From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Sun Oct 29 2000 - 13:23:21 MST
Samantha Atkins writes:
> That is opinion, not fact and a biased strawman at that. It might be
Of course it's an opinion: we can't study advanced cultures from close
as there aren't any. Nevertheless, logics dictates that ignoring the
hardware layer is perilous as long as you couple to physical reality.
> that some form of what you might call "navel gazing" yields the most
> profound ability to manipulate physical reality all the way down to
> vacuum flux. If reality turns out to be more informational than
Yes, but then it stops being navel gazing.
> material/physical then some beings or even entire species may find the
> only meaningful game to be pretty internal rather than what we would
> call external. There is no need to make provincial judgements about
> such at this point of relatively little knowledge and understanding.
Sure it is provincial, but a cat may look at a queen.
I'm not judging on whether it is meaningful/worthwhile, or not (I'm
rather fond of navelgazing myself, orelse I wouldn't be here), but
realworld barbarians are rarely impressed with delicate works of
art. They will raze your diamond castles, and fashion trinkets from
your flesh & bone.
> I think we have more freedom to rewrite who we are and what "we" means
> than that or very soon will have. Used up all the atoms? Create more!
Uh, we don't know how to make new usable spacetime nor
matterenergy. I'm not saying it can't be done, just that we should
remain within the limits of known physics in our speculations. There
are a lot more of could-be's than there are what-really-is'ses.
> Socializing is actually pretty boring eventually as it becomes too
> boringly predictable if the agents involved stop changing.
In reality, the opposite is true. The higher cerebralisation, the more
resources allocated to intangibles. We primates are particularly good
at it.
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