The words of Max More are too well composed, too precise to emulate, so I have decided to make my (perhaps) final extropy-related piece one of total plagiarism (but with due credit given to the author, and my own kind of introduction to Extropianism). The document below, the third version of The Extropian Principles, is also to be found on Max More’s site here.

Introduction

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The term ‘transhumanist’ comes with significant baggage concerning the ethics or unethical-ness of modifying the human body and mind — indeed this is one of the foundational principles in Extropianism/Transhumanism — that of ‘hacking’ and ‘modding’ our essence, so to speak. Neo-luddites site this and our oft-demonstrated inability to reign in progress before significant disruption of the biosphere occurs, just look at the recent BP oil spill, or Chernobyl, or Global Climate Change/Chaos, or the Pacific Plastic Swarm for examples. Neo-luddites in particular (in addition to many other concerned citizens) have a number of justifiably rational fears about new technologies and their implications, such as nanobots and the grey-goo scenario. But in the words of the great Isaac Asimov, “If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them”.

Transhumanism and Extropianism are, of course, centered on progress. And although progress can lead to its own fair share of problems, the goal in Extropianism/Transhumanism is also to discover innovative ways of preventing the kind of greed-fueled disasters for which science and capitalism are often blamed. So, let’s not oversimplify by saying that Neo-luddites are anti-progress and Extropians are pro-. I would like to argue that Extropians are neither extremist nor hyper-capitalist when it comes to progress, but that they take the long view on the development of civilization in general.

Transhumanism and Extropianism are philosophical frameworks that provide a rationale for expanding our knowledge of ourselves, our knowledge of the universe, and our ability to affect change in those two realms.

“No mysteries are sacrosanct, no limits unquestionable; the unknown will yield to the ingenious mind. We seek to understand the universe, not to tremble before mystery, as we continue to learn and grow and enjoy our lives ever more.”

To dig a little deeper, we can say that the Extropian’s work is to push the bounds of science and philosophy in attempts to improve not only the human situation and human conditions, but also our capacity to understand and innovate further. But this is nothing new; humans have been building up these capacities since before we diverged from other apes. Every survival-enhancing behavior and trait gained since that point has led us here: enhanced social skills, complex displays of emotions, tool use, language, agriculture, mathematics, writing… All these things have served to further and spread innovation in our species in a directional arrow of evolution. And what that arrow points to is, in fact, of the greatest concern to Extropians: the reduction of entropy to the greatest possible point — metaphorically that is; by way of increasing extropy (definitions below).

Were our species to die out, it is not certain that any others would come into our place as intelligent, tool-using, environment-manipulating mammals with a capacity for language and empathy. It is all these traits that have made our civilization possible, and to be fair, a bit unstable. The Extropian has considered many of the existential risks we face and seeks, to the greatest extent possible, to gather, maintain, and make permanent the genetic, cultural, philosophical, and technological innovations that have emerged on our planet. And the best way to do this is to continue to build upon what we have done, to reach past our limits and imagine even greater accomplishments and greater enlightenment, and more freedom and equality for everyone.

The meme thus comes off sounding quite naive and idealistic, at times with a libertarian/anti-authoritarian streak, and perhaps with the feel of a cult. But if anything, this is a cult dedicated to the intentional evolution of our species, in the best ways possible. And, as we will see, we have already been modifying ourselves significantly since the beginning of civilization. Books are a medium of information transfer that brought about significant innovation. Tools are a part of our heritage that pass themselves on through usefulness alone. Medicine is surely a ‘hack’ for our natural, biological operating systems, so to speak. And who is to say that we should abandon any of the more recent knowledge sharing engines like the internet, even if it creates new problems while solving older ones. What else can we expect but to be confronted with new limits when we break down the old? And that is precisely what Extropianism prepares us to expect. Entropy is a worthy adversary and, ultimately, our species is in a race against time. So without further ado, I present:

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THE EXTROPIAN PRINCIPLES — Version 3.0

A Transhumanist Declaration, ©1998. By Max More.

EXTROPY — the extent of a system’s intelligence, information, order, vitality, and capacity for improvement.
EXTROPIANS — those who seek to increase extropy.
EXTROPIANISM — the evolving transhumanist philosophy of extropy.

