From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Feb 11 2002 - 09:50:33 MST
Michael Wiik wrote:
>
> Chances are almost certain anyway that we're living in a simulation,
> where bored programmers amuse themselves by letting reality slip a
> little for some people who are open to the flow. Generally, this means
> extropians are excluded. It'd cause too many aberrations if they let it
> slip for those engaged in any kind of scientific work. Aberrations mean
> long days of work tweaking reality below the surface such that the
> anomaly gets all logically explained in some theoretical paper written
> by a physicist in Turkey a week before the observed event.
I think that roughly the same number of bizarre events happened to me
before and after I became comfortable with my grasp of how physical
reality works and sure that my thoughts had no effect on it except through
my actions. The main effect of knowing that your thoughts have no effect
on reality - except for the sanity part - is that I can visualize a pickax
murderer lurking behind the door of my darkened apartment and still step
through quite confident that the probability of an actual pickax murderer
being there is no higher than on any other occasion. Which really does
make for a more comfortable thought process.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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