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

Thu Feb 22 18:01:08 UTC 2024

On Thu, 22 Feb 2024 at 18:52, Max More via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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.
>

Send them to me!

> 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> 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.
> >
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20240222/783f199c/attachment-0001.htm>