LESSWRONG
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Lawful Truth

Aug 24, 2017 by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Just as it was useful to contrast humans as goal-oriented systems with inhuman processes in evolutionary biology and artificial intelligence, it will be useful in the coming sequences of essays to contrast humans as physical systems with inhuman processes that aren’t mind-like.

We humans are, after all, built out of inhuman parts. The world of atoms looks nothing like the world as we ordinarily think of it, and certainly looks nothing like the world’s conscious denizens as we ordinarily think of them. As Giulio Giorello put the point in an interview with Daniel Dennett: “Yes, we have a soul. But it’s made of lots of tiny robots."

We start with a sequence on the basic links between physics and human cognition.

19The World: An Introduction
Rob Bensinger
10y
0
209Universal Fire
Eliezer Yudkowsky
18y
46
114Universal Law
Eliezer Yudkowsky
18y
28
76Is Reality Ugly?
Eliezer Yudkowsky
18y
48
110Beautiful Probability
Eliezer Yudkowsky
18y
123
158Outside the Laboratory
Eliezer Yudkowsky
18y
351
211The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition
Eliezer Yudkowsky
17y
76
77Perpetual Motion Beliefs
Eliezer Yudkowsky
17y
44
68Searching for Bayes-Structure
Eliezer Yudkowsky
17y
49