From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Jan 18 2002 - 09:25:23 MST
Gordon Worley wrote:
>
> On Thursday, January 17, 2002, at 08:16 AM, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>
> > Incidentally, I first named our home space the "Socrates Universe" in a
> > discussion of Alpha Lines on the Extropian mailing list, and as far as I
> > know, it was the first time anyone ever needed to come up with a name.
> > Who knows, maybe someday it'll become official.
>
> I'm curious: why Socrates? I've needed a clear way to refer to our
> universe (mostly because I wanted to call it something other than `the
> universe' because that gets to be like saying I live on `the planet')
> numerous times, but just never thought up a name. The possibility of
> universes other than our own seems obvious, to me anyway. But, I'm not
> really interested in who needed what first. I'd just like some
> explanation of how you got the name.
I like Socrates. I think that his method of thinking had a lot of
potential and might eventually have given birth to a Francis Bacon and a
Greek Industrial Revolution, had it not been for the total corruption of
all his ideas by Plato and Aristotle. Anyway, even with Plato and
Aristotle messing things up, I consider Socrates to be the inventor, or at
least the consolidator and social popularizer, of the quest for truth as
we moderns understand it. I think that's worthy of having a Universe
named after you.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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