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The FirstHost of the ChurchOfVirus, founder of 
Lucifer Media and owner/operator of lucifer.com.
aka DavidMcFadzean and Lucifer.
Day job: working on advanced 3D medical imaging software for CSI
Interests: AI
, complexity, information markets, EvolutionaryPsychology, building internet communities ... the common thread seems to be everything to do with increasing intelligence.
Finished reading: AgainstTheGods, TheBlankSlate, TheNewInquisition, FreedomEvolves, TheGoldenAge, TheRoadToSerfdom, TheAncestorsTale, AreWeSpiritualMachines
Currently reading: TheHiddenPattern
Next up: ?
Favourite books: TBA
Working on: The Game of Being BestOfVirus
todo list...
PascalsWager, TuringTest, PikeTest, MinimizeRegret, PancriticalRationalism, OnObjectivism, SashaChislenko, CellularAutomata, DigitalPhysics, DataCompression, CriticalThinking, OutOfControl, DarwinsDangerousIdea, CalvinAndHobbes, Nomic, BayesTheorem, GameTheory, DecisionTheory, PrisonersDilemma, ChineseRoom, transhumanism, NeuroLinguisticProgramming, OnSuicide, ArtificialLife, VirusNomicon, RecommendedBooks, TheIdeosphere, VirianMilestones
...always mount a scratchmonkey
A thing is defined by its pattern.
A pattern is a logical set of features.
Something exists if its pattern is instantiated in mass and/or energy.
Reality is the set of all things that exist.
A system is a pattern that has components that are causally connected.
A control systems is a system that transforms input patterns into output patterns.
Input patterns (impressions, perceptions) are created from the system's environment via physical transducers.
Output patterns (expressions, actions) affect the system's environment via physical transducers.
An agent is a control system that acts as a sequential decision maker.
An agent uses knowledge and values to derive actions.
Knowledge and values are patterns internal to the agent.
All and only agents have minds.
A mind is the set of active patterns that generate an agent's behaviour.
An agent is rational to the extent that it has logical consistency in its knowledge, goals and actions.
Knowledge encodes information about the world (agent + environment).
Knowledge is true to the extent that is accurately models the world.
Values encode preferences.
Goals combine knowledge and values to describe desirable future states of the world.
Game theory provides a good laboratory for studying agents in vastly simplified worlds.
Ideas, beliefs, actions and agents can be rational or irrational. Everything else is arational.
A belief is rational if it is consistent with the relevant evidence.
An action is rational if it is consistent with an agent's knowledge and goals.
An agent is rational if its beliefs and actions are rational.
A belief or action is rational if and only if it can be rationally justified.
A system has free will to the extent that its behaviour is generated endogenously.
Free will is a property of all and only control systems.
Reality is astronomically more complex than any individual mind (in other words, the environment contains many orders of magnitude more information than the agent).
Agents deal with the complexity of their environment by forming abstractions or "useful fictions" that discard most information to extract the salient features from the environment.
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