Ushering in the Millennium

Speaker 1

We have the chance now to hear from Brent Alsop on ushering in the millennium. Brent has always been a transhumanist. I guess from the moment he was born. And has been active in the extropian and transhumanist movements since 1994. He received a BS in computer science with a minor in psychology from the University of Utah. and is currently working as a senior software engineer for 3M Health Information Systems. Brent is the founder of Canonizer. com. He was raised in the LDS Church and served a mission to Sendai, Japan, and was married in the Jordan River Temple in 1985 to Malia Fairbanks. They have three adult children and currently live in Sandy, Utah. Welcome, Brent.

Brent Allsop

Well, I must say it’s pretty humbling to be come after so many of the talks that I’ve enjoyed so much today.

Brent Allsop

Basically and when you think of the expanding technological powers, there’s more and more Moral issues facing us every day. In the past, the animals were just concerned with survivability and they didn’t Have much effect on the world as a whole. But now, one of the previous speakers talked about how’s the universe going to end? Is it going to be a big collapse, a big crunch, or is it going to expand forever? And he pointed out it’s probably going to be a decision that we’re going to. To make. And so everything is becoming immoral. What should we do? What do we want it to do?

Brent Allsop

And so, and when you think about how do we manage that, how do we know how do we make these good decisions? Can we pick, if one of us picks one of these areas or any of the infinitely many more areas and says, well, I better focus on that one, that’s the most important. But to the degree that an individual focuses on that one issue, you tend to ignore the others and become less of an expert in the others. So it seems like to me we have to collaborate and work together and be able to communicate so that we can find out what all of the experts together agree on any particular issue and better communicate concisely and quantitatively around our moral decisions.

Brent Allsop

But today, whenever you bring up a controversial issue, it’s like in the Deseret News today, there was a paper, an article on the front page. talking about politics. If you bring up religion and politics, is that too polarizing? But the gist of the article basically was, so don’t even bring up Religion. Just if it’s controversial, just don’t bring it up because we don’t want to talk of it. It’s too painful. And so we become sort of almost afraid to talk about it. We don’t want to talk about it. And so morally, it’s almost like we stop talking about it and because we’re afraid of controversy.

Brent Allsop

So is there a better way to find out what everyone’s working on or believes in? And a lot of times, if you talk about something like global warming, people will approach the idea of, well, there’s an expert consensus here that global warming is a problem. But if someone makes that claim, how many people in the world can believe that? And how much of a consensus is it? Is it 99. 9%? Is it 65%? Does that really matter?

Brent Allsop

But anyway, I think that all of that kind of stuff and be able to communicate in that way so you can know what all who first off who are the experts and allow And one person’s experts, of course, is another person’s spiritually blind person, and so each individual has its own sets of experts. But imagine if one person you as an individual could find out on every single moral issue out there. You could spend your time picking handpicking a couple of hundred of the top experts in the world. and then you could survey for all of them what they thought was the most moral way to behave, then wouldn’t that be good advice to you, even if you weren’t as expert as them? then it seems like that would elevate the level of all of us to be the level of the smartest experts if we had that ability to communicate concisely and quantitatively what do all of my chosen experts believe.

Brent Allsop

And so that’s basically the whole idea around Canonizer. It’s the consensus building system. It’s a way for experts to communicate together and find out what they agree on and to make the come up with the different moral theories. We should do X, we should do Y, sixty nine percent of the people think we should do this, twenty percent of the people according to sixty nine percent of my selected experts think we should do this behavior. twelve percent and ten in the long tail think we should do that. So I think it would be we’d be much more moral people if we could communicate in that way and know what our selected experts believed was the right way to behave.

Brent Allsop

And you think just imagine something like Nutrition and say and what medications should we take. There’s new medications coming out to amplify our mind and stuff like that. Using some of the psychic drugs to enhance our cognitive abilities and stuff like that. And right now, I’m sure there’s some experts out there that are starting to know this information, but how do you tell the experts out there that know this information from all the quack stuff that’s out there? It’s no way to to filter and distinguish between between those various different things.

Brent Allsop

And so and it let’s see. So yes, and so basically, that’s what we’re moving towards with the survey project is right now there’s a few topics that are getting out there That we can measure let’s see But yeah, that’s the whole idea is to be able to give people the ability to select a canonizing algorithm according to whoever they want to use, how they select their experts, what they want to use. have their moral advice and what they want to use to canonize what they’ll accept as morally acceptable doctrine.