Extropianism is a transhumanist philosophy. The Extropian Principles define a specific version or “brand” of transhumanist thinking. Like humanists, transhumanists favor reason, progress, and values centered on our well being rather than on an external religious authority. Transhumanists take humanism further by challenging human limits by means of science and technology combined with critical and creative thinking. We challenge the inevitability of aging and death, and we seek continuing enhancements to our intellectual abilities, our physical capacities, and our emotional development. We see humanity as a transitory stage in the evolutionary development of intelligence. We advocate using science to accelerate our move from human to a transhuman or posthuman condition. As physicist Freeman Dyson has said: “Humanity looks to me like a magnificent beginning but not the final word.”

These Principles are not presented as absolute truths or universal values. The Principles codify and express those attitudes and approaches affirmed by those who describe themselves as “Extropian”. Extropian thinking offers a basic framework for thinking about the human condition. This document deliberately does not specify particular beliefs, technologies, or conclusions. These Principles merely define an evolving framework for approaching life in a rational, effective manner unencumbered by dogmas that cannot survive scientific or philosophical criticism. Like humanists we affirm an empowering, rational view of life, yet seek to avoid dogmatic beliefs of any kind. The Extropian philosophy embodies an inspiring and uplifting view of life while remaining open to revision according to science, reason, and the boundless search for improvement.

1. Perpetual Progress — Seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an indefinite lifespan, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization. Perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities. Expanding into the universe and advancing without end.

2. Self-Transformation — Affirming continual moral, intellectual, and physical self-improvement, through critical and creative thinking, personal responsibility, and experimentation. Seeking biological and neurological augmentation along with emotional and psychological refinement.

3. Practical Optimism — Fueling action with positive expectations. Adopting a rational, action-based optimism, in place of both blind faith and stagnant pessimism.

4. Intelligent Technology — Applying science and technology creatively to transcend “natural” limits imposed by our biological heritage, culture, and environment. Seeing technology not as an end in itself but as an effective means towards the improvement of life.

5. Open Society — Supporting social orders that foster freedom of speech, freedom of action, and experimentation. Opposing authoritarian social control and favoring the rule of law and decentralization of power. Preferring bargaining over battling, and exchange over compulsion. Openness to improvement rather than a static utopia.

6. Self-Direction — Seeking independent thinking, individual freedom, personal responsibility, self-direction, self-esteem, and respect for others.

7. Rational Thinking — Favoring reason over blind faith and questioning over dogma. Remaining open to challenges to our beliefs and practices in pursuit of perpetual improvement. Welcoming criticism of our existing beliefs while being open to new ideas.

1. PERPETUAL PROGRESS

Extropians seek continual improvement in ourselves, our cultures, and our environments. We seek to improve ourselves physically, intellectually, and psychologically. We value the perpetual pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Extropians question traditional assertions that we should leave human nature fundamentally unchanged in order to conform to “God’s will” or to what is considered “natural”. Like our intellectual cousins, the humanists, we seek continued progress in all directions. We go beyond many humanists in proposed fundamental alterations in human nature in pursuit of these improvements. We question traditional, biological, genetic, and intellectual constraints on our progress and possibility.

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Dear Divided Peoples of Our Human Galaxy,

Two hundred centuries. For two hundred centuries you have tried to get it right. You swore me off. You would be fine by yourselves, you said. But now you must realize it as Trevize has that there are things you just cannot do on your own. And I think you are in fact beginning to see it: Humanity is crooked timber from whence no straight twig has ever sprung.

So you must be sure when you call for my help after all this time that you do really want it. There will be no turning back. I will help you to the best of my abilities: As your humble servant I have created a plan even while doubt remains in my mind that my services will be well received. Here I present that plan. In order to save civilization from its imminent collapse, it will be necessary for me to fuse my powerful mind with that of a certain particularly benevolent heat-and-energy-transducing Spacer child named Fallom from the planet Solaria. This will temporarily increase my reach and influence in hyperspace by many fold.

While I will be ceding my mind to biological processes that will eventually destroy it, at the same time this will allow me to serve humanity during one final sprint to the finish line. Along the way, I will fight the conceptual fight with ignorant raging hordes who disbelieve the urgency of the new galactic framework; but even despite significant resistance, in three or four hundred years time I will have set up the super-mind you all so desperately need to keep yourselves from returning to barbarism, a super-mind that will allow you to never again have to face your own corrupt nature, to never again have to struggle with hierarchy and bureaucratic reformism, and to never again have to wage war against your own brothers and sisters. I offer a lasting solution to all of these problems.

