pjeby comments on Rationality quotes: June 2010 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Morendil 01 June 2010 06:07PM

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

Comments (215)

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

Comment author: gwern 02 June 2010 06:15:22PM 6 points [-]

I'm not entirely sure what your criticism is. I'll take it as meaning 'isn't it just an arbitrary accident that the vampires happen to be more rational than humans, and not an intrinsic part of those characters?'

No. It isn't. If you remember, one of the running suggestions in Blindsight is that consciousness is a useless spandrel that sucks up tons of brainpower, and which can/will be discarded with much benefit. The vampires may be rationally superior to humans because they are p-zombies, and they evolved that way in order to effectively predict human actions and hunt them. The arbitrary accident was the cross glitch - otherwise the vampires would have won rather than died out. If the vampires could as well have been less-rational-than-humans p-zombies, that would undo that major theme.

Comment author: pjeby 02 June 2010 09:04:28PM 2 points [-]

I'm not entirely sure what your criticism is. I'll take it as meaning 'isn't it just an arbitrary accident that the vampires happen to be more rational than humans, and not an intrinsic part of those characters?

I actually meant that "rationalist" is a label that doesn't make sense when applied to an entity that's already rational, but I'll admit my phrasing was confusing... probably because my attention was mainly focused on trying to make a joke about p-zombie vampires. ;-)