Granted, and a good point. Schmidhuber's paper should be enough of an explanation, but Burfoot's book lends additional credibility to the notion, and of course gives us additional information on the subject.
The merits of Schmidhuber's formulation would be discussed in Part II, but it seems that this post won't be received well, so even if Part II will be posted elsewhere it probably won't appear on LessWrong. (ETA: Actually, Part II likely won't be put here in any case, as it might start to justify meta-ethical theism, and many LessWrong users will see the conclusion, meta-ethical theism, and infer by backwards-chaining that the arguments must be wrong even before seriously considering them.... (read more)
Thanks. Burfoot's book is mostly irrelevant to the post: it's about epistemology, whereas the post is about meta-ethics and axiology.
Added.
(Cross-posted from another blog but written with LessWrong in mind. Don't worry, if this post isn't well-received then for LessWrong the series will end with this post.)
Summary: This post is the beginning of a systematic attempt to answer the question "what is the most important thing?". (Updateless) decision theory is used to provisionally define "importance" and Juergen Schmidhuber's theory of beauty is introduced as a possible answer to the question. The motivations for bringing in Schmidhuber's theory are discussed. This post is also intended to serve as an example of how to understand and solve hard problems in general, and emphasizes the heuristic "go meta".
This post is the first in a series... (read 1166 more words →)
I should take as much long-term, fixed dollar debt as I can.
Get 50 credit cards in one day and go on to accrue as much debt as possible over the course of a few years. Give the credit card companies a temporary address and a temporary phone number such that you can lose their annoyance easily. Put half of your newfound free money into high yield investment opportunities such that you have a shot of paying it all back later. Use the other half to travel the world, become Enlightened, learn highly useful skills, and get yourself in a good position to make a lot of money or otherwise gain a lot... (read more)
Beautiful.
Granted. I didn't think it necessary because I don't think Schmidhuber's theory is a legitimate answer to the question, it's just a step on the way to finding an answer. Also, Burfoot's book doesn't include the relevant aspect of Schmidhuber's theory, which is the axiological aspect, i.e. the aspect pertaining to beauty and so on. A literature review of meta-ethics, on the other hand, would be more relevant, but wouldn't be necessary for the modest nature of this post. Existent meta-ethics will start needing referencing in Part II and beyond, though it doesn't look like Part II will show up on LessWrong.