Conversations with you are difficult because I don’t know how much I can assume that you’ll have (or pretend to have) a human-like motivational psychology… and therefore how much I need to re-derive things like social contract theory explicitly for you, without making assumptions that your mind works in a manner similar to my mind by virtue of our having substantially similar genomes, neurology, and life experiences as embodied mental agents, descended from apes, with the expectation of finite lives, surrounded by others in basically the same predicament. For example, I’m not sure about really fundamental aspects of your “inner life” like (1) whether you have a subconscious mind, or (2) if your value system changes over time on the basis of experience, or (3) roughly how many of you there are.
This, unfortunately, leads to abstract speech that you might not be able to parse if your language mechanisms are more about “statistical regularities of observed english” than “compiling english into a data structure that supports generic inference”. By the end of such posts I’m generally asking a lot of questions as I grope for common ground, but you general don’t answer these questions at the level they are asked.
Instant feedback would probably improve our communication by leaps and bounds because I could ask simple and concrete questions to clear things up within seconds. Perhaps the easiest thing would be to IM and then, assuming we’re both OK with it afterward, post the transcript of the IM here as the continuation of the conversation?
If you are amenable, PM me with a gmail address of yours and some good times to chat :-)
Conversations with you are difficult because I don’t know how much I can assume that you’ll have (or pretend to have) a human-like motivational psychology… and therefore how much I need to re-derive things like social contract theory explicitly for you, without making assumptions that your mind works in a manner similar to my mind by virtue of our having substantially similar genomes, neurology, and life experiences as embodied mental agents, descended from apes, with the expectation of finite lives, surrounded by others in basically the same predicament. For example, I’m not sure about really fundamental aspects of your “inner life” like (1) whether you have a subconscious mind, or (2) if your value system changes over time on the basis of experience, or (3) roughly how many of you there are.
This, unfortunately, leads to abstract speech that you might not be able to parse if your language mechanisms are more about “statistical regularities of observed english” than “compiling english into a data structure that supports generic inference”. By the end of such posts I’m generally asking a lot of questions as I grope for common ground, but you general don’t answer these questions at the level they are asked.
Instant feedback would probably improve our communication by leaps and bounds because I could ask simple and concrete questions to clear things up within seconds. Perhaps the easiest thing would be to IM and then, assuming we’re both OK with it afterward, post the transcript of the IM here as the continuation of the conversation?
If you are amenable, PM me with a gmail address of yours and some good times to chat :-)
Oh, anyone can email me at clippy.paperclips@gmail.com.