Voltairina comments on Leave a Line of Retreat - Less Wrong

58 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 February 2008 11:57PM

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

Comments (72)

Sort By: Old

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

Comment author: Voltairina 14 October 2014 02:13:04PM *  1 point [-]

Well, a world that lacked rationality might be one in which all the events were a sequence of non-sequiters. A car drives down the street. Then dissappears. We are in a movie theater with a tyrannosaurus. Now we are a snail on the moon. Then there's just this poster of rocks. Then I can't remember what sight was like, but there's jazz music. Now I fondly remember fighting in world war 2, while evading the Empire with Hans solo. Oh! I think I might be boiling water, but with a sense of smell somehow.... that's a poor job of describing it -- too much familiar stuff - but you get the idea. If there was no connection between one state of affairs and the next, talking about what strategy to take might be impossible, or a brief possibility that then dissappears when you forget what you are doing and you're back in the movie theater again with the tyrannosaurus. If 'you' is even a meaningful way to describe a brief moment of awareness bubbling into being in that universe. Then again, if at any moment 'you' happen to exist and 'you' happen to understand what rationality means- I guess now that I think about it, if there is any situation where you can understand what the word rationality means, its probably one in which it exists (howevery briefly) and is potentially helpful to you, even if there is little useful to do about whatever situation you are in, there might be some useful thing to do about the troubling thoughts in your mind.

Comment author: CCC 14 October 2014 02:34:32PM 2 points [-]

While that is a world without rationality, it seems a fairly extreme case.

Another example of a world without rationality is a world in which, the more you work towards achieving a goal, the longer it takes to reach that goal; so an elderly man might wander distractedly up Mount Everest to look for his false teeth with no trouble, but a team of experienced mountaineers won't be able to climb a small hill. Even if they try to follow the old man looking for his teeth, the universe notices their intent and conspires against them. And anyone who notices this tendency and tries to take advantage of it gets struck by lightning (even if they're in a submarine at the time) and killed instantly.

Comment author: Voltairina 15 October 2014 12:46:08AM 3 points [-]

That reminds me of Hofstadter's Law: "It will always take longer than you think it is going to take. Even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."