yes, keep on with a lower posting frequency!
And some dynamic page with a ToC of all the posts would be really great. So that you have a map when you want to study this material. Although I have read maybe 60%. I would still like to read most of it again! I konw there have been some collections, but they have not been dynaimc and well, not useful enough.
For a community I would find some kind of wiki-like system, where people try to build a map of the territory together much more useful, a normal wiki might not be the best though. Something like The Brain, but much much better would be cool. I really like Tomboy, but it is a desktop program.
Eliezer:Robin Brandt, is whatever increasing technology does to a society, moral progress by definition, or does increasing technology only tend to cause moral progress?
I see, I answered quite a different question there, I had a funny feeling of that while writing that comment.
Increasing technology tends to cause moral progress yes, by making moral choices economically and experientially(as in our experience of things) more strategic/optimal. It all boils down into satisfying our adapted pattern-recognizers that gives us pleasure or a feeling of righteousn...
Technology is the single most important thing for morality. As technology allows better resources, communication, documentation, safer paths for society emerge as in the difference between bonobos and chimps, where resources makes the species less aggressive. Also when we become economically dependent on each other due to specialization and can be held responsible for our actions due to documentation, the threshold for cheating increases. Also we seem to want to generalize as many principles we dare to, if we are healthy, feel safe and have plenty of resou...
from http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_5.html#smolin
"Other physicists argue that aspects of time are real, such as the relationships of causality, that record which events were the necessary causes of others. Penrose, Sorkin and Markopoulou have proposed models of quantum spacetime in which everything real reduces to these relationships of causality."
I guess Eliezer is already aware of these theories...
Great summary I have sent the link to all my friends! In the wait for some kind of TOC this is the best link yet to send people concerning this series.
I would like to know your opinion on Max Tegmarks ultimate ensemble theory! Or if someone knows Elis opinion on this wonderful theory, please tell me!
Are other bright scientists and philosophers aware of this blog? Do you send links to people when there is a topic that relates to them? Do you send links to the people you mention? Does Chalmers, Dennett, Pinker, Deutsch, Barbour, Pearl, Tegmark, Dawkins, Ving...
Also about the chocolate eating, you can get addicted so that you no longer even need the qualia keep on eating it. There seems to be a distinction between qualia induced choclate eating and addictive choclate eating where you continue eating although it does not taste so good anymore, wich if you notice the lameness of the qualia may make you stop eating. Why is that, if qualia is a mere confusion, there should not be such distinctions. It seems not rational to spend energy on producing qualia if they are not useful in any sense. But useful for what? Still qualia affecting our decisions seems rather impossibe to me, but that has to be a fact about my own confusion not about the territory.
Hopefully Anonymous:
It means that I used to belive the experience of consciousness/qualia/the hard problem is just like the sound of the heart, i.e. whitout any functional role. I never thought zombies would really be possible... just in principle. And I had my doubts even then. Don´t laugh at me because the functional role of qualia is not easy to understand.
poke:
I think you missed the point here. The question is why choclate eating feels like anything, it seems that the qulia should be unessecary for the brain function of chocolate eating behavior. The s...
Agree, with anonymous, just can´t wait to read the whole book and deepen my understanding. With the right editing it will certainly be a new and even more important, insightful and rich book in the tradition of GEB! And I can´t wait to give it to all my friends and professors, and I can´t wait to hear the reception from academia, they/we have so much to learn. You will be on TED and on EDGE in no time! Your hard work, and deep thought is so precious, I think it is rather wonderful that a social ape can penetrate so deep into reality. I just think this blog...
I value many things intrinsically! This may make me happy or not, but I don´t rely on the feelings of possible happiness when I make decisions. I see intrinsic value in happiness itself, but also as a means for other values, such as art, science, beauty, complexity, truth etc, wich I often value even more than hapiness. But sentient life may be the highest value. Why would we accept happiness as our highest terminal value when it is just a way to make living organisms do certain things. Ofcourse it feels good and is important, but it is still rather arbita...
Great post again!! This seems to be a good portal to the series as well! But my gosh I feel infoleptic!! I feel as though I would need 100 more brains to be able to do and read and learn everything I would like to with 1 brain! And if I would have a 100 brains I would probably feel I would need a 1000! etc. I think it is really sad this blog didn´t have some kind of rating system! There seems to be so many good posts. And if someone totally new to this would come here it would be hard to know where to start. So a list of the most important posts would be ...
I´m really curious to know what you think about the other branch of ep that don´t rely as much on the more unstable assumptions of Tooby & Cosmides. I first dove into this field when I found an incredible volume titled The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology by Dunbar(leader of EP program in Liverpool) and Barett, it seems awsome! It takes a couple of steps back in certainty, and is a lot more open for new developments in biology i.e. Nieche-construction(Laland) theory and Multi-level selection(David Sloan Wilson), also the speed of natural sele... (read more)