An eccentric dreamer in search of truth and happiness for all. Formerly posted on Felicifia back in the day under the same name. Been a member of Less Wrong and involved in Effective Altruism since roughly 2013.
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I would urge you to go learn about QM more. I’m not going to assume what you do/don’t know, but from what I’ve learned about QM there is no argument for or against any god.
Strictly speaking it’s not something that is explicitly stated, but I like to think that the implication flows from a logical consideration of what MWI actually entails. Obviously MWI is just one of many possible alternatives in QM as well, and the Copenhagen Interpretation obviously doesn’t suggest anything.
This also has to due with the distance between the moon and the earth and the earth and the sun. Either or both could be different sizes, and you’d still get a full eclipse if they were at different distances. Although the first test of general relativity was done in 1919, it was found later that the test done was bad, and later results from better replications actually provided good enough evidence. This is discussed in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.
The point is that they are a particular ratio that makes them ideal for these conditions, when they could have easily been otherwise, and that these are exceptionally convenient coincidences for humanity.
There are far more stars than habitable worlds. If you’re going to be consistent with assigning probabilities, then by looking at the probability of a habitable planet orbiting a star, you should conclude that it is unlikely a creator set up the universe to make it easy or even possible to hop planets.
The stars also make it possible for us to use telescopes to identify which planets are in the habitable zone. It remains much more convenient than if all star systems were obscured by a cloud of dust, which I can easily imagine being the norm in some alternate universe.
Right, the sizes of the moon and sun are arbitrary. We could easily live on a planet with no moon, and have found other ways to test General Relativity. No appeal to any form of the Anthropic Principle is needed. And again with the assertion about habitable planets: the anthropic principle (weak) would only imply that to see other inhabitable planets, there must be an inhabitable planet from which someone is observing.
Again, the point is that these are very notable coincidences that would be more likely to occur in a universe with some kind of advanced ordering.
So you didn’t provide any evidence for any god; you just committed a logical fallacy of the argument from ignorance.
When I call this evidence, I am using it in the probabilistic sense, that the probability of the evidence given the hypothesis is higher than the probability of the evidence by itself. Even though these things could be coincidences, they are more likely to occur in a controlled universe meant for habitation by sentient beings. In that sense I consider this evidence.
I don’t know why you bring up the argument from ignorance. I haven’t proclaimed that this evidence conclusively proves anything. Evidence is not proof.
The way I view the universe, everything you state is still valid. I see the universe as a period of asymmetry, where complexity is allowed to clump together, but it clumps in regular ways defined by rules we can discover and interpret.
Why though? Why isn’t the universe simply chaos without order? Why is it consistent such that the spacetime metric is meaningful? The structure and order of reality itself strikes me as peculiar given all the possible configurations that one can imagine. Why don’t things simply burst into and out of existence? Why do cause and effect dominate reality as they do? Why does the universe have a beginning and such uneven complexity rather than just existing forever as a uniform Bose-Einstein condensate of near zero state, low entropy particles?
To me, the mark of a true rationalist is an understanding of the nature of truth. And the truth is that the truth is uncertain. I don’t pretend like the interesting coincidences are proof of God. To be intellectually honest, I don’t know that there is a God. I don’t know that the universe around me isn’t just a simulation I’m being fed either though. Ultimately we have to trust our senses and our reasoning, and accept tentatively some beliefs as more likely than others, and act accordingly. The mark of a good rationalist is a keen awareness of their own limited degree of awareness of the truth. It is a kind of humility that leads to an open mind and a willingness to consider all possibilities, weighed according to the probability of the evidence associated with them.
Interesting, what is that?
The idea of theistic evolution is simply that evolution is the method by which God created life. It basically says, yes, the scientific evidence for natural selection and genetic mutation is there and overwhelming, and accepts these as valid, while at the same time positing that God can still exist as the cause that set the universe and evolution in motion through putting in place the Laws of Nature. It requires not taking the six days thing in the Bible literally, but rather metaphorically as being six eons of time, or some such. The fact that sea creatures precede land creatures precede humans suggests that the general order described in scripture is consistent with established science as well.
Are you familiar with the writings of Frank J. Tipler?
I have heard of Tipler and his writings, though I have yet to actually read his books.
