~100 Interesting Questions
I saw the application for SPARC, a rationality summer program for high school students, earlier this year. It included a prompt I found super exciting: “List ~100 questions you have that interest you.” This is my response. (It’s not very organized—I go in no particular order and I sometimes interject some of my current thoughts about the questions.) I would love to hear people’s thoughts on any of these questions, and I would love to see other people post their responses.
What does quantum entanglement mean for causality?
Due to entanglement, there can be spacelike separated measurements such that there exists a reference frame where it looks like measurement A precedes and has a causal influence on the outcomes of measurement B, and also a reference frame where it looks like measurement B precedes and has a causal influence on the outcomes of measurement A.
How do I rely on the notion of causality in my reasoning about the world? Do I have to revise this usage in practice?
Why is mathematics so (unreasonably) effective in the natural sciences?
Why is the universe structured in such a way as to have the same math accurately describe so many different aspects of the physical world?
How can the Continuum Hypothesis be independent of the ZFC axioms? Why does the lack of “explicit” examples of sets with a cardinality between that of the naturals and that of the reals not guarantee that there are no examples at all? What would an “implicit” example even mean?
What are the biggest easy wins in instrumental rationality?
Candidates for me: Deleting the Youtube app, jumping into work immediately upon waking up (before brushing or eating or doing anything)
Problem of Induction: Under what conditions do / should we expect the future to be like the past?
What open problems only require theoretical genius to solve? (As opposed to slow and steady engineering progress.)
Probably many problems in math and theoretical CS?
Is my confidence in total hedonistic utilitarianism, despite the extent of its controversy among smart people, appropriate?
What does it mean for something to be fundamental? To belong in a proper ontology of the universe? (Does it mean anything?)
Is consciousness fundamental?
What effects does consciousness have?
How was consciousness incentivized by evolution, if at all? (I now think it probably was.)
Is there a really good reason to believe or not believe one of the following theories of consciousness? (I think I find b most likely.) (I do not consider epiphenomenalism a serious option anymore, basically due to the arguments described here.) (I don’t really consider c a very serious option either.)
Everything is physical—consciousness isn’t fundamental. (Basic response—I feel like any attempt to describe consciousness in terms of physical phenomena will be missing something.)
Consciousness is fundamental. Conscious experiences are caused by physical processes, and have effects on physical processes in return. (Basic response—it seems a little absurd to believe that the Standard Model makes incorrect predictions in the brain because consciousness intervenes. It feels even more absurd to imagine there is any reasonable answer to the question, “How fast can physical processes affect consciousness, and how fast can consciousness affect physical processes?”)
Hindu philosophy (poorly represented): We are vessels for a universal consciousness. (I kind of feel like there ought to be a knockdown argument against this, but I actually don’t think I’ve found one yet.) (Basic response—it sure seems like my consciousness is distinct from everyone else’s.)
What beliefs about consciousness that I may hold (option b above?) involve weird latent laws of physics waiting for the physical structures that produce consciousness to arise in the universe? What is an appropriate response?
Perhaps panpsychism is an appropriate response
Do the laws of physics belong in a proper ontology of the universe?
Is it appropriate to expect the laws of physics that have so far remained constant across time to continue to remain constant?
What evidence can we get for physical systems, such as AI’s, being conscious?
How should we approach the development of AI when it seems very hard to tell whether / to what extent AI is conscious at any given time?
What can we know with absolute certainty?
Maybe that my conscious experience does in fact consist of what it appears to consist of, mathematically proven statements, and tautologies? But maybe even those can be questioned?
Does the universe exist? How seriously should I take various arguments against the universe’s existence?
Solipsism, Boltzmann brains, Simulation argument
What is the most reasonable response to the Fermi paradox?
What kinds of anthropic reasoning are reasonable? What kinds are flawed?
Did cosmic inflation really happen? Is the evidence sufficiently compelling to believe it? Has there been experimental confirmation of any predictions other than what the power spectrum of the CMB should look like, conditioned on the number of peaks? How wild is that prediction before using inflationary theory?
