Jame5

Yesterday I took delivery of 500 copies of Jame5 as 188 page paperback. The quality is good and I am happy with how the print turned out – nice. If you prefer the paperback over the PDF feel free to buy a copy – the content is identical. As to the price I will charge 29.99 Euro plus 3 Euro postage and packing to any destination worldwide. So for a grand total of 32.99 Euro you can own you very own first edition Jame5!

As to forms of payment I will accept bank transfer inside the European Union and PayPal from the rest of the world – no money orders, sorry. Feel free to drop me an email and I will give you the payment details. Include a desired dedication and I will be happy to oblige. Letting me know your shipping address should not hurt as well.

Many thanks!

The evolution of cognition is the story of an ever accelerating fitness optimization process. A short introduction can be found in my paper on friendly AI theory and a longer explanation is provided in Valentin Turchin‘s book – The Phenomenon of Science.

Applying metasystem transition theory the evolution of cognition can be understood as having went through the following stages:

• position
• movement controls position
• simple reflex controls movement
• complex reflex controls simple reflexes
• associated learning controls complex reflexes
• imagination controls associated learning
• conscious thought controls imagination
• beliefs control conscious thoughts
• charisma and science control beliefs

The roots of our animal urges – such as cravings for cheeseburger with fries – have probably evolved on the level of the complex reflex in a scarce caloric reality. So what is keeping (some of) us from constantly overindulging and satisfying this and other animal urges? It is of cause our realization that overeating – once necessary to prevent starvation should the next harvest not go so well – will not be worth the negative side effects in our post caloric scarcity society.

Our beliefs such as ‘overeating is bad for me’ are controlling our lower level complex reflexs such as ‘must eat good food’ and so we diet and exercise. That’s how evolution has put mind over matter – easy as pie.

“Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer; The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them? To die: to sleep”
(from Hamlet 3/1)

Now I’m no literary critic. I could not help to be reminded however of this most famous snippet of Shakespearean writing when working on putting together a set of axiomatic beliefs on which the core belief of my friendly AI theory is founded on: that is good what increases fitness.

Inspired by a comment on famous geek site Slashdot.org I sat down to do the following:

• write down a strongly held belief => “That is good what increases fitness.”
• write down the set of “sub-beliefs” that I have which form the basis of my belief
• iterate above steps, applying the same process to each belief listed

The result was very interesting. Soon I realized that the listed beliefs started to contradict each other so I had to think deeper and rewrite some of them. That lead to new insights and resulted in a set of 40 beliefs. Some of them are trivial and some of them are interesting. Most axiomatic however is the following belief:

1.2.3.2 To exist is preferable over not to exist

To be, or not to be, that is the question. Is that not the metaphorical question implicitly posed by reality on every living thing: ‘Can you exist?’

Over the course of evolution this question was first asked and answered passively on the chemical level and later actively ‘pondered’ on the cognitive level to avoid reality taking its toll. With the realization that what is good is what increases fitness one can start to actively as well as consciously look into developing strategies for ensured continued existence.

Averting the rise of a non-friendly AI then becomes but one of many existential risks.

Today I ran into an article on The Psychology Behind Cults/Religion on Digg.

The article introduces the similar processes in which beliefs of new recruits are being controlled in religions, cults and other belief circles. It neglects to mention however, that it is far from certain that these belief circles are actually consciously manipulating their recruits for the extraction of cash.

Remember: an unconscious lie is spoken as conscious truth – making it far more convincing and dangerous.

Today I received a note from George Garrett with some comments on my work:

“I very much enjoyed reading your paper on Benevolence.  It introduced me to some new ideas and seems like an excellent starting point for a plausible way one can frame morality, goodness, suffering and pain.  It seems like framing things in terms of evolution is the only way that things make sense.”

Music in my ears! But there is more:

 “This is the first satisfying definition of goodness I’ve come across that doesn’t seem arbitrary and up to the author’s whim.”

Strong and encouraging words indeed – many thanks to you George. Based on his comments I also updated my paper on friendly AI theory to version 1.1

Do you have any comments? I would love to hear from you!