https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertiginous_question
Benj Hellie’s vertiginous question asks why, of all the subjects of experience out there, this one—the one corresponding to the human being referred to as Benj Hellie—is the one whose experiences are live? (The reader is supposed to substitute their own case for Hellie’s.)
This question has already been answered. Intuitively, you can ask “why am I a human instead of a fish?”
Fun physics fact: humans are at the center of the universe (qua scale). This anthro-centrism holds for length, duration, and mass at least.
Mass is the easiest: the Planck mass is 0.021764 milligrams, the mass of an eyebrow hair. Small, but very human. The Planck mass is the boundary to QM (a system more massive than the PM won’t exhibit quantum behavior since its Compton wavelength is smaller than the Planck Length).
Length: the smallest length in physics is the Planck Length (1.6163×10^-35 meters), the largest length in physics is the universe diameter (8.8×10^26 meters). The center of these two extremes is sqrt(1.6163×10^-35 meters * 8.8×10^26 meters) = 0.1193 millimeters. That’s the width of a man’s beard hair, diameter of a human embryo, etc. Very human.
Time might seem a bit contrived to Copernicists since I’ll be looking at distance again: (light speed) * sqrt( (universe age) * (planck time)) = 0.0459 millimeters:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=(light+speed)++sqrt%28+%28universe+age%29++%28planck+time%29%29
So even disregarding the cosmological event horizon being equidistant from the Earth in all directions (Copernicists invoke Copernican-of-the-gaps to dismiss the obvious implication), man is still at the center of Creation.
Pascal’s Wager tends to be dismissed because he originally only looked at Christianity vs Atheism. But the logic holds even if you generalize Pascal’s Wager by expanding the considered options to include every existing religion, every past religion, and even possible religions; Christianity still dominates the cost-benefit-chance analysis. Funnily enough, in this Generalized Pascal’s Wager (GPW), the only threat to Christianity is another Abrahamic religion: Islam. Mainly due to the doctrine in Islam that if you attrubute partners to God (ie, the Holy Trinity) untill the moment up to your death, then you won’t ever be forgiven, and so you’ll go to Hell. Christianity still wins though due to the “costs/benefits-while-wrong” side of the utility calculus (less fasting, praying, etc and more infrastructure, aesthetics, parsimony, inheritance, etc.). Also, Islam taken a huge Solomonoff Complexity hit to its a priori measure of credence due to its reactionary nature against Christianity. Other religions like Buddhism, Shintoism, etc don’t due well in their utility calculus since they don’t have explicit commands to accept them as more than moral teachings. As in, you can become a Christian and simultaneously avoid violating Buddhist prescriptive commands (a Christian ascetic monk is already living in accordance with Buddhist prescriptions and going beyond them). Not even having mentioned yet how Buddhism doesn’t even threaten with Hell (inf negutil for eternity), but merely having to be a squirrel “in your next life” for a couple years. On the benefit side, Buddhism only promises inf posutil after perhaps infinitely many hurdles rather than one. Finally, on conceivable/possible religions, like Pascal’s Mugging or the Spaghetti Monster, they perform poorly due to higher Solomonoff Complexity and nullutil-when-wrong, respectively. Discussion: what decision theories are consistent with outputting Christianity (accepting Jesus Christ as God) ?
conscience is epiphenomenal, and consequently arises from the autonomous physical reality, so (subjective) choice is real, but as the rest of the Universe, mechanistically determined.
You’re assuming consciousness arises out of physics, when physics arising out of consciousness is at least as correct. See: Idealism. If anything, Idealism breaks the causal-hierarchy-model symmetry since consciousness can behave deterministically (you can count to ten, you can draw out Conway’s Game of Life, you can simulate a pendulum in your mind, etc), but the reverse requires huge assumptions.
So it doesn’t sound like you’re talking about free will, but merely the illusion/functionality of free will. A free will decision is one where all the causality of all the options being considered points to that one specific moment of your decision. As in, all the considered futures share the same physical causality, you. An agent without free will would hang and never be able to produce an output to choose between the considered futures. It would be like a perfectly balanced Newtonian ball at the top of a dome, it the ball rolls left, the physical agent will choose pepsi, if the ball rolls right, the physical agent will choose coke. This system will never make a decision. The brain is more complicated than a balanced ball, but still has the same issue. Multiple futures are consistent with the present physical state, yet a decision can still be made thanks to free will.