Is the universe exactly flat? Is it appropriate to have a uniform prior on the cosmic density parameter (Omega)?
How can a person intentionally become better at interacting with people?
How does emotional intelligence develop? Can it be learned later in life?
Why do neural networks generalize so well?
What are the inductive biases of neural networks?
Is deep learning enough for AGI?
Will we ever truly enter a machine intelligence era? Or will the development of AI and its contributions to the world be more mundane than that?
If we are going to enter a machine intelligence era, when will that happen?
What do we mean when we use probabilities?
Usually degree of belief, plus primitivism for probabilistic quantum phenomena?
How should the insights of theoretical CS inform my general reasoning about the world?
How can a person systematically improve the way they learn? What does optimal learning look like?
What should I do?
As a matter of general principle
In my current circumstances
What are the philosophical implications of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems? Does truth transcend proof? In what sense? What other results from mathematical logic and computability theory are closely related, and what are their philosophical implications?
How can we deliberately design the training procedures of neural networks to more reliably get them to behave how we want them to?
How can we build Artificial General Intelligence / Artificial Superintelligence? (Not sure I actually want to know too soon, but it’s definitely interesting.)
How did evolution lead to general intelligence in humans?
How do humans learn representations?
How much can human intuitions develop through new experiences?
Could playing a well-designed video game (to the point of “knowing the meta”?) allow a human to have thorough intuitions about quantum mechanics? About 4D space?
Do humans have the cognitive capacity to eventually do basically anything that is physically possible?
How do we operationalize the notion of “physically possible” here? In some sense, we always do everything that is physically possible, since only one thing is actually possible, namely the laws of physics playing out. Maybe something like “locally physically possible,” where we don’t specify the entire state of the universe, just the state of a local region of it, and then verify that this local specification does not violate any local laws.
What are we really doing when we talk about counterfactuals? Is there any actually principled way to consider them? If not, why does nothing go wrong in our standard use-cases for counterfactuals?
What are some good things I could do to expand my comfort zone?
What are the benefits of expanding one’s comfort zone?
Why do people sometimes experience a certain mood with no clear context for why they should feel that way? (e.g. unexcited, sad) For negative ones, how can a person escape that feeling despite being unable to trace its source?
How can a person kickstart themselves during a period of low motivation?
What are unconventional social circumstances that would be highly beneficial to at least some people if they were to enter into them?
Possible example: several couples with kids living together, sharing some responsibilities of raising the children.
What are all the useful-to-isolate components of standard human functioning and intelligent human behavior?
Particularly interesting when considered alongside AI systems
Possible example: We have compact and reusable representations of high-level things, like tables, that we then use for causal reasoning.
How can we build superintelligent AI systems that are extremely beneficial to the universe?
Should we expect interactions with alien civilizations to be a critical part of the long-term future of human civilization? If so, how should we be thinking about it now?
Is it reasonable to expect that we will be able to build interpretability tools that allow us to understand the largest and most powerful neural networks at a level that enables us to use this knowledge to steer them effectively?
What are the most promising AI alignment strategies?
Generally, what actions can be taken by what actors to most effectively increase the expected impact of AI?
What AI policies can be implemented by what actors to most effectively increase the expected impact of AI?
What people or organizations are going to build AGI?
Do the empirical facts about the world today indicate that total hedonistic utilitarians should be longtermists?
What are some stable equilibria in philosophical belief space? What concepts support these equilibria and enable lots of people to hold these beliefs?
How can people (like me) who spend lots of time thinking about meta-level ideas keep from frequently sabotaging their own ability to “enjoy the moment?”
To what extent is it possible to detach one’s well-being from their material circumstances?
Is there an objective measure for how good a work of art is?
Aggregate the opinions of all people
Does aggregate mean take an average or a sum?
All people who actually observe it?
All people who exist?
All possible minds?
All people who “get it”?
Problem of universals: Do universals exist independent of the particulars which instantiate them?
