It took me forever to figure out that these strange thingies were physical systems in the computers themselves, and a bit longer to realize that they didn't look anything like what I thought they did. (I still haven't bothered to look it up, despite having a non-negligible desire to know.)
Look what up, exactly?
Oh, sorry, I thought that was clear. I want to find out what the physical systems in a computer actually look like. Right now all I (think I) know is that RAM is electricity.
Edited to make this more clear.
Buried somewhere among Eliezer's writings is something essentially the same as the following phrase:
"Intentional causes are made of neurons. Evolutionary causes are made of ancestors."
I remember this quite well because of my strange reaction to it. I understood what it meant pretty well, but upon seeing it, some demented part of my brain immediately constructed a mental image of what it thought an "evolutionary cause" looked like. The result was something like a mountain of fused-together bodies (the ancestors) with gears and levers and things (the causation) scattered throughout. "This," said that part of my brain, "is what an evolutionary cause looks like, and like a good reductionist I know it is... (read 261 more words →)
Now that I think of it I didn't say it explicitly, but I was. I called myself Catholic, but I had already rejected the Bible (because it was written by humans, of course) and concluded that God so loved His beautiful physics that He would NEVER EVER touch the universe (because I had managed to develop a fondness for science, though for some reason I did not yet accept e.g. materialism).
Hi, I am Alyssa, a 16-year-old aspiring programmer-and-polymath who found her way to the wiki page for Egan's Law from the Achron forums. From there I started randomly clicking on links that mostly ended up leading to Eliezer's posts. I was a bit taken aback by his attitude toward religion, but I had previously seen mention of his AI Box thing (where (a) he struck me as awesome, and (b) he said some things about "intelligence" and "wisdom" that caused me to label him as an ally against all those fools who hated science), and I just loved his writing, so I spent about a week reading his stuff alternately thinking, "Wow,... (read more)
The way I read it, it seems like Will_Newsome is not using the word in this way. It may be a case of two concepts being mistakenly filed into the same basket -- certainly some people might, when they hear "Theism-in-general is a mistaken and sometimes harmful way of thinking about the world", understand "theism-in-general" to mean "any mode of thought that acknowledges the possibility of some intelligent mind that is outside and in control of our universe". Under this interpretation, the assertion is quite obviously false (or at least, not obviously true).
I wonder if there is still a disagreement if we Taboo "theism"? (Though your point in the last paragraph is a good one, I think.)