Emlyn has written,
> It is actually my full point that you can't grok your 3-month old self. Why
> don't we have any memories of that age?
Many people *do* have memories of that age. You might try hypnosis and age
regression.
> I wonder if we can't remember what it was like to be that age, because the
> points of view of an adult and a 3-month old are so disparate; maybe there
> is just no way to model what it is like to be 3 months old, so you lose the
> information, save for the odd, mostly untrustworthy, flash or vision.
A meditation exercise that some have found useful is to regress to 3-months or
younger. The ability of the human brain to remember is surprising to anyone who
hasn't tried it. People don't remember the first three or four years of life
because, as you point out, those times are so very different from adult
experience, and also because those years are painful in many ways. We tend not
to remember pain.
> I'm thinking that an SI, even one which is technically an augmented human
> (ie: take raw human adult, add technology, iterate), may have the same
> trouble with grokking grown up humans, that we have with our littlest folk;
> surely, after all, the gap in mental power is similar.
Yes, that's right, and remember that an adult has a better concept of what it's
like to be an infant than an infant has of what it's like to be an adult. An
important element of enlightenment for people to consider is that enlightened
masters understand the unenlightened infinitely more accurately than the
unenlightened can ever understand enlightened masters.
> It's pretty much impossible to understand/experience being smarter than you
> are, to any large degree. Maybe it is likewise as difficult to be
> understand/experience being dumber (outside of a small range)?
It's like someone who has never had vision trying to understand what sight is
like. Much easier for a sighted person to understand blindness.
--J. R.
WEDW 9/28/00 - 6:48 PM... to each other about what it was that they touched. The
web is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. According to some
it a communications device, according to others it's an information gathering
system. It's the beginning of artificial intelligence. It's a huge
communications vehicle. Maybe a direct marketing vehicle. What is the web? >>
The web is just one part of something very radical that's happening and it's a
changing civilization. It's about the fact that the human brain is very special.
If you can get more content in the human brain, you don't saturate it, you can
get more pretty. The web is more way, one way of getting more information. You
have digital tv. You go back 50 years, you came into an accountant firm, you
opened up ten letters in your mornings, that was your work. Now we all get vast
amounts of e-mail, phone messages, it all about this fundamental change, which
is using people's brains more because those are actually the scarce resource. >>
So what is one of the outcomes of allowing more...
http://www.TVEyes.com/database/expand.asp?ln=2344223&Key=artificial%20intell
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:39:29 MDT