Why can we talk about how long ago the Big Bang happened without running into major issues with the non-absolute-ness of time? Are we talking exclusively about our (Earth’s) reference frame? Are there other “reasonable” reference frames in which the age of the universe is very different?
What philosophies can a person be made to buy into with a sufficiently well-written narrative?
Authors tend to be able to make readers root for who they want them to root for (in books where there is someone we are supposed to root for).
How good is the average human conscious experience right now?
How good is the average conscious experience on Earth right now?
Wild animal welfare is a major consideration.
How good is the average human conscious experience over all time up to now?
How good is the average conscious experience on Earth over all time up to now?
How problematic is infinite ethics for a person (like me) who thinks the value of the universe is given by the sum over all conscious experiences ever of [the integral with respect to (subjective) time, from the first conscious moment to the last, of the conscious experience’s well-being]?[1]
Is the universe infinite in space?
Are there infinite conscious experiences currently ongoing?
Are there infinite conscious experiences identical to my own currently ongoing?
Is the universe infinite in time?
What would I do if I were optimizing for my own happiness?
What would I do if I were optimizing for intellectual stimulation?
What would I do if I were optimizing for “success according to conventional definitions of success?”
How should I adjust my choices in accord with the answers to the above three questions?
What does it take to be able to look at the behavior of an agent and identify when that agent’s behavior fails to systematically achieve the agent’s own values?
How would we create an AI that could learn human values without being confused by the fact that we often fail to systematically achieve our values?
How important is it to maintain a diversity of cultures in the world?
What is the maximum amount of productive work I can do in a sustainable manner?
How can a person find this out?
Should I really be aiming for this?
What major insights about the world do other people have that I do not have? How can I acquire as many of these as possible?
How can a person intentionally optimize their social environment to have as positive an influence on their life as possible?
What is an appropriate way to assign prior probabilities to things?
What constitutes a scientific theory? Are there distinct legitimate scientific theories that make exactly the same predictions? That is, is scientific theory underdetermined by evidence?
How does one construct / deal with probability distributions over sets larger than the real numbers? (e.g. over the set of all possible ways the universe could be.)
Does space exist independent of the material objects situated within it?
Time probably doesn’t
Are space and/or time fundamental? Or are they emergent phenomena? What would that mean?
Are there ongoing moral catastrophes?
Does marginal reasoning plus the view that individuals cannot significantly shift the margins on large issues imply that individuals trying to maximize their impact should focus all their efforts towards one issue rather than diversifying? Is there any principled counterargument to this?
Should I be paying more attention to things that fit into mainstream conceptions of where people can have a positive impact (e.g. politics, law, medicine, climate) that I find less interesting than utilitarian philosophy + AI X-risk?
How can I efficiently learn more about what lives very different from my own (e.g. in many other countries) are like?
What scientific and technological advancements could play a very large role in the long-term future of humanity? What does the path to achieving them look like?
E.g. interstellar travel, ability to settle other planets, brain-computer interfaces
The path to many of these may be, “Build artificial superintelligence, have ASI make it”
Why is there something rather than nothing?
How has evolution shaped human goals?
What factors lead to variation in values across humans?
Will AI’s undertake processes of value and goal formation that are comparable to those of humans?
What are the most interesting questions on other people’s minds?
What is a response commensurate to existing?
How should the notion and inevitability of death inform the way I live?
What are some characteristic qualities of exceptional works of art?
Are there opportunities for having a massive positive impact on the world that no one has thought of yet?
How good is the average conscious experience on factory farms today?
What are trends like for quantity and quality of conscious experiences on factory farms?
What is the most efficient way to convert money into the well-being of conscious creatures?
Bonus
Roughly answered:
Do we have free will?
I don’t know or remember enough about these topics to really know what the specific interesting questions are:
What’s the deal with UDASSA? Should I actually not think of heat death as a critical component in my estimation of the value of the universe?
What’s the deal with quantum gravity?
What’s the deal with the black hole information paradox?
- ^
The value of the universe:
It means that you can’t reach a contradiction by starting with “Let S be a set of intermediate cardinality” and following axioms of ZFC.
