Re: ENTROPIAN ALERT! Another warning for us to organize

From: GBurch1@aol.com
Date: Fri Mar 09 2001 - 07:10:05 MST


On March 2, 2001 Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:

>There comes a point where, however transhumanistically incorrect it may
>be, you have to face the fact that you've gone so far beyond the critics
>that you have a better chance of spotting flaws in your ideology than they
>do.

While this MAY be true, it seems to be a moral and epistemological position
that is functionally indistinguishable from what might be seen as the kind of
sense of invincibility that paranoids and religious fundamentalists feel,
i.e. the tinfoil hat crowd and assertions like “I know that the Bible is
literally true because it’s the word of God and I know that the Bible is the
word of God because it says so in the Bible”. It seems like a healthy thing
to do to maintain a chain of reasoning and presumptions that can be traced
back to the mental world of the “mundanes” and to make periodically
rechecking the validity of that chain of reasoning a regular habit.

       Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
      Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
         http://www.gregburch.net -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
                                           ICQ # 61112550
        "We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
        enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
       question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
                                          -- Desmond Morris



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