interstice

• intersticeMay 21, 2025, 1:19 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: 0blivion’s comment on: The Crawl­ing Chaos, or why im­mor­tal­ity is both in­evitable and a curse

  They’d need not only to simulate quantum states, they’d need the whole list of all quantum events and their results in the spacetime they are simulating in order to reproduce you perfectly

  Not really though. Your brain has ~10^15 synapses. It literally doesn’t have enough space to store records of its entire past light cone. So there is actually some equivalence class of possible past histories which could produce an identical brain state to the one you have now.

  there is no conceptual way they could simulate you particularly

  They definitely could, by just randomly sampling human brains they would have some low probability of picking out yours or mine in particular. With a randomized simulation they could pick us out with much higher probability.

  In order to simulate a particular individual, it would require far more than merely simulating the species homo sapiens[...]

  Yeah but the point is, for however many unlikely coincidences/​”coin flips” the aliens would need to get right, the Boltzmann fluctuations would have to get at least that many coin flips right, plus more because they aren’t modeling any deterministic parts of the process.

Amish NWO

• intersticeMay 20, 2025, 7:33 PM

  3 points

  1

  in reply to: 0blivion’s comment on: The Crawl­ing Chaos, or why im­mor­tal­ity is both in­evitable and a curse

  Even if a civilization decided to simulate humans on a massive scale, the probability of getting someone identical to you through a NON RANDOM process… Is nihil

  You need to consider partially random/​partially non-random processes. Imagine an alien civilization that decided what other race to simulate/​what history to simulate based on flipping a series of quantum coins. The overall amplitude for that process picking you out will be very low, but still higher than the Boltzmann brain scenario. Why? Because the aliens will intentionally simulate the structured, deterministic parts of your life history and so will need less “random coincidences” to pick you out when compared to pure quantum fluctuations. This is even more so the case if we imagine future AIs simulating us, or humans in an alternate quantum branch who want to simulate alternative histories and decide on the exact person/​civilization to simulate by flipping quantum coins. Yes the amplitude for this occurring will be very small, but still exponentially higher than the Boltzmann brain scenario.

  Drake equation[...]can conclude that the rarity of conscious life is extremely high. We can even infer that it is likely we are the only conscious beings in the entire observable universe

  Have you seen Robin Hanson’s Grabby Aliens argument? Basically, he argues that there are likely other aliens civilizations out there(in the observable universe) based on how early we are in the universe’s history. But even if we are the only life in the observable universe, it’s once again all about the relative likelihood. Life was at any rate likely enough for us to exist, that’s enough to see that it has far more relative likelihood compared to purely random fluctuations.

• intersticeMay 20, 2025, 6:26 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: 0blivion’s comment on: The Crawl­ing Chaos, or why im­mor­tal­ity is both in­evitable and a curse

  Unless you can prove that this is still far more probable than what I described which would mean that, most of your conscious time would be spent in conditions similar to our current conditions right now.

  So, are you talking here about your and my current conscious experience, or what continuations of our conscious experience will tend to look like past the point at which we would typically die in baseline reality? If you’re referring to what we’re experiencing right now, that is a relatively “normal” human life, then I think most of the probability mass for that experience is either on (a) relatively “normal” instantiations or (b) possibly simulations, but actual simulations on a computer arising from a “normal” causal history, not Boltzmann brains. Now if you’re thinking of possible continuations of our experience past what would normally be our biological death in “baseline” reality, then those would have their probability mass concentrated on scenario (b), simulations on computers arising from a simple causal history(perhaps run by aliens, or future humanity, or an AI built by either).

  So, basically, once you are dead, I think it is far more likely that you will be instantiated again in broken circumstances rather than in normal ones

  I think you’re conflating subjective time and objective time. There is no 1:1 relationship between your internal subjective “timeline” and time in the external universe. So there’s no reason to expect you to be instantiated “again” after your biological death; rather, there exist some weird possible continuations of your experience somewhere else in the multiverse, which would mostly be emulations with a simple causal origin.

  Remember, “it all adds up to normality”. The hypothesis “we are Boltzmann brains” predicts that we should see our experience degenerate into random static at any moment. Since we do not see this we should update against that hypothesis.

