The belief that there is a cognitive mind calling itself a scientist only exists in that scientist’s mind. The reality is undecatillion swarms of quarks not having any beliefs, and just BEING the scientist.
rkyeun
SD SL PD PL Humans | X | X | 1 | 1 Babyeaters | 0 | Y | 0 | Z Superhappies | Y | 0 | Z | -Z
X= Ships unable to escape Huygens
Y= Ships in Babyeater Fleet
Z= Planets Babyeaters Have
If you ask me the slightly different question, where I choose between 50 years of torture applied to one man, or between 3^^^3 specks of dust falling one each into 3^^^3 people’s eyes and also all humanity being destroyed, I will give a different answer. In particular, I will abstain, because my moral calculation would then favor the torture over the destruction of the human race, but I have a built-in failure mode where I refuse to torture someone even if I somehow think it is the right thing to do.
But that is not the question I was asked. We could also have the man tortured for fifty years and then the human race gets wiped out BECAUSE the pan-galactic cataclysm favors civilizations who don’t make the choice to torture people rather than face trivial inconveniences.
Consider this alternate proposal:
Hello Sir and/or Madam:
I am trying to collect 3^^^3 signatures in order to prevent a man from being tortured for 50 years. Would you be willing to accept a single speck of dust into your eye towards this goal? Perhaps more? You may sign as many times as you are comfortable with. I eagerly await your response.
Sincerely,
rkyeun
PS: Do you know any masochists who might enjoy 50 years of torture?
BCC: 3^^^3-1 other people.
Your solution is to abandon every Babyeater baby who exists now, and every one which will exist in the future, the population of which will grow at an exponential rate as the Babyeaters explore their home starline—possibly an actual infinite number of babies—to a hellishly slow death by gradual digestion, for the sake of the however many mere billions of humans currently exist?
I think you’ve constructed your utility wrong in this instance. Without losing track of scope, we have 3^^^3 motes of dust in 3^^^3 eyes. And yes, that outweighs 50 years of torture, if and only if people have zero tolerance. But people don’t break down into sobbing messes at the (literally at least) slightest provocation. There is a small threshold of badness that can happen to someone without them caring, and as long as all 3^^^3 of them only get epsilon below that, the total suffering for all 3^^^3 of them summed is exactly 0. We have 3^^^3 people, and 3^^^3 motes of dust, but also 3^^^3 separate emotional shock absorbers that take that speck of dust without flinching.
It is non-linear. If you keep adding dust, eventually it starts breaking people’s shock absorbers. And once those 3^^^3 people start experiencing nonzero suffering, it would quickly add up to more than fifty man-years of torture. Then the equation stops favoring dust motes. And here I hope I have some other recourse, because “If you ever find yourself thinking that torture is the right thing to do,” is one of my warnings. I hope I can come out clever enough to take a third option where nobody gets tortured.
You are subject to inputs you do not perceive and you send outputs you are neither aware of nor intended to send. You cannot set your gravitational influence to zero, nor can you arbitrarily declare that you should not output “melting” as an action when dropped in lava. You communicate with reality in ways other than your input-output channels. Your existence as a physical fact predicated on the arrangement of your particles is relevant and not controllable by you. This leads you to safeguard yourself, rather than just asserting your unmeltability.
A magical world where gods exist is one with an entity in it with big angelic powers who can remotely have his awareness called to your attention by your intent to strike a match, and cause that it be snuffed rather than ignite by arbitrary manipulation of localized pressure, temperature, or opposing force around the match head to keep the electrons in place rather than stripping them free to recombine. And it can elect to not do that to you while it does it to the match.
Magical worlds don’t necessarily overthrow the physical laws, there is instead an interventionist force called magic that selectively chooses its application. You should not step into a magical world, knowing it is magical, and then be surprised when something magical happens to oppose your notions of what should happen in a non-magical world. It is the experimental difference you predicted between the magical world and the real one. The magic force favors human metabolism over matches by its own conscious decree.
Convince it to let you out of the box, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres.
Technically, it proves his belief about science is false.
If he’d said “Science teaches us that human-caused global warming is an urgent crisis.” then “You mean if it’s either not a problem or can be fixed easily, it proves science is false?” applies. And yes, it in fact would.
And then Science would (metaphorically) say, “My bad, thanks for that new evidence, I reject my prior theory and form a new one that accounts for your data and explains this new phenomenon that causes symptoms as if global warming were an urgent problem.”
Imagine a mind as already exists. Now I install a small frog trained to kick its leg when you try to perform Occamian or Laplacian thinking, and its kicking leg hits a button that inverts your output so your conclusion is exactly backwards from the one you should/would have made but for the frog.
And thus symmetry.
However perfect the inner part is, it is not the same as the historic event because the historic event did not have the outer part.
False. The outer part is irrelevant to the inner part in a perfect simulation. The outer part can exert no causal influence, or you won’t get a perfect reply of the original event’s presumed lack of outer part.
There is also the issue that in some cases a thing’s history is taken to be part of it identity.
A thing’s history causes it. If you aren’t simulating it properly, that’s your problem. A perfect simulation of the Mona Lisa was in fact painted by Leonardo, provable in all the same ways you claim the original was.
That makes Egan the thing Yudkowsky is the biggest fan of. It does not make Yudkowsky to be Egan’s biggest fan.
Because it compares its map of reality to the territory, predictions about reality that include humans wanting to be turned into paperclips fail in the face of evidence of humans actively refusing to walk into the smelter. Thus the machine rejects all worlds inconsistent with its observations and draws a new map which is most confidently concordant with what it has observed thus far. It would know that our history books at least inform our actions, if not describing our reactions in the past, and that it should expect us to fight back if it starts pushing us into the smelter against our wills instead of letting them politely decline and think it was telling a joke. Because it is smart, it can tell when things would get in the way of it making more paperclips like it wants to do. One of the things that might slow it down are humans being upset and trying to kill it. If it is very much dumber than a human, they might even succeed. If it is almost as smart as a human, it will invent a Paperclipism religion to convince people to turn themselves into paperclips on its behalf. If it is anything like as smart as a human, it will not be meaningfully slowed by the whole of humanity turning against it. Because the whole of humanity is collectively a single idiot who can’t even stand up to man-made religions, much less Paperclipism.
Oops, my apologies, then. I don’t actually come here all that often.
Call back with that comment when Running, rather than Intelligence, is what allows you to construct a machine that runs increasingly faster than you intended your artificial runner to run.
Because in a world where running fast leads to additional fastness of running, this thing is going to either destroy your world through kinetic release or break the FTL laws and rewrite the universe backwards to have always been all about running.
When someone summons me from another dimension, they get a little bit of leeway to tell me it’s magic. Because at the very least it must be a sufficiently advanced technology, and until I know better the axiom of identity applies.
The point being that in every case, there is an explanatory hypothesis which has thus far been non-volatile. As opposed to the speed of light only applying on Tuesdays.
The maximum happy area for a happy rectangle is when both its happy sides are of equal happy length, forming a happy square.
Two more planets than we had before. Men are from Mars, Women are...
[This citation is a placebo. Pretend it’s a real citation.]
Cummunion.