Tag: creativity, culture, experience, free-will, freedom, individuality, journalism, philosophy, singularity, technology, thought-experiments, zombies

Jaron Lanier

Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience…. If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will – or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual – then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic. Humans are free. We can commmit suicide for the benefit of a Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion. Or we can believe in ourselves. By chance, it might turn out we are real.

Jaron Lanier

Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience…. If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will – or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual – then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic. Humans are free. We can commmit suicide for the benefit of a Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion. Or we can believe in ourselves. By chance, it might turn out we are real.