Re: black holism

Robin Hanson (hanson@hss.caltech.edu)
Fri, 15 Aug 1997 14:38:47 -0700 (PDT)


>Our supreme eagerness to impute purpose, telos, narrative to the world
>arises because that is indeed an appropriate way to understanding the human
>realm, the regime of intentions for which our minds have evolved their
>special competence. Minds, as we've seen, are more like rowdy parliaments
>than diamond crystals.

I agree that this is a very important key in understanding how
thinking goes wrong. Many of my early (and not especially good)
physics ideas were trying to pursue this line, to make physics basics
more like minds. It took a long time to really accept that physics
fundamentals are probably nothing like minds. It really is a very
strange fact to assimilate, relative to our "natural priors".