[ExI] The digital nature of brains

Spencer Campbell lacertilian at gmail.com
Wed Jan 27 00:44:47 UTC 2010


Ben Zaiboc <bbenzai at yahoo.com>:
> I suspect that sooner or later you'll be asked to get back under your bridge lest any goats come to harm.  Don't let it come to that, Gordon.
> Think about what people are saying, instead of just re-regurgitating the same tired old meaningless phrases.  Please.

I second the motion.

The whole syntax/semantics/symbol grounding/consciousness debacle is
too much of a memetically incestuous mess for me to lay all the blame
on Gordon, but certainly it wouldn't exist if he stopped sustaining
it. As far as I can tell, the situation is Gordon versus The World. It
would be much easier to kill the thing by taking Gordon out than by
taking The World out, and considering the fact that no one seems to
have anything better to gain here but pride I am strongly in favor of
bringing about a conclusion as swiftly as possible.

I'd like to point out that I've been subscribed to Extropy-Chat for a
little more than twelve days. I've gotten a rough average of five
messages per day; sixty-one in all. In that span, the only thing I've
learned is that the human brain is plastic enough for our minds to add
novel limbs to their body images. I can't even apply that information
right now.

This is very low extropy!

(To be fair, I also learned that submitting a 9,197 byte exploration
of human communication in the abstract will not, as a rule, attract
much attention. While I'm here: if anyone wants me to continue the
thought started in "[ExI] The Throughput of English", please let me
know. I'll finish it eventually anyway, but won't necessarily send it
here.)



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list