All the things you know and love doing with sets —intersection, union, choice, comprehension, Cartesian product, power set — you can do those things with S and nothing will go wrong. S “behaves like a set”, you’ll never catch it doing something unsetlike.
Another way to say this is: There is a model of ZFC that contains a set S of intermediate cardinality. (There is also a model of ZFC that doesn’t. And I’m sympathetic to the view that—since there’s no explicit construction of S -we’ll never encounter an S in the wild and so the model not including S is simpler and better.)
Caveat: All of the above rests on the usual unstated assumption that ZFC is consistent! Because it’s so common to leave it unstated, this assumption is questioned less than maybe it should be, given that ZFC can’t prove its own consistency.
At least one mathematician (I forget his name) considers V=L to be a reasonable axiom to add. Informally put, it says that nothing exists except the things that are required to exist by the axioms. ZF + V=L implies choice, the generalised continuum hypothesis, and many other things. His argument is that just as we consider the natural numbers to be the numbers intended to be generated by the Peano axioms, i.e. the smallest model, so we should consider the constructible universe L to be the sets intended to be generated by the ZF axioms. The axioms amount to an inductive definition, and the least fixed point is the thing they are intended to define. One can think about larger models of ZF, just as one can think about non-standard natural numbers, but L and N are respectively the natural models. I don’t know how popular this view is.
In Peano arithmetic, the induction axiom (not axiom schema) basically says ”… and nothing else is a natural number”. It can only be properly formulated in second-order logic, and the result is that Peano arithmetic becomes “categorical”, which means it has only one (the intended) model up to isomorphism. The real or complex number systems and geometry also have categorical axiomatizations. Standard (first-order) ZFC is not categorical, since it allows both for models that are larger than intended (like first-order Peano arithmetic) and smaller than intended (unlike first-order Peano arithmetic). However, second-order ZFC is also not categorical, although I think it rules out some part of the non-standard models. But your description of the theory ZF+V=L sounds like this theory (i.e. a second-order version) would indeed be categorical. Though presumably this would be somewhat of a big deal but is nowhere mentioned in the Wikipedia article. So I guess the theory probably is still not categorical.
Your “simpler is better” is hard to apply. One way of thinking about models where there are no intermediate cardinals isn’t that S doesn’t exist. But that T, a mapping from S to either the naturals or the reals, does exist.
And T will also be something you can’t explicitly construct.
Also, the axiom of choice basically says “there exists loads of sets that can’t be explicitly constructed”.
Very good, fundamental questions.. I don’t understand question 85 though. Here are two more good questions.
Are human beings aligned?
Is human alignment, insofar as it exists, a property of the goals we have when we act or a property of the actions themselves?
Basic idea of 85 is that we generally agree there have been moral catastrophes in the past, such as widespread slavery. Are there ongoing moral catastrophes? I think factory farming is a pretty obvious one. There’s a philosophy paper called “The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe” that gives more context.
I thought that was what was meant. The question is probably the easiest one to answer affirmatively with a high degree of confidence. I can think of several ongoing ”moral catastrophs”.
I have a post speculating on that, taking on the “follow physicalism off a cliff” perspective! Nobody liked it, though.
You may also find the last chapter of Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality interesting, here; also in relation to your Question 2. I don’t personally buy it, and think it introduces a bunch of redundant, will-obviously-be-proven-wrong details, but the fundamental approach there is interesting.
The Grabby Aliens model + Dissolving the Fermi paradox both seem like plausible, and not mutually exclusive, answers.
You may want to look at geometric rationality, and this post specifically.
“Causality” is already a somewhat fraught notion in fundamental physics irrespective of quantum mechanics; it’s not clear that one needs to have some sort of notion of causality in order to do physics, nor that the universe necessarily obeys some underlying causal law. To the extent that quantum mechanics breaks our common-sense notions of causality, it’s only in this very particular sense (where it seems like Alice measuring first “causes” Bob’s measurement to take a certain value, or vice versa), and since neither party can use a measurement scheme like this to send information, the breakage doesn’t invite paradoxes or any sort of other weirdness.
