From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Dec 05 1999 - 20:15:02 MST
Robert Owen wrote:
>
> I don't want to believe there are two kinds of people, but then neither
> do I wish to regard myself as a psychopathic predator who has learned
> to impersonate a civilized being, deceiving myself and others in the
> process.
For myself, I am not foolish enough to participate in the cosmic joke of
regarding Nazi Germany as being peculiarly German, or Hitler as being
"inhuman". I believe I can claim a passing familiarity with cognitive
science, and particularly what it means to be human. Hitler and the
Nazis strike me as being human, almost archetypally human. The Nazi
memes mesh with the built-in human mindware, which is how they took over
the whole country. There hasn't been any point in reading _Rise and
Fall_ where I said: "But how could people do that?" It isn't a very
pleasant experience, but it does reaffirm one's faith in transhumanism.
"Hitler was inhuman", you say. Why? Because you think of yourself as
being "human", and everyone in your group must be good guys, and all the
bad guys must be in another group. This group polarization reflex is,
of course, one of the same pieces of mindware underlying the success of
the Nazi racial-superiority meme. By calling Hitler inhuman, one is
demonstrating (1) that one shares the same basic mindware with Hitler
and all other human beings, thus demonstrating (2) the falsity of (a)
one's own statement, (b) the Nazi philosophy, and (c) the mindware itself.
A cosmic, cruel, and Hofstadterian joke.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
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