• intersticeMay 20, 2025, 3:16 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: 0blivion’s comment on: The Crawl­ing Chaos, or why im­mor­tal­ity is both in­evitable and a curse

  Most conscious beings in the universe would be simulated, in this scenario. Moreover, most would simply be what we can call “abominations”, because they would have some mental illness or some fundamental problem making them broken shells. Most of the time , they would be simulated only for a few seconds before collapsing into nothingness.

  OK I think I see where you are coming from more, you’re thinking of like conscious beings being instantiated out of random noise, like Boltzmann brains. I think your intuition that most beings would arise in this fashion is mistaken: instead the vast majority of beings would find themselves in situations like ours, having arisen in a self-bootstrapping way from a relatively small random fluctuation(the origin of life in our case). The reason being is that far fewer coincidences(that is, unlikely quantum measurements) are required to generate a being in the “normal” way* than in the “Boltzmann brain” way: a relatively small number of fluctuations needed to seed the Earth with favorable conditions for life, say, then a relatively deterministic process of evolution occurring VS an entire brain state appearing out of the void**. This means that beings arising in “normal” scenarios are exponentially more likely than “Boltzmann brain” scenarios.

  *Note that “normal” here could include AIs building simulations of people or other weird scenarios, I just mean to exclude “people arising out of random vacuum fluctuations for a yottosecond” or such things.

  **of course to explain a particular being’s life you need to condition on more details than the origin of life, but the point is that a being’s life/​brain state has a lot of redundancy which can better be explained/​takes fewer coincidences to explain given an evolutionary account of their origins VS Boltzmann brain

• intersticeMay 20, 2025, 11:52 AM

  3 points

  0

  on: The Crawl­ing Chaos, or why im­mor­tal­ity is both in­evitable and a curse

  Proposition 6 is the weakest: yes going by entropy alone unhappy brain states might be more common than happy ones, but most conscious beings in the universe will have some influence over their surroundings which they will try to use to make their situation good rather than bad. This is the reason humans have good lives on Earth(relative to maxent, anyway)

• intersticeMay 12, 2025, 5:44 PM

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: moridinamael’s comment on: It’s Okay to Feel Bad for a Bit

  given that The Mind Illuminated is often put forth as a remarkably accessible and lucid map through the stages of vipassana

  FWIW there are a fair number of meditation people who anti-endorse TMI as a practice guide, see e.g. this twitter thread.

• intersticeMay 6, 2025, 3:24 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: plex’s comment on: New­ton’s sec­ond law ex­plained: it works in many universes

  I think the math involved is typically closer to non-quantum statistical field theory, it just so happens that quantum and statistical field theory share a lot of mathematical techniques.

• intersticeApr 25, 2025, 3:50 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: ryan_green­blatt’s Shortform

  but there seemingly are some unintuitive reasons why clever approaches for doing the later could be better

  Because there might be some other programs with a lot of computational resources which scan through simple universes looking for programs to run?

  Alien civilizations might race to the bottom by spending resources making their civilization easier to point at

  This one doesn’t feel so unintuitive to me since “easy to point at” is somewhat like “has a lot of copies” so it’s kinda similar to the biological desire to reproduce(though I assume you’re alluding to another motivation for becoming easy to point at?)

• intersticeApr 4, 2025, 2:34 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: On Down­votes, Cul­tural Fit, and Why I Won’t Be Post­ing Again

  Still, this is not a truth-maximizing website

  I mean, I agree with this, but popularity has a better correlation with truth here compared with any other website—or more broadly, social group—that I know of. And actually, I think it’s probably not possible for a relatively open venue like this to be perfectly truth-seeking. To go further in that direction, I think you ultimately need some sort of institutional design to explicitly reward accuracy, like prediction markets. But the ways in which LW differs from pure truth-and-importance-seeking don’t strike me as entirely bad things either—posts which are inspiring or funny get upvoted more, for instance. I think it would be difficult to nucleate a community focused on truth-seeking without “emotional energy” of this sort.

• intersticeApr 4, 2025, 2:19 PM

  25 points

  15

  in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform

  Or disadvantage, because it makes it harder to make long-term plans and commitments?

