From: Robin Hanson (hanson@econ.berkeley.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 23 1998 - 12:49:32 MDT
James Ganong writes:
>... a group of children trying to fathom the ways of adults; it is IMO
>the closest analogue to someone on one side of a dramatic phase-change
>(Singularity) trying to understand those who have already gone through
>it. ... I for one can only come to the conclusion that at this point
>in time, no meaningful statements can be made;
To me this model suggests the opposite conclusion. The full time job of
children is to understand the adult world around them, and they pretty
much all succeed at it. When they do, we call them adults. That
suggests that if we put in sufficient time into the effort, we can
understand posthumans. The analogy would also suggest that
succeeding in the effort would make us posthumans, but this only goes
through if humanity were spending full time at this effort. But in
fact humanity now spends only the tiniest fraction of its time trying
to envision posthumans. So by this analogy we should be able to spend
more time to get better understanding without hitting any obvious limits.
Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/
RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884
140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-2627
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