On Sat, Aug 12, 2023, 4:14 AM <[email protected]> wrote:
> @Matt > Until you can explain how wealthy people would suicide, I don't understand > how that works. > I am sure you are aware of millionaire celebrities who seem to have everything and then die young from suicidal behavior like drug overdoses. Achieving goals depends on knowledge and computing power, the things we measure with IQ and academic tests like memory size, learning rate, and reasoning speed. But your goals, like food, sex, social status, and avoiding the things that can kill you, are not the goals of evolution. The goal of evolution is to reproduce as fast as possible. It takes fewer resources to design animals that fear death for long enough to reproduce and then die. You are born fearing pain, heights, large animals, and spiders. You have illusions of consciousness, qualia, and free will conditioned by positive reinforcement of computation, input, and output respectively, so you want to preserve them by not dying. You have an illusion of identity, which says that copies of you (your children who inherit your knowledge) are not you, that you are more than your memories. If I presented you with a robot that looks and acts like you, would you shoot yourself to complete the upload? Or would your evolved beliefs stop you? But to answer your question, high IQ people are better at achieving their goals, even if it's suicide. We were smart enough to invent birth control. Smart people (by our definition, not evolution's) can increase their wealth by not having children. Smart people, unlike children and animals, realize they will eventually die and can invent rational reasons to take control of dying and achieve that goal. There were mass suicides in Germany after Hitler killed himself because people believed their fates would be worse under occupation. Suicide rates in the US are higher in states with high rates of gun ownership because other methods usually fail. But maybe the gal is.....escape velocity for immortality? It won't happen in our lifetimes. The cost of medical care is rising exponentially, just like the cost of computation is falling exponentially. Eroom's law (Moore spelled backwards), says that the cost of new drugs doubles every 9 years. Coincidentally, this is the same rate as your death probability past age 30. The result is a constant rate of life expectancy increase of 0.2 over the last century. Wouldn't 3 parents be better? Hundreds would be even better. That's what we effectively got when we evolved language, allowing us to organize into tribes and villages with government and an economy where people could cooperate and specialize in farming, teaching, or defence. ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T772759d8ceb4b92c-M1f0d4352a7b0a7eabd155996 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
