From: Mikko Rauhala (mjrauhal@cc.helsinki.fi)
Date: Tue Apr 29 2003 - 13:24:50 MDT
Incidentally, I somewhat agree with Samantha that this thread doesn't
seem to be exceedingly relevant here (in this length, anyway). Still, I
suppose it is of a somewhat high Shock Level, since somebody described
the subject as mind-blowing, and it seems that the powers that be agree
so far, so here's a couple of cents courtesy of yours truly.
On Tue, 2003-04-29 at 02:54, Gary F. York wrote:
> I'm unpersuaded for reasons I'll get to in a moment. I should confess that I
> most particularly don't _want_ to be persuaded. Seems to me the implication is
> utterly horrible: every evil, monstrous act that could conceivably be
> perpetrated must have happened -- somewhere.
Indeed. As someone who is rather persuaded, I wouldn't recommend it if
you're not sure you can deal with it completely rationally. (I so far
can't, it seems; not completely.)
> I don't think this is actually possible. If we consider the movement from time
> N to N + 1 as a state change, my contention is that some state changes are
> constrained. Any arrangement of atoms and molecules configured at time N as
> _me_ is not, for instance, going to move at N + 1 to a state that cuts open the
> next baby it sees to see if it likes the taste of baby heart. It's not just a
> low probability event, it's a zero probability event.
>From my viewpoint, it suffices if there's a construct Gary N+1 who
_thinks_ he is a continuation of Gary N but with a desire to eat a
baby's heart, as I don't see any fundamental reason to believe that
there's causality or continuity in other than subjective realities. As I
intuit that Gary N+1 is a self-consistent construct in and of itself, he
should exist in the set of all possible (and therefore, I intuit,
actual) realities, as should his victim. (See also Theory of Dust.)
It should be noted that it is of course nevertheless rational to act as
though there is some non-subjective causality, unless one is
_absolutely_ sure that this is not the case, which seems impossible to
me at this point.
> Even if I'm utterly wet in this instance, surely one among you can propose
> something plausible that leads neither to horror nor unimaginably tedious
> redundancy.
Sorry.
-- Mikko Rauhala - mjr@iki.fi - <URL:http://www.iki.fi/mjr/> Transhumanist - WTA member - <URL:http://www.transhumanism.org/> Singularitarian - SIAI supporter - <URL:http://www.intelligence.org/>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:42 MDT