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NihilCredo comments on Limitless, a Nootropics-Centered Movie - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: atucker 15 March 2011 01:58AM

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Comment author: NihilCredo 17 March 2011 03:17:20AM 0 points [-]

godshatter

?

It was mentioned in an Eliezer post, and in the thread there was this comment:

Godshatter is the term he uses for a superintelligence ramming data and thought patterns into a human brain.

but I'm not seeing the connection here...?

Comment author: Gabriel 18 March 2011 12:27:49AM 4 points [-]

Your unaugmented brain wouldn't be able to process the memories and concepts formed while under the influence of the drug. So you would end up with a head full of incomprehensible data stuffed there by a superintelligent former-you.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 17 March 2011 03:05:30PM 1 point [-]

Not that it helps alleviate your confusion, but I'll note that he's borrowing the term from Vernor Vinge in Fire Upon The Deep, where the "any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from a god" principle is applied liberally.

Comment author: DanArmak 18 March 2011 12:52:34PM 1 point [-]

TheOtherDave is right. Eliezer borrowed the word but not the entire concept.

What I meant was, "you'll become more stupid/slow-thinking/... but have memories of when you were much smarter, and that is intolerable."

Comment author: TheOtherDave 18 March 2011 03:25:43PM 1 point [-]

This pretty much describes the first month after my stroke. It's no fun at all... but it isn't intolerable. People are pretty good at recalibrating.

That said, as has been said by others, the other piece of it is perhaps more problematic: your head will be stuffed with memories that you can no longer fully process. This is OK, as long as the corrupted versions of those memories that you end up creating in the course of trying to process them aren't dangerous.

By way of analogy, consider system A with a max string length of N chars trying to read a database file written by a system B with a max of 2n chars. It might be OK (the strings we care about happen to be <=N). It might be a relatively isolated failure (a few strings get truncated and some data gets lost). It might be catastrophic (the strings aren't terminated and overflow into adjacent registers and system A crashes).