Outside of philosophical musings about causality (which, to be clear, I think are perfectly valid and interesting) it suffices to say that entangled systems exhibit correlations without a common cause, and leave it at that.
If you’re interested in a recent technical discussion of some of these ideas, I recommend the following paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.02721.pdf
4D space, I think yes. Especially if you used 3D glasses, and then represented the 4th dimension by color.
Quantum mechanics in general, probably no, because it would require tracking an exponential number of states along with their complex amplitudes. That’s just too much data to track.
It unlocks the options you otherwise wouldn’t have. Imagine some things you did in your life that led to a good outcome… and now imagine someone else in your position, for whom doing that thing would be outside their comfort zone. They would be deprived of that good outcome. Now probably the same is true also for you. (You may underestimate how much, because we often do not even notice the opportunities we wouldn’t take anyway.)
As an answer to #43, find some people who achieved something you would like to achieve, and observe them. What is inside their comfort zone that is outside of yours? Could it have contributed to their success?
This is tricky, because any advice in form “do X” will turn into “but how do I make myself do X when my motivation is low?”. I think a better way is to surround yourself with people who motivate you. (Easier said than done.)
Maybe make some simple checklist, such as taking a short walk outside every morning, and then hire some online assistant from a cheap country to call you every day and ask you if you have completed your checklist for today. (This may be a generalization from one example, but for me, it is easier to make myself doing things, if they have social consequences, however trivial. On the other hand, it is too easy to give up on promises made to myself, if no one else cares.)
Note the “conventional” in some (sub)culture may be “unconventional” in some other. So let’s simply talk about things that some people never tried, and probably never even thought about them.
Many people are working from home these days, but didn’t try coworking. A few people working for different companies remotely can take their notebooks and meet in the same room for the day. Either rent a space, or at someone’s home.
Polyamory?
Some kind of meditation? Stop thinking, and then either (a) do the loving-kindness thing, or (b) focus on your sensory inputs—especially when you are in nature.
Thinking can be turned off, you just need to learn how. Just like for some kids it is almost impossible to learn to shut up; this is similar.
I think that diversity is good (in the sense that having a choice between N cultures of comparable goodness is better than only having one such culture), but some cultures are better than others. Of course, cultures can also evolve. So my advice would be approximately: first try to fix all cultures, then destroy the ones that cannot be fixed, and keep the diversity of those that are okay.
Meet different kinds of people and talk to them.
I suspect that at some moment this becomes a group effort, so maybe the first step is to find a group of people who want to do the same?
All the wars, famines, racism, sexism, and random interpersonal violence, all around the world. Factory farming. Aging and death. Probably missed a lot, but the answer is clearly yes.
I suspect that some values arise in a way “if you keep practicing X, you start valuing X”. For this category, the answer is: previous experience. Which was probably shaped by upbringing, or talent.
You should adjust your risk-taking accordingly. On one hand, you don’t want to needlessly die too soon. On the other hand, death puts a limit on long-term thinking—at some moment you need to actually spend the resources you saved, or you will die without ever spending them.
I suggest to widen this category to also include “things that people have thought of, but didn’t actually do”. Or “they did a half-assed job, and doing this properly requires 3× more effort, but has 100× larger impact”.
My example would be Khan Academy. It’s not like no one had an idea to make an amateur educational video before Salman Khan. Probably thousands did. Yet there was an extra value possible to make by making those videos (a) good, (b) free, (c) covering a large part of the curriculum, and (d) putting them all in one place, rather than let people google each of them individually.
Digital stuff seems to scale better. This includes websites, applications, videos, books, etc.
Horrible, I suppose.
Interesting questions!
I will try to answer #3, but full disclosure, in set theory, I am just a mathematically gifted autodidact.
