Thank you for the concern, but things have been fairly mellow this time around anyway.
When I was a teenager, I thought about the mind as people here do, at least some of the time. I was happy to think of consciousness as something like a video camera aimed at its own output. But I know that by the time I was 20, I was thinking differently, and I do not expect to ever turn back. It’s clear to me that computer science and mathematical physics only address a subset of the world’s ontology, and that the reductionisms we have consist at best of partial descriptions, and at worst of misidentifications. Also, in the study of phenomenology, especially Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, I’ve had a glimpse of how to think rigorously about the rest of ontology.
This is my larger agenda. The problem of the Singularity is being approached within the existing scientific ontology, which is incomplete, and the solutions being developed, like CEV and TDT, are also stated in terms of that ontology. To really know what you’re doing, when attempting to initiate a Friendly Singularity, you’d need to understand those solutions, or their analogues, in terms of the true ontology. But to do that requires knowledge of the true ontology.
So, while trying to figure out a better ontology, I have an interest in understanding the thought processes of people who are satisfied with the existing one, because such people dominate the Singularity enterprise. Ideally I’d be able to provoke some sense of philosophical crisis and inadequacy, but obviously that isn’t happening. However, I think there has been minor progress. I intend to let the current discussion wind down—to reply where there’s more to be said, but not to get into “Yes it is, no it isn’t” exchanges—and to get on with the larger enterprise, once it’s over. These discussions have all already occurred, at a higher level of sophistication on all sides, in the philosophical literature, and I should relocate the ontological component of my project in that direction.
Thank you for the concern, but things have been fairly mellow this time around anyway.
When I was a teenager, I thought about the mind as people here do, at least some of the time. I was happy to think of consciousness as something like a video camera aimed at its own output. But I know that by the time I was 20, I was thinking differently, and I do not expect to ever turn back. It’s clear to me that computer science and mathematical physics only address a subset of the world’s ontology, and that the reductionisms we have consist at best of partial descriptions, and at worst of misidentifications. Also, in the study of phenomenology, especially Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, I’ve had a glimpse of how to think rigorously about the rest of ontology.
This is my larger agenda. The problem of the Singularity is being approached within the existing scientific ontology, which is incomplete, and the solutions being developed, like CEV and TDT, are also stated in terms of that ontology. To really know what you’re doing, when attempting to initiate a Friendly Singularity, you’d need to understand those solutions, or their analogues, in terms of the true ontology. But to do that requires knowledge of the true ontology.
So, while trying to figure out a better ontology, I have an interest in understanding the thought processes of people who are satisfied with the existing one, because such people dominate the Singularity enterprise. Ideally I’d be able to provoke some sense of philosophical crisis and inadequacy, but obviously that isn’t happening. However, I think there has been minor progress. I intend to let the current discussion wind down—to reply where there’s more to be said, but not to get into “Yes it is, no it isn’t” exchanges—and to get on with the larger enterprise, once it’s over. These discussions have all already occurred, at a higher level of sophistication on all sides, in the philosophical literature, and I should relocate the ontological component of my project in that direction.