From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Nov 04 1999 - 20:24:49 MST
Billy Brown wrote:
>
> Of course, I suppose they could be controlling our minds to prevent us from
> noticing the intervention, but that approach leads to untestable (and
> therefore pointless) theories.
We're assuming that they're hiding, and if they want to hide, I'd tend
to assume that they're hiding pretty darn well. This theory isn't one
that gets tested by looking, because it doesn't predict that we'd find
anything. This theory is one that's generated by other theories about
racial psychologies, the Universal distribution of intelligence, and the
persistence of initial programming in Powers. It's the subtheories that
are testable.
Besides which, if they've got hardware subtle enough to read our minds,
they've got hardware subtle enough to intercept the output of any
microscopes advanced enough to spot the nanoagents. Or they might have
descriptor-theory scanners (or some other kind of ontotechnology) that
can just directly read out the state of local reality in ways no
pre-Singularity culture could spot.
I still think the theories are pointless, because, believe it or not,
I'm a pragmatic guy. In most of these exotic theories, either not much
is at stake, or the only significant action is still a Singularity. So
why speculate? We know what comes next; let's *do* it and get it over with.
--
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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