“Giving N people each 1/Nth is nonetheless a fair sort of thing to do”
How can we know this unless we actually define what “fair” is, or what its bedrock is? Or are we just assuming that roughly, “fair” means “equal proportions”?
Wiseman
Karma: −18
@Eliezer: “As this is what I identify with the meaning of the term, ‘good’...”
I’m still a little cloudy about one thing though Eliezer, and this seems to be the point Roko is making as well. Once you have determined what physically has happened in a situation, and what has caused it, how do inarguably decide that it is “good” or “bad”? Based on what system of prefering one physical state over another?
Obviously, saving a child from death is good, but how do you decide in trickier situations where intuition can’t do the work for you, and where people just can’t agree on anything, like say, abortion?
Are we really still beating up on group selectionism here, Eliezer?
I think this fallacy needs to be corrected. Yes, group selection is real. Maybe not in the anthropomorphic way of organisms “voluntarily” restraining their breeding, but in terms of adaptation, yes, individual genomes will adapt to survive better as per the requirements of the group. They have no choice BUT to do this, else they go extinct.
The example Eliezer gave of insect populations being selected for low population, actually proves group selectionism. Why? Because it doesn’t matter that the low group population was achieved by cannibalism, so long as the populations were low so that their prey-population would not crash.
Saying group selection isn’t real is as fallacious as saying a “Frodo” gene cannot exist, despite the fact that it does, in reality.
Can we correct these misconceptions yet?
This post is called the “The Meaning of Right”, but it doesn’t spend much time actually defining what situations should be considered as right instead of wrong, other than a bit at the end which seems to define “right” as simply “happiness”. Rather its a lesson in describing how to take your preferred world state, and causally link that to what you’d have to do to get to that state. But that world state is still ambiguously right/wrong, according to any absolute sense, as of this post.
So does this post say what “right” means, other than simply “happiness” (which sounds like generic utilitarianism), am I simply missing something?
Evolution is not mindless or stupid. Rather, it gets more intelligent as time goes on and intelligence in species increases.
Why? Because as the intelligence in an organism increases, that intelligence becomes a real selection pressure for other organisms around it. For example, human beings mentally decide to be with friends with like mindsets often, thus increasing that persons genetic fitness.
If human beings are directly part of the selection pressure in evolution, evolution cannot possibly be called stupid.
This is how love can evolve out of nothing, from evolution that is initially stupid, because evolution evolves reality to require love to survive, by nature of reality’s increased complexity and increased intelligence.
Eliezer: Wiseman, if everyone were blissed-out by direct stimulation of their pleasure center all the time, would that by definition be moral progress?
Compared to todays state of affairs in the world? Yes, I think that would be enormous moral progress compared to right now (so long as the bliss was not short term and would not burn out eventually and leave everyone dead. So long as the bliss was of an individual’s choice. So long as it really was everyone in bliss, and others didn’t have to suffer for it. Etc. etc.)
Since the actual source of the meaning of “morality” is simply about achieving happiness, humans will eventually link political philosophies which increase happiness with “morality”.
Subhan’s challenge is easy to solve if you accept that morality is not epiphenomenal, and actually grounded in concrete, mechanically-driven happiness.
I don’t get this side debate between Eliezer and Caledonian.
Caledonian’s original comment was “Deeper goals and preferences can result in the creation and destruction of shallower ones”, which cites a common and accepted belief in cognitive science that there is such a thing as hierarchical goal systems, which might explain human behavior. Nothing controversial there.
Eliezer responds by saying that emotions, not goals, have to be flat, and further, that “each facet of ourselves that we judge, is judged by the whole”, which is only ambiguously related to both goals and emotions.
Now Caledonian, did you mean something other than just generic goals to explain this conflict?
Or Eliezer, do you really believe that a goal system is necessarily flat, or that emotions == goals? If so, under what pretense?
In that case I don’t think MWI says anything we didn’t already know: specifically that ‘stuff happens’ outside of our control, which is something which we have to deal with even in non-quantum lines of thought. Trying to make choices different when acknowledging that MWI is true probably will result in no utility gain at all, since saying that x number of future worlds out of the total will result in some undesirable state, is the same as saying, under copenhagen, the chances it will happen to you is x out-of total. And that lack of meaningfull difference should be a clue as to MWI’s falshood.
In the end the only way to guide our actions is to abide by rational ethics, and seek to improve those.
Kaj—there is a more cheerful answer. And this is it: Many-Worlds isn’t true. Although Eliezer may be confident, the final word on the issue is still a long way off. Eliezer has been illogical on enough of his reasoning that there is reason to question that confidence.
Err, how can two copies of a person be exactly the same when the gravitational forces on each will both be different? Isn’t the very idea that you can transfer actual atoms in the universe to a new location while somehow ensuring that this transfer doesn’t deterministically guarantee being able to determining which person “caused” the copy to exist (I.E. the original), physical nonsense?
