[ExI] how large is a human mind?

Anders Sandberg anders at aleph.se
Tue Jan 1 11:14:46 UTC 2013


On 2013-01-01 07:38, Alan Grimes wrote:
> Why would any slightly sane person permit such a regime to arise?

Sounds like a common objection against a lot of situations we find 
ourselves in these days. Just consider the top news headlines.

The answer typically is 1) we did not see it coming, 2) that we lacked 
the necessary coordination to avoid it, 3) nobody found a way of 
changing the rules unilaterally so that the state was avoided.

While better smarts might fix 1, it is still worthless if the state is 
an attractor that will swallow you. Fixing 2 is risky because big 
coordination might squash individual liberty (but historically we have 
become better at coordinating, including non-coercive coordination). 
Fixing 3 is unreliable, since radical innovations that can change the 
underlying rules of societal states can also cause rapid and unexpected 
trouble: the fewer good states there are, the more risky innovation or 
institution design becomes.

-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University



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