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

Kelly Anderson postmowoods at gmail.com
Thu Mar 7 03:35:31 UTC 2024 

I think it would be fun to feed the list into an LLM training. Rather
than searching, one could ask a question of our general knowledge base
then... I have no idea how specifically to do this, but I'm sure it
would be cool and would work.

-Kelly

On Fri, Feb 23, 2024 at 12:31 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Feb 22, 2024 at 7:05 PM Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> These files are already online.
>
>
> Where? The GitHub repo has files from 1996, but we are talking of 1993-96 files.
>
>>
>>
>> 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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