>>> This is something that can only be grasped through much study of cognitive science, until the full horror begins to dawn upon you.
I haven't yet studied much cognitive science (though I definitely plan to), but horror is precisely what I felt when I finally comprehended the process which produced humans and the human brain.
Eliezer -- this post goes straight to my Favorites. Giving concise, straightforward summaries to posts is a great idea.
My attention is very fragmented (thanks to my job), so when reading Quantum Arena, I completely missed the point of the post which you gave in your excellent summary:
"Instead of a system state being associated with a single point in a classical configuration space, the instantaneous real state of a quantum system is a complex amplitude distribution over a quantum configuration space."
This sentence, in fact, has told me a lot more than the entire post -- which, of course, I'm going to re-read now.
Please consider including such summaries / guides for every series of posts you write. It would be even better if you could include such summaries into a dependency graph like the one you posted here earlier -- for example, the summaries might display when a user hovers the mouse cursor over a graph node.