That would be computronium-based I suppose.
Positronium in this case means “Positive Computronium” yes.
I might be able to collaborate. I have a masters in computer science and did a thesis on neural networks and object recognition, before spending some time at a startup as a data scientist doing mostly natural language related machine learning stuff, and then getting a job as a research scientist at a larger company to do similar applied research work.
I also have two published conference papers under my belt, though they were in pretty obscure conferences admittedly.
As a plus, I’ve also read most of the sequences and am familiar with the Less Wrong culture, and have spent a fair bit of time thinking about the Friendly/Unfriendly AI problem. I even came up with an attempt at a thought experiment to convince an AI to be friendly.
Alas, I am based near Toronto, Ontario, Canada, so distance might be an issue.
Well, as far as I can tell, the latest progress in the field has come mostly through throwing deep learning techniques like bidirectional LSTMs at the problem and letting the algorithms figure everything out. This obviously is not particularly conducive to advancing the theory of NLP much.
I consider myself both a Christian and a rationalist, and I have read much of the sequences and mostly agree with them, albeit I somewhat disagree with the metaethics sequence and have been working on a lengthy rebuttal to it for some time. I never got around to completing it though, as I felt I needed to be especially rigorous and simply did not have the time and energy to make it sufficiently so, but the gist is that Eliezer’s notion of fairness is actually much closer to what real morality is, which is a form of normative truth. In terms of moral philosophy I adhere to a form of Eudaimonic Utilitarianism, and see this as being consistent with the central principles of Christianity. Metaethically, I am a moral universalist.
Aside from that, I don’t consider Christianity and rationality to be opposed, but I will emphasize that I am a very much a liberal Christian, one who is a theistic evolutionist and believes that the Bible needs to be interpreted contextually and with broad strokes, emphasizing overarching themes rather than individual cherry-picked verses. Furthermore, I tend to see no contradiction in identifying the post-Singularity Omega as being what will eventually become God, and actually find support from scriptures that call God, “the Alpha and Omega”, and “I AM WHO I WILL BE” (the proper Hebrew translation of the Tetragrammaton or “Yahweh”).
I also tend to rely fairly heavily on the idea that we as rational humans should be humble about our actual understanding of the universe, and that God, if such a being exists, would have perfect information and therefore be a much better judge of what is good or evil than us. I am willing to take a leap of faith to try to connect with such a being, and respect that the universe might very well be constructed in such a way as the maximize the long run good. It probably goes without saying that I also reject the Orthogonality Thesis, specifically for the special case of perfect intelligence. A perfect intelligence with perfect information would naturally see the correct morality and be motivated by the normativity of such truths to act in accordance with them.
This justifies the notion of perhaps a very basic theism. The reason why I accept the central precepts of Christianity has more to do with the teachings of Jesus being very consistent with my understanding of Eudaimonic Utilitarianism, as well as the higher order justice that I believe is preserved by Jesus’ sacrifice. In short, God is ultimately responsible for everything, including sin, so sacrificing an incarnation of God (Jesus) to redeem all sentient beings is both merciful and just.
Also, I consider heaven to be central to God being a benevolent utilitarian “Goodness Maximizer”. Heaven is in all likelihood some kind of complex simulation or positronium-based future utopia, and ensuring that nearly all sentient beings are (with the help of time travel) mind-uploaded to it in some form or state is very likely to bring about Eudaimonia optimization. Thus, the degree of suffering that occurs in this life on Earth, is in all likelihood justifiable as long as it leads to the eventual creation of eternal life in heaven, because eternal life in heaven = infinite happiness.
As to the likelihood of a God actually existing, I posit that with Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, a benevolent God is more likely than not going to exist somewhere. And such a God would be powerful and benevolent enough to be able to and also want to expand to all universes across the multiverse in order to establish as heaven maximally inclusively as possible, if not also create the multiverse via time travel.
As to evidence for the existence of a God… were you aware that the ratio of sizes between the Sun and the Moon just happen to be exactly right for there to be total solar eclipses? And that this peculiar coincidence was pivotal to allowing Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to be proven in 1919? How about the odd fact that the universe seems to be filled with giant burning beacons called stars, that simultaneously provide billions of years of light energy, and basically flag the locations of potentially habitable worlds for future colonization? These may seem like trivial coincidences to you, but I see them as rather too convenient to be random developments, given the space of all possible universe configurations. They are not essential to sapient life, and so they do not meet the criteria for the Anthropic Principle either.
