From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Mar 29 1999 - 17:49:28 MST
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> I can't imagine a more complete and precise answer to
> the question "for what reason...?" than "none". The
> fact that you don't like the answer is /your/ problem,
> not the universe's.
And once again, Crocker lands in my (as-yet-unpublished) Quotes file.
Even so, I do have a minor quibble. Except for state-vector reduction,
there are no truly non-causal events in physics, and even that exception
is debatable. I would say that there are events which have no
*high-level* reason.
If you ask, "Why was I born under the sign of Sagittarius in the
constellation of Andromeda?", the only answer is "The Universe" - all
the atoms acting under the laws of physics to produce the final event.
There is no high-level explanation, or at least no high-level
explanation that uses the same simplifying descriptors as the high-level question.
--
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.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:03:26 MST