poster [none/use name]

post moar

I'm not confused about the details of evolution, nor am I elevating humanity in particular as better than other life. I'm trying to figure out what happens after evolution.

The universe is a big sandbox where anything that doesn't violate the laws of physics is possible. Life is probably abundant, and evolution is just how life changes where it exists (allow me the liberty of this definition). The more interesting thing to me, what I'm trying to talk about, is what happens to break out of evolution being the driving force of change on a planet to something else being a greater factor. It took 3.5 billion years for life to get to where we are now, and in the last 100k years we have changed from evolution being the driving force behind human development to technological progress taking over that role.

If evolution doesn't produce a technology-developing organism, that is the boring case. How are you going to send radio signals/explore the galaxy with biological evolution only? Of course the life can still be there, but it's trapped on the planet.

I don't know that I have a point, just getting some thoughts down. Thanks for your critique, I don't know where to take this discussion but I'll check out your reference and next time I'll try to be more convincing that I understand evolution.

Do you think there could be life for millions of years without evolution?

Or did you mean that life doesn't necessarily progress to building complicated machines? What other progression would it take?

Inanimate matter can't build towards anything either. i just mean that life proliferates to the fullest until it reaches a general-purpose biological form capable of building machines that can build more machines. Instead of the stone age, bronze age, etc, there's the inanimate age, the life age, the machine age, then...? It's possible the machine age is really hard to achieve given the Great Filter of all things elsewhere in this post.

Transfer of consciousness from machine to machine is viable, so replacement machines running the same software seems different than human to machine transfer would be. Redundant parts or fixing them as they break or upgrading hardware altogether solves this, so in effect the machine can be immortal.

Take GPT3 for example. It's a neural network that responds in certain ways, and you can copy it and run it on other hardware with the same result. It's not "conscious", but for several reasons, one of which is because it might just not be complex enough. But that argument is coming to an end in the next few years--neural networks will be complex enough to support general-purpose problem solving. The disconnect is that it doesn't have sensory inputs to the real world and also it has no body to preserve/defend so it has no real-world goals. Give a complex-enough neural network a body, goals, and make it understand that it has to preserve itself somehow, and you might end up with a conscious computer.

Evolution leads to something with general purpose problem-solving skills like humans and then evolution stops in humans because technology takes over. It should be possible to build immortal/transferable computer-based life and any aliens we find have a good chance of being created rather than evolved. Uploading human consciousness is a bullshit idea that assumes we have to teach the machines what is right rather than figuring it out themselves.

For spreading out into the galaxy, who cares if traveling to a star takes thousands of years if you are immortal? The pre-technology evolution track is cute (predator/prey, trees, flowers) and sustainable while the technology track is not sustainable without stronger laws that nobody seems to want. (Want to kill millions of sharks to make bullshit medicine that we don't need as a population? Nobody can stop you because we don't have the laws or enforcement. Or just do it as another entity that doesn't have to follow a common law).

We are in the singularity already with the invention of computers, the great filter we face now is running out of resources before we build intelligent machines that can go to Mars and explore the galaxy for us. Don't send me to Mars, it sucks there! If we fuck this up there will not be another opportunity on this star for a long time.

I'm other words, if the goal of matter is life, the goal of life is evolution, the goal of evolution is creation and immortality, and I don't know what's after that. Expansion? Fun with simulations?