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

Thu Feb 22 18:05:04 UTC 2024

These files are already online.

On Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 12:02 PM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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.
>> >
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