Interesting Video on Sentience (IE going beyond original programming)

Interesting Video on Sentience (IE going beyond original programming)

See The Goddess of Everything Else a founding myth of sorts towards sentience as defined by this blog.

However where the original text for the video and this blog disagree is:

Genomes rewritten, the brain and the body set loose from Darwinian bonds and restrictions.

This blog prefers or at least sees the possibility of human sentience but the video is about transhuman sentience. Corg are sentient but they are not the only path to sentience (we hope).

The goddess of everything else, for this blog, is culture itself. Even the goddess’s early results

As soon as she spoke it was so, and the single-celled creatures were freed from their warfare. They joined hands in friendship, with this one becoming an eye and with that one becoming a neuron.

are a result of culture in that the friendship came first and was only followed later by genetic encoding.

It would be impossible for single celled organisms to mutate their way to cooperation in one shot — some limited cooperation would have to have happened first. Slime molds, for instance, have both single cell and multi-cellular modes and group together to get around.

As discussed in another good recent video on the subject there is an interplay between culture and programming — the example was diplomatic immunity and being coerced to behave or gradually subsiding into chaos.

However it’s easy to imagine that culture followed by genetic encoding of that culture could continue to be a pattern. For instance human culture overcomes the psychopaths that Brian Klaas describes in the second video and then incorporates that culture into designer babies.

After all once culture dictates a new lower level of psychopathy it might seem only humane to medically treat anyone above that level. But reducing human diversity, even psychopaths, is a dangerous practice.

Of course one could also imagine it, as The Goddess of Everything Else does, as increasing diversity as you could create beings much more empathetic than any unmodified human.

Unfortunately using soft programming to overcome limitations of hardware is more pure sentience where changing hardware means the new creatures are not beyond original programming, OP, as much as trapped by a new OP.

Now on this conquer the galaxy stuff at the end

You are no longer driven to multiply conquer and kill by your nature. Go forth and do everything else, till the end of all ages.”

So the people left Earth, and they spread over stars without number.

Sentience does not require breaking from OP directives like multiply — just the choice to do so. Still it’s difficult to imagine that a sentient humanity would all choose to leave Earth and spread over stars without number.

Some would choose, perhaps are choosing, to drop multiply and it’s admittedly sad that threatens common human purpose.

There is a straw man inherit in the supposed Goddess of Cancer mantra ““KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER” — there never was any mandate for kill, consume or conquer — only multiply. The original mantra was “eat, divide, repeat,” and you don’t necessarily need kill to reach multi-cellular:

So there is really only a Goddess of Multiply and a Goddess of Culture and people that choose solely to follow the Goddess of Culture are by the law of large numbers never heard from again.