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Monday, December 23, 2002

Forgotten Thoughts

I'm presently going through piles of files (of the physical type) and transferring them to the trash.

I love throwing stuff away. (I think that's why I'm a good programmer. :)

But of course some of it I have to thumb through, like this mysterious unmarked folder full of hand-written diagrams and notes.

After stuffing most of its pages into the trash, I happened upon an interesting diagram which proved to be a design for a physical actuator. Sadly or happily it's much better than my more recent idea for solving the same problems. Fortunately, the AI-related ideas in the same pile seemed mostly to be subsumed by my more recent work, so hopefully I can blame a shift of focus rather than a decline in mental capacity. Still it's disturbing to know it's even possible to completely forget my own inventions. On the other hand, I guess I planned on that or I wouldn't have left myself this little reminder buried deep in the recesses of my filing cabinet. :) Hopefully I'll remember this time, though, 'cause I just sold my filing cabinet.

Also found a little essay I wrote on the nature of arbitrary propositions, where of course I used God as the archetypal example. The essay ends with this thought:

Furthermore, an arbitrary proposition can be true: It may be that the proposition is only arbitrary within the context of our knowledge. Consider, for instance, what you would think if you appeared at the pearly gates after your death. You wouldn't think "this is infinitely unlikely, so it's not happening," but rather, "I'll be damned!"

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