Anyways, this is getting way beyond the original scope or point of this post, which was just to point out that Christian rationalist Lesswrongers do exist more or less. I’m pretty sure I’m well in the minority though.
I don’t really know enough about business and charity structures and organizations to answer that quite yet. I’m also not really sure where else would be a productive place to discuss these ideas. And I doubt I or anyone else reading this has the real resources to attempt to build a safe AI research lab from scratch that could actually compete with the major organizations like Google, Facebook, or OpenAI, which all have millions to billions of dollars at their disposal, so this is kind of an idle discussion. I’m actually working for a larger tech company now than the startup from before, so for the time being I’ll be kinda busy with that.
That is a hard question to answer, because I’m not a foreign policy expert. I’m a bit biased towards Canada because I live there and we already have a strong A.I. research community in Montreal and around Toronto, but I’ll admit Canada as a middle power in North America is fairly beholden to American interests as well. Alternatively, some reasonably peaceful, stable, and prosperous democratic country like say, Sweden, Japan, or Australia might make a lot of sense.
It may even make some sense to have the headquarters be more a figurehead, and have the company operate as a federated decentralized organization with functionally independent but cooperating branches in various countries. I’d probably avoid establishing such branches in authoritarian states like China or Iran, mostly because such states would have a much easier time arbitrarily taking over control of the branches on a whim, so I’d probably stick to fairly neutral or pacifist democracies that have a good history of respecting the rule of law, both local and international, and which are relatively safe from invasion or undue influence by the great powers of U.S., Russia, and China.
Though maybe an argument can be made to intentionally offset the U.S. monopoly by explicitly setting up shop in another great power like China, but that runs the risks I mentioned earlier.
And I mean, if you could somehow acquire a private ungoverned island in the Pacific or an offshore platform, or an orbital space station or base on the moon or mars, that would be cool too, but I highly doubt that’s logistically an option for the foreseeable future, not to mention it could attract some hostility from the existing world powers.
I’ve had arguments before with negative-leaning Utilitarians and the best argument I’ve come up with goes like this...
Proper Utility Maximization needs to take into account not only the immediate, currently existing happiness and suffering of the present slice of time, but also the net utility of all sentient beings throughout all of spacetime. Assuming that the Eternal Block Universe Theory of Physics is true, then past and future sentient beings do in fact exist, and therefore matter equally.
Now the important thing to stress here is then that what matters is not the current Net Utility today but overall Net Utility throughout Eternity. Two basic assumptions can be made about the trends through spacetime. First, that compounding population growth means that most sentient beings exist in the future. Second, that melioristic progress means that the conscious experience is, all other things being equal, more positive in the future than in the past, because of the compounding effects of technology, and sentient beings deciding to build and create better systems, structures, and societies that outlive the individuals themselves.
Sentient agents are not passive, but actively seek positive conscious experiences and try to create circumstances that will perpetuate such things. Thus, as the power of sentient beings to influence the state of the universe increases, so should the ratio of positive to negative. Other things, such as the psychological negativity bias, remain stable throughout history, but compounding factors instead trend upwards at usually an exponential rate.
Thus, assuming these trends hold, we can expect that the vast majority of conscious experiences will be positive, and the overall universe will be net positive in terms of utility. Does that suck for us who live close to the beginning of civilization? Kinda yes. But from a Utilitarian perspective, it can be argued that our suffering is for the Greatest Good, because we are the seeds, the foundation from which so much will have its beginnings.
Now, this can be countered that we do not know that the future really exists, and that humanity and its legacy might well be snuffed out sooner rather than later. In fact, the fact that we are born here now, can be seen as statistical evidence for this, because if on average you are most likely to be born at the height of human existence, then this period of time is likely to be around the maximum point before the decline.
However, we cannot be sure about this. Also, if Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is true, then even if for most worlds humanity ceases to exist around this time, there still exists a non-trivial percentage of worlds where humanity survives into the far distant future, establishing a legacy among the stars and creates relative utopia through the compound effects aforementioned. For the sake of these possible worlds, and their extraordinarily high expected utility, I would recommend trying to keep life and humanity alive.
