On Fri, May 04, 2001 at 02:15:59PM -0700, Damien Sullivan wrote:
>
> I just don't like to see this defeatism about the human brain, and early
> turning to the blind idiot god of natural selection[1]. Yeah, selecting on
> bitspray can work, but selecting on higher-order stuff is much cooler and
> faster.
Exactly. Just because it is a mess doesn't mean it is a *hopeless* mess.
I think we can already say a few useful things about how it might be
improved (such as where we might want to add extra input channels to
modulate processing, for example) and in a few years it is likely we
understand enough to really start coming up with fun improvements.
> [1] Lovecraft reference. "Azathoth, the blind idiot suzerain of the universe,
> gibbering madly at the center of all things." I've thought that's a wonderful
> metaphor for natural selection. The gibbering can be the random mutations.
It is a very good metaphor.
> I don't think Yog-Sothoth maps to anything real. Laws of physics, maybe.
I always envisioned it as spacetime. It is coincident with all space and
time, and knows the gates (wormholes).
Nyarlathotep is entropy of course.
Hmm, maybe the birth of a new organisation: Extropians for Cthulhu :-)
"That is not dead that can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death
may die"
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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