Singularity

Considering we are currently bound by our genetics, our thoughts and wants have arisen in parallel to a biological system that evolved on a mere "good enough to survive" basis, incrementally. To what extent can our goal system wander away from these biological roots when our minds our not constrained by the physical and chemical drives of our bodies, or even by the limits of our own minds. In other words, will we continue to go down our current path of fulfilling our desires ever more effectively when  radical enhancement technologies are unleashed upon a 100,000 year old species, or will our desires change appropriately? If we had to analyze our species in the same way we would any other, how would we classify our main drives?

There's lots of variation in the human species (in terms of action) but on a whole our main actions seem to center around eating, sleeping, excreting and sex. This is a ridiculously crude analysis, but assuming this were our actual goal system, that is to do these 5 things were are main desires, where would a 10,000 fold improvement take us a species? Homo sapiens would be constantly shitting, 1000's of times a day simultaneously going in and out of sleep 10,000 times a day whilst also eating and fucking and they would all be very happy about it. Fortunately this is not our actual goal system as these things are more of a means to an end than the actual act itself.

We do them to fulfill some other desire, i.e. you eat to reduce hunger and perhaps to experience pleasure from a particular kind of taste, so now assuming the internal effect and not the physical act is the goal, where does a 10,000 fold improvement take us a species? Assuming we remove the unpleasant sensation of hunger permanently, the physical need to eat in order to function, and also satisfied the desire to experience the pleasure of food at all times, how much food as a species would we continue to eat? Perhaps out of some anachronistic desire to grow ones own food and consume it people will continue to engage in this behavior, but on a whole I think consuming food would become incredibly rare.

This conclusion leads me down a much darker road and I'm not so sure I am comfortable with where it goes. So the desires that lead people to eat food are being fulfilled constantly, internally, with no requirement of action on our part, to what extent do we want to feed this desire? What if it were possible to experience the pleasure of eating your favorite food all of the time whilst also removing the boredom or dissatisfaction that comes with eating the same thing again and again. Personally I don't want to do that, it seems absurd that I would continue to satiate a desire that existed only in the first place to keep a biological system alive if I no longer required that, given the option I would remove the desire for food entirely. Some people might say that is weird and they can't imagine removing such a pleasure from their lives.

What if evolution had configured our brains to experience the exact same experience of hunger but instead of being satisfied by food was instead satisfied by staring at triangular shaped rocks for minutes at a time. What difference does it make in what satisfies our desires? Should we attempt to constrain them to anything? What difference does it make if we as a species get the exact same pleasure and uniqueness of experience by ceasing to do everything, remaining perfectly still for the entirety of our existence, just passively consuming energy.

If we start redesigning our minds, what drives them, how they function, how they think, does it really matter if the result leads to something that is not understandable or desirable from a human perspective? Even the most pointless drivel of a goal system could be made  rewarding to a hugely intelligent mind capable of writing its own drives. I've heard the example of an out of control A.I. populating the universe with nothing but smiley faces, or paper clips, consuming all resources to accomplish it's task, which from it's goal system is extremely self fulling and would never want to do anything else, and thought the entirety of human existence was equally as meaningless as we see the act of filling the entire universe with paperclips.

Is there a goal system that has any objectivity? I don't know, but I really think we need to think about where we want to go as a species or as individuals before we start messing around with our own code. I'm not advocating for any kind of enforcement or restrictions on what you can do with your own body or mind, I'm just pointing out that if you make incremental changes to your own operating system you may end up in a place where you are completely comfortable to be, yet where you ended up may be absolutely horrifying to you in your present state. Are you comfortable with that?