From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Jul 28 2001 - 16:46:09 MDT
Samantha Atkins wrote:
>
> Are you so utterly certain that all who claim to
> have been touched by such a Mind or have caught a small glimpse
> of it or from within it are simply victims of a biochemical
> storm and nothing else?
The Powers depicted in "A Fire Upon the Deep" are far more impressive than
any god or God I've ever seen depicted. This state of affairs is not
consistent with an SF writer competing against true contactees, but it is
consistent with a smart SF writer competing against people imagining a
white man with a beard leaning out of the sky.
If any human had touched the Blight or Old One, much less the Final Mind,
then I would expect us to be living in a drastically different world.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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