From: Gordon Worley (redbird@rbisland.cx)
Date: Sun Aug 25 2002 - 08:29:09 MDT
On Sunday, August 25, 2002, at 07:18 AM, Cliff Stabbert wrote:
> Saturday, August 24, 2002, 10:56:21 PM, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>
> ESY> Rationality is the universal of which evolution and brains are
> partial
> ESY> implementations, and the truth that confers upon them their
> powers. It
> ESY> underlies the inductive reasoning that gave birth to flowers, and
> the
> ESY> deliberative reasoning that put footprints on the moon. If you
> look past
> ESY> surface similarities and differences you can see the rationality
> burning
> ESY> underneath like blood flowing under skin.
>
> What an unexpectedly poetic message!
>
> Your definition of "rationality" is clearly different from common
> usage, and from Gordon Worley's and James Rogers' usage in this thread.
Well, while Eliezer does have a rather odd way of getting around to all
of this, the point is that rationality is possible for everything in the
universe. The difference between humans and everything else that we now
about is that humans can take out the irrationality that has been
introduced into them. In other words, everything follows roughly the
same decision making process and it's how you assign the weights and
what decisions you try to assign weights to that makes all the
difference.
-- Gordon Worley `When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty http://www.rbisland.cx/ said, `it means just what I choose redbird@rbisland.cx it to mean--neither more nor less.' PGP: 0xBBD3B003 --Lewis Carroll
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:40 MDT