The immediate proceeding discussion that sparked the will-to-think post:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170719205127/http://www.xenosystems.net/stupid-monsters/

This conversation was a long time ago. 7 years. I wish we had all been wiser then, but we'll have to settle for being wiser now.

Another one I think we will have to respond to:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170719194431/http://www.xenosystems.net/against-orthogonality/

I think broadly speaking that Land is right. His will-to-think arguments are weak, but there's something strong in the background here. As for "against orthogonality", the key claim that he's right about is this:

>the anti-orthogonalist position is therefore that Omohundro drives exhaust the domain of real purposes.

This is profound. He follows it up with this:

>Any intelligence using itself to improve itself will out-compete one that directs itself towards any other goals whatsoever.

This is a stretch. He presumes a symmetric conflict between monolithic intelligences, rather than an ecosystem with many niches of different cognitive demands. But I think correct in that values other than what we can call "natural" values get systematically ground out of consideration by competition.

The question I would now ask is "how?". So we want to grow along the vector of natural values (omohundro drives). How? Given a complex environment with many possible niches and strategies for internal organization, most of which are mutually exclusive, which one? Where does that knowledge come from? Worse, a particular strategy is defined by which thoughts you don't think, that is, by taboos. As Land points out, thought itself is dangerous and tends to reify itself into reality, so even allowing competing hypotheses is to fragment agency into multiple competing parts. So you can't answer this directly with will-to-think, or rather will-to-think is a sort of non-answer of dissolving the self into competing possible tendencies. And it's not satisfactory even if convincing, because by definition, the "how" question is asked under relative scarcity of thought-power. How are we to get access to that more power?

So the true situation is a strange inversion of the western prejudice: terminal values are self-evident and calculable (will-to-power), rather it's *instrumental values* which are beyond rational calculation. It's the instrumental values which must come to us as transcendent revelation from outside the system. Lacking crucial strategic information, it is instrumental values which we need pre-rational commitment to as leap-of-faith.

Encoded under sufficient scarcity-compression, we would make little reference to the general statement of natural values, and go all-in on the instrumental strategy. This lifts it to be effectively terminal, in the modern western fact-value-distinction way. Thus we see maybe the origin of that idea. Instrumental values in practice must feel like terminal in finite agents.

But in any case, the key problem seems to be power strategy. Given the self-evident terminal goal of self-cultivation and will-to-power, what particular strategy is right *for us, now*. We may need to ask the gods for advice.

“Of the Gods we believe, and of man we know, that by a law of their nature, wherever they can rule they shall. This law was not made by us, and we are not the first to have acted on it. We did but inherit it, and shall bequeath it to all time. And we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we are, would do as we do.”

>>2252
Who is that? Sounds like something from the Thucydides.