Re: The inevitable limitations of all finite minds....

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Nov 22 2000 - 11:03:58 MST


Alicia Madsen wrote:
>
> Do you mean perfection to be the balance of choosing whether it is best to
> maximize intelligence or "mental health" (which I take from your use as
> synonymous with "mindfulness" and "wisdom") in a given finite universe?
> Perfection is born from an almost instinctual awareness of previous
> experience, which is what we call wisdom. So I see how wisdom and perfection
> are related. But the "superintelligent supermind" has more than an instinctual
> awareness of the past, but possesses an intrinsic and simultaneous awareness
> of the past. Therefore your argument,
>
> "Having compressed, we no longer have access to what we originally
> experienced, only to the compressed form. We have lost some information.",
>
> does not apply.

This sounds a bit religioid to me. We're talking, by the by, not about
"the superintelligent supermind", but about superintelligent minds running
on hardware we can understand - which might be a mistake in itself, but
this is hardly avoidable. I can think of several ways to achieve an
"intrinsic and simultaneous awareness of the past" on understandable
hardware, although the most obvious method would require an exponentially
increasing amount of processing power and memory storage - which might
still turn out to be available, of course. I also disagree that
perfection derives from awareness of past experience.

Thou shalt justify thine statements.

-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence



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