Brent Allsop

And as things become more broad and right now, there’s a lot of Mormon transhumanists that are Participating in it. And so you can say, well, the Mormon transhumanists say you should this is the way to behave. But if we broadened that and expanded out more and got more than just Mormon transhumanists To be part of that, then people would say, well, what do Mormon transhumanists think? But what do traditional Mormons think? Or what do Catholics think? And what do people like me, whoever that me happens to be, what do they think? And I think that all of that will help every group of people become more intelligent than they are standing alone by themselves, and eventually, that helps us all improve.

Brent Allsop

And the Consciousness Survey Project is the one that we’ve had that’s the one I’m personally most interested in, so I’m focusing on that. So that’s the most developed. And I’ve spent many years now attending conferences. Next week, we’re going to TSC. And I’ve talked to a lot of experts trying to survey everyone, what are the best theories of consciousness, what do you believe? And trying to get is there any consensus out there, trying to measure that and get a hold of that. Are there any theories emerging or other theories? Being falsified and accepted as incorrect and stuff like that.

Brent Allsop

And but let’s see where we and it seems and and And it seems like to me that there is a clear set of doctrines emerging around consciousness and what consciousness is and how it works and everything that And the name that we’ve coined, that the set of experts that have given the theory the set of doctrines that is the most agreed upon level theory is called representational qualia theory. And the thing that’s surprising to me is if you took that set of doctrines that’s emerging, that seems to be well more than half of the experts agree that representational qualia theory is the experts.

Brent Allsop

And if you understand that, and if you took all that’s described in there and tried to describe that in the language that Joseph Smith had access to, I would challenge anyone to get any closer to that than what Joseph Smith said. And some of there’s both that statement there from Joseph Smith history and then this one here that’s in the DNC. But to me, it’s surprising how similar those are just to the expert consensus theory of what consciousness is and the way Joseph Smith described it. But anyway, the bottom line is, is there’s been let’s see.

Brent Allsop

So yeah, and then we talk about immortality, trying to seek immortality. And that seems pretty mind blowing. Whoa, if I achieved eternal life, but when you talk about reli religions, there’s a material world and a spiritual world, and a lot of people believe in some ethereal world, that there’s some kind of magical interface. But if you think about the theories of consciousness and the study of consciousness, is it’s it’s I mean, it’s more than just achieving immortality, it’s piercing that spiritual veil And it’s breaking into the spirit world and it’s learning how it all works and being able to scientifically manipulate it and understand it and amplify it and make it better.

Brent Allsop

And in general, there’s been a lot of talk today about love and about helping other humans become friends. and everyone working together. And if you think about what is all of that, what’s the fundamental bottom? And we talk about, oh, well, if I if artificial intelligence and the machines are smarter than me, then I don’t have a job. But that just seems to turn it around. And people, I think, are missing the big picture. Because what drives everything is what do we want? What does each individual want? And those machines aren’t to take our jobs away. The whole goal of everything is to find out what you want and to get you what you want. And so to me, the most important thing is to find out what everyone wants concisely and quantitatively. And once we can do that, getting it for ever getting all of it for everyone is going to be the easy part.

Brent Allsop

And so that’s all I have to say. I can’t remember your name. Sorry.

Speaker 3

Hi, so Consensus seems to be really important to you, but canonizer also has opens up a path for contention. You get in there and contend. until we get consensus. But do we necessarily always have to land in consensus? Because I’m having a problem here between unity and conformity. You know, the Babel problem that the Tower of Babel, that we’re going to all be, We’re not going to be unified. We’re going to all have to conform. And God doesn’t want that because diversity is still going to be important. The big long question is, where does contention lie in the canonizer? And where do we get usefulness out of that? Because I think contention is very useful.

Brent Allsop

Yes, I would completely agree. Diversity is the most important thing, and anything that anyone could want has value. And we should seek after all of that. And the unity comes in expanding all that infinite amount of diversity and seeking after all of it. And the consensus needs to come back what’s true and what’s false. Like if you have a false belief or you think you want something but you’re mistaken, then someone needs to discover that. So building a consensus over what’s true or what works and what doesn’t is sort of along those lines. But yes, by all means, diversity is a good thing and you need to track it. So you need as much as you can, but Where there’s consensus, that needs to be measured in Tract II.