From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Aug 12 2002 - 06:44:37 MDT
Alex Ramonsky wrote:
>
> Wow this is really scary...I've never really got the 'adult' thing. I
> mean, how do you _know_? Do you just wake up one morning and feel
> different? Then you know you're grown up?
Well... yes. There's a certain Dilbert strip where Dilbert thinks he's
really just been faking it since fourth grade and wonders whether others
sometimes feel the same. If you go through enough stress, at one point
you wake up in the morning and realize that you're never again going to
get the feeling that Dilbert strip depicts.
> I keep waiting for it to
> happen to me and it just hasn't.
Then you may not be "grown up" in that particular sense. As you know,
it's not a function of age. Maturity can be defined all kinds of
different ways because it has all kinds of different components - some
of which I still haven't gotten my hands on, Ifni knows - but in this
particular case maturity appears to be the result of knowing your own
ability to make decisions under life-threatening circumstances. At that
point you know you're not faking it.
If you're lucky (or unlucky) you may never grow up. If you're unlucky
(or lucky) you'll get mugged in a dark alley, crash your car into a
highway divider, or join the army; come out of it with your life; and
wake up one morning knowing you're a grownup. For those not interested
in risking their lives, I understand that having a child sometimes but
not always produces the same effect.
So it goes.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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