billswift comments on "Ray Kurzweil and Uploading: Just Say No!", Nick Agar - Less Wrong

4 Post author: gwern 02 December 2011 09:42PM

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Comment author: billswift 03 December 2011 06:19:56PM *  0 points [-]

Indeed, the line in the quote:

argue that an ineliminable risk that mind-uploading will fail makes it prudentially irrational for humans to undergo it.

Could apply equally well to crossing a street. There is very, very little we can do without some "ineliminable risk" being attached to it.

We have to balance the risks and expected benefits for our actions; which requires knowledge not philosophical "might-be"s.

Comment author: gwern 03 December 2011 06:31:36PM 2 points [-]

Yes, I agree, as do the quotes and Agar even: because this is not Pascal's wager where the infinites render the probabilities irrelevant, we ultimately need to fill in specific probabilities before we can decide that destructive uploading is a bad idea, and this is where Agar goes terribly wrong - he presents poor arguments that the probabilities will be low enough to make it an obviously bad idea. But I don't think this point is relevant to this conversation thread.

Comment author: billswift 04 December 2011 12:53:08AM *  0 points [-]

It occurred to me when I was reading the original post, but I was inspired to post it here mostly as a me-too to your line:

We can't even do formal mathematics without significant and ineradicable risk in the final proof

That is, reinforcing that everything has some "ineradicable risk".