I would feel relieved if there was miscommunication between us.
I was mostly concerned with the issue of what we *should* care about and what cares we *should* be acting upon. If you are simply talking about some cognitive biases we have that you concede ought to be overcome (or that we ought to try to overcome to whatever extent possible), then great, it sounds like we don't really have much of a disagreement, except perhaps on some details. John Ku On 5/27/07, Samantha Atkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
It was not perhaps so simple as you are portraying it. There is deep EP programming behind caring about human beings that puts it partially beyond conscious choice changeable by new information. However, our EP also includes quite a bit of xenophobia against those perceived as not us. EP xenophobic tendencies that haven't been sufficiently overcome do a good job of explaining racism. I think you may be overly focusing on the roles of conscious thought and individual history. While conscious thought and work is required to overcome suboptimal responses and attitudes it is important to acknowledge the less conscious and more ingrained aspects of the problem. ..... That part of what I wrote would seem to require the least clarification. What are you asking? I was referring to the occassional intellectual dissociation as if we were already uploads or otherwise disembodied or no longer human. From this false Olympian perspective we reason about what we should care about. We think we are being intellectually and ethically cleaner when we do so. Yet from a more humble perspective we are literally sawing away at the branch we are sitting on. .... Actually, at this point in our technological development their well-being obviously does depend on the continuation of biological humanity. Even with not yet available uber-tech their well-being will depend on some means of perserving the matrix within which such beings can exist, whatever that matrix may come to be. ..... I am not confused at all. Perhaps you are as to what I was writing about. My apologies if I did not communicate with sufficient clarity. ..... Genes per se are just mechanism. Continued existence of humanity is important regardless of what the mechanism is or becomes. By "evolutionary dead end" I meant something that could perhaps be less confusing to you if I had wrote "developmental dead end" of this particular species of intelligent being.
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