Wednesday, September 19, 2007

More from the "rationalists". . .

The favorite blog of the "rationalists" these days has to be Overcoming Bias.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the most prolific bloggers there. A man unwilling to consider the possibility of parapsychology experiments being valid unless they pass a repeatibility test that no experimental psychology protocol (or clinical medical protocol) has ever acheived: a 95% successful replication rate across many different research centers. Now let's read him pontificate about human longevity:


I think it's pretty absurd for any of us to pretend to maturity when all of us are less than a thousand years old, making us infants by the standards of future civilization.


That ranks right up there with his comment on how terrible and immoral it is not to freeze the heads of everyone after they die, presumably so that the nanotech replicators can copy our neural synapses and download them into computer simulations. Eliezer also believes that his non-profit organization will succeed in bringing about the Singularity by developing the world's first artificial intelligence.

Yes, folks, this is "rationalism" for you. . . Meanwhile, Eliezer and his fellow travellers have absolutely no interest in reading about real research suggesting that the mind is something other than just brain processes.

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