From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Jul 11 2002 - 06:00:49 MDT
Greg Burch wrote:
>
> There's actually a very good reason: So that any temporary failure in
> the liquid nitrogen "topping off" regimen will result in thawing of the
> feet first, and the head last. It does have the unfortunate effect of
> running counter to our billions-of-years evolved preference for having
> things be "right-side-up".
Completely irrelevant nitpick: Multicellular organisms have only
existed for the last 850 million years.
Second-order nitpick: Perhaps some earlier single-celled organisms had
a preferred vertical orientation, despite the stereotype of spherical
blobs floating around in primordial soup. (I don't know offhand of any
evidence one way or the other; I'm just guessing.) Still, I'm not sure
such a physical vertical orientation can be regarded as the legitimate
ancestor of our nervous system's assumption of a preferred vertical
orientation in visual, spatial, and motor processing. If we're talking
about "our" evolved preference for having things be right-side-up, I
think it should be traced back to the earliest nervous systems, but not
traced back billions of years.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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