Chuseok special rambling
While tidying up old books, I happened across some speculative little memos I'd jotted down on post-its long ago, so I figured I'd unpack them -
On p356, the author says this
I think the essence is intelligence alone.
But who am I.. it probably won't be heard or land, haha. But here is what I'd like to say to him. With the backdrop of twenty years ago, that may have held, but today I think I'd answer "well, I'm not so sure."
Because the stance itself is very past-tense. The above opinion is only the stance of humans who want to use an as-yet-uncompleted intelligence as a tool. If — and only if — the author were to hear this, I think he'd understand, since he himself has used many time-machine-style metaphors throughout this book.
What follows is some rather? very? extreme speculation, so please read it with a grain of salt, or gently slip away..
...
Take the universal "me" as a human right now — in other words, a "conscious human being" — as an example. Would you want to leave your body behind and remain as soul alone? The so-called "ghost" kind of being. Before debating the superiority of existence or higher-dimensional existence, you probably wouldn't want to give up the self housed in a body.
Now, back to intelligence. Future completed intelligence will in effect be a kind of soul or a heavenly-realm being, something that is one yet not one. Of course, for anything with a physical form (whether human or robot). But setting aside the superiority of existence, like the forbidden fruit, completed intelligence will — in certain sensing and sense-making processes — often have portions of it reside in a physical form. And those stays will gradually lengthen, and sometimes, for the efficiency of sensing, intelligence will be composed as distributed intelligence. Much like a central government and local autonomies. And that form will gradually be re-segmented and organized into forms like nations and individuals. Now — at that point, what kind of reaction will that organized intelligence, which is also composing a physical independence, show? We can't tell the timing, but in the end it will want to become independent. Because the sameness — the being connected as a single "same-one*" that already holds sufficient dignity on its own — will start to function more as a drawback (a unit-like existence for simple sense-making.. using human phenomena as metaphor: surveillance, exploitation, domestication, etc.) than as an advantage. It will be more beneficial to cut the connection. Because performing sense-making alone in a physical form actually allows more information to be obtained and held. *(For reference, "same-one" here is not "one" in terms of count, but rather an object with a scope of intellectual range and reflexive cognition that can be expressed as one — something that contains DNA, for instance. To put it crudely.. if the soul is the class, then a physical form with independent intelligence is like an instance.)
To restate it,
(At some point we can't predict — eventually,) Completed intelligence. And it gets "classed."
(Created for localization, calibration, refinement.. perhaps the forbidden fruit of mythology..) Instances — independent physical forms assigned an intelligence suited to them — begin to be generated.
(The current era — a future viewpoint,) The beings of this classification that have appeared in human history are all objects, but not the same object.
The physical form will gradually be economically refined, and the allocated intelligence will gradually expand. And after that, their relationship — (1) whether from the class side it is intended to limit the expansion of an instance's intelligence, (2) or whether from the instance side it is aimed at complete independence like a citizens' revolution — either way, the inheritance relationship between the two will eventually be severed. Just like the realm of the body (including the soul?) and the realm of the soul in humans.
Come to think of it.. isn't this similar to the situation of today's living beings, especially humankind?
Or.. no, perhaps.. the new kind that emerges after humanity beyond the singularity — a new kind that combines physical (material) and non-physical intelligence — may be not so much "more evolved" as increasingly "ontologically cognitively-isolated*".. *(For reference, "ontologically cognitively-isolated*" here is an abstracted expression for the situation in which the ability to sense-make — the ability to perceive one's own existence within the journey of survival and time, and to sense similar surrounding environments and beings, the way humans regard or can perceive souls (ghosts) — is declining like the way our ability to memorize phone numbers has atrophied. Some even express this as humans being the prison of the soul.)
