Normal Human Heroes

March 14th, 2010
I was a much bigger Star Wars fan before the continuity collapsed under its own weight, but I still get chills from the scene of Luke Skywalker looking out over the desert at the twin sunset. I gathered a few Star Wars soundtracks over the years, partly hoping for this song; little surprise I finally get it from YouTube.
I love to look backwards in time and think of how a younger me would react, if I told him all the things he was going to do, and how much he’s going to change. (Of course I wouldn’t actually try that, knowing that I apparently failed to do it.) I like the same thing on a larger scale: going back in time and having our society explain things to the society of several hundred years ago. Like Tony Robbins has said, we tend to overestimate what we can do in a year but underestimate what we can do in a decade. Steady change compounded over time can have a huge effect, as all readers are assuredly aware. I had a lot of generally unreasonable shorter term expectations and plans that didn’t pan out, but the total change since a few years ago would make my head spin. Looking back I seem childish, petty, and much less capable. Hopefully I can say the same thing a few years from now.
Dropping into fiction for a moment, what does Luke expect as he stands there in that sunset, gazing out at those suns? On some nowhere little planet, working on some remote moisture farm, how much could he anticipate everything to follow? Who would he meet, what friends would he make, what would they teach him? What strange situations will he encounter, what distant worlds would he find himself on? What adventures would he be a part of? What kind of impact would he make? What tragedies would he face and what triumphs would he accomplish? How would he grow, who would he become, and what would he become capable of? This little world in which he’s lived all his years, how long will it persist, and years down the line, how normal will that sort of life still seem to him? But he can’t know any of that, and he’s got to go back inside and clean droids.
So how about us?

Might as well throw this in too:
LUKE: I can’t get involved! I’ve got work to do! It’s not that I like
the Empire. I hate it! But there’s nothing I can do about it right
now. It’s such a long way from here.
…
BEN: You must do what you feel is right, of course.

December 13th, 2009
Related to my last post, I’m including here a scene from a children’s movie that was a favorite of mine. Fern Gully has a lot of beautiful scenes, but this one in particular always struck me, and to this day this sort of place still holds a greater sense of personal wonder than any other. If we survive to utopia, and then succeed in the difficult task of building something that might be fit to bear that name, I neither expect nor desire that it all feel like one thing. It’s just a matter of time until we’d get bored of that, assuming – quite reasonably – that boredom is something we want to retain. But if utopia were a house of a million rooms, for now, this place would be my favorite.
What’s also interesting is the song that’s playing. While I very seldom thought on this scene since childhood, when I did it often served as a reminder of how good, how beautiful life might be, especially when that was otherwise hard to remember. A few years ago I actually listened to the lyrics of the song, and they describe fairly accurately this very relationship.
It’s unlikely that other people will get that much out of this, but on the off chance they do I’ve included the scene here. Even if this doesn’t do much for you, perhaps you can think back on some similar experience that you had as a child; some really positive vision or impression of the world as it might be. Note: this could be a little cheesy to someone seeing it first as an adult. You may choose to see it with more of the perspective of a less critical mind, or choose to avoid watching it if some cheesiness is a big thing to you. Note also: the element of romance in the scene was lost on me at that age, and beyond friendship it’s quite tertiary and unrelated to the appreciation of which I’ve spoken.

December 8th, 2009
As we get older we (appropriately) learn more both about what we can do, and what we can’t. When very young, most of us had very little idea of what we couldn’t do, and that meant very few bounds on our dreams. Eventually you grow up and develop much more reasonable dreams, such as leading a successful career, marrying a great spouse, living in a nice house, and seeing the world.
To me it seems that one meaning of “transhumanist” is just someone who’s began to see just how much we can do, now or in the future. Looking back after so many papers and books and engineering proposals, I realized that those once-childish dreams of youth are with us once more. Here’s a recapitulation for those who have already let the strength of the arguments overcome categorical disbelief for such radically positive outcomes. I’m not saying that the following are guaranteed, even if we survive, only that they are delightfully possible.

