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army1987 comments on The curse of identity - Less Wrong
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You don't understand. This "rationality" you speak of is monstrous irrationality. And anyway, like I said, Meta knoweth that ye have Meta-shattered values—but your wants are satisfied by serving Meta, not by serving Mammon directly. Maybe you'd get more out of reading the second half of Matthew 6 and the various analyses thereof.
You may be misinterpreting "the rationality of an agent is its goal". Note that the original is "the light of the body is the eye".
To put my above point a little differently: Take therefore no thought for godshatter: godshatter shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the lack-of-meta thereof.
For clarity's sake: Yes, I vehemently dispute this idea that a goal can't be more or less rational. That idea is wrong, which is quickly demonstrated by the fact that priors and utility functions can be transformed into each other and we have an objectively justifiable universal prior. (The general argument goes through even without such technical details of course, such that stupid "but the choice of Turing machine matters" arguments don't distract.)
Meh. The goal of leading to sentient beings living, to people being happy, to individuals having the freedom to control their own lives, to minds exploring new territory instead of falling into infinite loops, to the universe having a richness and complexity to it that goes beyond pebble heaps, etc. has probably much more Kolmogorov complexity than the goal of maximizing the number of paperclips in the universe. If preferring the former is irrational, I am irrational and proud of it.
Oh, also "look at the optimization targets of the processes that created the process that is me" is a short program, much shorter than needed to specify paperclip maximization, though it's somewhat tricky because all that is modulo the symbol grounding problem. And that's only half a meta level up, you can make it more elegant (shorter) than that.
That means that I should try to have lots of children?
Why do you think of a statistical tendency toward higher rates of replication at the organism level when I say "the processes that created the process that is [you]"? That seems really arbitrary. Feel the inside of your teeth with your tongue. What processes generated that sensation? What decision policies did they have?
(ETA: I'd upvote my comment if I could.)
You mean, why did I bother wearing braces for years so as to have straight teeth? <gd&rVF!>
I mean that, and an infinite number of questions more and less like that, categorically, in series and in parallel. (I don't know how to interpret "<gd&rVF!>", but I do know to interpret it that it was part of your point that it is difficult to interpret, or analogous to something that is difficult to interpret, perhaps self-similarly, or in a class of things that is analogous to something or a class of things that is difficult to interpret, perhaps self-similarly; also perhaps it has an infinite number of intended or normatively suggested interpretations more or less like those.)
(This comment also helps elucidate my previous comment, in case you had trouble understanding that comment. If you can't understand either of these comments then maybe you should read more of the Bible, or something, otherwise you stand a decent chance of ending up in hell. This applies to all readers of this comment, not just army1987. You of course have a decent change of ending up in hell anyway, but I'm talking about marginals here, naturally.)
Comments like this are better for creating atheists, as opposed to converting them.
When Will talks about hell, or anything that sounds like a religious concept, you should suppose that in his mind it also has a computational-transhumanist meaning. I hear that in Catholicism, Hell is separation from God, and for Will, God might be something like the universal moral attractor for all post-singularity intelligences in the multiverse, so he may be saying (in the great-grandparent comment) that if you are insufficiently attentive to the question of right and wrong, your personal algorithm may never be re-instantiated in a world remade by friendly AI. To round out this guide for the perplexed, one should not think that Will is just employing a traditional language in order to express a very new concept, you need to entertain the idea that there really is significant referential overlap between what he's talking about and what people like Aquinas were talking about - that all that medieval talk about essences, and essences of essences, and all this contemporary talk about programs, and equivalence classes of programs, might actually be referring to the same thing. One could also say something about how Will feels when he writes like this - I'd say it sometimes comes from an advanced state of whimsical despair at ever being understood - but the idea that his religiosity is a double reverse metaphor for computational eschatology is the important one. IMHO.
And a cybernetic/economic/ecological/signal-processing meaning, ethical meaning, sometimes a quantum information theoretic meaning, et cetera. I would not be justified in drawing a conclusion about the validity of a concept based on merely a perceived correspondence between two models. That'd be barely any better than talking acausal simulation seriously simply because computational metaphysics and modal-realist-like-ideas are somewhat intuitively attractive and superintelligences seem theoretically possible. One's inferences should be based on significantly more solid foundations. I just don't have a way to talk about equivalence classes of things while still being at all understood—then not even people like muflax could reliably understand me, and much of why I write here is to communicate with people like muflax, or angels.
Thank you for the clarification, and my apologies to Will. I do have some questions, but writing a full post from the smartphone I am currently using would be tedious. I'll wait until I get to a proper computer.
Your talk of God involves a concept of "God" that applies to things that are in some major sense infinite, like a an abstract telos for all superintelligences, and things that are in some sense finite, like all particular superintelligences. Any such perceived crossing of that gap would have to be very carefully justified—e.g., I can't think of any kind of argument that could prove that a human was the incarnation of the Word. Unlike, say, my model of that Catholics, who explicitly make such inferences on the basis of the theological virtues of faith and hope and not unaided reason as such, I don't think you'd do be so careless in your own thinking, but I want to signal that I am not nearly so careless in my own, and that you shouldn't think I am so careless. I think there are decent metaphysical arguments that such interactions are possible in principle, but of course such arguments would have to be made explicit and any particular mechanism (e.g. "simulation" of a human in a (finite? finite-but-perceived-to-be-infinte? infinite?) "heaven" by a finite god approximating an infinitely good telos) should not be a priori assumed to be possible. Only a moron would be so sloppy in his metaphysics and epistemology.
"gd&r" is an old Usenet expression, roughly "sorry for the horrible joke"; literally "grins, ducks, and runs".
I expect "VF" stands for "very fast".