From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Oct 04 1999 - 19:30:21 MDT
I can't think of any good reason to read philosophy, unless of course
it's my philosophy. Socrates was the only competent pure philosopher I
know of, and Plato screwed his legacy up for the next two thousand
years. The competent philosophers of this generation are uniformly
scientists, and lately computer programmers, who happen to mention
philosophy while they're educating you about something - and even their
philosophy simply doesn't come up to the standards of completeness and
simplicity necessary to design personal philosophies for AIs, which is
the only point at which there's some real criterion for success or failure.
Philosophy is the art of telling the simplest possible true story about
the Universe that lets us model reality and make choices. Philosophy,
by its nature, is not a human art; anthropomorphism is a legitimate
criticism of any philosophy, as much so as of a theory of physics. I
have yet to see any non-anthropomorphic philosophy other than my own,
which is also anthropomorphic. Hence my skepticism.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
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