From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue May 21 2002 - 15:21:09 MDT
Wei Dai wrote:
>
> Great book, but I don't understand some of the events either. Spoilers
> follow:
> Could somebody please explain the endless resimulations of the judge
> reuniting with his wife? That makes no sense to me.
It makes no sense to me either. Cruel and pointless.
> Also, why did Aleph allow parents to deceive their children and force them
> to live without advanced technology? The valley people had the right to
> leave and join the Renounciators, so why didn't the Renounciators have the
> right to leave and join the rest of humanity, at least until Aleph was
> forced to stop the deception and give them the choice?
As I said, this "Aleph" fellow is clearly none of my work. In fact,
according to the novel, Aleph started out way, way, way back when as an
uploaded human.
Aleph is behaving not just very oddly but in a humanishly cruel sort of way
- i.e., Aleph puts the judge through random hoops to impress him with his
own inferiority. Why does Aleph care? Is this a case of Damien, at one
remove, trying to impress the readers?
> The original Renounciators must have asked Aleph to remove certain
> knowledge from their minds and to continue to deceive them about reality.
> Should Aleph have accommodated them? Clearly deceiving one's children
> should not be allowed (and I don't understand why it's allowed in the
> book), but what about deception of one's own future selves? Why should
> Aleph deceive someone just because a past version of him requested it?
It seems pretty clear that Aleph is not following volitional-Friendliness
rules.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:14:15 MST