drethelin comments on Connecting Your Beliefs (a call for help) - Less Wrong

24 Post author: lukeprog 20 November 2011 05:18AM

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Comment author: drethelin 20 November 2011 07:48:13AM 2 points [-]

You don't understand. Decompartmentalization doesn't have a direction. You don't go forwards towards a belief or backwards from a belief, or whatever. If your beliefs are decompartmentalized that means that the things you believe will impact your other beliefs reliably. This means that you don't get to CHOOSE what you believe. If you think the singularity is all important and worth working for, it's BECAUSE all of your beliefs align that way, not because you've forced your mind to align itself with that belief after having it.

Comment author: rwallace 20 November 2011 07:57:33AM 4 points [-]

I understand perfectly well how a hypothetical perfectly logical system would work (leaving aside issues of computational tractability etc.). But then, such a hypothetical perfectly logical system wouldn't entertain such far mode beliefs in the first place. What I'm discussing is the human mind, and the failure modes it actually exhibits.