Your previous article on the subject got downvoted to −15, and yet you posted a second article anyway? Why did you do that? Did you perform further research to determine whether all of us were confused, or only you? Did you try to determine whether there was any question to answer or not? Did you try to figure out why it seemed like there was a question to answer?
I don’t know you very well at all, but it appears that you’re an intelligent and useful person. I’m guessing that seeing the response to your articles will be leaving you disappointed and discouraged. Please remember that we humans have a greater than optimal tendency to give up when faced with unimportant and nominal failures; we’d like you to learn from your mistakes and come back stronger. Possibly, the best thing for you to do is try to forget about this issue for a few weeks and see what your attitude toward it is then.
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.
No offense, but...
Your previous article on the subject got downvoted to −15, and yet you posted a second article anyway? Why did you do that? Did you perform further research to determine whether all of us were confused, or only you? Did you try to determine whether there was any question to answer or not? Did you try to figure out why it seemed like there was a question to answer?
I don’t know you very well at all, but it appears that you’re an intelligent and useful person. I’m guessing that seeing the response to your articles will be leaving you disappointed and discouraged. Please remember that we humans have a greater than optimal tendency to give up when faced with unimportant and nominal failures; we’d like you to learn from your mistakes and come back stronger. Possibly, the best thing for you to do is try to forget about this issue for a few weeks and see what your attitude toward it is then.
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.
Not a karma junkie maybe?