It’s just an empirical fact that all of the most advanced discussion and speculation about realityfluid has occurred in the context of online stories with at least some erotic component.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Karma: 162,623
Erogamer “7.!”, (Planecrash=) Project Lawful “the meeting of their minds”, incredibly heavy spoilers on both though much more so Project Lawful.
Well, yes. Any sane choice of UTM is famously pretty equivalent in terms of epistemology, if you’re willing to presume that sanity. Eg, to end up thus convinced against all evidence that Guam is planning to invade the United States, you’d have to twist up the UTM to make it hugely costly to internally simulate other UTMs that would assign greater than negligible probability to “Guam is not planning to invade the United States”. And even then, it washes out in the limit, etcetera.
But if we suppose it to be a prior metaphysical fact out there in the territory, you’d think the territory actually would have to fix some choice of UTM; the territory cannot just say, “Eh, they’re pretty much equivalent” and leave itself uncertain, for all uncertainty exists in the map rather than the territory.
If the territory has picked any sane UTM, all sane UTMs will do well pretty well predicting it.
But how would the territory pick any UTM whatsoever to decide which universes got exactly how much reality-fluid?
The whole argument rests on naive/basic logic about complexity being expensive, and yet the actual Solomonoff Prior hasn’t been mentioned?!?
Why should mathematical realism obey the Solomonoff prior? There’s a clear reason from epistemology why the map has to distribute its probability mass more and more sparsely over possible explanations of higher complexity, for in the limit there are countably infinitely many hypotheses of unbounded fine complexity. That’s why, faced with a phenomenon that we think has only one true explanation, we follow Occam’s Razor in our maps.
Why would a Solomonoff prior be out there in the territory? Who is in charge of distributing probability mass over mathematical structures with inhabitants? According to which possible measure of simplicity? What does it mean to pour realityfluid into a mathematical structure?
Mathematical realism answers none of this. To actually try to answer it is to try to come up with a metaphysics of realityfluid. This is beyond anything that Earth can publish in philosophy journals; you would have to look to online erotica for it.
One moment of orderly experience that includes remembering an ordered story of how it came to be.
Instead you could in principle choose to implement a dynamic that concludes “the universe is probably going to soon get bored of being simple, and start being disordered for a while”.
Why don’t you choose to implement that dynamic?
Why, because I don’t expect to see that actually happen to me, of course! In a way that doesn’t depend at all on which anticipation-dynamic I try to implement, even if I could modify my own source code.
Beings that modify their own source code to expect to win the lottery are then promptly surprised by losing the lottery. Beings that modify their preferences to care much more about worlds in which they win the lottery, predominantly see themselves losing the lottery and ending up in the world they cared about less. If you decide to give up on anticipating that your vision stays ordered, it will nonetheless stay quite ordered. The dynamic by which we expect order is not an explanation for that order. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Even if you were a kind of being that could stop believing in order, it still wouldn’t go away.
Of which I have also said: The art of shepherding is not about using pebbles to control sheep, but letting sheep control pebbles.
Why not unwind our justification loop for expecting order? Why, because at the end of unwinding, we would still see order rather than chaos. You and I both know that’s true. But why is it true? Not the map-why of how do we justify believing it; the territory-why of “How did it end up that way?”
You didn’t say anything about “a correctness-maximization perspective” and those never have a need to “precommit” to anything, which is a decision-theory rather than epistemic concept.
Try deciding that it’s useful to believe you’ll win the lottery. You’ll nonetheless not win the lottery! So what it is useful to believe cannot account for our experiences; and our experiences of an ordered universe continue to call out for an explanation even if you say that it’s instrumentally useful to believe in an ordered universe. Of course in reality it’s only useful to believe this if the universe actually is ordered.
I also note that if you’re not familiar with the mores around here, we do not in general think it clever to violate the epistemic-instrumental firewall.
Agreed. I will revise to “makes it hard to explain”. The actual problem is that some such views seem to present significant barriers to somebody else coming up with an explanation, haven’t even noticed that there’s a problem, etc.
The lottery is something you view as being under your control. If it was baked in, by evolution say, to only care about worlds where you win the lottery, then you really might be expecting to win the lottery.
And then, on how my model of reality actually works, you wouldn’t win the lottery. Do you think differently?
For example, you wrote about “where recursive justification hits bottom”, and the loop of a simplicity prior justifying itself through the meta level: I believe in some kind of simplicity prior because it’s a simple hypothesis that such a prior will keep on being true and useful, given that it has been true and useful constantly up until now. Why not truly question the simplicity prior so hard that you stop evaluating its possible alternatives by the meta-level judgements of the simplicity prior itself?
The map is not the territory. “Justifiable reason to believe something” is a map-thing that is not the same as “knowing why it happens” out in the territory. We have seen the universe be simple at us really really hard. We are justified in map-expecting our experiences to probably continue to be ordered. We don’t know what territory lies behind it.
If you cared a lot about universes where you won the lottery, would you expect to win the lottery?
The correct answer is: No. Your preferences don’t control what you see, so they don’t explain what you see, so seeing a simple universe calls out for an explanation that is not preference.
If you cared a lot about universes where you won the lottery, would you expect to win the lottery?
The correct answer is: No. Your preferences don’t control what you see, so they don’t explain what you see, so actually seeing a simple universe calls out for an explanation that is not preference.
A relatively brief explanation of Boltzmann Brains
The issue the Allied forces encountered was that German forces also attacked through the Ardennes forest south of the main Allied forced and through rapid movement broke through weak parts of the line and encircled the Allied armies.
This is the issue that turned up in war games, was counterargued and disregarded by high command, and which was sufficient to lose France the war. No?
Very few people have enough levels in Scientist to run an experiment whose result they might not like.
I’ll fix it
(Agreed.)
The Owned Ones
That there would possibly be other wars and lethal threats beyond World War II did not make the Maginot Line not be one-chance-to-get-it-right. So this doesn’t at all cut against the concept I was pointing to. As for names, there is no name that can stop a fool from being a fool, but if there’s some brief name that proves empirically to provoke fewer fools than I am open to it.
Separately: There’s a threshold level of ASI beyond which It can easily align the next ASI. A country of geniuses in a datacenter might fall short, especially because “country of geniuses” is not yet dath ilan, and possibly not even enough to seek out dath ilan as its successor; I have often found myself unimpressed by the taste and discrimination among ideas and possibilities of those whom Earthlings call geniuses. A country of geniuses in a datacenter otherwise able to stabilize the Earth and smart enough to notice if they can’t align the next system would constitute a victory, however.
Well, yes, if you read the relatively more advanced works on anthropics, which universally take the form of online erotica, they will observe—I think Erogamer does this as well as Project Lawful—that probability stops working entirely if you claim that an “infinite” amount of stuff exists in the classic sense of infinity, just as much as if you claim that nothing exists. Everything that exists has to be a finite fraction of existence and you have to be able to take ratios between them. The ratios are the critical requisite for stuff to work. It doesn’t matter if you say they exist infinitely, finitely, or zero, what matters is the ability to take ratios.