= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Marcello comments on The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (574)
We actually live in hyperspace: our universe really has four spacial dimensions. However, our bodies are fully four dimensional; we are not wafer thin slices a la flatland. We don't perceive there to be four dimensions because our visual cortexes have a defect somewhat like that of people who can't notice anything on the right side of their visual field.
Not only do we have an absolute denial macro, but it is a programmable absolute denial macro and there are things much like computer viruses which use it and spread through human population. That is, if you modulated your voice in a certain way at someone, it would cause them (and you) to acquire a brand new self deception, and start transmitting it to others.
Some of the people you believe are dead are actually alive, but no matter how hard they try to get other people to notice them, their actions are immediately forgotten and any changes caused by those actions are rationalized away.
There are transparent contradictions inherent in all current mathematical systems for reasoning about real numbers, but no human mathematician/physicist can notice them because they rely heavily on visuospacial reasoning to construct real analysis proofs.
I thought about this once, but I discovered that there are in fact people who have little or no visual or spatial reasoning capabilities. I personally tested one of my colleagues in undergrad with a variant of the Mental Rotation Task (as part of a philosophy essay I was writing at the time) and found to my surprise he was barely capable of doing it.
According to him, he passed both semesters of undergraduate real analysis with A's.
Of course, this doesn't count as science....
EDIT: In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I make something of an Internet Cottage Industry out of trolling people who believe the real numbers are countable, or that 0.9999... != 1, and so on. So obviously I have a great stake in there being no transparent contradictions in the theory of real numbers.
I'm not sure of the mathematical details, but I believe the fact you can tie knots in rope falsifies your first bullet point. I find it hard very hard to believe that all knots could be hallucinated.
(All cats, on the other hand, is brilliant.)
Fabulous story idea.
Actually, it was used in Terry Pratchett's ``Mort''.
This seems to be one of the many examples of cross-fertilization between Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, since this is a major aspect of Gaiman's "Neverwhere".
There's a character in Worm that has this power. People don't think of her as dead, but her power allows her to be immediately forgotten, and exude a SEP field while it's active. Some people are immune to it, but it's kinda awesome.
I was going to write something about a certain character from Luminosity, but it's not important.
What's that?
Never mind, it doesn't matter.
I know who you meant, man, I was setting up an Airplane! joke...
Yeah, OK. Sorry, I've never seen Airplane!.
Now I am going to stop chattering about unimportant nonsense and go off and do something actually interesting.
Magical unnoticeabilty is common in fantasy. Allirea's power in Alicorn's Radiance is very similar to Imp's.
There's a semi-famous short story "Nobody Bothers Gus" by Algis Budrys that runs on this premise. The main character of the old Piers Anthony novel Mute also makes people forget him as soon as they leave his presence.
It was actually an occasional fantasy of mine to be able to switch to such a state and then figure out how much fun I could have. The ultimate freedom - have your meals by stealing a king's plate, enjoy sports matches from the middle of the field, go listen to what they really talk about in the UN backroom deals, slap [insert disliked celebrity] ten times a day, joyride a fighter jet...
It is a power of the witches in Lyra's world in Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials".
There seems to be strong evidence that this is true in Haïti.
Agreed, but the fact that religion exists makes the prospect of similar things whose existence we are not aware of all the scarier. Imagine, for example, if there were something like a religion one of whose tenants is that you have to fool yourself into thinking that the religion doesn't exist most of the time.
They say that everybody in the world who knows about "The Game" is playing The Game. This means that, right now, you are playing The Game. The objective of The Game is to forget about its existence and the fact that you are playing for as long as possible. Also, if you should remember, you must forget again as quickly as possible.
Given that you mentioned The Game (bastard), the most unexpected thing that the AI could possible say would be "The Game." Not the most interesting, but the most unexpected.
Well, okay, maybe something you'd never thought before would be more unexpected. But still.
bastard
What ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)
EDITED because Markdown (which is infuriating) won't allow parentheses in URLs, nor does subsituting ")" seem to work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)
See comment formatting: Escaping special symbols on the Wiki.
No, that fails, religion isn't absolute denial, it's just denial. On the other hand, cats are actually an absolute denial memetic virus, and the fact you can see, hold, weigh and measure a cat is just testament to the inventive self-delusion of the brain.
I don't think it's so much the tone of voice, but think about it this way: how many people "go through the motions" of saying "I believe in God" etc. just for the social benefits that religion provides? And so are just as happy to help bring others in?
How do you distinguish between going through the motions and believing?
The difference is that when you really believe somehting, your internal predictive model of reality contains it, which would mean you sometimes predict different results and act accordingly.
Externally, I don't know, but it sure feels different. Also, there's a partial-believing state that I was in for years as a child and teenager, where I didn't really believe (and hence didn't pray except to show belief in public), but I still kinda believed (and hence was afraid that God would punish me for sinning). At the same time.