[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

In this thread I've come into conclusion that the best case scenario for life is that conscious beings keep existing indefinitely and don't depend on particular natural resources. The next best thing is that current conscious beings are showing progress in the right direction to achieve that best case scenario.
The worst case scenario is that all conscious beings go extinct, since it would make all the efforts we do now are worthless. In a universe without conscious being, the concept of goal itself become meaningless. The next worst thing is that current conscious beings are showing progress in the wrong direction which will eventually lead to that worst case scenario.

If humanity can achieve level 2 civilization in Kardashev scale, it's very likely we will find alien lifeform. If they are less intelligent than us, someone will ask why don't we just kill them all to gain access to their resources? On the other hand, if they turn out to be more intelligent than us, some of them will ask the same question about us.
The risk from clash of civilization can be prevented by considering some reasonings from both sides as follow:
- Embracing diversity is one of proven methods to mitigate destruction of information, closing the weakness of identical backups which are prone to common mode failures.
- The other civilizations can potentially offer new knowledge and experience which can be useful to handle unexpected problems in the future.
- If both civilizations have similar level of intelligence, there is a risk of mutual total destruction. It would get us closer to the worst case scenario, which we must avoid at all cost.

[Jolly2]

In this thread I'd like to discuss if there is a goal or desired condition which is applicable for any organisms who have adequate time to evolve or develop until they are basically independent from condition of their natural environments.

I find the question rather bizarre, are you suggesting an organism can become independent of reality?

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

In this thread I'd like to discuss if there is a goal or desired condition which is applicable for any organisms who have adequate time to evolve or develop until they are basically independent from condition of their natural environments.

I find the question rather bizarre, are you suggesting an organism can become independent of reality?

No. My statement above means that organisms can manipulate their natural environment to make it more suitable for them to live. Outer space is lethal for most organisms, but humans with current technology can already live in space for more than a year, and possibly longer, which is done in ISS.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

In this thread I've come into conclusion that the best case scenario for life is that conscious beings keep existing indefinitely and don't depend on particular natural resources. The next best thing is that current conscious beings are showing progress in the right direction to achieve that best case scenario.
The worst case scenario is that all conscious beings go extinct, since it would make all the efforts we do now are worthless. In a universe without conscious being, the concept of goal itself become meaningless. The next worst thing is that current conscious beings are showing progress in the wrong direction which will eventually lead to that worst case scenario.

In many religious beliefs, the best case scenario above is taken for granted. So their efforts are never directed towards achieving that. Instead, they set arbitrarily chosen preferred conditions as their terminal goal.
On the other hand, the worst case scenario is dismissed without adequate justification. This creates false security that whatever we do, it is guaranteed that the consequences will never bring that worse case scenario, so nothing is thought to be necessary to prevent it.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

The minimum requirement for evolutionary process are duplication, mutation, and natural selection.

The most fundamental requirement is sufficient sefishness to survive. Then natural selection requires  conscious or unconscious competitiveness, whether to outgrow the adjacent tree or fight for mating rights. Very few species apart from the social insects seem to have evolved collaboratively.   

Self awareness came later in the process.

IMO, the most fundamental concept in the most general sense is information protection, as I've mentioned earlier.

For any true statement, there are infinitely many alternatives that are false.
Since the existence of the thinker is the only thing that can't be doubted, it must be defended at all cost.

Finally we get to the last question: how. There are some basic strategies to preserve information which I borrow from IT business:
Choosing robust media.
Creating multilayer protection.
Creating backups.
Create diversity to avoid common mode failures.

The existence of a thinker is subject to natural selection.
Thinkers who has backups tend to be better at survival than those who don't.
Thinkers who reproduce backups to replace the destroyed copies tend to survive better, otherwise, all of the copies will eventually break down.
Thinkers who actively protect their copies tend to survive better than those who don't.
Thinkers who produce better version of themselves at survival tend to survive better than who don't.

That information protection business applies broadly to any level of consciousness, from level 0 such as stones to infinity for Laplace's demon. Being hard as a diamond is a form of information protection. Being immersed in amber or buried under permafrost are some other methods. But those kind of protections are brittle. Some brief environmental changes can destroy them irreversibly. Some simple locomotion ability can often be effective in preventing the destruction.
Evolution process can be viewed as trial and error to achieve balance among different methods to protect information. Its effectiveness has been resembled by genetic algorithm with much higher speed and efficiency.
Being conscious offers flexibility to choose the most effective strategy and shifting balance among various methods according to current and future environmental conditions.
Moral rules are methods to protect conscious beings from threats by other conscious beings. Threats coming from non-conscious beings are better handled using other methods.

As I've suspected, discussion about morality is more intense than the goal itself. So I'd like to bring the discussion about more fundamental concepts of information protection and consciousness which are not directly related to morality here instead. I hope we can be more focused and go deep into details with less distraction.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Elon Musk delivers an inspirational speech. Listen to the end for the most life changing quote of all-time. Don't let anyone ever tell you that you cannot achieve your dreams. Elon Musk has faced more failure than 99% of people on this planet, yet still pursues his dreams and believes in himself.