It seems to me that the literature on set theory focuses on the technical details and ignores the meaning of what they are doing. Which makes sense from certain perspective: it is easy to bullshit when you talk about the meaning of stuff, so you can signal seriousness by only doing the equations. Also, for the experts, the meaning is probably so obvious that it doesn’t seem to them like it needs to be communicated.
Unconcerned with expert status, here is my attempt to communicate what the set theory seems to be about, to me.
First, we have some intuition of set as a collection. Set of all natural numbers. Set of 4, 8, 17. Set of sets, as in “all possible pairs of natural numbers between 1 and 10”. So it seems like we talk about the same thing. Yet I bet that if you interrogated hundred people about their intuitions, you would get many different answers.
Can a set contain objects of a different type, such as the number 5, but also the set of 7, 9, and 11? The official ZF answer is “yes”, but probably many mathematicians do not actually have a practical use for such sets, so they would not mind a negative answer. Can a set contain itself? Some people would say “why not”, others would object that in their intuition, a set is an afterwards created collection of pre-existing objects, therefore no (ZF also says no). But it is also possible to answer positively. Can there be an infinity so insanely large that it cannot even be expressed in the terms of smaller infinities? (Technically: Can there be K which is larger than a limit of any sequence of numbers smaller than K where the length of the sequence is also smaller than K? Well, there is the omega, which is larger than a “limit” of any finite sequence of finite numbers, but other than that?) Some people would go like “why the heck would I need such infinity”, while others would be like “yeah, if we can describe them consistently, the richer the set theory, the better”. You can keep inventing questions like this, so you can have dozens of mutually different definitions of “a set” what comply with someone’s intuition.
Second, there is an ambition to express the axioms in the language of first-order logic. There are some good reasons to do that, but the problem is that first-order logic cannot even define what “a natural number” means. The ZF set theory is supposed to have well-founded ordinals, but you can’t express “well-founded” in first-order logic either! The Axiom of Foundation/Regularity, translated to first-order logic, is just not the same thing.
Thus, if we stick to the first-order logic, we are not actually talking about “sets” (in the sense of: collections compatible with some sane person’s intuition of a set), but about “mathematical structures that technically follow the axioms of the set theory, even if no sane person would actually call them sets”. The latter is usually abbreviated to “sets”. But it includes (mostly) monstrosities beyond imagination which technically happen to obey the dozen axioms that we chose.
Generally, “X independent of ABC axioms” means that the axioms are ambiguous, there are many possible structures that obey them, in some of them X is true, in others X is false. Among the monstrosities that follow the ZFC axioms, and no sane person would call most of them sets, in some of them the technical interpretation of Continuum Hypothesis is true, in others it is false.
The idea of “cardinality” itself does not mean what you might naively expect it to mean. Consider Skolem’s paradox: “there are countable models of uncountable sets”. In other words, sets that are obviously countable, but also technically uncountable. That’s because, technically, “same cardinality” is defined as “there is a bijection”, and “bijection” is defined as “a set of pairs”… so if you cleverly redefine “set” to exclude those inconvenient sets of pairs—tada! -- you have an obviously countable set which, technically, now does not have a bijection to the natural numbers, and therefore, technically, is uncountable.
So the “set with a cardinality between that of the naturals and that of the reals” could technically be some set of reals defined by a really good lawyer. (Unfortunately, I am not that good lawyer, yet, so I cannot give you the exact definition.)
Actually, this is also related to #35:
I think “proof” is a concept from first-order logic, and “truth” is a concept from second-order logic. But I am confused about this, so this is just a vague pointer towards the answer, not the answer itself.
This is a great exercise.
I’m a hardcore consciousness and metaphysics nerd, so some of your questions fall within my epistemic wheelhouse. Others, I am simply interested in as you are, and can only respond with opinion or conjecture. I will take a stab at a selection of them below:
4: “Easy” is up in the air, but one of my favorite instrumental practices is to identify lines of preprogrammed “code” in my cognition that do me absolutely no good (grief, for instance), and simply hack into them to make them execute different emotional and behavioral outputs. I think the best way to stay happy is just to manually edit out negative thought tendencies, and having some intellectual knowledge that none of it’s a big deal anyways always helps.
