From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Fri Jan 09 2004 - 23:09:50 MST
On Fri, 09 Jan 2004 05:16:22 +0000
"Mitchell Porter" <mitchtemporarily@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Samantha:
>
> >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.
>
> Well, the question (as raised by Paul Fidika) was, how do we
> know that recursive self-enhancement is an accelerating process?
> You could just as well argue that it slows down, because each
> new improvement is harder to discover. Eliezer gave examples
> from history, which suggest an accelerating tendency stretching
> across biological, cultural and technological evolution. My idea was
> indeed that this might all just be an artefact of the weak anthropic
> principle: Any sentient being, when it investigates its origins, has
> to find a world that went through all those transitions; but sentience
> having been attained, WAP says nothing about further evolutionary
> leaps being likely. We may be wrong to generalize about the
> powers of evolution, on the basis of how it unfolded here on Earth.
>
OK, so the above doesn't really say that WAP has anything to do with whether significant recursive self-enhancement is possible/likely. It merely gives an alternative explanation for one argument for the possibility. Correct?
-s
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:43 MDT