<div dir="ltr"><div><div>Though it took me a long time to leave the church, I now cannot understand why anyone would think our bodies were created by some god. We are put together, cobbled together, patched together, and all systems usually work well enough to get us to mating age. Beyond that we start downhill. We are susceptible to innumerable diseases both physical and mental. Among the mental are not diseases per se but faults of our mind. If you haven't been there already, check out Wikipedia and search for 'cognitive errors'. My colleagues in social psych put most of them there. Pages and pages of how we can and usually do go wrong. Creating a new mind in my book will take most of what we are and dump it. Some emotions go: anger, resentment, retaliation, joy in seeing others hurt or killed, and maybe more. Some tastes go: fat, sugar and salt need to be drastically lowered in motivation, sex needs to be time-programmed (only feel an interest from 7 to 12 at night) and more. We need to see much further into our unconscious mind than we do now. This is the sort of thing I asked the group to offer.<br>
<br></div>As an aside: I have written help and gotten an incomprehensible return that looks like some sort of programming commands and does not address my questions: how do I find out the topics people on the list are interested in? When I click on reply does my email go only to my correspondent? Or to everyone? If you could just take a minute to explain this site to me it would be a big help.<br>
<br></div>Thanks!<br><br>Bill Wallace<br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 5:11 PM, Anders Sandberg <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:anders@aleph.se" target="_blank">anders@aleph.se</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="im">On 09/01/2014 21:39, Ben wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
It occurs to me that minds that were evolved to cope with the African<br>
Savannah on approximately the metre scale, are woefully inequipped for<br>
understanding how the universe works. The reason that the double-slit<br>
experiment, and all the other manifestations of quantum theory (and many<br>
other things) are mind-blowing to us is probably that our minds never<br>
needed to understand those things during our evolutionary development.<br>
That kind of understanding will probably require a different mental<br>
architecture than the one we have. It's likely that anyone capable of<br>
understanding how the universe works can't be 'human' in any<br>
currently-accepted sense.<br>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
I think this is right.<br>
<br>
Our perceptual and conceptual apparatus is demonstrably weak when moving out of our domains of evolutionary adaptiveness. Just look at how hard it is to think about implications in logic correctly, let alone multidimensional spaces. The fact that it can handle so much is amazing, and might even hint at some kind of "Turing universality" of our thinking. But even if things can in principle be thought or understood by human-style minds they might be too slow or big to be thought in practice.<br>
<br>
An even more worrying possibility might be that our motivation systems (and hence emotions and ethics) are also wrong for the universe at large.<br>
<br>
In the most general case the No Free Lunch Theorems kindly tell us not to bother: no mind is better than any other mind across the space of all possible universes. But this global egalitarian nihilism doesn't apply to our universe, since it is a special case: not everything is equally likely, and for any utility function there exist more or less adequate minds when trying to maximize it in our universe.<br>
<br>
The moral is not to trust intuitions outside our domains of evolutionary adaptiveness. And to embrace the individuality of this particular universe with all its quirks. It got just one time dimension, scandium, maybe Thorne-Żytkow objects, and power-law distributions everywhere! Yay!<br>
<br>
<br>
-- <br>
Anders Sandberg,<div class="im"><br>
Future of Humanity Institute<br>
Oxford Martin School<br></div>
Faculty of Philosophy<br>
Oxford University<div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
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