintelligent equivalent of an orgasm to recognize an individual bit that's represented by an actual, buckstoppingly physical bit. And at top. . . well, we can't even begin to contemplate, but I'm sure we can reasonably speculate that we'll want to do the superintelligent equivalent of finding superstructures valuable, perhaps very vaguely analogous to how we find structures such as light extremely valuable, and granted even though a single unaccompanied photon isn't a favorite pastime.
;)
Anne writes,
New things are interesting and desirable not just because they are new, but because they hold some value for the individual.
This brings up a problem I have with Sapolsky's definition of "novelty." He confuses useful novelty with meretricious novelty. I generally ignore popular culture these days because the effort to learn about it goes to waste in a few years. (A decade from now, some kid in middle school could ask, "Doesn't Jack Bauer sell a line of outdoor clothing?") But I started to eat and appreciate sushi about a year ago, even though Sapolsky gives that as an example of food novelty I should repugn at my advanced age. Sushi will still exist and offer value a decade from now, but I can't guarantee the shelf life of most current popular culture.
The same goes for familiar things; I bet that if the music you'd encountered in the 70s had been what you considered to be mind-blowingly awesome, you'd still seek it out regularly.
If music has value, your ability to appreciate it shouldn't have that much to do with the generation you grew up in. I like Mozart, for example, but that doesn't mean that I came of age in Vienna during the 1780's.
Very interesting stuff. There certainly is a lot of things out there that I want to explore and learn about. Given an infinite lifespan maybe I would get to do all of them, including the new things that would come up as a result of such a technological society/universe. I would even do things like reliving the simulated life of every being that has ever lived. At said point, I will probably have had quite a few amazing experiences. Why not erase my memory of these things and do it again? (It would take a really, really long time to come to this point, if one can even reach it.)
Interesting post as I get bored very easily with the mundane in life.
AnneC,
I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that those superlongevity-ennui people are against the superlongevity not only for themselves, but for others.
Igor: No need to draw my attention to the fact that some people want to impose their own permanent boredom-prevention regimen on others -- I'm quite aware that some do, but I honestly don't think that argument is really going to be much of an issue in the future at all. People who don't want superlongevity won't use the technologies that would enable it: problem solved.
And though some of them might make a lot of noise right now about how boredom is going to be some kind of big problem, ennui is by far one of the weakest arguments I've ever heard against superlongevity (in principle: I know that there's no proof yet that it's even possible to dramatically extend human lives -- which is part of the reason the experiment needs to be run). I doubt that people making noise about boredom are really going to end up taking action on that basis (that is, directly trying to interfere in superlongevity developments); people who go on and on about how bored they are don't tend to be all that action-prone about anything.
eh, ... my mistake!
I thought that you used "-ennui" as a general label for the anti-longevity crowd (ennui or philosophical equiv. of it is the most common anti-long. argument...) - my mistake!
I see now that you wrote strictly about boredom-prone folks....
Thanx for the clarification.
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