From: "Mark Walker" <tap@cgocable.net>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2001 2:03 PM
Subject: Re: WAS: Re: Economic (ignorance) Nativism and me
>
> 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.
>
Isn't the TOE really the start of interesting physics, rather than the end?
Once you've got the formulas, are they just for your T-Shirt, or do you then
need to find out what they imply?
Emlyn James O'Regan - Managing Director
Wizards of AU
http://www.WizardsOfAU.com
emlyn@WizardsOfAU.com
"Australian IT Wizards - US Technology Leaders
Pure International Teleworking in the Global Economy"
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