David_Gerard comments on Fixedness From Frailty - Less Wrong

10 Post author: Vaniver 14 November 2010 09:51PM

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

Comments (51)

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

Comment author: David_Gerard 16 November 2010 12:05:58PM *  -1 points [-]

Yes. But there are people on LW seriously claiming to assign a nonzero (or non-zero-plus-epsilon) probability of Omega - a philosophical abstraction for the purpose of thought experiments on edge cases - manifesting in the real world. At that point, they've arguably thought themselves less instrumentally functional.

Comment author: shokwave 16 November 2010 12:47:15PM 1 point [-]

there are people on LW seriously claiming to assign a nonzero probability of Omega - a philosophical abstraction for the purpose of thought experiments on edge cases - manifesting in the real world.

Being charitable, they assign a non-zero probability to the possibility of something coming into existence that is powerful enough to have the kinds of powers that our fictional Omega has. This is subtly different from believing the abstraction itself will come to life.