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entirelyuseless comments on Why people want to die - Less Wrong Discussion

49 Post author: PhilGoetz 24 August 2015 08:13PM

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Comment author: entirelyuseless 05 September 2015 09:40:20PM 1 point [-]

There may not be any second law of themodynamics for algorithms, but there's surely something pretty similar. If I leave my computer running indefinitely, it quickly becomes "psychologically exhausted", runs slowly, starts causing programs to crash, and so on. If I leave it on anyway, at some point it's going to commit suicide with a blue screen.

So I still don't see why it would be simpler for evolution to build a brain that never gets exhausted, or why my story isn't a reasonable one.

Comment author: The_Jaded_One 07 September 2015 08:44:14PM -1 points [-]

If I leave my computer running indefinitely, it quickly becomes "psychologically exhausted", runs slowly, starts causing programs to crash, and so on.

  • really? Oh you mean if you kept using it, not if you just left it there? I would suspect that the equivalent (and this is a stretched analogy, but let's go with it) would be that a human brain would "fill up" with memories. But over what timescale? The amount of genuinely "new" experiences that a human has probably already varies by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Do people with particularly exciting lives full of new careers/hobbies/travel/goals/relationships go insane after 20 years? No... I mean maybe they would after 1000 years. But that's my point: the timescale for psychological "exhaustion" will be hugely varied. We kind of already know that it is.
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