Re: The inevitability of death, or the death of inevitability?

From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Fri Dec 28 2001 - 01:26:10 MST


"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:

> Perhaps. Understand that I do not have "faith" that immortality is
> possible. I am simply stating that before we get all emotional about this
> issue - that is, before we begin making value judgements or philosophical
> assumptions based on it - we should remember that the model the prediction
> is based on is a model which historically has often changed and currently
> is still in flux.

Faith may be a word that has fallen into disrepute in some
camps. However, if I did not have "faith" that X (SI,
singularity, immortality) was possible I wouldn't spend any time
at all working towards actually producing such. In short, some
questions are not effectively tackled by armchair cogitations.
They can only be resolved, to the extent they are resolvable, by
taking a working hypotheses and proceeding to check whether it
is or can be made real.

We know so very little about what "the universe" is and includes
that it is extremely hubristic to claim that the universe simply
does not allow X or that there is no way for anything that was
part of the universe to survive the "death" of said universe or
certain types of transformation thereof.

- samantha



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