Following the reasoning behind the Doomsday Argument, this particular thought is likely to be in the middle along the timeline of all thoughts experienced. This observation reduces the chances that in the future we will create AI that will experience many orders of magnitude more thoughts than those of all humans put together.
Angela
The amount of consciousness that a neural network S has is given by phi=MI(A^H_max;B)+MI(A;B^H_max), where {A,B} is the bipartition of S which minimises the right hand side, A^H_max is what A would be if all its inputs were replaced with maximum-entropy noise generators and MI(A,B)=H(A)+H(B)-H(AB) is the mutual information between A and B and H(A) is the entropy of A. 99.9%
There is a paper on both IIT and causal density here:
The likes of Pythagoras got attributed with performing miracles too. Although Mark, the first synoptic gospel to be written, is claimed to be an eyewitness account in Christian circles, it is likely that none of the gospels were. Paul was writing before then, but he never directly met Jesus, he only had a vision of Jesus. Also, Paul does not mention the empty tomb anywhere.
The hard problem of consciousness will be solved within the next decade (60%).
I used to assume that the probability that heaven and hell existed was not zero, and I lived much of my teenage years by Pascal’s Wager, partly because I was scared of what my parents would say if I stopped believing in God and partly because I had heard of miracle stories and not yet worked out how they had happened and I could not bear the thought of life being meaningless. Then I realised that if there were a non-zero probability of me having eternal life then the probability of me currently being in this first finite fraction of my life would be zero. Since I am currently on Earth the probability of eternal life must therefore be zero.
Basic true/false test; reverse stupidity is not intelligence but rationalists tend to have fewer false beliefs. Taking the test upon entering the school would prevent the school from teaching to the test and the test could be scored on multiple areas of which one is a cunningly disguised synonym for rationality and the others are red herrings so that irrationalists have no incentive to lie on the test.
Then why does it also work for sugar water, which does not taste repulsive?
Even if it turns out that there is no rigorously definable one-dimensional measure of valence we still need to search for physical correlates to pleasure and pain and find approximate measures to use when resolving moral dilemmas.
Regarding the response to (6), why don’t you want to maximise hedons? Having a rigorous definition of what you are trying to maximise needn’t mean that what you are trying to maximise is arbitrary to you, and that pleasure is complex (or maybe it is simple but we don’t understand it yet) does not imply that we don’t want it.
Drink lots of water. Stop eating anything that contains wheat and other grains.
I don’t think that either of these two has much evidence going for it.
Do short but intense exercise once a week.
Once a week is not often enough. The endorphins from exercise wear off fast so to sustain high energy levels I require a short burst of intense exercise is required every few hours with a longer run at least once a day.
I remain convinced that the probability is 90%.
The confusion is over whether you want to maximize the expectation of the number of utilons there will be if you wake up in a green room or the expectation of the number of utilons you will observe if you wake up in a green room.
If slowing metabolism increases longevity, how come exercise, which increases metabolism, is beneficial?
As an endurance runner with a BMI of ~20 on an eat-as-much-as-you-like diet, is my calorie consumption is optimal for longevity?
As human population densities increased and complex societies formed, selection pressure for social skills increased, and social skills became more relevant than intelligence. Larger brains usually have fewer long-range connections but more local connections, and long-range connections enable the rapid processing required for socialising. People with autism tend to have larger brains than those without and females tend to have smaller brains than males, so an inverse correlation between brain size and social skills would not surprise me.
I can concentrate much better after I’ve spent time running around outdoors, watching sunsets or listening to good music. I do not believe that the pleasure of being outside is more important than my other goals, but when I force myself to stay indoors and spend more time working I become too moody to concentrate and I get less work done in total than I would if I had ‘wasted’ more time. Cookies are different though, because the tedium of baking them outweighs the pleasure of eating them.
The students were split up into the control and values affirmation groups. If the values affirmation group happened by chance to contain more of the brighter women then the control group would contain fewer of them so the two samples cannot be treated as independent. The paper doesn’t seem to mention any attempt to take this into account, so the actual p-values might be higher than those calculated in the paper, which weren’t especially low to begin with.
Assuming that the question means “would you be interested” and not “does there exist at least one person in the multiverse who would be interested”.
I have tried alcohol twice in an attempt to break my reputation for being a loner who doesn’t drink. Both times I felt very drowsy afterwards, had to go to bed early and slept about ten hours. Sleepiness was the only discernible effect.
The paperclip maximiser’s perspective
Maybe she cares about other things besides paperclips, including the innate desire to be able to name a single, simple and explicit purpose in life.
This is not supposed to be about non-human AGI paperclip maximisers.
If some means could be found to estimate phi for various species, a variable claimed by this paper to be a measure of “intensity of sentience”, it would the relative value of the lives of different animals to be estimated and would help solve many moral dilemmas. Intensity of suffering as a result of a particular action would be expected to be proportionate to the intensity of sentience, however whilst mammals and birds (the groups which possess neocortex, the parts of the brain where consciousness is believed to occur) can be assumed to experience suffering when doing activities that decrease their evolutionary fitness (natural beauty etc. also determine pleasure and pain and are as yet poorly understood, but they are likely to be less significant in other species anyway, extrapolating from the differences in aesthetics from humans with high vs low IQ). However for AI it is much harder to determine what makes it happy or whether or not it enjoys dying, for which we will need to find a simple generalisable definition of suffering that can apply to all possible AI rather than our current concept which is more of an unrigorous Wittgensteinian family resemblance.