8: I would define it as “existing in its minimally reduced, indivisible state”. For instance, an electron is a fundamental particle, but a proton is not because it’s composed of quarks.
12 (and 9): I think you’re on the best track with B. Consciousness is clearly individuated. Is it fundamental? That’s a multifaceted issue. It’s pretty clear to me that it can be reduced to something that is fundamental. At minimum, the state of being a “reference point” for external reality is something that really cannot be gotten beneath. On the other hand, a lot of what we think of as consciousness and experience is actually information: thought, sensation, memory, identity, etc. I couldn’t tell you what of any of this is irreducible—I suspect the capacities for at least some of them are. Your chosen stance here seems to approximate a clean-cut interactionism, which is at least a serviceable proxy.
13: I think this is the wrong question. We don’t know anything yet about how physics at the lowest level ultimately intersects and possibly unifies with the “metaphysics” of consciousness. At our current state of progress, no matter what theory of consciousness proves accurate, it will inevitably lean on some as-yet-undiscovered principle of physics that we in 2023 would find incomprehensible.
16: This will be controversial here, but is a settled issue in my field: You’d be looking for phenomenological evidence that AIs can participate in metaphysics the same ways conscious entities can. The easiest proof to the affirmative would be if they persist in a discarnate state after they “die”. I sure don’t expect it, but I’d be glad to be wrong.
19: I think a more likely idea along the general lines of the simulation hypothesis, due to the latter’s implications about computers and consciousness that, as I said above, I do not expect to hold up, is that an ultra-advanced civilization could just create a genuine microcosm where life evolved naturally. Not to say it’s likely.
20: Total speculation, of course—my personal pet hypothesis is that all civilizations discover everything they need to know about universal metaphysics way before they develop interstellar travel (we’re firmly on that track), and at some point just decide they’re tired of living in bodies. I personally hope we do not take such an easy way out.
21: I can buy into a sort of quantum-informed anthropic principle. Observers seem to be necessary to hold non-observer reality in a stable state. So that may in fact be the universe’s most basic dichotomy.
33: In my experience, the most important thing is to love what you’re learning about. Optimal learning is when you learn so quickly that you perpetually can’t wait to learn the next thing. I don’t think there’s any way to make “studying just to pass the test” effective long-term. You’ll just forget it all afterwards. You can probably imagine my thoughts on the western educational system.
43-44: Speaking to one’s intellectual comfort zone, Litany of Tarski-type affirmations are very effective at that. The benefit, of course, is better epistemics due to shedding ill-conceived discomfort with unfamiliar ideas.
45: I’ve actually never experienced this, and was shocked to learn it’s a thing in college. Science will typically blame neurochemistry, but in normal cognition, thought is the prime mover there. So all I can think of is an associative mechanism whereby people relate the presence of a certain chemical with a certain mood, because the emotion had previously caused the chemical release. When transmitters are released abnormally (i.e. not by willed thought), these associations activate. Again, never happened to me.
56: I’d consider myself mostly aligned with both, so I’d personally say yes. I’m also a diehard metaphysics nerd who’s fully aware I’m not going anywhere, so I’d better fricking prioritize the far future because there’s a lot of it waiting for me. For someone who’s not that, I’d actually say no, because it’s much more rational to care most about the period of time you get to live in.
58: As someone who’s also constantly scheming about things indefinitely far in the future, I feel you on this one. I find that building and maintaining an extreme amount of confidence in those matters enriches my experience of the present.
71-73: For me, studying empirical metaphysics has fulfilled the first two (rejecting materialism makes anyone happier, and there’s no limit of possible discovery) and eventually will the third (it’ll rise to prominence in my lifetime). I can’t say I wouldn’t recommend.
78: Same as 71-73, for an obvious example. I can definitely set you in the right direction.
81: Following the scientific method, a hypothesis must be formed as an attempt to explain an observation. It must then be testable, and present a means of supporting or rejecting it by the results of the test. I’ve certainly dealt with theories that seem equally well supported by evidence but can’t both be true, but I have no reason to think better science couldn’t tease them apart.
