From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Mar 24 1999 - 15:26:16 MST
Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> Neither of them is a neuroscientist (Hameroff comes closest, I think
> he was opriginally an anesthesiologist), and both are definitely not
> speaking about the areas where they are respectable. We shouldn't
> trust people for being respectable established scientists, we should
> look at their theories and the facts they presents.
No; we should trust people for being respectable scientists, and believe
them for their theories and the facts they present. If a scientist is
talking and mentions that XYZ weird phenomenon occurs, I'm willing to
believe him until someone contradicts him. If a complete unknown starts
talking about weird phenomena, I want to see an authoritative reference,
or someone else duplicate the experiment, before I'll start drawing
conclusions from the phenomena. On the other hand, demanding
"documentation" on speculations is simply silly, a conversational tactic
and nothing more.
In other words, I'm willing to trust that Penrose and Hameroff aren't
just making up the phenomena they speculate about; I'm not willing to
trust their speculations. And, in point of fact, I usually agree when
they say that XYZ phenomenon looks noncomputable or theoretically could
be noncomputable; but I think the speculations that the noncomputability
occurs using Q speculative neural mechanism and R speculative physics
are premature, and will probably be disproven eventually.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html
http://pobox.com/~sentience/singul_arity.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
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