Re: The Extropian Principles

Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@factory.net)
Tue, 30 Jul 1996 21:15:29 -0700

At 4:09 AM 7/29/96, Anders Sandberg wrote:
>Why not? I have begun to dislike reification (= turning concepts into
>"things") lately; intelligence is not something you can increase (as if
>it was some golden liquid in our brains), it is the ability to act/think
>in an intelligent way. Extropy cannot be static, then it is not extropy.
>Remember that the word is based on "Ex" ("out") and the "tropos" (move).

This is beautiful, and I agree with it strongly.

Hofstadter in GOEDEL, ESCHER, BACH, liked to talk about Jumping Out Of The
System so much that he made an acronym for it: jootsing. One of his ideas
there seemed to be that the crux of intelligence is identifying orderly
systems... and then jumping out of their limits. And one of the things he
seemed to be hinting at in that book is that this is a necessarily endless
process.

>Extropy cannot be static, then it is not extropy.

"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao."

I have no interest in starting another Great Witch War; this is intended as
a witticism which I simply could not resist.

Eric Watt Forste <arkuat@pobox.com> http://www.c2.org/~arkuat/