• intersticeApr 4, 2025, 2:42 AM

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Ex­ist­ing UDTs test the limits of Bayesi­anism (and con­sis­tency)

  It’s rare to see someone with the prerequisites for understanding the arguments (e.g. AIT and metamathematics) trying to push back on this

  My view is probably different from Cole’s, but it has struck me that the universe seems to have a richer mathematical structure than one might expect given a generic AIT-ish view(e.g. continuous space/​time, quantum mechanics, diffeomorphism invariance/​gauge invariance), so we should perhaps update that the space of mathematical structures instantiating life/​sentience might be narrower than it initially appears(that is, if “generic” mathematical structures support life/​agency, we should expect ourselves to be in a generic universe, but instead we seem to be in a richly structured universe, so this is an update that maybe we can only be in a rich/​structured universe[or that life/​agency is just much more likely to arise in such a universe]). Taken to an extreme, perhaps it’s possible to derive a priori that the universe has to look like the standard model. (Of course, you could run the standard model on a Turing machine, so the statement would have to be about how the universe relates/​appears to agents inhabiting it, not its ultimate ontology which is inaccessible since any Turing-complete structure can simulate any other)

• intersticeApr 1, 2025, 1:29 AM

  7 points

  7

  in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: On Down­votes, Cul­tural Fit, and Why I Won’t Be Post­ing Again

  They care if you have a PhD, they don’t care if you have researched something for 5 years in your own free time.

  I don’t think this is right. If anything, the median lw user would be more likely to trust a random blogger who researched a topic on their own for 5 years vs a PhD, assuming the blogger is good at presenting their ideas in a persuasive manner.

Hal­i­fax – ACX Mee­tups Every­where Spring 2025

• intersticeMar 24, 2025, 7:40 PM

  13 points

  4

  in reply to: Eric Neyman’s comment on: Will Je­sus Christ re­turn in an elec­tion year?

  Marketing. It was odd enough for you to post about on LW!

• intersticeFeb 28, 2025, 12:34 AM

  9 points

  4

  in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: You can just wear a suit

  Wearing a suit in an inappropriate context is like wearing a fedora. It says “I am socially clueless enough to do random inappropriate things”

  This is far too broadly stated, the actual message people will take away from an unexpected suit is verrrrry context-dependent, depending on (among other things) who the suit-wearer is, who the people observing are, how the suit-wearer carries himself, the particular situation the suit is worn in, etc. etc. etc. Judging from the post it sounds like those things create an overall favorable impression for lsusr?(it’s hard to tell from just a post of course, but still)

• intersticeFeb 16, 2025, 10:49 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: interstice’s comment on: Player vs. Char­ac­ter: A Two-Level Model of Ethics

  But I still have a problem with the post’s tone because if you really internalized that “you” are the player, then your reaction to the informational content should be like “I’m a beyond-‘human’ uncontrollable force, BOOYEAH!!”, not “I’m a beyond-human uncontrollable force, ewww tentacles😣”

• intersticeFeb 16, 2025, 7:36 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: Player vs. Char­ac­ter: A Two-Level Model of Ethics

  Goodness maximizing as undefined without an arbitrary choice of values

  By “(non-socially-constructed) Goodness” I mean the goodness of a state of affairs as it actually seems to that particular person really-deep-down. Which can have both selfish—perhaps “arbitrary” from a certain perspective—and non-selfish components.

• intersticeFeb 15, 2025, 10:33 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: interstice’s comment on: Player vs. Char­ac­ter: A Two-Level Model of Ethics

  I changed my mind about this, I actually think “lovecraftian horror” might be somewhat better than “monkey” as a mental image, but maybe “(non-socially-constructed)-Goodness-Maximizing AGI” or “void from which things spontaneously arise” or “the voice of God” could be even better?

• intersticeFeb 9, 2025, 1:42 AM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: omnizoid’s comment on: Keep­ing it (less than) real: Against ℶ₂ pos­si­ble peo­ple or worlds

  He doesn’t only talk about properties but also what people actually are according to our best physical theories, which is continuous wavefunctions—of which there are only beth-1.