hairyfigment

Karma: 1,960

hairyfigment 18 Sep 2017 21:09 UTC
0 points
on: Unusual medical event led to concluding I was most likely an AI in a simulated world
Sort of reminds me of that time I missed out on a lucid dream because I thought I was in a simulation. In practice, if you see a glitch in the Matrix, it’s always a dream.

I find it interesting that we know humans are inclined to anthropomorphize, or see human-like minds everywhere. You began by talking about “entities”, as if you remembered this pitfall, but it doesn’t seem like you looked for ways that your “deception” could stem from a non-conscious entity. Of course the real answer (scenario 1) is basically that. You have delusions, and their origin lies in a non-conscious Universe.

hairyfigment 18 Sep 2017 20:58 UTC
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in reply to: Erfeyah’s comment on: Intrinsic properties and Eliezer’s metaethics
The second set of brackets may be the disconnect. If “their” refers to moral values, that seems like a category error. If it refers to stories etc, that still seems like a tough sell. Nothing I see about Peterson or his work looks encouraging.

Rather than looking for value you can salvage from his work, or an ‘interpretation consistent with modern science,’ please imagine that you never liked his approach and ask why you should look at this viewpoint on morality in particular rather than any of the other viewpoints you could examine. Assume you don’t have time for all of them.

If that still doesn’t help you see where I’m coming from, consider that reality is constantly changing and “the evolutionary process” usually happened in environments which no longer exist.

hairyfigment 18 Sep 2017 20:11 UTC
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in reply to: Erfeyah’s comment on: Intrinsic properties and Eliezer’s metaethics
Without using terms such as “grounding” or “basis,” what are you saying and why should I care?

hairyfigment 18 Sep 2017 19:48 UTC
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in reply to: Erfeyah’s comment on: Stupid Questions September 2017
I repeat: show that none of your neurons have consciousness separate from your own.

Why on Earth would you think Searle’s argument shows anything, when you can’t establish that you aren’t a Chinese Gym? In order to even cast doubt on the idea that neurons are people, don’t you need to rely on functionalism or a similar premise?

hairyfigment 18 Sep 2017 6:01 UTC
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in reply to: Erfeyah’s comment on: Stupid Questions September 2017
What about it seems worth refuting?

The Zombie sequence) may be related. (We’ll see if I can actually link it here.) As far as the Chinese Room goes:
- I think a necessary condition for consciousness is approximating a Bayesian update. So in the (ridiculous) version where the rules for speaking Chinese have no ability to learn, they also can’t be conscious.
- Searle talks about “understanding” Chinese. Now, the way I would interpret this word depends on context—that’s how language works—but normally I’d incline towards a Bayesian interpretation of “understanding” as well. So this again might depend on something Searle left out of his scenario, though the question might not have a fixed meaning.
- Some versions of the “Chinese Gym” have many people working together to implement the algorithm. Now, your neurons are all technically alive in one sense. I genuinely feel unsure how much consciousness a single neuron can have. If I decide to claim it’s comparable to a man blindly following rules in a room, I don’t think Searle could refute this. (I also don’t think it makes sense to say one neuron alone can understand Chinese; neurologists, feel free to correct me.) So what is his argument supposed to be?

hairyfigment 16 Sep 2017 22:44 UTC
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in reply to: DragonGod’s comment on: Open thread, September 11 - September 17, 2017
Do you know what the Electoral College is? If so, see here:

The single most important reason that our model gave Trump a better chance than others is because of our assumption that polling errors are correlated.

hairyfigment 16 Sep 2017 19:35 UTC
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in reply to: DragonGod’s comment on: Open thread, September 11 - September 17, 2017
Arguably claims about Donald Trump winning enough states—but Nate Silver didn’t assume independence, and his site still gave the outcome a low probability.

hairyfigment 19 Aug 2017 22:41 UTC
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in reply to: ImmortalRationalist’s comment on: Open thread, Jul. 17 - Jul. 23, 2017
Not exactly. MIRI and others have research on logical uncertainty, which I would expect to eventually reduce the second premise to induction. I don’t think we have a clear plan yet showing how we’ll reach that level of practicality.

Justifying a not-super-exponentially-small prior probability for induction working feels like a category error. I guess we might get a kind of justification from better understanding Tegmark’s Mathematical Macrocosm hypothesis—or, more likely, understanding why it fails. Such an argument will probably lack the intuitive force of ‘Clearly the prior shouldn’t be that low.’

hairyfigment 19 Aug 2017 22:31 UTC
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in reply to: ImmortalRationalist’s comment on: What Are The Chances of Actually Achieving FAI?
I would only expect the latter if we started with a human-like mind. A psychopath might care enough about humans to torture you; an uFAI not built to mimic us would just kill you, then use you for fuel and building material.

(Attempting to produce FAI should theoretically increase the probability by trying to make an AI care about humans. But this need not be a significant increase, and in fact MIRI seems well aware of the problem and keen to sniff out errors of this kind. In theory, an uFAI could decide to keep a few humans around for some reason—but not you. The chance of it wanting you in particular seems effectively nil.)

hairyfigment 20 Mar 2017 18:32 UTC
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in reply to: SnowSage4444’s comment on: Double Crux — A Strategy for Resolving Disagreement
Yes, but as it happens that kind of difference is unnecessary in the abstract. Besides the point I mentioned earlier, you could have a logical set of assumptions for “self-hating arithmetic” that proves arithmetic contradicts itself.

Completely unnecessary details here.

hairyfigment 14 Mar 2017 1:10 UTC
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in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Double Crux — A Strategy for Resolving Disagreement
Not if they’re sufficiently different. Even within Bayesian probability (technically) we have an example in the hypothetical lemming race with a strong Gambler’s Fallacy prior. (“Lemming” because you’d never meet a species like that unless someone had played games with them.)

On the other hand, if an epistemological dispute actually stems from factual disagreements, we might approach the problem by looking for the actual reasons people adopted their different beliefs before having an explicit epistemology. Discussing a religious believer’s faith in their parents may not be productive, but at least progress seems mathematically possible.

hairyfigment 3 Mar 2017 1:29 UTC
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in reply to: Elo’s comment on: Why Don’t Rationalists Win?
How could correcting grammar be good epistemics? The only question of fact there is a practical one—how various people will react to the grammar coming out of your word-hole.

hairyfigment 13 Feb 2017 21:31 UTC
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in reply to: entirelyuseless’s comment on: Forcing Anthropics: Boltzmann Brains
1. I’m using probability to represent personal uncertainty, and I am not a BB. So I think I can legitimately assign the theory a distribution to represent uncertainty, even if believing the theory would make me more uncertain than that. (Note that if we try to include radical logical uncertainty in the distribution, it’s hard to argue the numbers would change. If a uniform distribution “is wrong,” how would I know what I should be assigning high probability to?)
2. I don’t think you assign a 95% chance to being a BB, or even that you could do so without severe mental illness. Because for starters:
3. Humans who really believe their actions mean nothing don’t say, “I’ll just pretend that isn’t so.” They stop functioning. Perhaps you meant the bar is literally 5% for meaningful action, and if you thought it was 0.1% you’d stop typing?
4. I would agree if you’d said that evolution hardwired certain premises or approximate priors into us ‘because it was useful’ to evolution. I do not believe that humans can use the sort of pascalian reasoning you claim to use here, not when the issue is BB or not BB. Nor do I believe it is in any way necessary. (Also, the link doesn’t make this clear, but a true prior would need to include conditional probabilities under all theories being considered. Humans, too, start life with a sketch of conditional probabilities.)

hairyfigment 13 Feb 2017 8:41 UTC
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in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: Interview with Nassim Taleb ‘Trump makes sense to a grocery store owner’
OK, they gave him a greater chance than I thought of winning the popular vote. I can’t tell if that applies to the polls-plus model which they actually seemed to believe, but that’s not the point. The point is, they had a model with a lot of uncertainty based on recognizing the world is complicated, they explicitly assigned a disturbing probability to the actual outcome, and they praised Trump’s state/Electoral College strategy for that reason.

hairyfigment 13 Feb 2017 8:02 UTC
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in reply to: entirelyuseless’s comment on: Forcing Anthropics: Boltzmann Brains
Seems like you’re using a confusing definition of “believe”, but the point is that I disagree about our reasons for rejecting the claim that you’re a BB.

Note that according to your reasoning, any theory which says you’re a BB must give us a uniform distribution for all possible experiences. So rationally coming to assign high probability to that theory seems nearly impossible if your experience is not actually random.

hairyfigment 11 Feb 2017 22:51 UTC
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in reply to: entirelyuseless’s comment on: Forcing Anthropics: Boltzmann Brains
One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. I don’t even believe that you believe the conclusion.

hairyfigment 9 Feb 2017 23:06 UTC
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in reply to: Erfeyah’s comment on: Stupid Questions February 2017

I am completely ignoring the very important part of defining God

That is indeed the chief problem here. I’m assuming you’re talking about the prior probability which we have before looking at the evidence.

hairyfigment 9 Feb 2017 11:33 UTC
4 points
in reply to: MrMind’s comment on: Interview with Nassim Taleb ‘Trump makes sense to a grocery store owner’
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I bet all of my money he didn’t predict Trump would win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote by millions. That article gives no hint he even knows it happened. Meanwhile, Five Thirty-Eight supposedly based most of the probability mass they assigned to Trump winning on a technical EC victory, and they said he had one chance in four (one in three earlier).

The fact that a 25% chance can happen with potentially devastating consequences is roughly why Trump the outsider might blow up America, though I’d give that no more than a 13% chance.

hairyfigment 8 Feb 2017 18:24 UTC
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in reply to: entirelyuseless’s comment on: Forcing Anthropics: Boltzmann Brains
I don’t think that’s descriptively true at all. Regardless of whether or not I see a useful way to address it, I still wouldn’t expect to dissolve momentarily with no warning.

Now, this may be because humans can’t easily believe in novel claims. But “my” experience certainly seems more coherent than one would expect a BB’s to seem, and this calls out for explanation.

hairyfigment 7 Feb 2017 0:22 UTC
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in reply to: whpearson’s comment on: Why I’m working on satisficing intelligence augmentation (and not blogging about it much)

If it can’t be solved, how will MIRI know?

For one, they wouldn’t find a single example of a solution. They wouldn’t see any fscking human beings maintaining any goal not defined in terms of their own perceptions—eg, making others happy, having an historical artifact, or visiting a place where some event actually happened—despite changing their understanding of our world’s fundamental reality.

If I try to interpret the rest of your response charitably, it looks like you’re saying the AGI can have goals wholly defined in terms of perception, because it can avoid wireheading via satisficing. That seems incompatible with what you said before, which again invoked “some abstract notion of good and bad” rather than sensory data. So I have to wonder if you understand anything I’m saying, or if you’re conflating ontological crises with some less important “paradigm shift”—something, at least, that you have made no case for caring about.