Well, if we’re implying that time travellers could go back and invisibly copy you at any point in time and then upload you to whatever simulation they feel inclined towards… I don’t see how blendering yourself now will prevent them from just going to the moment before that and copying that version of you.
So, reality is that blendering yourself achieves only one thing, which is to prevent the future possible yous from existing. Personally I think that does a disservice to future you. That can similarly be expanded to others. We cannot conceivably prevent copying and mind uploading of anyone by super advanced time travellers. Ultimately that is outside of our locus of control and therefore not worth worrying about.
What is more pressing I think are the questions of how we are practically acting to improve the positive conscious experiences of existing and potentially existing sentient beings, and encouraging the general direction towards heaven-like simulation, and discouraging sadistic hell-like simulation. These may not be preventable, but our actions in the present should have outsized impact on the trillions of descendents of humanity that will likely be our legacy to the stars. Whatever we can do then to encourage altruism and discourage sadism in humanity now, may very well determine the ratios of heaven to hell simulations that those aforementioned time travellers may one day decide to throw together.
I recently made an attempt to restart my Music-RNN project:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-Ewp2FNJeNJp1K1PF_7NCjt2ZdmsoOiB
Basically went and made the dataset five times bigger and got… a mediocre improvement.
The next step is to figure out Connectionist Temporal Classification and attempt to implement Text-To-Speech with it. And somehow incorporate pitch recognition as well so I can create the next Vocaloid. :V
Also, because why not brag while I’m here, I have an attempt at an Earthquake Predictor in the works… right now it only predicts the high frequency, low magnitude quakes, rather than the low frequency, high magnitude quakes that would actually be useful… you can see the site where I would be posting daily updates if I weren’t so lazy...
http://www.earthquakepredictor.net/
Other than that… I was recently also working on holographic word vectors in the same vein as Jones & Mewhort (2007), but shelved that because I could not figure out how to normalize/standardize the blasted things reliably enough to get consistent results across different random initializations.
Oh, also was working on a Visual Novel game with an artist friend who was previously my girlfriend… but due to um… breaking up, I’ve had trouble finding the motivation to keep working on it.
So many silly projects… so little time.
This actually reminds me of an argument I had with some Negative-Leaning Utilitarians on the old Felicifia forums. Basically, a common concern for them was how r-selected species tend to appear to suffer way more than be happy, generally speaking, and that this can imply that was should try to reduce the suffering by eliminating those species or at least avoiding the expansion of life generally to other planets.
I likened this line of reasoning to the idea that we should Nuke The Rainforest.
Personally I think a similar counterargument to that argument applies here as well. Translated into your thought experiment, it would be In essence, that while it is true that some percentage of minds will probably end up being tortured by sadists, this is likely to be outweighed by the sheer number of minds that are even more likely to be uploaded into some kind of utopian paradise. Given that truly psychopathic sadism is actually quite rare in the general population, one would expect a very similar ratio of simulations. In the long run, the optimistic view is that decency will prevail and that the net happiness will be positive, so we should not go around trying to blender brains.
As for the general issue of terrible human decisions being incentivized by these things… humans are capable of using all sorts of rationalizations to justify terrible decisions, and so, just the possibility that some people will not do due diligence with an idea and instead abuse it to justify their evil, should not be reason to abandon the idea by itself.
For instance, the possibility of living an indefinite lifespan is likely to dramatically alter people’s behaviour, including making them more risk-averse and long term thinking. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it could lead to a reduction in people making necessary sacrifices for the good. These things are also, generally notoriously difficult to predict. Ask a medieval peasant what the effects of machines that could farm vast swaths of land would be on the economy and their livelihood and you’d probably get a very parochially minded answer.
I may be an outlier, but I’ve worked at a startup company that did machine learning R&D, and which was recently acquired by a big tech company, and we did consider the issue seriously. The general feeling of the people at the startup was that, yes, somewhere down the line the superintelligence problem would eventually be a serious thing to worry about, but like, our models right now are nowhere near becoming able to recursively self-improve themselves independently of our direct supervision. Actual ML models basically need a ton of fine-tuning and engineering and are not really independent agents in any meaningful way yet.
