From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Sun Jan 04 2004 - 11:43:10 MST
On Sun, 04 Jan 2004 08:18:37 +0000
"Mitchell Porter" <mitchtemporarily@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Eliezer:
>
> >Problem is, the equations you're offering can't be fitted to the case of
> >hominid evolution, or evolution, or to human culture, or to any of the
> >other classic cases of accelerating complexity offered by John Smart, Ray
> >Kurzweil, and the like.
>
> Processes leading to us may have an anthropic element - the
> critical path to sentience has to be traversed before the sun
> boils the oceans, without premature extinction of intermediate
> ancestral forms, etc. So they may be unrepresentative of
> self-improving processes in general.
>
Unless you are speaking of more than weak anthropic principles at work I fail to take your point. What does this have to do with relatively weak mechanisms of self-improvement leading to us being here versus relatively strong means of self-improvment we can easily envision? I don't see what a supposed anthropic element has to do with it.
-s
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