I struggle to satisfyingly interpret ⋅, the 'evaluation function'. Or maybe struggling to interpret W, the world timelines (presumably full world evolutions).  Any advice on how to think about them?

In particular, how should I understand a ⋅ e = a_0 ⋅ e = w? the agent is different, but the worlds are the same. So then what's the difference between e and w? 

I guess ⋅ is something like "the world partitioned into things that are relevantly different for me"? Would appreciate anyone's clarifying thoughts.

It's like virtue and reputation ("honor") were one thing at the time, and now they're two things.

I almost wonder if the problem is less "people stopped caring about being truly-intrinsically-virtuous" and more: People stopped rationalizing their reputation-management as virtuous; which fed into a "it's impractical and uncouth to care about virtue" cycle; which resulted in people having too many degrees of freedom, because it's easier to rationalize arbitrary actions as practical than to rationalize arbitrary actions as virtuous.

Yeah,  I was having similar thoughts.

That's a good point. Reputation is less naturally spiritual. I think you can experience it both ways. Imagine someone who thinks about reputation as painted on their heart. Versus someone who is is fine with trying to manipulate their reputation.

Modernity has made people quite averse to talking about and dealing with spirituality. I think maybe a big part of what's going on is that while PR is a material concept, honor is a spiritual concept. It deals with meaning directly rather than only indirectly. Honor matters for its own sake (or can), matters to your soul. Whereas PR can only ever matter indirectly, only as a consequence of other things. No one has PR in their soul.

That would mean that people end up avoiding thinking about and relating to things like honor and reputation because it just feels weird. It feel like the sort of thing that you're not supposed to deal with. It feels like something that science and technology have vaguely disproven.

>Thus, I think that the process is relatively reliable but not totally reliable. 

Absolutely. That's exactly right. 

>My Christian friend claimed that atheists/rationalists/skeptics/evolutionists cannot trust even their own reason (beacuse it is the product of their imperfect brains in their opinion).

It sounds like there's a conflation between 'trust' and 'absolute trust'. Clearly we have some useful notion of trust because we can navigate potentially dangerous situations relatively safely. So using plain language its false to say that atheists can't trust their own judgement. Clearly they can in some situations. Are you saying atheists can't climb a ladder safely? 

It sounds like he wants something to trust in absolutely. Has he faced the possibility that that might just not exist?

Consider how justified trust can come into existence. 

You're traveling through the forest. You come to moldy looking bridge over a ravine. It looks a little sketchy. So naturally you feel distrustful of the bridge at first. So you look at it from different angles, and shake it a bit. And put a bit of weight on it. And eventually, some deep unconscious part of you will decide that it's either untrustworthy and you'll find another route, or it will decide its trustworthy and you'll cross the bridge. 

We don't understand that process, but its reliable anyway.

Thanks, I forgot to make it clear I'm looking for digital versions.

I'm making an online museum of ethos (my ethos). I'm using good and bad art and commentary to make my ethos very visible through aesthetics.

I am doing an art criticism project that’s very important to me, and I’m looking for high res digital versions the art in the following books. 

• The Complete Brambly Hedge
• Beksinski volume 1-4
• Trouble For Trumpets

Help with getting these via a university library, or pointers to where I could buy an electronic copy of any of these is much appreciated. 

Is there a good source for many things we know from the Diamond Princess data? Or even just the numbers so far from DP? I'm not sure how to find that data.