[extropy-chat] Reductionism

[Damien Broderick]

At 05:22 PM 11/26/2004 -0500, Eliezer wrote:

>>>Name me a single concept I must use, for which I cannot give an 
>>>experimentally testable consequence of its presence or absence.
>>Friendliness.
>>(And watch out for those Type I and Type II errors.)
>
>Presence: you live
>Absence: you die
>
>I didn't say it would be a perfect test that caught every case and only 
>those cases.  I just said there would be an experimentally testable 
>consequence.

Well, you can *impute* or *infer* unfriendliness on the part of someone who 
might have preserved your life but failed to do so, although the motivation 
might have been quite otherwise. I'd have preferred a less extreme 
instance; say, if the suspected unfriendly fails to share her slice of cake 
with you, or hold the door open for you. But even in this extreme case of 
death, there are so many situations where people die in the absence of 
malign or indifferent intention that it fails utterly as an *experimental 
test*.

Damien Broderick