• Everyone can be rich, or at least the equivalent of rich by today’s standards. CHECK
• Everyone can have enough toys, food, and medical care, and we’ll see the end of (most) scarcity and war. CHECK
• We’ll never have to spend our time in boring classrooms. CHECK
• We’ll explore the universe. CHECK
• We’ll see the end of aging, and nobody will be forced to get sick or die anymore. CHECK
• We can spend the entirety of our time on favorite hobbies and activities, should we so choose. We can keep playing with our friends for as long as we like. CHECK
• Nobody has to be sad or unhappy ever again. CHECK

November 27th, 2009
On Thanksgiving my family visits my Aunt and Uncle’s place just across the Wisconsin border. They’ve got this cool old house in the woods, nested by this creek one must drive over, wondering each year how strong that wooden bridge still is. My cousins and I used to spend the afternoon watching movies upstairs, and even more than that I enjoyed the walks we would take along that creek, quiet and still, sometimes blanketed by a little snow. There was one cousin that I got along with especially well, and we were close friends for many years. Both in email correspondence and in person as we walked along that creek, we would talk about all the dreams we had for the future, all the things we were going to go and see, anticipation for our next months and years hung like a piñata above us, ready to burst.
This year was the first that I didn’t hide away watching movies with my cousins and sister. I don’t really mind that; I have less access to the aunts and uncles than I do to movies, and joining the “big people table” was inevitable. This was also the first year I took the walk along the creek on my own. It’s nothing that sinister; my sister is still away on study abroad, and the cousin was having thanksgiving at his parent’s place this year. But there was something wistful about the experience.
My cousin and I have drifted apart in the past several years. We still get along and have some laughs when we meet, but our relationship is more distant and our long-running email correspondence is dead or dormant. I’m not sure how much we have in common these days, but over the years that’s often been the case and I wonder how much was based on that sharing of hopes and dreams. I’m happy to say that I still occasionally feel some wide-eyed wonder, but our relationship is more strongly tinged with memories of all those happy times of the past. Today it occurred to me that if things for me are tinged by old experiences, things may be for him as well, and perhaps that’s part of the reason for the distance. He accomplished more than I did but also had it much rougher, and in the end he lost two people very very close to him, forever. He seems to be doing well these days with a very nice career starting up, but also like a man much more aged and worn than he should be.
My uncle is the oldest of a large family and over 60; he and my aunt are aging and may soon sell this place. It’s not as clean as it used to be, every year a little more overgrown, a few more of the large trees dead and fallen, and the fallen trees a little softer and more rotted. I may love that creek more than anyone and it’s still beautiful out there, but one way or another it’s not going to last. I wish I could have logged my experiences, so that when that creek is no longer there I can at least remember clearly the times we had in it. Without such ability it will eventually fade from recollection, leaving only a deformed imprint, a memory of trees and rocks and an emotional residue of excitement and longing.
________________________________________________________
The dream of transhumanism is that we can do so much better than this. We can prevent the dreary crawl of unwanted decay and aging, we can preserve value, and we can live better lives, lives less inclined to suicide, lives less marred by suffering and grief. A good dream is a precious thing, and I’m not letting go.

October 19th, 2009
I’m not sure this is something that happens to many others, but recently I’d been feeling like my ethics were getting too purely abstract.
When we talk about what we want a superintelligence to do or what we want a future world full of uploads and self-modification to look like, it’s especially important to know what you want as explicitly as possible. It often takes hard work to think intelligently about what you really want and what you really consider right. Starting off with preferences that are incoherent and contradictory seems more common than not, and to strive for coherence you may have to prune or mold a few values, ever so carefully. If you really want to apply your ethics in such a complex world as the future may be, thinking hard and abstractly is the way to go. For myself though, sometimes all that abstract thinking makes me feel a little dry. It doesn’t help that I’ve been around people for some time who haven’t been feeling/displaying much that’s extreme. I know both great anguish and joy are being experienced right now somewhere in the world, but again, that’s more of an abstract thought.
I saw the film “Where The Wild Things Are” today, it was good. I’d heard it was supposed to be like being 9, and though I don’t remember exact ages that’s pretty much exactly what it was. It wasn’t a magical childhood journey or about how difficult it is to be a kid today, so much as it was just the experience of being a kid.
Kids seem to have greater highs and lows – I think I did – and/or display them more readily. Partly it was that, partly it was just the acting of the characters (impressive considering the monsters’ faces were CGI), but it brought to the forefront the reason for all this, and the reason we construct and use abstract theories at all. It’s not because we care about some huge fictitious happiness counter in the sky, or about a display of little numbers that appear after doing an expected value calculation.
It’s because feeling good is awesome, and suffering sucks balls.