shminux comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong

25 Post author: orthonormal 26 December 2011 10:57PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (1430)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 02 May 2012 04:18:14PM *  2 points [-]

Speaking from a non-physicist perspective, much of what the QM sequence helped teach me is helping see the world from bottom-up; QM is regular, but it adds up to normality, and it's normality that's weird. Delving down into QM is going up the rabbit's hole away from weirdness and normality, and into mathematical regularity.

By analogy, normal people are similarly weird because they're the normality that was produced as the sum of a million years of evolution. Which in turn helps you realize that a random mind plucked out of mindspace is unlikely to have the characteristics we attribute to humanlike normality. Because normality is weird.

Once you go from bottom-to-top, you also help dissolve some questions like problems of identity and free will (though I had personally dissolved the supposed contradiction between free will and determinism many years before I encountered LessWrong) -- I still think that many knots people tie themselves over regarding issues like Quantum Suicide or Doomsday Dilemmas, are caused by insufficient application of the bottoms-up principle, or worse yet a half-hearted application thereof.

Comment author: shminux 02 May 2012 04:52:07PM 0 points [-]

I'm curious how you used this approach to resolve the Quantum Suicide argument.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 02 May 2012 05:06:02PM *  0 points [-]

I should perhaps make a fuller post about this at some point, but in brief: "Individuals" are in reality quite divisible (pun intended). Quantum Suicide makes sense to me only if you have a top-down pespective on identity that either persists as a whole or is destroyed as a whole and nothing in between.

If you instead view the self as some bizarre arbitrary conglameration of qualia-producing processes (including whatever processes produce self-awareness, however they do it), then the very concept of destruction or persistence must be applied to actually individual thought-processes, and is meaningless when applied to whole people.

Comment author: DanArmak 02 May 2012 05:35:39PM 0 points [-]

If you instead view the self as some bizarre arbitrary conglameration

Again with the bizarre :-)