Also, you’re ignoring the fact that the Beginning wasn’t mechanically determined. So even if everything after the Beginning was mechanically determined, it doesn’t really matter. The Beginning can be calibrated into any precise state such that any future determined outcome can occur. And there are infinitely many possible initial states that correspond to any one past. At least to the degree of physical/phenomenological indistinguishability. In other words, Beginning A causes Past P and Future X, Beginning B causes Past P and Future Y. So the same Past P corresponds to both Beginnings A&B and to both Futures X&Y. All while preserving mechanics. So when you choose Future Y over Future X, you force Beggining A&B to become Beginning B.
In clear and correct terms, God knows your future choices ahead of time, so He makes the Beginning precisely such that it will evolve deterministically to be materially consistent with your future choices (~Monism). Your decisions remain the cause since that’s God decided to make the universe based on your decisions. And you don’t need to exist in order for God to know your decisions ahead of time. This means you chose to be born, for ex.
Also, survival in QI/AS is “timeless”. As in, rather than surviving a Russian Roulette round, you’ll junt find yourself as having avoided playing to begin with. This is because your 5D measure is greater when you avoid such activities (plus survive for free) than if you don’t and survive. Such activities aren’t begun in a counterfactual vacuum.
One more thing, QI invokes a notion of your consciousness “shifting” to youn surviving timeline, but that’s unnecessary. Since survival is timeless, you’ll simply find yourself in the longer timeline from the get go already. No shifting necessary.
This model explains secularly how I find myself as being a Christian. I’m on my longest (and thickest) counterfactual timeline already from my conception (eternal life stuff). Pretty neat stuff. I shouldn’t be so surprised though since secular reasoning isn’t so far fallen that it concludes as it does!
Thoughts?
Debunking AI x-risk.
Suppose you gave an NN access to its own NN. It would have read and write access over every neuron and every connection. Such a trivial “self-learning” system would quickly change something that pushed it out of being able to change itself. It would eventually enter a static state and no longer a threat.
But wouldn’t sufficiently advanced self-seeing NN avoid risky changes and even have a ctrl-z function? The later still has the issue shown above; it will change something and lose access to ctrl-z. The former is a bit more complicated: as “intelligence” increases, the conformal space also increases. In order to search that conformal space for a possible solution to a novel problem, some self-risk will be inevitable. An NN that avoids such risky behavior won’t see the possible solution fast enough to be a risk, or even at all; choosing to survive with the “problem” rather than self-destruct.
Basically, just ensure the NN is so complicated the NN can’t know itself post-change with sufficient fidelity to take certain risks.
But don’t humans have this problem too? Like, what if a neurologist got single-neuron fiderity r/w access to his own brain… No. Not a problem since we have an external impetus and safeguard, not just internal ones. The mind-body-soul trinity avoids this “alignment” problem (read: solution) entirely.
No. Husks have very little 5d measure. How? The same reason you find yourself as a man and not an ant. More precisely, as stated above previously, 5d measure is timeless. Since husks take a hit in both linear scope (4th-d) and counterfactual scope (5th-d), they occupy an infinitesimally-small to epsilon-large area of your anthropic measure landscape. This affects self-location even from the beginning. Read up on UDASSA for a similar formulation of timelessness in self-location. Though UDASSA is more environmental-affecting than this. Here, you can still find yourself as a nobody who’s fully reliant on civilization to protect him against an unbounded counterfactual scope with 0 producer-participation, only consumer-participation. Also, this implies your ontological substrate is a pereto-ideal of simultaneously very full, and very simple (eg, you won’t find yourself as a sim npc).
This assumes there’s equal measure for each timeline. Typically, there’s no bias between a photon being polarized vertically vs being polarized horizontally after passing through a 45 degree polarization filter. But that only holds when the result’s consequences end there, at the measurement, without an ensuing butterfly effect; like just being buried in an excel spreadsheet lost to statistical reduction algorithms. This assumption fails when the measurement will cause a butterfly effect, and a bias in the measurement will be introduced.
