Re: Socialism, Intelligence, and Posthumanity

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
13 Jan 1999 22:20:04 +0100

"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:

> "Keith M. Elis" wrote:
> >
> > "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
> > >
> > > Welcome, Keith M. Elis to the very small group of people whom I guess,
> > > from personal observation, to be relatively sane.
> >
> > How small would you say?
>
> Me, you, Greg Egan, Mitchell Porter, Billy Brown, Eric Watt Forste and
> Lee Daniel Crocker; possibly Anders Sandburg, Max More, Walter John
> Williams, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Carl Feynman and Socrates; and quite a
> few people I can't think of offhand. But almost certainly no more than
> twenty all told.

I'm deeply honored to be possibly included in this set :-)

> No offense intended to those omitted; sanity is a highly specialized
> mental discipline, comparable to Zen meditation or lucid dreaming.

Interesting idea. I think rational thinking is something we have to learn, but that we have some built in facilities for learning just like we has a built in facility for learning languages. But you can train your rationality more or less.

Sanity might be something similar. I would guess it is really composed by several components that synergize, like rationality, emotional maturity and good metaprograms.

> There are two main pieces of advice I can give you:
> 1. Catch yourself lying to yourself. If you can just once perceive the
> sensation of knowing the truth but refusing to acknowledge it, you can
> apply the lesson and clean out your entire mind.

Very good advice. Overall, the ability to notice what is going on in one's mind is important in self-transformation. 

-- 
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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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