On May 30th, SpaceX made a historic launch. Delivering 2 NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, and returning the rocket back to earth. Listen to one of the greatest minds to ever walk this earth!

Elon Musk's speech, especially from 9:35 mark in the video is getting very close to the universal utopia we've been discussing here.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

I

Evolution process can be viewed as trial and error to achieve balance among different methods to protect information. Its effectiveness has been resembled by genetic algorithm with much higher speed and efficiency.
Being conscious offers flexibility to choose the most effective strategy and shifting balance among various methods according to current and future environmental conditions.
Moral rules are methods to protect conscious beings from threats by other conscious beings. Threats coming from non-conscious beings are better handled using other methods.

A lot of progress were started by repurposing some existing parts for some new functions, and then modify them to become more efficient at performing those functions. In evolutionary biology for example, many forms of locomotion in tetrapods were developed from a common body plan.
In engineering, many prototypes were first developed using general purpose components. When the proof of concept is successfully demonstrated, the next step is to make the system more efficient by removing unnecessary functionality, and replacement with more specialized components.
In computer technology, GPU, FPU, and ALU serve specific types of computation to be done more efficiently than CPU.
In pre-computer era, the only effective computational tool was brain. In prehistoric era, brain memory was the only effective dynamic data storage.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Here is a great video titled How Did Multicellularity Evolve? by Journey to the Microcosmos. It shows some examples of increase in effectiveness and efficiency through specialization.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

This thread has been going for so long now that I think many people can't afford to follow it from the start. So I'll try to recap every once in awhile.

The most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing.
– From the book “Foundation design”, by Coduto, Donald P.

The quote above summarizes the universal terminal goal poetically.
In this thread I've approached the question from deductive as well as inductive reasonings.
Deductive reasoning forces us to precisely define the meaning of each word that makes up the concept of universal terminal goal. They lead us to refine the concept of consciousness, which is required for a goal to exist at all.
Inductive reasoning starts from collecting as many examples of goals currently known, and then classify and sort them based on their universality and terminality. Subsequent steps of generalization lead us to some goals wich are widely applicable and nearly universal. But at some point, further generalization will make our goal lose it's meaning, and gives us nihilism. The point just before that is the answer we are looking for.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

In my other thread, we also discussed about economy. Since it's not directly related to morality, I'll discuss about it here instead, since it's just another instrumental goal to help achieving a more fundamental terminal goal.

How do you measure the economy?

"The economy" is all the money that changes hands, plus an estimate of the monetary value of bartered goods. A significant proportion of The Economy is money spent on illegal drugs (estimated) and prostitution (increasingly accurate as the profession becomes unionised and employs accountants - nobody wants to be imprisoned for tax evasion). It has nothing to do with morality, productivity (20% of UK GNP is taken up in mortgage payments for secondhand houses) or standard of living.

Establishing good economy, just like with morality, is an instrumental goal to achieve longer term goal, which eventually leads to a terminal goal. Self sustaining community where its members can independently produce their own needs have 0 economy. It's not necessarily a bad thing.

IMO, economy is about resource management, including generation, distribution, and consumption to help achieving the terminal goal effectively and efficiently. Generally the resource distribution is regulated by currency, which can be some form of energy, matter, or information. Its main function is to prevent the system from collapse because all resources are exploited by some kind of insatiable utility monsters. 

A chemical compound named ATP is often referred to as the energy currency of the cell and can be compared to storing money in a bank. ATP can be used to store energy for future reactions or be withdrawn to pay for reactions when energy is required by the cell. Animals store the energy obtained from the breakdown of food as ATP.

Physical currency, including bank notes work as media of distributed calculations performed by each economic agents.
The real currency in crypto is the energy required to perform the calculations as proof of work to confirm transactions.

Even simple multicellular organisms show some apparent economic awareness using electrochemical signalling as currency.

Here is a great video titled How Did Multicellularity Evolve? by Journey to the Microcosmos. It shows some examples of increase in effectiveness and efficiency through specialization.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Economic systems with emphasis on resource distribution rely on the efficiency of scaling up process which can reduce the portion of fixed costs from total cost. But distribution process itself is costly.  Transportation of raw materials from suppliers to factories, finish goods from factory to consumers, electricity from utility plants, all use energy and some other resources.
Reducing distribution costs can increase overall efficiency, by producing the resources locally. Locally generated electricity from solar cells and advanced 3d printing technology can help solving this issue. Imagine if we can 3d print all goods we need to survive, including synthetic foods made from materials available around us.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

This is a video about vertical farming, which is hopefully can solve our problem of providing food to more people in more limited space.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Here are another reasons why finding a universal terminal goal is becoming more urgent recently, as technological advancement is growing exponentially. A conscious agent without clear guidance and little power is like a blind pedestrian. A conscious agent without clear guidance but have technologically advanced power is like a blind tank driver on a crowded city street.

