[ExI] Early Archives... Re: Yudkowsky ‘Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50’

[Max More]

I could upload the files but I don't know the format. The files have names like "DIG30269". The files open just fine using MS Notepad. The one I opened as a test had a message from Reilly Jones – another old name to remember. Here it is, from.... wow, almost 30 years ago.

From: Reilly Jones <70544.1227 at compuserve.com>
Date: 31 Oct 94 17:35:54 EST
Subject: [#94-10-621] Zen Physics Enlightenment

Marvin Minsky wrote 10/30/94: <I don't know why you're so sanguine about Zen
enlightenment.  I know of no one who has experienced much of it who has also
been able to continue to make significant mathematical or physical discoveries.
In particular, the dozen or so people formerly known for substantial
accomplishments in modern physics seem to have totally lost those capacities...
I attribute this to serious mental damage from "Zen  enlightenment".  The best
evidence is seen in their strident claims of now being able to understand even
more about mind and nature.>

The mystic state is low-focus conscious attention.  It is content-transcending,
meaning that the connections to external reality are implicit and bypass the
semantic bootstrapping cognitive mechanism in our brains.  All mystics,
everywhere and forever, can describe in great semantic detail, the trip to
enlightenment, as they gradually shut off the external world of desires, and get
their focus of attention lower and lower (or broader).  At some point, the
attentive state goes below semantic content and opens up to implicit knowledge,
the open-ended connections between non-self and the self.  Nothing from this
mental state can be brought back into consensual reality to share with others
because it is literally wordless.

The philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset agrees with Marvin's assessment as to
mysticism's practical value:

  "My objection to mysticism is that out of the mystic vision no intellectual
  benefit redounds to mankind.  Fortunately some mystics were thinkers of
  genius before they were mystics-men like Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, and
  Bergson.  In these men the fertility of thought, logical or expressed,
  contrasts curiously with the poverty of what they discovered when in a
  state of ecstasy."

I think that when people who have contributed in the intellectual field go off
on a mystical journey, that they have somehow sensed the sterility of the field
they are working in.  They have sensed that their field is approaching a
complexity catastrophe that is due to the exceedingly rugged fitness landscape,
the steepness of the scientific peak of knowledge they and others are clinging
to.  They know that unless they descend the peak, and search in the basins
between clusters of peaks of potential knowledge, that they have ended up in an
epistemic evolutionary dead-end.

The state of advanced physics, cosmology and mathematics for the bulk of this
century has been sterile and dead-ended (relative to other, more productive
epochs or other current scientific fields), assumptions at the very core of
these fields must need to be re-examined.  This felt need for re-examination is
what launches specialists off into the basins for a long-jump search.  It is an
exceedingly low-probability tactic of discovering where the assumptions went
wrong or discovering better assumptions, but the people making the search have
decided that local hill-climbing, or tweaking the existing scientific framework,
is not going to be fruitful.  So, although most people going this route waste a
lot of time in fruitless search, it is unpredictable when and if someone will
come up with something highly fruitful.  Sometimes a trip to the wilderness
makes you see things differently, usually you just get bug-infested and dirty.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reilly Jones               |        Philosophy of Technology:
70544.1227 at compuserve.com  |  The rational, moral and political relations
                           |  between 'How we create' and 'Why we create'
________________________________
From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> on behalf of Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2024 10:10 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ExI] Early Archives... Re: Yudkowsky ‘Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50’

This GitHub repo has archives from 1996, upload new archives here, or send them to me and I will upload them.
https://github.com/Extropians/extropians


On Wed, 21 Feb 2024 at 16:25, MB via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org<mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>> wrote:
Keith,

It would be a plus to share those archives with someone on the list (*not*
me!) - like John Klos, or spike or ExIMod, someone who will preserve them
besides you.  Just something to consider.  :)

Be Well!
Regards,
MB

On Tue, February 20, 2024 20:50, Keith Henson via extropy-chat wrote:

> PS.  I have the early archives of Extropy Chat, but they are had to
> access.
>
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