From: Eliezer Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Jan 07 1997 - 22:06:16 MST
> Oh, you hardly need to upload to do that. People have been doing that for
> thousands of years. I prefer Doubting myself. Not only is it more fun, it's
> also more productive of knowledge.
You haven't Doubted enough if your world is so secure that you don't
care to know the *real* truth. When was the last time you confronted a
Hard Problem... something so completely and blankly unanswerable that
you couldn't even touch it? The Meaning of Life? The First Cause?
Conscious experience? I could be wrong, oh Eric Watt Forste, but from
what you have said your world is far too... not certain... *solid*. You
blithely speak of answering the First Cause with the Anthropic Principle
and say life has "many" meanings if asked why you get out of bed in the
morning.
Doubting is only *mere* fun when you doubt only the deep surface issues
like political conflicts and your emotional motivations. When your
Doubting has reduced your entire goal system to a shambles, so that you
cannot even walk across a room without wondering why, you will take
Doubt a bit more seriously.
Doubt is fun. And productive of knowledge. And morally pure beyond any
other motivation. Love and hate and honor and greed have all produced
boundless misery in their times, but science and smartness and the
search for truth have ultimately built everything that lasts. For
billions of years life came and went upon the Earth without impinging on
the slightest upon the rest of the Universe; then humanity awoke and
with their intelligence set foot upon the Moon and now joke offhandedly
of stellifying Jupiter.
> >I just want to Know.
>
> Oh, you hardly need to upload to do that. People have been doing that for
> thousands of years. I prefer Doubting myself. Not only is it more fun, it's
> also more productive of knowledge.
I want the Final Answers. The burning search for that takes precedence
over everything else. What can I do without the Truth? How can I know
what I'm doing or why I should be doing it without the Truth? Doubting
isn't just a hobby or even just a way of life. It is an action taken
with a specific and most final goal in mind: To Know everything that
matters.
> (I'm also afraid that I simply *must* quibble with your implicit contention
> that Knowledge is something non-physical.)
What is Knowledge? I don't know. Haven't a clue. And it sure does
make things difficult not to have a clue about something like that.
What is "physical"? What is "non-physical"? Should I be answering your
question or doing something else? Is the asking of your question
worthwhile of itself? Is the answer worthwhile? Is either act real? I
don't know. But I damn well intend to find out once and for all.
Why is it necessary to upload to find the Final Answers? Because humans
are too damn stupid to figure out the Truth. We don't have enough
neurons. We're too easily distracted. We don't live long enough or
think fast enough. The Answers are incompatible with our cognitive
architectures and we don't have enough self-knowledge to even say *how*
our cognitive architectures interfere with our perceptions, much less
rebuild them accordingly.
We are not fully self-conscious. We are no more captains of our souls
than we are telekinetic masters of the atoms which trace them.
Uploading will solve that. And so will the Singularity. I have faith
in neither, but I am driven towards them - as much as a countersphexist
can ever be driven towards anything.
You can have the galaxy. One whole mess of atoms. What good will it do
you? Why should I care about anything physical but unconscious? Why
are two billion identical copies of me better than one? Why is
travelling a billion lightyears more significant than moving an inch?
Or shifting stars more significant than tossing rocks? The only thing
that matters is the mind, and it is the mind which uploading shall
kindle and Singularity shall ignite.
> (I'm also afraid that I simply *must* quibble with your implicit contention
> that Knowledge is something non-physical.)
Is the mind "non-physical"? To the extent of my knowledge, almost
certainly not... but I don't know. And I intend to find out.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/algernon.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:43:58 MST