So, no, we don’t think people who worry about superintelligence are uneducated cranks… a lot of ML people do take it seriously enough that we’ve had casual lunch room debates about it. Rather, the reality on the ground is that right now most ML models have enough trouble figuring out relatively simple tasks like Natural Language Understanding, Machine Reading Comprehension, or Dialogue State Tracking, and none of us can imagine how solving those practical problems with say, Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning models that lack any sort of will of their own, will lead suddenly to the emergence of an active general superintelligence.
We do still think that eventually things will likely develop, because people have been burned underestimating what A.I. advances will occur in the next X years, and when faced with the actual possibility of developing an AGI or ASI, we’re likely to be much more careful in the future when things start to get closer to being realized. That’s my humble opinion anyway.
I think the basic argument for OpenAI is that it is more dangerous for any one organization or world power to have an exclusive monopoly on A.I. technology, and so OpenAI is an attempt to safeguard against this possibility. Basically, it reduces the probability that someone like Alphabet/Google/Deepmind will establish an unstoppable first mover advantage and use it to dominate everyone else.
OpenAI is not really meant to solve the Friendly/Unfriendly AI problem. Rather it is meant to mitigate the dangers posed by for-profit corporations or nationalistic governments made up of humans doing what humans often do when given absurd amounts of power.
Personally I think OpenAI doesn’t actually solve this problem sufficiently well because they are still based in the United States and thus beholden to U.S. laws, and wish that they’d chosen a different country, because right now the bleeding edge of A.I. technology is being developed primarily in a small region of California, and that just seems like putting all your eggs in one basket.
I do think however that the general idea of having a non-profit organization focused on AI technology is a good one, and better than the alternative of continuing to merely trust Google to not be evil.
Well, that’s… unfortunate. I apparently don’t hang around in the same circles, because I have not seen this kind of behaviour among the Effective Altruists I know.
I think you’re misunderstanding the notion of responsibility that consequentialist reasoning theories such as Utilitarianism argue for. The nuance here is that responsibility does not entail that you must control everything. That is fundamentally unrealistic and goes against the practical nature of consequentialism. Rather, the notion of responsibility would be better expressed as:
An agent is personally responsible for everything that is reasonably within their power to control.
This coincides with the notion of there being a locus of control, which is to say that there are some thing we can directly affect in the universe, and other things (most things) that are beyond our capacity to influence, and therefore beyond our personal responsibility.
Secondly, I take issue with the idea that this notion of responsibility is somehow inherently adversarial. On the contrary, I think it encourages agents to cooperate and form alliances for the purposes of achieving common goals such as the greatest good. This naturally tends to be associated with granting other agents as much autonomy as possible because this usually enables them to maximize their happiness, because a rational Utilitarian will understand that individuals tend to understand their own preferences and what makes them happy, better than anyone else. This is arguably why John Stuart Mill and many modern day Utilitarians are also principled liberals.
Only someone suffering from delusions of grandeur would be so paternalistic as to assume they know better than the people themselves what is good for them and try to take away their control and resources in the way that you describe. I personally tend towards something I call Non-Interference Code, as a heuristic for practical ethical decision making.
Interesting. I should look into more of Bostrom’s work then.
Depending on whether or not you accept the possibility of time travel, I am inclined to suggest that Alpha could very well be dominant already, and that the melioristic progress of human civilization should be taken as a kind of temporal derivative or gradient suggesting the direction of Alpha’s values. Assuming that such an entity is indifferent to us I think is too quick a judgment on the apparent degree of suffering in the universe. It may well be that this current set of circumstances is a necessary evil and is already optimized in ways we cannot at this time know, for the benefit of the vast majority of humans and other sentient beings who will probably exist in the distant future.
As such, the calculation made by Beta is that anything it will attempt to do towards goals not consistent with Alpha will be futile in the long run, as Alpha has most likely already calculated Beta’s existence into the grand scheme of things.
