So how do you create an incentive for a company to do private research and development?
jhuffman
Karma: 942
I think the “random words and phrases” I keep seeing in these comments is a bit of an exaggeration. Reading the (completely undocumented) wikipedia article I get the understanding that they crafted these poems using their own previous work, original ideas as well as phrases clipped wholesale from a book of quotations and deliberately convoluted rhymes from a rhyming dictionary etc. Nonetheless they strung them together with some sense of purpose—the selection was not technically random.
If you read an example from that article you will see that it has some continuity—its not the gibberish you would get from having a computer program randomly selecting phrases. So rather what you have is poetry written by poets using an unconventional method for an unconventional purpose. Its not surprising there are those who found this interesting—but I know absolutely nothing of poetry.
Missing the point I think. Einstein wasn’t stating this as any sort of appeal to authority. He was expressing his confidence in his mathematical proofs.
I don’t really see any commentary on the underlying assumptions here made about the badness of being dead. In summary for a physicalist, being dead has no value: it is a null state. Null states cannot be compared with non-null states, so being dead is not worse than being alive.
To put that another way, I cannot be worse off by being dead because there won’t be an I at that point. An argument can be made that I have no personal interest in my being dead—only other living people have a stake in that. That doesn’t change the fact that I want to live. There is an I here that wants this, and wants it indefinitely. But once I’m gone, its not a problem for me.
So I tend to favor arguments related to organ-donation since future living people are unlikely to get more benefit from me than current living people in need of organ transplants.
Also, there is a real but small chance that cryo-preservation could lead to a sort of hell—what if I’m only thawed to be a permanent exhibit in a zoo or to be experimented upon or subjected to conversations with classical-language enthusiasts.
So there is a non-zero chance of being consigned to hell if I’m cryo-preserved; whereas once I’m dead its a null state and can be considered an even-break if you really must try and attach a value to it.
Notice the subtle difference in language though. You are talking about dying. Dying is pretty obviously a bad thing. Its only once you are dead that you are in a null state.
Cryo-preservation does not prevent you from dying. You still go through the dying process, and I doubt you are very much comforted by the small chance that you could be revived at some point.
I’m not sure why you are so dismissive of your first footnote. The question of being adopted is a testable hypothesis. Whether you actually test it or not, you do not need to rely on your trust of your parents to know the truth here. Since the claim that you are not adopted is not particularly extraordinary there is little reason to actually go and test it. Also, knowing the truth here one or way or the other probably would change very little about how you live your day-to-day life.
Religious claims are extraordinary and if true would have a profound impact on how you should live your day-to-day life. Many “religious believers” are in fact so good at partitioning that this is not the case—they do not live as though their beliefs are true.
Yes, I will make value judgments concerning the merits and characters of both those people and people who “apply reason” in an irrationally discriminatory matter.
When exactly will the probability estimate go way up? Someone living in the holodeck obviously isn’t aware they are living “in the future” or not. The probability has to be calculated from the inside, so I don’t see how it would ever change.
Getting Over Dust Theory
Zack has written it here for you, but if you’d clicked the links in my first sentence you’d have a fuller explanation than anything I could provide myself. I also didn’t want to risk getting a discussion hung on some discrepancy in my account of it so felt it better to refer to source material.
Care to share why you don’t buy it?
I mean, I don’t either but I can’t think of a rational reason not to.
Also we should note that it doesn’t even really matter if you are running in a computer simulation; your conscious state could be encoded in anything with enough detail structure to represent your entire state for a particular time slice. Whether there is an encoding for prior or latter time slices isn’t even important.
Its easiest to work up to this by starting with “mind uploading” and then playing games with the information such as pausing it, rewinding it, removing time slices etc. Thats pretty much the first couple chapters of the novel.
Good point; I don’t think there is a lot of difference between the two problem statements. Boltzmann brains may require a somewhat more complex structure, if that problem includes requirements for information processing while time passes. Dust theory doesn’t really require such complex structures; just structures that have enough memory and state to perceive a passage of time and a processing of information.
I suppose I am over-generalizing if not outright misusing the A.P. It seems that a similar principal does apply here though. Egan’s rejection of Dust theory is based on the fact that we observe an orderly universe. I’m arguing if we didn’t perceive an orderly universe we wouldn’t even debate if dust theory was true; maybe observers in a chaotic universe wouldn’t consider it a problem at all but a simple and obvious fact that they owe their existence to.
Yes I perceive nearly infinitely more order than is necessary. But in an infinite configuration space some observers would remember or experience a perception of that. What are the odds its me? Well if I weren’t perceiving that—I wouldn’t even be troubled by this problem! Only entities that remember perceptions of a universe of far greater complexity than needed to support their information state perceive a problem.
What makes such interactions a requirement?
Well, I agree we need to base theory on observable facts. Dust theory is more of a thought experiment or problem related to the nature of consciousness, which is not something we’ve been able to attack empirically. Nonetheless, Egan dismisses it with this “orderly universe” business. I’m arguing that there is a selection bias—if dust theory were true then only in an “orderly universe” do we argue about dust theory.
But I’m starting to come around to the position I think most of you are taking, which is that this is just a “pink unicorn” what-if proposition that isn’t worth contemplating—since we do in fact have an orderly universe which seems to account for things the way they are.
My problem is that once I accept the information state theory of consciousness, “dust based” conscious entities seems like an inevitable result, unless the actual universe is sufficiently bounded in time and space that the statistical likliehood of this is prohibitive.
But for anyone that adopts a many-worlds interpretation of QM or any variant of cosmology theory that yields an unbounded configuration space then I don’t see a way around this problem.
It’s empirically wrong: my experiences have been highly ordered in the past and so I expect them to be ordered in the future, and not to jump randomly around the universe just because there exist embodiments of every possible future state I might experience.
Just because the encoding of the different states are scattered about the universe doesn’t mean the conscious experience does not appear to be contiguous and linear to the observer; while they’d be in the minority in an infinite configuration space it is impossible that there won’t be states without memories of contiguous experiences.
Also, I agree. Based on our experiences we can conclude that we are not dust-minds.
Could either of you explain how you would expect your current state of consciousness with its memories of experiences to be any different from how it is now if it were a dust-mind?
I STILL am noticing that.
When you say you are still noticing it, what you are saying is that you have a memory of noticing it before, and you perceive it now. Talking to me about experiencing the passage of time amounts to just saying “dust theory is wrong”. I agree with that conclusion, but you haven’t given me any information I don’t already seem to have 33 years worth of.
It is extremely unlikely, but in an unbounded configuration space it simply has to happen, and to happen many times.
Many scientists and rationalists won’t offer a “why” alternative because we hit an information boundary at the unique cosmological singularity of the big bang. And most scientists think we should have evidence which we can use to build models that make accurate, verifiable predictions before we claim to understand the “why” of anything.
Can you imagine a world where everyone followed this advice? I don’t really know what would happen but it seems possible if all disposable income is given to people who don’t have an income in regions that don’t have an economy that this would choke economies and bringing the entire world population down to a subsistence level.