Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote
> "Robert J. Bradbury" wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> >
> > > Physicists can build nuclear weapons but they can't
> > > build better physicists.
> >
> > However, if the physicists are approaching a complete TOE, or at
> > least a sufficiently robust TOE that they can't take it any
> > further without recreating a big bang, then even the very
> > best cognitive science will not be able to build better
> > physicists. >
> As someone else commented, that's a big honkin' "IF" you got there. But
> leaving that aside, of course it's still possible to build better
> physicists. You can build a physicist so good that ve *could* have gone
> from "Things fall down" to General Relativity in only a thousand
> subjective seconds. If *that* physicist then says you're done, you really
> *know* you're done.
>
I am not sure that speed here is either necessary or sufficient as a
criterion. The more salient point is that if you are going to claim a
complete TOE, then you have to have completed the processes of attempting to
build better physicists. We won't know that we have the final TOE until we
have the final physicist--presumably there will be several iterations of
this process beyond the human physicist. Completing the project of
transhumanism, thus, is logically prior to completing physics.
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