Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> "Keith M. Elis" wrote:
> > How small would you say?
>
> Me, you, Greg Egan, Mitchell Porter, Billy Brown, Eric Watt Forste and
> Lee Daniel Crocker; possibly Anders Sandburg, Max More, Walter John
> Williams, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Carl Feynman and Socrates; and quite a
> few people I can't think of offhand. But almost certainly no
> more than twenty all told..
Thanks. I don't have any arguments with your list. I would put Eric Drexler on the 'possible' list - I don't know him well enough to form a firm opinion, but he seems to understand personal, conscious meme-pruning.
> I think it's because most people, and certainly almost all philosophers,
> can't keep track of what's real when they're operating at that level of
> abstraction.
> I can always keep track of the concrete consequences of
> any philosophical proposition; for me the words are only descriptions of
> my visualization and not the visualization itself. I can concretely
> define any term whatsoever, as it is actually used - in terms of our
> cognitive handling of the word, if necessary. And that's where
> virtually my entire facility with philosophy comes from. When I talk
> about "objective morality", I am talking about an amorphous
> (unknown-to-us) physical object which possesses an approximate
> correspondence to our cognitive goals and which motivates
> superintelligences, not "objective morality"..
I would presume you still have the limited-working-memory problem when working with complex idea systems. If not, please explain - I've been trying to generalize around that one for years now.
> The "mortals", not the "gaussians". I'm a Specialist, not a gaussian; I
> possess some slight variance relative to the unmodified human race, but
> it is not significant on a galactic or supragalactic scale. I am well
> within the mortal side of any mortal/Power duality. If it comes down to
> Us or Them, I'm with Them, but it would be megalomaniac to expect this
> to result in any sort of preferential treatment.
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@conemsco.com