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Visions of the post-scarcity super-utopia
electricitylikesme
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So lately I've been thinking. What do we do with ourselves once we achieve a post-scarcity society?
It doesn't sit right with me for us just to exist because we can, at least not until we've improved the lot of everyone. Which got me thinking: surely the ultimate utopia needs to provide for not only those fortunate enough to live in it, but all those who suffered before to make it possible.
My proposal is thus that the ultimate utopia would be one where we use our technology to bring every human being that has ever lived back to life as well. We must build our own afterlife.
Obviously this depends on technology and physics we don't have in order to accomplish it. But to me it seems like a moral imperative of a post-scarcity society for us to establish conclusively whether or not it can be done. Even then - it would be a huge undertaking - dealing with the mental health and specific requirements of so many billions of people. But to me, it seems like we would have a moral imperative - if it could be done - to do such a thing.
It doesn't sit right with me for us just to exist because we can, at least not until we've improved the lot of everyone. Which got me thinking: surely the ultimate utopia needs to provide for not only those fortunate enough to live in it, but all those who suffered before to make it possible.
My proposal is thus that the ultimate utopia would be one where we use our technology to bring every human being that has ever lived back to life as well. We must build our own afterlife.
Obviously this depends on technology and physics we don't have in order to accomplish it. But to me it seems like a moral imperative of a post-scarcity society for us to establish conclusively whether or not it can be done. Even then - it would be a huge undertaking - dealing with the mental health and specific requirements of so many billions of people. But to me, it seems like we would have a moral imperative - if it could be done - to do such a thing.
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I'm just really confused as to how that would work, even if we had real actual magic.
We develop some technology which lets us observe the past accurately, meaning we can take accurate readings of people's brains/bodies right up to the moment of death. With this information, we recreate them in the present.
There was also a movie from the 80's which had the same idea, only their they were kidnapping people who died in highly publicized ways and time-travelling them right as they were about to die.
Edit: Also, I want to thank you for giving me a great idea for a short story... This technology is used secretly and people are brought back to life in simulated versions of whatever afterlife they believed they were destined for.
It's an idea which spiralled. I started thinking about doing it to people when we knew where and when they died - hence the best way to go for immortality being to die in a highly publicized way with exact GPS coordinates or something.
But then I got thinking that strictly speaking that wouldn't be a limitation depending how good your technology was and what the laws of physics let us do in terms of reverse-predicting the flow of time.
Shit, what was the name of that movie? It sounds really, really familiar and I cannot think of the title.
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU JUST REFERENCED FREEJACK
Sorry, I just couldn't help myself. I have nothing of value to contribute here. Carry on.
PS: That movie came out in '92.
PSN/XBL: Zampanov -- Steam: Zampanov
you must ensure that everyone human who might potentially live in the future can benefit from this utopia as well. every single possible viable combination of nucleotides must be accounted for!
Quitter.
PSN/XBL: Zampanov -- Steam: Zampanov
I guess this gets into the old cloning/teleportation question- if you make a perfect duplicate of someone, with the exact same body, brain, and memories, is it really the same person? Or would the original person still be dead? Basically, do you believe that humans have a soul?
You make me even more confident in the conclusion of the simulation argument.
Theseus? Yeah, that guy. What's so special about uninterrupted existence when your consciousness is already interrupted to an extent by sleeping/getting knocked out/comas. My current thinking on it is that you're alive, then you die for however long it takes to get there, then you're alive again. The teleported/time travel recreated you is just as much 'you' as the you from 5/10/20 years/minutes/seconds ago is 'you'.
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if you take the position that humans have no soul, then I'd agree with this. But if you do have a soul, well, sleeping is a natural thing whereas teleportation really isn't.
But yeah, as much as I know my philosophical stance I'm a physicalist or something like that.
If it's a moral imperative to have everyone in a post-scarcity utopia and we are in a simulation, then the simulators are dicks. Problem of evil and all that.
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Ah yes, Freejack. I have fond childhood memories of that movie.
Not really, if you control all the factors and you can add happiness later (as in an afterlife or something similar), it's pretty easy to justify short term suffering for long term gain.
You are doing strange things with the word "consciousness"
Having consciousness in the sense that I think you want to use it isn't simply being awake.
Like, we become beings devoid of a consciousness when we fall asleep or are knocked out. I mean, where does it go? How do we get it back?
While there is a legit meaning of "conscious" as "being awake or aware" when you talk about "consciousness" generally something else is being referenced.
So transporting one's consciousness is not simply a matter of transferring a wakeful and alert state.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I'm not terribly optimistic that we will achieve utopia simply by virtue of eliminating materials and energy scarcity.
That actually helps my stance of teleportation doing nothing special to consciousness, though.
And I would say that consciousness is purely a function of brain activity, although it's obviously difficult if not impossible to test that scientifically.
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But I don't think cheating death is a desirable part of a utopia. A perfect society, to me, would make life as fulfilling and happy for everyone as possible, but wouldn't artificially prolong life far beyond our natural lifespans. Death is not a bad thing.
I had no intention of weighing in on what teleportation might "do" to one's consciousness. All I wanted to do was get your terminology sorted out.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Again someone is using 'natural' ambiguously. What is our 'natural' lifespan? What it was in hunter-gatherer societies? Early agricultural ones? The working class during the industrial revolution?
'Natural lifespan' is a meaningless term, the only close to reasonable definition I can think of is 'how long you last without medical intervention' which is still pretty silly.
Well I'm pretty sure this is the first time a philosophy-oriented person has corrected me in a conversation without having an ulterior motive.
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I envision cities in the sky, and those who want nothing to do with it can walk the earth, live their tribal lives out. After many generations, we will have civilized humans and feral humans. Civilized humans will occasionally send hunting parties down to the surface for exotic foods or resources, well armed to defend from attacks from their feral cousins. Among the land-walkers will be those who wanted some middleground, maintaining a society, fending off the feral and civilized, but occasionally trading with those who live among the clouds.
... <_<
I think you're way too romantic and if we ever met we'd probably have to fight to the death.
eternal life ain't cool beans AT ALL
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If any individual human has nearly limitless power, the cosmos will be filled with planet sized wangs
Good to know where you stand philosophically.
Don't we have a fuckton of fusion fuel on the Moon though?
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In looking this up, I discovered the best-named wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_law
Anyway: not really. There's hydrogen on the moon (what with all that water), but we've kind of got a lot of that already. Lithium is what we'd be short on (maybe... there are other means of fusion, but lithium+tritium is the most promising)
[edit] Where'd you get that number from, L|ama? I did find [a href=http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1971LPSC....2.1217C]this[/a], which actually gives around 6.6 ppm for moon rocks and 18 ppm for moon soil, for lithium. However, I don't think that there's any particular advantage to going all the way to the fucking moon for some goddamned rocks.
Like anyone knows from experience!
He meant Millennium (1989). Or he should have meant Millennium, if he didn't. It was a better movie.
lol, this was a very artful Godwin.
The idea of a utopia (or more importantly: any effort to get us as close as possible to one as we can) would be to maximize individual freedoms and the like.