From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rms2g@virginia.edu)
Date: Sat Feb 08 2003 - 21:29:48 MST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Saturday, February 08, 2003 8:57 PM
Subject: Debunking meatspace (was: I am the Google)
>
> Even today, despite having transformed almost every aspect of our lives,
> the neturalistic view continually meets with fierce opposition because of
> the universal fear of being offline. It may indeed be daunting to
> confront the prospect of spending five days without Net access once
> stripped of the comforting myth that the "flesh" will go on existing
> independently of any Net presence. But this is not only an incoherent
> concept, but directly falsifiable, as shown by the fact that going
> *partially* offline - for example, spending five days with a 56K modem -
> results in exactly the attenuation of Net presence we would expect under
> the neturalistic view.
### Now, Eliezer, you are presenting the classical neturalistic analysis,
treading in the intellectual footsteps of such powerful presences as W.
Gibson, and W. Wachendon. However, recently a new, reactionary school of
netanalysis has formed around an observation of the semantic complexity of
attenuated posters. It was shown, that sometimes periods of attenuated net
presence, or even absence, are associated with quantum jumps in the content
of posts, frequently associated with claims of "having read a book", or
"having seen a movie". Interestingly enough, the book, or film in question
indeed appears googleable but only *after* the reports of having been seen.
This would raise the disturbing possibility of back-propagation of net
content, or even retrodiction of keystrokes, an anathema to the classical
neturalist.
A hypothesis which avoids these paradoxes is the supposition that there *is*
a tenuous, even ghostlike, yet strangely real realm beyond the Net, where
superpositions of keystrokes exist in a medium capable of supporting
calculations influencing both the semantic complexity of posts, and the
appearance of matched datastructures of great beauty, and even some
practical usefulness.
I trust that you will join the iconoclasts who defy conventional netiquette,
and return to the faith of our mythical, pre-net forebears, an act perhaps
reactionary, yet full of sophistication and finesse, not to mention greatly
simplifying car repairs.
Rafal
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