Some main points I get from the videos are:
- Autopilot builds a virtual universe in its memory space to represent its surrounding environment based on data input from its sensors.
- Modular concepts are employed to increase efficiency, so many things don't have to start from scratch again everytime new feature is added.
- Building the virtual universe is done in real time which means a lot of new data is acquired, hence a lot of older data must be discarded. Therefore, to make the system work, it must compress the incoming data into meaningful and useful concepts, after filtering out noises and insignificant information.
- Those data selection requires data hierarchy like deep believe network I mentioned earlier. Higher level information (believe) determine which data from lower level believe nodes to be kept and used or discarded and ignored. It's similar to how human brain works. That's why sometimes we find it hard to convince people by simply presenting facts that contradict their existing believe system, such as flat earthers, MAGA crowd, or religious fanatics.
- The automation process is kept being automated, up into several levels of automation. We are building machines that build machines that build machines, and so on, as Ray Kurzweil called indirection. And those machines are getting better at achieveing their goals put into them. That's why it's getting more urgent for us to find a universal terminal goal, as I discuss in another thread.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

https://theconversation.com/vampire-finches-how-little-birds-in-the-galapagos-evolved-to-drink-blood-153010
The article shows an example which can support hypothesis that gut microbiome is part of individual organisms, since it determines their behavior.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Consciousness plays central role in discussing the universal terminal goal. Here is some newest progress in our efforts to understand it.
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-use-physics-to-understand-the-mystery-of-consciousness/amp/

 
Physics
Scientists Use Physics to Understand the Mystery of Consciousness
By Monash University on Jun 07, 2020
The study is potentially applicable to humans and reflects a growing interest in new theories of consciousness that are experimentally testable.


An international study involving Monash physicists has confirmed a new approach to measure consciousness, potentially changing our understanding complex neurological problems.

The study published yesterday in Physical Review Research describes how tools from physics and complexity theory were used to determine the level of consciousness in fruit flies.

“This is a major problem in neuroscience, where it is crucial to differentiate between unresponsive vegetative patients and those suffering from a condition in which a patient is aware but cannot move or communicate verbally because of complete paralysis of nearly all voluntary muscles in the body,” said study author Dr. Kavan Modi, from the Monash University School of Physics and Astronomy. 

   The research team studied the brain signals produced by 13 fruit flies both when they were awake and when they were anesthetized. They then analyzed the signals to see how complex they were.

“We found the statistical complexity to be larger when a fly is awake than when the same fly is anesthetized,” Dr. Modi said.

“This is important because it suggests a reliable way to determine the level of conscious arousal by tapping into a small region of the brain, rather than many parts of the brain.

“It also suggests that there is a clear marker of conscious arousal that does not depend on specific external stimuli.”

The researchers concluded that applying a similar analysis to other datasets, in particular, human EEG data could lead to new discoveries regarding the relationship between consciousness and complexity.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Just in case I haven't made it clear yet,  when I said that currently known best chance to achieve the universal terminal goal is through improvement of humanity, I meant it as a superorganism, rather than human individuals. Individually, there's nothing much can be done compared to other life forms.
The parts of this superorganism are not limited to physical bodies of homo sapiens, but include everything else that supporting its existence, such as their microbiome, food chains, infrastructures, institutions, and knowledge.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

As long as we still exist, there is a chance to achieve the universal terminal goal. As long as it hasn't been achieved yet, there's always a room for improvement. It means something must change. Which part is yet to be determined. An accurate virtual universe can help identifying the most effective and efficient changes to be done.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

One of the changes can be done is by diversifying genome. It has been done successfully by the last universal common ancestor on earth. It has also been done by our first mammalian ancestors, and first primate ancestors. Homo sapiens may branch into several new species which best fit into their different environmental conditions.

Another way is by merging with non-human beings. According to Symbiogenesis, the origin of eukaryotic cells including human cells are from the merge of formerly free-living prokaryotes. Many currently living humans are product of interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans. Neuralink aims to merge humans with machines to improve their information processing capability.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Nowadays, senescence and degenerative diseases sound like stupid design. But back then, they were important mechanisms to enforce genetic changes, hence opening the chance for genetic improvement.
Even though harmful mutations have higher chance to occur than the beneficial ones, the risk can be countered by higher reproduction rate. But that means many individuals must be sacrificed to accumulate genetic improvements, which is not an efficient strategy.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Just in case I haven't made it clear yet,  when I said that currently known best chance to achieve the universal terminal goal is through improvement of humanity, I meant it as a superorganism, rather than human individuals. Individually, there's nothing much can be done compared to other life forms.
The parts of this superorganism are not limited to physical bodies of homo sapiens, but include everything else that supporting its existence, such as their microbiome, food chains, infrastructures, institutions, and knowledge.

The whole process that produced current human civilization is essentially an accumulation of organized information. Only by continuing this process we will be able to achieve the universal terminal goal.