While molecules may not have invisible “unique ID” numbers attached to them, they are unique in the sense of quantum evolution, preserving the “importance” of one atom distinguished from another.
I am interested in the answer to John Maxwell’s question as well.
In that vein, let me re-ask a question I had in a previous post but was not answered:
How does MWI not violate no-faster-than-light-travel itself?
That is, if a decoherence happens with a particle/amplitude, requiring at that point a split universe in order to process everything so both possibilities actually happen, how do all particles across the entire universe know that at that point they must duplicate/superposition/whatever, in order to maintain the entegrity of two worlds where both posibilities happen?
Question: how does MWI not violate SR/no-faster-than-light-travel itself?
That is, if a decoherence happens with a particle/amplitude, requiring at that point a split universe in order to process everything so both possibilities actually happen, how do all particles across the entire universe know that at that point they must duplicate/superposition/whatever, in order to maintain the entegrity of two worlds where both posibilities happen?
Dustin: “Good God, he’s even making up his own contradictions now.”
That is a meaningless comment, and adds nothing to this discussion. The whole point I believe, of Caledonian’s argument is that the statement “MWI -is- collapse” is not a contradiction, so long as the differences in the theories/interpretations of QM can never be substantiated with experimental evidence, ever, because the theories themselves don’t allow for it, rather than we just haven’t seen those experiments yet.
That said, I don’t think that’s the case with MWI. If you are saying something about reality that supposedly is true, and has an effect on the rest of reality, I find it unlikely that if it were true, it wouldn’t eventually result in experimental evidence that proved that.
But if it can not be shown that MWI would result in experiments that explicitly differentiated it from non-local collapse, than Caledonian’s point remains valid, or at least valid enough that there’s no reason to be nasty about it (Eliezer, Dustin).
Bob: But multiple worlds are observed, in subatomic phenomena. That’s what superposition is. There is experimental evidence for multiple worlds.
How does the experimental evidence favor MW over a possible collapse function with non-GR-violating non-locality?
4 points:
If collapse actually worked the way its adherents say it does, it would be:
The only non-linear evolution in all of quantum mechanics.
The only non-unitary evolution in all of quantum mechanics. 3.… WHAT DOES THE GOD-DAMNED COLLAPSE POSTULATE HAVE TO DO FOR PHYSICISTS TO REJECT IT? KILL A GOD-DAMNED PUPPY?
Not a valid argument. The physics of the universe are what they are, at the microscopic and macroscopic levels. If it so happens that there is some non-GR-violating non-locality going on (don’t complain, just cause you can’t imagine it, doesn’t mean it’s not possible), then your list above simply would be wrong, and there would be no violation of “traditional physics” to complain about.
In any case, since from the perspective of each world we have non-determinism, and the only world we are acting on is our own, why is it necessary to explain many worlds for the purposes of AGI?
Well, first: Does any collapse theory have any experimental support? No.
Neither does MW, they are both interpretations.
I’m going out on a limb on this one, but since the whole universe includes separate branching “worlds”, and over time this means we have more worlds now than 1 second ago, and since the worlds can interact with each other, how does this not violate conservation of mass and energy?
Wiseman, there’s only one amplitude distribution. One. Not two. Not three. One, in all the physics we know.
I do understand this Eliezer. But my point is even though it’s just one distribution, there is still a description of differentation within that one distribution, otherwise the universe would be just one electron, or something like that. So since there is differentation within the distribution, and since those differentations are tracked and consistent due to the non-random laws of this universe, isn’t that really the same as “identity”, in that the “differentations” are always 100% unique?
Isn’t each particle or amplitude configuration unique because only it has its exact relationship to every other amplitude configuration in the universe? Doesn’t that sufficiently make each amplitude configuration at a specific spatial-temporal locality different from every other one, in that the universe can “tell” one from the other?
Ben Jones: Well that’s just plain wrong.… QM is the most experimentally validated theory we have, but one of its implications is the relative identity of quanta.
The experiments show specific results, but it may be possible that some properties of the particles aren’t interacting with any aspect of the experiment, thus QM would still be correct in the explanation for the original experiments, but not complete, as they don’t explain the additional properties. So it is entirely possible.
The generality “invalidating one aspect of a theory can’t invalidate the whole” may be a bit too extreme, but for practical purposes most theories are complex enough that that usually won’t happen, it and it certainly wouldn’t in the case of QM and particle identity.
@J Thomas: “Why would anybody think that there is a single perfect morality, and if everybody could only see it then we’d all live in peace and harmony?”
Because they have a specific argument which leads them to believe that?
You know, there’s no reason why one couldn’t consider one language more efficient at communication than others, at least by human benchmarks, all else being equal (how well people know the language, etc.). Ditto for morality.
Thomas, you are running in to the same problem Eliezer is: you can’t have a convincing argument about what is fair, versus what is not fair, if you don’t explicitly define “fair” in the first place. It’s more than a little surprising that this isn’t very obvious.