Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3

OpenThreadGuy

From Costanza's original thread (entire text):

"This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant."

Meta:

How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.

Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.

Meta:

I still haven't figured out a satisfactory answer to the previous meta question, how often these should be made. It was requested that I make a new one, so I did.
I promise I won't quote the entire previous threads from now on. Blockquoting in articles only goes one level deep, anyway.

From the last thread:

From Costanza's original thread (entire text):

"This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant."

Meta:

How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.

Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.

Meta:

I still haven't figured out a satisfactory answer to the previous meta question, how often these should be made. It was requested that I make a new one, so I did.
I promise I won't quote the entire previous threads from now on. Blockquoting in articles only goes one level deep, anyway.

I would certainly say you're justified in not caring about hypothetical murders. I would also say you're justified in not caring about murders in other MW branches.

What you seem to want to say here is that because murders in other MW branches are "actual", you care about them, but since murders in my imagination are not "actual", you don't.

I have no idea what the word "actual" could possibly refer to so as to do the work you want it to do here.

There are certainly clusters of consistent experience to which a hypothetical murder of a hypothetical person corresponds. Those clusters might, for example, take the form of certain patterns of neural activation in my brain... that's how I usually model it, anyway. I'm happy to say that those are "actual" patterns of neural activation. I would not say that they are "actual" murdered human beings.

That said, I'm not really sure it matters if they are. I mean, if they are, then... hold on, let me visualize... there: I just "actually" resurrected them and they are now "actually" extremely happy. Was their former murder still evil? At best, it seems all of my preconceived notions about murder (e.g., that it's a permanent state change of some kind) have just been thrown out the window, and I should give some serious thought to why I think murder is evil in the first place.

It seems something similar is true about existence in a Big World... if I want to incorporate that into my thinking, it seems I ought to rethink all of my assumptions. Transplanting a moral intuition about murder derived in a small world into a big world without any alteration seems like a recipe for walking off conceptual cliffs.

What you seem to want to say here is that because murders in other MW branches are "actual", you care about them, but since murders in my imagination are not "actual", you don't.

Right, exactly. I'm taking this sense of 'actual' (not literally) from the sequences. This is from 'On being Decoherent':

You only see nearby objects, not objects light-years away, because photons from those objects can't reach you, therefore you can't see them. By a similar locality principle, you don't interact with distant configurations.

Later on in th... (read more)

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3

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