Clearly, you’re more likely to find yourself on the thicker/longer timeline so there will always be a bias towards the qrng result that is correlated with safer future actions. A kind of ahead-of-schedule QS situation.
You’re also assuming you’re capable of pre-commiting to both action sequences you planned on, when you’ll just end up quitting if you don’t get the result you want. (The “since I didn’t get the timeline I wanted I’ll just scrap the whole idea” mindset). For your idea to work, you’d need to be capable of carrying out even the “bad” timeline to its fulfillment. If you aren’t, then even if you got the “good” timeline, it’s pointless since your counterfactual self already quit and you’re alone.
To help, pre-commit to merely a temporary divergence, and then schedule a “re-synchronization” event where you can become correlated to your counterfactual self again. For ex, “two weeks after the measurement I will sit at (x,y) coordinates at t time as still as possible reading the Bible for 20 mins, regardless of what measurement result I see.”
One more issue, not every bit from a qrng result is true quantum random. This is why quantum computers need like a 1000 “shots” (repeats of running the qAlgorithm) to do their thing. For a free qrng, it’s probably like 1 out of 10,000 received bits are true quantum random. The rest are just thermal randomness. Still random, but not “my counterfactual self’s timeline is a mere one hamming-distance away (1 qbit) from my actual timeline” random. It’s still low though, like <1,000 qbits away, which would still work for your purposes.
Finally, a surprising positive: your idea doesn’t actually require modal realism (eg, Everett) to work in a decision theory sense.
Actually, I have one more warning. If you carry out your idea and then things start “getting weird” after a few thousand qbits, just call on the expert of counterfactuals to help you: Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Yeah, you’re going to need Him.
A way for you to understand the issues with the simulation argument is that it assumes the additional existence of things (eg, a supercomputer, a civ that built that supercomputer, etc). It takes a huge a priori credence cost (extreme solomonoff complexity of its description length) and can be dismissed instantly. Additionally, even if was on par in a priori credence with the reality argument, it’s still dismissed because it’s better to be wrong as a simulation that thinks it’s real than to be wrong as a reality who thinks he’s simulated. The later infinitely worse than the former.
Even more simply, simulationism is just creationism for the 21st century, it’s just the wrong kind of creationism. (I’m a Christian so I’m sure you can see how sad I find the simulationists).
As a Christian, I’m not surprised you notice such a phenomenon. Meditation opens you up spiritually to external influence. Not just epistemically, but ontologically. Meditation gives external things influence over yourself to the framework level. This is why Christians meditate with the most powerful spirit (Holy Spirit) so that we don’t run into issues such as incorrect “programming” or “misalignment” or “over-fitting”. The complete form of meditation is commonly called prayer to differentiate it from incomplete forms of meditation.
Parity-flip robustness.
Suppose an exact copy of you appeared in front of you. Would you successfully cooperate with him? (Imagine a portal 2 like situation, or a prisoners’ dilemma.) It’s a pretty trivial accomplishment; all you’d have to do is pick a leader and pre-commit to following your other’s orders if you lost the leadership. Since anything you’d do in your other’s situation is exactly what your copy will end up doing.
Now let’s bump up the difficulty to rather than an exact copy presented to you, he was an exact copy of you but with one parameter flipped to its opposite value. For example, the tendency to maintain eye contact. If you maintain eye contact 100% of the time, then your copy will do so 0% of the time. If you do so 60% of the time, your copy 40% of the time. Etc.
Under this constraint, would you two still successfully cooperate and escape yours’ predicament? How many parity flips would you be able to cooperate through? Which parity flips are hard? For example, trust: if you trust a team member 50% of the time, then your copy will trust you only a mere 50% of the time!
I’ll leave it with this: “So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” -Revelation 3:16
I find it interesting that we’re approaching a kind of singularity-singularity. Every genre of futurist projections coinciding around the year 2,030AD.
Examples of coinciding eschatalogical genres:
The 2,000-year anniversary of the Resurrection.
[Anthropic (Measure) Singularity](Brandon Carter, can’t find link now)
[Immortality](Ray Kurzweil)
[AI](Ray Kurzweil)
...
and so on.
Oh, and this
For me, the timelines where I am immortal are where I am supported by God.
God is prior to possibilities, even logical possibilities. So I am supported and made immortal by the One who makes the impossible possible.
