Over at lesswrong.com it’s the fate of a possible future galactic civilization people seem to care about most. But you don’t have to look that far, most people are devoting a big part of their lifes to think about and work for their future selves. Both ideas have something in common, they are both based upon imaginary entities.

But what we do has not to be bound to be about pleasing other beings, much less possible beings.

The only reasons we care about other people is either to survive, i.e. get what we want, or because it is part of our preferences to see other people being happy. Accordingly, trying to maximize happiness for everybody can be seen as purely selfish.  Either as an effort to survive, by making everybody wanting to make everybody else happy, given that not you but somebody else wins. Or simply because it makes you happy.

There does exist no goal that is of objective moral superiority.

It’s all about your preferences. It is up to what we want. And what do I want? You tell me? Nope, it will come to me naturally.

The ultimate purpose on which all meaning is based is the subjective first-person knowledge of volition. A truth which is self-evident. Volition is a truth that is adequately proven by circular reasoning. I want what I want, by reason that’s what I want. Consequently, any action that helps to enforce your will is the only preferable action.

The questions are if you are happy with the present, or else, what you want to achieve. Not what is possible. It’s possible that you’re just the tribesman who’s happily trying to improve his hunting skills but ignorant of the possible revolutions taking place in a city only 1000 miles afar. Your preferences, what you really want, change as your knowledge and understanding grow. Is what we’ve been doing as kids still intellectually demanding and satisfying?

You see, what is possible is too large to be taken into account. At what point are we going to stop and enjoy? Isn’t there always more to learn? How do we ever know if there isn’t something out there that is more worthwhile, valuable, beautiful, something that makes us happier?

Thus, can there be any goals except enjoying the present or the infinite seeking of knowledge and wisdom?

But are those considerations of your future self and our collective future as a galactic civilisation not too important, too big to be ruled over by the present, by our temporal position of power?

Your continuous existence is not irrelevant to you. You care not to be wiped out. But considering future possibilities regardless of the present is missing the only piece of information that is relevant to estimate the true value of these possibilities, namely what you want right now. It means to take a look from the outside, or in other words, take an objective view and thereby deduce that the present is of no value, that our current existence is irrelevant compared to the future. Of course, from the point of view of a fictional galactic civilisation or your possible infinite future this is true. From an imagined, made up viewpoint, created to give the desired result that the future is too big to be ruled over by the present.

If you are dead, there is no will, indeed everything is irrelevant to you. Taking this standpoint and deduce that if everything is irrelevant from that point of view, it is also irrelevant from any other position is the same as preferring the future over the present for that it is larger.

Just because you can imagine that as seen from outside of your first-person view thyself might be of no relevance, it doesn’t make it true. You will never “really”, “objectively” take that position, because it does not exist!

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It hurts my eyes http://ff.im/-h2C6A #

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Scientists admit that radiometric dating, one of the fundamental techniques used to show the earth is billions of years old is flawed!!! The earth is not 4.55 billion years old. Watch and find out just how old it really is.

Of course, scientists are always refining their techniques, it’s part of of science works. Creationists have pointed to a number of “results” from radiometric dating that prove it doesn’t work. Here I go over all the reasons why. Why is there Carbon-14 in some coal. Why did Potassium-Argon dating of the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens give ages on the order of hundreds of thousands of years.

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To download the scientific paper featured in this video please go to:
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Slides: hanson.gmu.edu/ppt/Econ%20of%20AI%20n%20Nanotech.ppt

Robin Hanson: “Economics of Nanotech and AI” at Foresight 2010 Conference from Foresight Institute on Vimeo.

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Bio for this speaker:
Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University, and chief scientist at Consensus Point. After receiving his Ph.D. in social science from the California Institute of Technology in 1997, Robin was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation health policy scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1984, Robin received a masters in physics and a masters in the philosophy of science from the University of Chicago, and afterward spent nine years researching artificial intelligence, Bayesian statistics, and hypertext publishing at Lockheed, NASA, and independently.

Robin has over 70 publications, including articles in Applied Optics, Business Week, CATO Journal, Communications of the ACM, Economics Letters, Econometrica, Economics of Governance, Extropy, Forbes, Foundations of Physics, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Information Systems Frontiers, Innovations, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Evolution and Technology, Journal of Law Economics and Policy, Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Prediction Markets, Journal of Public Economics, Medical Hypotheses, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Public Choice, Social Epistemology, Social Philosophy and Policy, Theory and Decision, and Wired.

Robin has pioneered prediction markets, also known as information markets or idea futures, since 1988. He was the first to write in detail about people creating and subsidizing markets in order to gain better estimates on those topics. Robin was a principal architect of the first internal corporate markets, at Xanadu in 1990, of the first web markets, the Foresight Exchange since 1994, and of DARPA’s Policy Analysis Market, from 2001 to 2003. Robin has developed new technologies for conditional, combinatorial, and intermediated trading, and has studied insider trading, manipulation, and other foul play. Robin has written and spoken widely on the application of idea futures to business and policy, being mentioned in over one hundered press articles on the subject, and advising many ventures, including GuessNow, Newsfutures, Particle Financial, Prophet Street, Trilogy Advisors, XPree, YooNew, and undisclosable defense research projects. He is now chief scientist at Consensus Point.

Robin has diverse research interests, with papers on spatial product competition, health incentive contracts, group insurance, product bans, evolutionary psychology and bioethics of health care, voter information incentives, incentives to fake expertise, Bayesian classification, agreeing to disagree, self-deception in disagreement, probability elicitation, wiretaps, image reconstruction, the history of science prizes, reversible computation, the origin of life, the survival of humanity, very long term economic growth, growth given machine intelligence, and interstellar colonization.

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