From: KPJ (kpj@sics.se)
Date: Mon Jan 11 1999 - 11:23:41 MST
KPJ wrote:
|
|You appear to enter the Debate Mode. This normally indicates that I have
|somehow triggered the meme system into self-protection. Sorry about that.
It appears as if Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> wrote:
|
|(?) I do have to worry about that, since I'm still a mortal. But I
|don't think so. I'll pay you a sincere compliment and assume that you
|were genuinely trying to make a point of evolutionary psychology, at the
|same level of facility I had a few years ago, rather than using a
|debating tactic.
I prefer discussions to debates.
Discussions allow for frank exchange of meme system and data. This allows
one to expand ones knowledge base and upgrade various models of the world
and its contents.
Debates mainly express mammalian politics, which I find uninteresting and
irrelevant. It comes down to "I am right, you are wrong." and
"'Shutup!', he explained." in the end. No new data there.
|I was simply echoing a point you made back at you; that if you feel
|threatened by a specific set of memes ("Nuke K-Mart"), then there's also
|a threat in any meme system which assumes a random trajectory. I'd feel
|nervous around someone who insisted that reality is only a matter of
|opinion, wouldn't you? He might decide that sulfuric acid was good for me.
Your stated preference for "evil" and the reckless statement for the immediate
destruction of a human populated structure without warning said population
made you appear a potential massmurder. I would avoid such an entity until
a confrontation made termination with extreme prejudice a necessity.
|It appears as if "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> wrote:
||
||I see. So, in other words, you're walking a totally predetermined
||trajectory where your current meme system determines the meme system
||you'll adopt next. (As adjusted for your innate instincts, of course.)
|
|Ahh, the old question of Free Will pops up.
|
|Not in the slightest. There are people who follow predetermined walks
|with respect to their opinions; we call it "blind faith", not "Free Opinion".
I rephrase. "You appear to assume that a meme system defines your behaviour
to 100% which would mean that no Free Will existed. The meme system guides
what you can think, not necessarily what you think and do exactly."
||Personally I use the meme system of scientific exploration called rational
||empirism. This system defines "truth" as the model matching the outer world
||and checks the truth value of the model by making experiments. I understand
||it has been rather successful during the last centuries.
|
|But you don't use that meme system to determine the truth of supergoals,
|only of opinions and subgoals. I use that meme system to determine what
|I do as well as what I say.
I feel you make long reaching conclusions on insuffient data here.
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