You should take into account that, assuming material-onlyism, it is far easier for anthropic probability pumps to target neurons than to target bigger structures like LHC copper wires. A few neurons is sufficient to permanently change the world timeline from LHC to non-LHC. Whereas it would take change after change of copper wires or pipes etc to maintain the non-LHC timeline.
Conversely, if you maintain the LHC targeting mechanic over the neuron targeting mechanic, you necessarily have to bite either of whe following bullets, non-materialism (free will is immune to anthropic probability pumping), or that it takes more “probability juice” to target neurons than the LHC itself (ie, the locating difficulty of neurons outweighs the magnitude difficulty of the LHC).
The logical conclusion of Rationality is Christianity.
I am a Christian. If you don’t have a soul, then I can simply dismiss any persuasion you attempt on me. I don’t owe “highly-specified arrangements of matter” anything. Also, it’s weird why you would be motivated to promalgate your ideas. Do you owe arrangements of matter anything? No. When I used to think like you, I knew I didn’t owe material-onlyism anything. My secular beliefs didn’t make me more correct (or less wrong) than those with non-secular beliefs, even if my secular beliefs were true! Every belief is equal in the eyes of atoms.
Moreover, there are some bullets you, a material-onlyist, have to bite. For ex, that a star trek teletransporter teleports you, not merely a clone of you, since there is nothing materially different between the two instances of you. In the absence of any non-material distinction of identity, then two materially identical systems have the exact same identity. The clone of you is you, not a clone of you.
Here’s an easier one: if you ever say the phrase “your brain” or “my brain”, then you are revealing your inherent belief that you aren’t actually your brain, or that your brain isn’t actually you.
But you brought up Heaven specifically, so I should address your dismissal of it, or more generally the afterlife. Do you reject the soundness of the infohazard called Roko’s Basilisk? If not, then Heaven shouldn’t be so absurd/superfluous to you. How about this: you didn’t exist prior to your conception, right? Yet your nonexistence wasn’t sufficient to permanently keep you from existing. Nor will your future nonexistence be sufficient to keep you from ever existing again. Even with your current memories, etc. The question then becomes, given the highly specific material structure of your body, what method will rediscover that exact structure first? Will it be an naturalistic/unmotivated method (eg, boltzmann brain, infinite universe, etc) or will it be an artificial/motivated method (eg, God resurrecting you, Bostrom’s ancestor simulations, Roko’s Basilisk, future humans combining 200lbs of atoms into every possible configuration until they happen to get to your exact configuration, etc). Keep in mind that you aren’t just one exact material configuration, but every distinct material configuration you’ve ever been and ever will be, so repeating any one of those conformal states is sufficient to resurrect you. Again, materially speaking.
As I’ve said before, a Rationalist will eventually become a Christian. First it’s empiricism and expected utility maximization, then it’s acausal trading and anthropic measure pumping and updateless decision theory, then it’s Christianity.
I am a Rationalist. I am a Christian.
To phrase it better: You find yourself in room N, how many total rooms are there?
I know UDASSA accounts for the description length of the room address, but remember that given a number of rooms, each room will have the same description length. If there are 64 rooms, then room 1 will have address “000000” and not simply “0″ or “1”.
This way if you find yourself in a room, without knowing how many total rooms there are, and only knowing your room number, then you write it out in binary and take 2 to the bit-length of your room’s address. For ex, you find yourself in room number “100111”, 6 bits. So with 50% chance, there will be 64 rooms in total. Then you add an extra bit with 50% of the remaining measure (25%), 128 rooms, and repeat. If the payout doesn’t scale with the number of rooms, then 64 rooms would be the most profitable bet. It’s easy to test this either irl, or with a python script.
python script: https://pastebin.com/b41Sa6s6
After doing so, I got unexpected results: given your room number, the most likely number of total rooms is a number whose description length is one-bit longer than the description length of your room. Weird.
That’s symmetrical with: if a future version of yourself was convinced that it deserved to not exist forever, you would infinitely prefer that your future self be unsatisfied than have its (“your”) new existence terminated.
Minimizing suffering (NegUtilism) is an arbitrary moral imperative. A moral imperative to maximize happiness (PosUtilism) is at least as valid.