> On an extropian web page, there was a book list for recommended reading.
> This list included various books on technologies, and a bunch of novel ideas.
> There were also some books on unproven theories like the Gaia Hypothesis--an
> idea that the Earth is a living organism in its own right and that us humans
are
> a part of that larger organism. There was also a notice that one book was
> removed from the list because it was found to be "incorrect". This book was
> called "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by
> Julian Jaynes.
Do you think it is rational to reject Extropianism because a few adherents
reject a single book you liked?
> The same thing is happening at Church of Virus. A discussion was started
at
> CoV about whether rational thinking is simply just another meme--arbitrary
> mental construct or does it exist apart from memetic structure. I said that
you
Nobody said the rationality meme is "arbitrary". It is extremely manipulative
of you to misrepresent my position as such. Does that make you a neo-cheater?
> must assume rational thinking is apart from memetic structure and that it can
> determine the degree that memes and mind are related. If rational thinking was
> just a meme we are infected with, it would be impossible to trust anything
> discovered through rational thinking--it would just be an arbitrary meme and
not
> necessarily have anything to do with reality. So, the act of figuring out
The fact that rational memes are not arbitrary, but in fact intimately
connected to reality utterly destroys your argument. If you are going to
put so much effort into attacking the CoV, it would be more efficient
to understand our position first.
I thought the rest of your message (the informational part) was excellent.
> The popular chaos theory is similar to surrealistic ideas mentioned--since
> we don't know all variables, and are not omniscient, then we cannot know
> anything and all thinking is useless.
Except for this part, which totally misrepresents chaos theory. What it does
say is that many natural processes contain feedback loops which has the effect
of making their behavior theoretically unpredictable no matter how much is
known about initial conditions. I can't imagine how you get "all thinking
is useless" out of that.
-- David McFadzean david@lucifer.com Memetic Engineer http://www.lucifer.com/~david/ Church of Virus http://www.lucifer.com/virus/