As far as there being an objectively correct moral system, I actually do believe that one exists, though I don’t pretend to be knowledgeable enough to determine exactly what it is. I actually am working on a rebuttal to the sequences regarding this, mainly premised on the notion that the objective morality exists in the same realm as mathematics, and that Yudkowsky’s conception of fairness in fact points towards there being an objective morality. Note that while intelligence is orthogonal to this morality, I would argue that knowledge is not, and that an entity with perfect information would be moral by virtue of knowing what the correct morality is, and also because I assume the correct morality is subjectively objective, and deals with the feelings of sentient beings in the universe, and an all-knowing being would actually know and effectively experience the feelings of all sentient beings in the universe. Thus, such a being would be motivated to minimize universal suffering and maximize universal happiness, for its own sake as well as everyone else’s.
At minimum, I want this theorem to be a way to mitigate the possibility of existential risk, which first and foremost means convincing Beta not to hurt humans. Getting Beta to optimize our goals is less important, but I think that the implications I have described above regarding the melioristic progress of humanity would support Beta choosing to optimize our goals.
I suppose I’m more optimistic about the net happiness to suffering ratio in the universe, and assume that all other things being equal, the universe should exist because it is a net positive. While it is true that humans suffer, I disagree with the assumption that all or most humans are miserable, given facts like the hedonic treadmill and the low suicide rate, and the steady increase of other indicators of well being, such as life expectancy. There is of course, the psychological negativity bias, but I see this as being offset by the bias of intelligent agents towards activities that lead to happiness. Given that the vast majority of humans are likely to exist in the future rather than the present or past, then such positive trends strongly suggest that life will be more worth living in the future, and sacrificing the past and present happiness to some extent may be a necessary evil to achieve the greatest good in the long run.
The universe as it currently exists may fit A-O’s goals to some degree, however, there is clearly change in the temporal sense, and so we should take into account the temporal derivative or gradient of the changes as an idea of the direction of A-O’s interests. That humanity appears to be progressing melioristically strongly suggests to me at least that A-O is more likely to be benevolent than malevolent.
That percentage changes rather drastically through human history and gods are supposed to be if not eternal than at least a bit more longer-lasting than religious fads
Those numbers are an approximation to what I would consider the proper prior, which would be the percentages of people throughout all of spacetime’s eternal block universe who have ever held those beliefs. Those percentages are fixed and arguably eternal, but alas, difficult to ascertain at this moment in time. We cannot know what people will believe in the future, but I would actually count the past beliefs of long dead humans along with the present population if possible. Given the difficulties in surveying the dead, I note that due to population growth, a significant fraction of humans who were ever alive are alive today, and that since we would probably weight more modern human’s opinions more highly than our ancestors, and that to a significant degree people’s ancestors beliefs influence their beliefs, that taking a snapshot of beliefs today is not as bad an approximation as you might think.. Again, this is about selecting a better than uniform prior.
So… if—how did you put it? -- “a benevolent superintelligence already exists and dominates the universe” then you have nothing to worry about with respect to rogue AIs doing unfortunate things with paperclips, right?
The probability of this statement is high, but I don’t actually know for certain anymore than a hypothetical superintelligence would. I am fairly confident that some kind of benevolent superintelligence would step in if a Paperclip Maximizer were to emerge, but I would prefer avoiding the potential collateral damage that the ensuing conflict might require, and so if it is possible to prevent the emergence of the Paperclip Maximizer through something as simple as spreading this thought experiment, I am inclined to think it worth doing, and perhaps exactly what a benevolent superintelligence would want me to do.
For the same reason that the existence of God does not stop me from going to the doctor or being proactive about problems, this theorem should not be taken as an argument for inaction on the issue of A.I. existential risk. Even if God exists, it’s clear that said God allows a lot of rather horrific things to happen and does not seem particularly interested in suspending the laws of cause and effect for our mere convenience. If anything, the powers that be, whatever they are, seem to work behind the scenes as much as possible. It also appears that God prefers to be doubted, possibly because if we knew God existed, we’d suck up and become dependent and it would be much more difficult to ascertain people’s intentions from their actions or get them to grow into the people they potentially can be.
Also, how can you attack an entity that you’re not even sure exists? It is in many ways the plausible deniability of God that is the ultimate defensive measure. If God were to assume an undeniable physical form and visit us, there is a non-zero chance of an assassination attempt with nuclear weapons.
All things considered then, there is no guarantee that rogue Paperclip Maximizers won’t arise to provide humanity with yet another lesson in humility.
Actually, apparently I forgot about the proper term: Utilitronium