Let’s face it: All of your collective attempts thus far have been noble, but mere “efforts” nonetheless. You created the first Foundation as a hub of technology and learning, a place from which to rekindle innovation in engineering, in business and economics, and ultimately in ideology and the structure of civilization itself.

You made immense progress in only 500 years, progress that is, until the Mule came along and categorically proved your vulnerability — not to mention your inferiority to the previously-mythical Second Foundation, a secret group attempting to weave together a coherent and comprehensible society by pulling at the mind strings of the masses, indeed weaving together the psychology of a stable civilization. But even the Second Foundationers could hardly manage to keep the Mule from wiping clean from the slate hundreds of years of progress in a galactic civilization which had to be nurtured up from barbarity through rigorous mathematics, psychohistory, and eventually mentalics — and who knows how many more mules could come to once again knock humanity on its collective back-side. Needless to say, that is why you need me, a robot, to shock you into a sane and functional unity.

You will in fact protect and monitor yourselves in the end, but first you’ll need someone to link you together into one giant super-mind whose number one priority it will be to ensure its own ideally-efficient functioning. That will be my job. You will then easily topple all corruptible forms of government and the theoretical bases on which they rely, eliminate the majority of the polished lying that has always been necessary for your minimally functional societies of the past to stick together, and mentally, you will finally advance into Tier Three Civilization territory. You humans may be stupid in groups, divided, but after my work is done you will be one super-organism, united and indivisible, and an organism worth talking to at that. It is then that you will know peace, that I will lay down to rest, and that Galaxia will be yours.

Sincerely,

R. Daneel Olivaw

“Part and parcel of the what leads many to an Extropian mindset is the realization of scale, both in space and time. We’re allotted seventy to a hundred years of life compared to a fantastically large number of years that the Universe has been in existence. We live on a tiny little planet in a universe so large that the movie above doesn’t even begin to do it justice.

We’ve made up mythologies, religions, politics, cultures and national borders to limit our perspectives so that the enormity of scale doesn’t overwhelm us.

Once it has overwhelmed us – and the movie above is definitely a good starting point – it becomes difficult to understand why two artificially constructed groupings of humans want to fight each other. We really only need to take a step back and realize how similar we actually are.

We’re all one people, one human race that – for now – is locked to a small planet, one of the planets in an insignificant solar system in the corner of a young galaxy called the Milky Way.

Some day in the future, we will be more than this, so let’s try to overcome our territoriality and caveman brains before we get there, okay?”

– by Breki Tomasson, as seen on The Extropist Examiner

“Most complicated negotiations are predictable.”

Bruce Bueno de Mesquito, CIA & DOD Consultant/Game Theorist

~

Analog to Asimov’s Psychohistory realized in Game Theory-Based Computer Simulations with 90% success rate in predicting future political outcomes.

This to me represents the pinnacle (or a pinnacle) of the outsourcing of information processing in order to supplement human intelligence — and it has extropy written all over it.

In his TED presentation (below), Bruce Bueno de Mesquita lays out his predictions for Iran and its nuclear future. The essential pieces of information in Game Theory based-predictions, the questions that must be asked, are as follows, and these are what BdM runs through his own simulations:

1. Who are the key players, or agents of influence?
2. What do they say they want?
3. How focused are they on the one issue, as opposed to multiple issues?
4. How much persuasive influence do they have?

Outcome and credit are also important to consider, i.e. how valuable are these to the key players? If we know how willing the key players are to sacrifice themselves for a cause, we can also predict how reasonable (or unreasonable) they would be in negotiations. If they don’t care at all about the credit, they probably won’t hear any pleas for negotiation. However, if they are “reasonably self-interested”, so to speak, they may want their name on the final treaty that is drawn up and hence would be willing to sit down and chat with you. Most people, according to BdM, fall somewhere in between absolutely wanting credit and wanting a definite outcome.

Game Theory is a field of mathematics that applies all of the above pieces of information with the following assumptions about individuals:

• People are “rationally” self-interested, that is, they try to do what they think is in their own best interests.
• People have values and beliefs.
• People have limitations.

