bogdanb comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong

58 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 January 2010 04:35PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (400)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 January 2010 06:48:17PM 5 points [-]

I suspect you need to travel some (most?) of the inferential distance to becoming a rationalist

At age eight? Even I wasn't much of a rationalist until nine or so.

Comment author: bogdanb 21 January 2010 12:29:33AM 0 points [-]

That's weird. Do you actually remember your thoughts from that age?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 January 2010 08:18:01PM 3 points [-]

I remember writing absolutely unthinkably awful science fiction, and reading Jerry Pournelle's A Step Farther Out.

Comment author: bogdanb 08 February 2010 08:07:17PM 0 points [-]

Hmm. Things like that I remember, at least in the sense that I have flashes of memory of reading a few books, or discussing a film with somebody, or some things I liked to draw. (Writing never quite attracted me, but I doodled all the time.)

However, I have almost no memory of my mental state. All my memories are almost like flashes of third-person-view scenes of my life; which tempts me to believe they're “re-constructed views” rather than memories, otherwise I'd expect them to be first-person.

(Also, the flashes of memories are not associated with moments. I might reconstruct when a memory was about by deducing from what I see in the flashes with things I can track down the age of, but otherwise I don't have a mental “when” something happened. All this of course applies only memories older than a few years.)