From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Jun 26 2003 - 21:04:36 MDT
At 01:14 PM 6/26/03 -0400, Eliezer wrote:
>Looks worthless except for those interested in keeping up with popular
>error.
It's quite depressing. Cory Doctorow's mishmash is exemplary: he doesn't
notice, for example, that his tired derisory comparison of uploading with
building a cargo cult airstrip and then foolishly expecting a plane to land
also proves that nobody is able to build an airstrip where planes will
land, and that nobody can build a working radio using parts from the store
and following the blueprint, and that nobody can bake a cake by mixing up
the ingredients according to the recipe and cooking it...
Where does he go wrong? As far as I can tell, by a sort of reverse cargo
cult faith: he thinks if you build an exact functional duplicate of a
brain, some sort of supernatural aircraft will ignore it, zooming
disdainfully far overhead. It doesn't occur to him that we build an
airstrip every time a bunch of DNA helices turns a flow of chemicals into a
child, and then by an astonishing stroke of luck, there's the aircraft on
the field...
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jun 26 2003 - 21:12:23 MDT