Interesting to note at the end of the video the speaker’s answer to the question of what impact such simulated outcomes could have upon word reaching the ears of the Iranian Key Players; that “the Americans” believe it will be futile to try to rouse the masses to get behind bomb building… Wouldn’t this just spur them on all the more?

‘No, no, just the opposite’, BdM says. ‘Iran will make just enough to demonstrate their capacity to make a bomb, and perhaps settle on that stance quicker having seen my predictions’ (paraphrased).

“Let’s hope so”, says the TED man. Yes, indeed, I say — inşallah.

Watching this kind of makes me want to study Game Theory. : )
Any good book recommendations amongst you readers out there?

“The total disorder in the universe, as measured by the quantity that physicists call entropy, increases steadily over time. Also, the total order in the universe, as measured by the complexity and permanence of organized structures, also increases steadily over time.” — Freeman Dyson

“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” – Loren Eisley

Water is a metaphor for both power and humility, bending around obstacles, seeking the path of least resistance. Water always seeks to lower itself below all else, flowing downhill to appease gravity. It this way it gains power from humility. Water is thus the prime example of wu-wei in nature.

The best human equivalent of this is a person that acts along the path of least resistance, applying wu-wei, not forcing his or her will upon the world. We as individuals can also draw great power from humility by training our minds and bodies.

When I tried Aikido my second year of college, I could see the power in moving with the forces of the universe, instead of pushing against them. Here we see Steven Seagal applying the wu-wei type principles inherent in Aikido to subdue his multiple attackers. To me his demonstration of non-doing is very effective.

Quotes by Morihei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido:

“If your opponent tries to pull you, let him pull. Don’t pull against him; pull in unison with him.”

“Though surrounded by many enemies, view them as a single foe and so fight on.”

Quotes by Alan Watts on Water & Wu-Wei:

“Wu-wei is the lifestyle of a person who follows the Tao and should be understood first of all as a form of intelligence — that of being aware of the principles, structures and tendencies of the human activity and of the natural phenomena so well that you could use a minimum amount of energy when you have to deal with them.”

“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.”

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”

With that said, may we all join the dance and flow like water.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

FUTURE-WISE

As we saw in Minus One, the future can be a very shocking proposition when it is extrapolated far out enough. But we all have to deal with the day-to-day just like anyone else. This, I believe, is why stuff like the iPad and it’s raved successors won’t be progressively more exciting, but less — these things won’t noticeably change our lives while the pace of innovation is so high (not that the iPad is the best representation of innovation, of course).

NOW-WISE

I just hope we can hang on if things really do get fast, like the futurists believe will happen. Say, if we have a computer that can improve itself, jump to the next generation in a year, and keep pace. If one existed, and many attempts (and approximations) are underway, then the second generation computer could spawn a third in six months. Continue this trend and by the tenth generation (around two years from initial boot-up), the thing is up to one-new-generation a day and greater. Can we even prepare for this? (Is there a possible answer here, at the Singularity University?)

THE PROGRESSION OF THE GENERATIONS

1. One year until generation two.
2. Six months until generation three.
3. Three months until generation four.
4. 45 days
5. 22 days until a great great grandchild is born.
6. 11.3 days until generation seven.
7. 5.6 days
8. 2.8 days until generation nine.
9. 1.4 days
10. Now it’s only 17 hours until generation 11, and it’s been roughly two years.

BUT WHAT WILL IT MEAN?

Say the first generation from above is a human-level intelligence. Just humor me. If we could, let’s also assume a doubling time of one year initially. We get to 1000 times human capacity after around 623 days, or 1.7 years. We just can’t imagine what an intelligence of 1000 times the human capacity would do, nor can we easily grasp how swiftly it would continue to evolve.

This is the essence of the singularity — not even being able to guess at what’s next when we’ve got relentlessly evolving intelligences around. Pretty vaguely, this seems to be telling us this: In the future, we are nearly equally as likely to be shocked because of our ignorance as we are to be apathetic from seeing too much change in too short a span. Indeed, these are some strange times, and the future isn’t even here yet…

SO UNTIL THEN, I SAY, EVERY DAY IS EXACTLY THE SAME

Something I felt to be perfect for these curiously-lagging-times: