infotropism

Karma: 436

infotropism 26 Mar 2012 9:23 UTC
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on: Free research help, editing and article downloads for LessWrong
Hi, could anyone help me obtain

“Limits of Scientific Inquiry” by G. Holton, R. S. Morison ( 1978 )

and

“What is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today’s Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable.” Brockman, John (2007)

Thanks in advance

infotropism 10 Aug 2009 20:57 UTC
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in reply to: UnholySmoke’s comment on: Dreams with Damaged Priors
So yes, you’d likely lose the fun of normal dreaming - experiencing weird stuff, letting the insane flow of your dreams carry you like a leaf on a mad wind and not even feeling confused by it, but rather feeling like it was plain normal and totally making sense, having lots of warm fuzzy feelings and partway formed thoughts about your experiences in that dream.

Yet you might on the other hand gain the fun of being able to, for instance, capitalize on your dreaming time to learn and do some thinking. Not to mention the pleasure and sense of security derived from knowing your rational mind can work even under (some) adverse conditions.

infotropism 19 Jul 2009 5:59 UTC
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on: Are You Anosognosic?
From the popularity of the “Strangest thing an AI could tell you” post, and anosognosia tidbits in general, this topic seems to fascinate many people here. I for one would find it freakishly interesting to discover that I had such an impairment. In other words, I’d have motivation to at least genuinely investigate the idea, and even accept it.

How I’d come to accept it, would probably involve a method other than just “knowing it intuitively”, like how I intuitively know the face of a relative to be that of a relative, or how I know with utter, gut level certainty that I have three arms. Considering that we are, well, rationalists, couldn’t we be supposed to be able to use other methods, to discover truth, than our senses and intuitions ? Even if the truth is about ourselves, and contradicts our personal feeling ?

After all, it’s not like people in the early 20th century had observed tiny pictures of atoms, they deduced their existence from relatively nonintuitive clues glued together into a sound theoretical framework. Observing nature and deducing its laws has often been akin to being blind, and yet managing to find your way around by using indirect means.

If I had to guess, I’d still not be certain that, even being a rationalist using scientific methods and all those tools that help straighten chains of inference, as well as finding anosognosia to be more of a treat than a pain to be rationalized, would make it a sure bet that I’d not yet retain a blindspot.

Maybe the prospect of some missing things could be too horrid to behold, not matter how abstractly, perhaps beholding them may require me to think in a way that’s just too complicated, abstract and alien for me to ever notice it as being something salient, let alone comprehensible.

Still that’s really not what my intuition would lead me to believe, what with truth being entangled and so forth. And such a feeling, such an intuition, may be exactly part of the problem of why and how I’d not pay attention to such an impairment. Perhaps I just don’t want to know the truth, and willingly look away each time I can see it. Then again, if we’re talking rationalization and lying to oneself, that has a particular feeling, and that is something one could be able to notice.

infotropism 17 Jul 2009 2:15 UTC
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in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
This, applies more generally than to anosognosia alone, and was very illuminating, thank you !

So, provided that as we grow, some parts of our brain, mind, change, then this upsets the balance of our mind as a whole.

Let’s say someone relied on his intuition for years, and consistently observed it correlated well with reality. That person would have had a very good reason to more and more rely on that intuition, and uses its output unquestioningly, automatically to fuel other parts of his mind.

In such a person’s mind, one of the central gears would be that intuition. The whole machine would eventually depend upon it, and to remove intuition would mean, at best, that years of training and fine-tuning that rational machine would be lost; and a new way of thinking would have to be reached, trained again; most people wouldn’t even realize that, let alone be bold enough to admit it and start back from scratch.

And so some years later, the black-boxed process of intuition starts to deviate from correctly predicting reality for that person. And the whole rational machine carries on using it, because that gear just became too well established, and the whole machine lost its fluidity as it specialized in exploiting that easily available mental ressource.

Substitute emotions, drives for intuition, and that may work in the same way too. And so from being a well calibrated rationalist, you start deviating, slowly losing your mind, getting it wrong more and more often when you get an idea, or try to predict an action, or decide what would be to your best advantage, never realizing that one of the once dependable gears in your mind had slowly been worn away.

infotropism 16 Jul 2009 20:36 UTC
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on: Absolute denial for atheists
There’s no such thing as an absolute denial macro. And I sure hope this to trigger yours.

infotropism 16 Jul 2009 7:01 UTC
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in reply to: PeterS’s comment on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
What ?

infotropism 16 Jul 2009 0:34 UTC
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in reply to: topynate’s comment on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
Yes I would. Why the acute interest ?

Is it because by admitting to being able to believe that, one would admit to having no strong enough internal experience of morality ?

Experience of morality, that is, in a way that would make him say “no that’s so totally wrong, and I know because I have experienced both genuine guilt and shame, AND also the embarrassment of being caught falsely signaling, AND I know how they are different things”. I have a tendancy to always dig deep enough to find how it was selfish for me to do or feel something in particular. And yet I can’t always help but feeling guilt or shame beyond whose deep roots exist aside from my conscious rationalizations of how what I do benefit myself. Oh, and sometimes, it also benefits other people too.

infotropism 16 Jul 2009 0:08 UTC
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in reply to: taw’s comment on: Our society lacks good self-preservation mechanisms

Now we have a lot higher GDP

Yes indeed. Do you expect that to remain true after a nuclear war too ? More basically, I suppose I could resume my idea as follows : you can poke a hole in a country’s infrastructure or economy, and the hole will heal with time because the rest is still healthy enough to help with that—just as a hole poked into a life form can heal, provided that the hole isn’t big enough to kill the thing, or send it into a downward spiral of degeneration.

But yes, society isn’t quite an organism in the same sense. There you probably could have full scale cataplasia, and see something survive someplace, and perhaps even from there, start again from scratch (or better, or worse, than scratch).

infotropism 15 Jul 2009 23:51 UTC
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in reply to: steven0461’s comment on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
Agranarian is the new vegetarian.

infotropism 15 Jul 2009 23:39 UTC
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in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
Well, kidding aside, your argument, taken from Pearl, seems elegant. I’ll however have to read the book before I feel entitled to having an opinion on that one, as I haven’t grokked the idea, merely a faint impression of it and how it sounds healthy.

So at this point, I only have some of my own ideas and intuitions about the problem, and haven’t searched for the answers yet.

Some considerations though :

Our idea of causality is based upon a human intuition. Could it be that it is just as wrong as vitalism, time, little billiard balls bumping around, or the yet confused problem of consciousness ? That’s what would bug me if I had no good technical explanation, one provably unbiased by my prior intuitive belief about causality (otherwise there’s always the risk I’ve just been rationalizing my intuition).

Every time we observe “causality”, we really only observe correlations, and then deduce that there is something more behind those. But is that a simple explanation ? Could we devise a simpler consistent explanation to account for our observation of correlations ? As in, totally doing away with causality ? Or at the very least, redefining causality as something that doesn’t quite correspond to our folk definition of it ?

Grossly, my intuition, when I hear the word causality is something along the lines of

″ Take event A and event B, where those events are very small, such that they aren’t made of interconnected parts themselves—they are the parts, building blocks that can be used in bigger, complex systems. Place event A anywhere within the universe and time, then provided the rules of physics are the same each time we do that, and nothing interferes in, event B will always occur, with probability 1, independantly of my observing it or not.” Ok, so could (and should ?) we say that causality is when a prior event implies a probability of one for a certain posterior event to occur ? Or else, is it then not probability 1, just an arbitrarily very high probability ?

In the latter case with less than 1 probability, then that really violates my folk notion of causality, and I don’t really see what’s causal about a thing that can capriciously choose to happen or not, even if the conditions are the same.

In the former case, I can see how that would be a very new thing, I mean, probability 1 for one event implying that another will occur ? What better, firmer foundation to build an universe upon ? It feels really, very comfortable and convenient, all too comfortable in fact.

Basically, neither of those possibilities strike me as obviously right, for those reasons and then some, the idea I have of causality is confused at best. And yet, I’d say it is not too unsophisticated or pondered as it stands. Which makes me wonder how people who’d have put less thought in it (probably a lot of people) can deservedly feel any more comfortable with saying it exists with no afterthought (almost everyone), even as they don’t have any good explanation for it (which is a rare thing), such as perhaps the one given by Pearl.

infotropism 15 Jul 2009 9:41 UTC
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in reply to: taw’s comment on: Our society lacks good self-preservation mechanisms
What should be realized here, however, is that Hiroshima could become a relatively ok place because it could receive a huge amount of help for being part of the country with such a high GDP.

Hiroshima didn’t magically get better. A large scale nuclear war would destroy our economy, and thus our capability to respond and patch the damage that way. For that matter, I’m not even sure our undisturbed response systems could be able to deal with more than a few nuked cities. Also please consider that Hiroshima was nuked by a 18 kt bomb, which is nothing like the average 400 − 500 kt nukes we have now.

infotropism 15 Jul 2009 8:18 UTC
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on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
1 ) That human beings are all individual instances of the exact same mind. You’re really the same person as any random other one, and vice versa. And of course that single mind had to be someone blind enough not to chance upon that fact ever, regardless of how numerous he was.

2 ) That there are only 16 real people, of which you are, and that this is all but a VR game. Subsequently results in all the players simultaneously being still unable to be conscious of that fact, AND asking that you and the AI be removed from the game. (Inspiration : misunderstanding situation in page 55-56 of Iain Banks’s Look to Windwards).

3 ) That we are in the second age of the universe : time has been running backwards for a few billion years. Our minds are actually the result of the original minds of previous people being rewound, their whole life to be undone, and finally negated into oblivion. All our thoughts processes are of course horribly distorted, insane mirror versions of the originals, and make no sense whatsoever (in the original timeframe, which is the valid one).

4 )

5 ) That our true childhood is between age 0 and ~ 50-90 (with a few exceptional individuals reaching maturity sooner or later). If you thought the ‘adult conspiracy’ already lied a lot, and well to ‘children’, prepare yourself for a shock in a few decades.

6 ) That the AI just deduced that the laws of physics can only be consistent with us being eternally trapped in a time loop. The extent of the time loop is : thirty two seconds spread evenly around now. Nothing in particular can be done about it. Enjoy your remaining 10 seconds.

7 ) Causality doesn’t exist. Not only is the universe timeless, but causality is an epiphenomenon, which we only believe because of a confusion of our ideas. Who ever observed a “causation” ? Did you, like, expect causation particles jumping between atoms or something ? Only correlation exists.

8 ) We actually exist in a simulation. The twist is : somewhere out there, some people really crossed the line with the ruling AI. We’re slightly modified versions of these people : modified in a way as to experience the maximum amount of their zuul feeling, which is the very worst nirdy you could imagine.

9 ) The universe has actually 5 spatial macro dimensions, of which we perceive only 3. Considering what we look like if you take the other 2 into account, this obliviousness may actually not be all too surprising.

10 ) That any single human being has actually a 22 % probability of not being able to be conscious of one or more of these 9 statements above.

infotropism 15 Jul 2009 7:39 UTC
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in reply to: Liron’s comment on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
Funnily enough, you realize this is quite similar to what you’d need to make Chalmers right, and p-zombies possible, right ?

infotropism 14 Jul 2009 22:15 UTC
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in reply to: taw’s comment on: Our society lacks good self-preservation mechanisms
Under those assumptions your estimates are sound, really. However, should we only count the direct deaths incurred as a consequence of a direct nuclear strike ? Or should we also take into account the nuclear fallout, radiations, nuclear winter, ecosystems crashing down, massive economy and infrastructure disruption, etc. ? How much more worse does it get if we take such considerations into account ?

Aside from those considerations, I really agree with your idea of getting our priorities right, based on numbers. That’s exactly the reason why I’d advocate antiagathic research above a lot of other things, which actually kill and make less people suffer than aging itself does, but not everyone seems to agree to that.

infotropism 14 Jul 2009 22:04 UTC
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in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: Our society lacks good self-preservation mechanisms
I see your point, sometimes we may have already written the bottom line, and all that comes afterward is trying to justify it.

However, if an existential risk is conceivable, how much would you be ready to pay, or do, to investigate it ? Your answer could plausibly range from nothing, to everything you have. There ought to be a healthy middle there.

I could certainly understand how someone would arrive at saying that the problem isn’t worth investigating further, because that person has a definite explanation of why other people care about that particular question, their reason being biased.

I’d for instance think of religion, as an example of that. I wouldn’t read the Bible and centuries of apologetics and debates to decide that God does or doesn’t exist. I’d just check to see if at first, people started to justify the existence of a god for other reasons than it existing. That’s certainly a much more efficient way of looking at the problem.

Is there no sum of money, no amount of effort, however trivial, that could nevertheless be expanded on such an investigation, considering its possible repercussions, however unlikely those seem to be ?

infotropism 14 Jul 2009 21:39 UTC
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in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: Our society lacks good self-preservation mechanisms
A fair point. So what you’re telling me is that we should desire a future civilization that is descended from our own, probably one that will have some common points with current humanity, like, some of our values, desires (or values, desires who’d have grown from our own) etc. ?

infotropism 14 Jul 2009 21:33 UTC
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in reply to: nerzhin’s comment on: Our society lacks good self-preservation mechanisms
How many deaths, directly or indirectly derived from the pope’s prohibition, would be enough for his influence to be considered negative in this case ?

infotropism 14 Jul 2009 21:09 UTC
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in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: Our society lacks good self-preservation mechanisms
Technological progress seems to be necessary, but not sufficient to ensure our civilization’s long term survival.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem quite adamant on arguing against the idea that our current civilization is in danger of extinction, when so many other people argue the other way around. This seems like it has the potential to degenerate into a fruitless debate, or even a flame war.

Yet you probably have some good points to make; why not think it over, and make a post about it, if your opinion is so different, and substantiated by facts and good reasoning, as I am sure it must be ?

infotropism 14 Jul 2009 21:00 UTC
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in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: Our society lacks good self-preservation mechanisms

I sometime wonder why people think this outcome is bad.

Mind if I ask, but, as opposed to considering it good ?

infotropism 14 Jul 2009 20:57 UTC
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in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: Our society lacks good self-preservation mechanisms

hypothetical “disasters”, civilisation doesn’t end—it is just that it is no longer led by humans

You’d think that’s actually pretty much what most of us humans care about.