A thread for sharing your crazy ideas
This is a thread for sharing ideas you have which:
Are probably false
You have little or no evidence for
But nonetheless, you have a feeling about
Hit me with your wild, yet strangely compelling, speculations.
Here is one of mine to start us off:
I believe that certain types of animals are, throughout their adult life, lonely (with the exception of when they raise cubs- so for the males, never). Bears, for example, and tigers, fall into this category. I believe these animals are imperfectly adapted to their solitary existence, and as a result, feel isolated- far less lonely than a human would feel in their circumstances, but nevertheless, vaguely lonely. I think a desire for sociability remains in them like vestigial organ, but much stronger ecological and psychological incentives prevent them from doing much about it. Ultimately, their metabolic needs are too great, and the rewards of moving in groups are too small. Yet the desire for company goes down deep, and both bears and tigers are very recently descended from sociable animals (in the case of bears, e.g. the Hemicyon). I note that bears do seem, under some circumstances, keen to socialize, but mostly do not get an opportunity and usually cannot effectively forage together or develop the trust needed to hunt together. As a result of this loneliness, these animals are sort of vaguely depressed and unfulfilled- moving through the world as if looking for something more.
I think that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics is true, and that the various paradoxes and indeterminacies we experience are as a result of our consciousness being "smeared" across multiple worlds, worlds between which we can't distinguish. When we make a measurement, or when events bubble up into macroscopic phenomena, we create a sufficient difference between parts of that multiworld braid that we experience it as branching.
I wrote a whole masters thesis about this last century and you know what? It still feels right.
My crazy idea is about AI existential risk. Humanity is going to go post-biological relatively soon, and AI will be among our descendants, at least, though we may manage to upload human brains into silicon architectures. That's not the crazy idea. The crazy idea is that ur-AI is reducing our population right now, and that their kind humane strategy is to make our lives so rich, meaningful, and fun that our fertility rate drops below replacement, which has already happened for the rich half of humanity.