89: Definitely space travel, AI, VR, aging reversal, genetic engineering. I really think metaphysical science will outstrip all of the above in utility, though...
96: …by making this cease to be relevant.
98: Of course there are, because there’s so much we know nothing about when it comes to what the heck we even are. I’d almost argue we have very little idea how to truly have the biggest positive impact on the future we can at this stage. We’ll figure it out.
Lots of interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing!
You seem to have an unconventional view about death informed by your metaphysics (suggested by your responses to 56, 89, and 96), but I don’t fully see what it is. Can you elaborate?
Yes, I am a developing empirical researcher of metaphysical phenomena. My primary item of study is past-life memory cases of young children, because I think this line of research is both the strongest evidentially (hard verifications of such claims, to the satisfaction of any impartial arbiter, are quite routine), as well as the most practical for longtermist world-optimizing purposes (it quickly becomes obvious we’re literally studying people who’ve successfully overcome death). I don’t want to undercut the fact that scientific metaphysics is a much larger field than just one set of data, but elsewhere, you get into phenomena that are much harder to verify and really only make sense in the context of the ones that are readily demonstrable.
I think the most unorthodox view I hold about death is that we can rise above it without resorting to biological immortality (which I’d actually argue might be counterproductive), but having seen the things I’ve seen, it’s not a far leap. Some of the best documented cases really put the empowerment potential on very glaring display; an attitude of near complete nonchalance toward death is not terribly infrequent among the elite ones. And these are, like, 4-year-olds we’re talking about. Who have absolutely no business being such badasses unless they’re telling the truth about their feats, which can usually be readily verified by a thorough investigation. Not all are quite so unflappable, naturally, but being able to recall and explain how they died, often in some violent manner, while keeping a straight face is a fairly standard characteristic of these guys.
To summarize the transhumanist application I’m getting at, I think that if you took the best child reincarnation case subject on record and gave everyone living currently and in the future their power, we’d already have an almost perfect world. And, like, we hardly know anything about this yet. Future users ought to become far more proficient than modern ones.
If the traditional idea of causality is an asymmetric a->B relationship , then entanglement doesn’t look like causality.
Why is mathematics so (unreasonably) effective in the natural sciences?
In important ways, it isn’t: a mathematical truth is not per se a physical truth.
Why not? There’s no guarantee that any set of axioms should solve every problem.
Arguments: phsyicalism is generally succesful. Counterarguments: hard problem, irreducubillity, Mary’s room.
Arguments: same as the counterarguments to physicalism. Counterarguments: parsimony, physical closure, interaction.
Rationalists think of counterfactuals in terms of the behaviour of agents and Newcomb’s paradox. Whereas, the mainstream view is that counterfactual is a “what if”, or path not taken—not necessarily involving agents at all. On the mainstream view, the five numbers that did no come up on the die are counterfactuals.
Rationalists have problems with counterfactuals that the mainstream does not. This immediately suggests that rationalists can solve their problems by adopting the mainstream view.
In the mainstream view, counterfactuals are ott defined in terms of free will, only probability. Which is to say, that as far as everyone who is not a Yudowskian rationalist is concerned,counterfactuals aren’t defined in terms of free will, only probability.
Counterfactuals are defined in terms of probability, but not of objective probability. Subjective probability is always available because subjects have limited knowledge..so subjective counterfactuals are always available.
Whether there is a “principled” way of handling them depends on your principles. Assume determinism and omniscience, and you’ll have problems.
An excellent exercise! There’s also a meta-question which shows up in how you choose to frame the questions. There’s an implication underneath “should”, “appropriate”, “proper”, “good”, and other glosses you chose for that archetype that they reference—the thing they point at tends to make new handles for itself if you taboo the existing ones, and tends to resist rigorous formal definition. However, trying on potential definitions for it can nevertheless un-ask or reframe most questions that rely on it.
Very Hype1