The "Abolitionists" want to genetically create a cruelty free world

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Clarke

Did you notice the description of Eywa-like distributed intelligence systems? Powerful, though perhaps not completely human-level AI is apparently part of the premise.

More likely, they are entirely aware of this lack of goal - and bypass it, by replacing the randomly evolved lifeforms with life that is, objectively, designed to survive better than that which is currently existing.

It was not so much about the technologcal capability to create this, but about an argument if it is somethign that SHOULD be done. Though I would challenge the technological capabilities as well, because a true AI that is able to learn and evolve and that maybe even is as intelligent as humans or more will find its own logic, morale and not have to stick to what we claim are our moral values. I see it as an immense hybris though to claim that human values of preventing predator/prey relationships and death should be applied to all of nature and that they in fact could be applied by factually designing a whole world with billions of species. And to top this off, you even claim that they would survive better than the ones currently existing!?! Life on Earth made it over about 4 billion years! multicelled animals continued to exist for over 600 million years. I'd say that is quite a record and quite a long time to experiment and find good solutions to create closed cycles on Earth that ensure sustainability. If anything, human intelligence is currently applied to damage or reduce the capability of these natural systems to continue existing. To assume that just because we soon have bio-nano-computertechnology that gives us more power to control nature will somehow mysteriously make humans all the sudden adhere to their ethical ideals is an unbased assumption, IMO.

If significantly transhuman intelligence comes into play, you are about to lose the game,[...]you might as well bow down and start worshipping. There's not a lot else you can do, and nothing you could do would matter.

You really want this to happen, do you? What a weird kind of masochism. I dont know if there is anything I CAN do, but surely I will not look forward to this and my mind will be focussed on how to avoid this whole transhumanist thing.

But how do we decide what culture is valuable, and which is not?
And don't say that all culture is equally valuable; it's clearly not. If it were, you'd positively support assimilating all the natives in the world into the 21st century hivemind. After all, the cultural and artistic output via the Internet is vastly larger, both in absolute terms and in proportion, than any other culture in history, perhaps by orders of magnitude.

I would challenge the last part of your statement in several ways that deal with the fallacy of trying to quantify cultural and artistic output plus the fact that obviously 7 billion people will do more of anything than 1 billion. But to make this argument in more detail would take toomuch room here.
Regarding the first part, I think you dont understand what it is that I regard as valuable. It is not one culture or another it is the presence of a cultural diversity. The distinctness of different cultures. If I would say that they are all equally valuable, it still would not mean that I would promote them all being absorbed into a hivemind culture. Equal value does not mean that they have all no value and can as well just be assimilated. But I dont even say that - certainly not all cultures are of equal value for people living in that or other cultures. I for my part would argue that cultures that are sustainable, that promote the health of the natural world, that promote happiness of its members and maybe that of others, that provide humans and nonhumans with adequate living conditions are more valuable than those that pillage and plunder and exploit their own members. But maybe that is just my opinion. Others may like to be exploited or pillaged, who knows.

I was trying to prompt a justification of why nature as it stands is automatically better than some other hypothetical nature-like construct. The apparent implicit one is, "Because it's traditional", but that would be fallacious, and so I'm sure it's not the one aurora is using.

In a way I would actually. Not just by itself, but out of two reasons. One is that something that has developed and evolved for billions of years certainly does have some merit. It made its way for some orders or magnitude longer than civilized human existence and survived. So part one is that Nature is a system that is working well and that is sustainable. Replacing it with something else, or disturbing it fundamentally for that matter, should require serious considerations and something next to certainty about a replacement for it to have the same properties. And if that replacement is devised in a timeframe that is massively shorter, I'd say caution is advised. This is not a computer that you can start from the backup partition if something goes wrong. And the other thing is, that certainly I and almost all other living things on this planet are part of this Nature, have evolved into it and have a connection to it. Certainly that alone is a reason to desire it to still be there in the future and not be wiped out. Even though some people call me a misanthop, I am not, because I even say that humanity has damn well a place in this world and is very much worth to exist in the future and should definitely see and act on the fact that a purely technological and artificial future is a probability. Maybe not one like in that article but maybe one that is even worse because it does not even retain a shred of our world.