From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Sat Feb 08 2003 - 21:24:31 MST
> >Provably untrue. There exists some information which has been written
> >down on paper, but never recorded in any electronic form. (Organic
> >neural networks not counting: those are more chemical than electronic.)
> >And then there is information that is not even recorded that much. For
> >example: what is the layout of the room I sit in while I type this? To
> >me, at least, this is not mere data, for I must use it to navigate the
> >room. And yet this information is not - at this moment, at least -
> >available online.
>
> Ah. I see that our epistemological disagreement goes far deeper than I
> had suspected. If you read Deniel Dannett's "Meatspace Explained", you
> will see that your key failure lies in the use of concepts such as "room"
> or "organic neural network" as if they described separate substances apart
> from their appearance in your post. Ultimately, of course, such fallacies
> stem from Vinge's Error, in which the Net is described as an "Other World"
> set apart from "Real Life". Vinge's "True Names", the original fantasy of
> a real life set apart from the Net, was the first story to vividly depict
> this hypothesis; although not, alas, the last. Not until the advent of
> the Church-Turing Thesis did a few brave souls dare to suggest that,
> indeed, *all* phenomena can be understood as computations and hence that
> the world of the Net, what Vinge called the Other World, is in truth the
> *only* world - what we know today as the neturalistic view.
Allow me to bring Eliezer's abstractions down to Earth: if you e-mail
me the floorplan of your room, I'll PayPal you ten bucks. If you agree
to this transaction, then the information was online, wasn't it? (And if
you don't I'll just try harder).
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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