= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Dallas comments on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey - 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 (733)
Am I the only person who answered "100" on the cryonics question because "revived at some point in the future" was indefinite enough that a Boltzmann brain-like scenario inevitably occurring eventually seemed reasonable?
Also, I did all the extra credit questions. At twos in the morning.
I assumed it was supposed to mean ‘revived in a way that wouldn't have been possible if the patient hadn't been cryopreserved’.
Damn, really? I factored in time travel.
I wouldn't even know how to define “will be revived” if time travel were possible. (Assuming that the world-line of a person is continuous and time-like, it means “there's some t in the future such that the person is in the “not alive” state shortly before t and in the “alive” state shortly after t”, which under these assumptions is either true in all frames of references or in none of them. If time travel is possible, then there might be frames of reference in which there are two copies of the person at the same time, one dead and one alive...)
I was thinking magical future brain-scanning before information-theoretic death.
Not if the Universe is too small, or it ends first, or if there is a flaw in the BB model, or if we are in a simulation preventing BB, or... In other words, nothing is 100% and BB least of all.
True, but presumably Dallas assigns all these scenarios epsilon, leaving 100-epsilon for Boltzmann Brains. (100 doesn't mean absolute certainty in this survey.)
This seems to rely on a controversial theory of personal identity. I'm of the opinion that personal identity requires some sort of causal continuity: for a future person to be me, his mental states must have appropriate causal links to my mental states. That wouldn't be true of a Boltzmann brain. To put it another way, if the universe is spatially infinite, there are presumably Boltzmann brains qualitatively identical to my brain somewhere out there right now (where the "now" is relative to some foliation of space-time, of course). I don't consider those spatially distant BBs to be identical to me, and I'm guessing you wouldn't either. Why should I judge differently if the BB's are not just spatially but also temporally separated from me?
I have no problem with the idea that there are Boltzmann brains out there right now who are as much me as this body is.
Really? If someone (very trustworthy and very powerful) offered you a choice between a minute of intense pleasure administered to the body reading this right now or to a qualitatively identical but spatially very distant body, would you be indifferent?
If someone offered this brain a choice between pleasure for this brain and pleasure for that brain, I would no doubt choose the former.
Does that mean that nothing but this brain is me?
It might also turn out that if someone offered my right brain hemisphere a choice between pleasure for my right-brain and pleasure for my left-brain, I consistently choose pleasure for my right hemisphere. If that turns out to be true, does that mean that nothing but my right hemisphere is me? (If the analogous thing also turns out to be true for my left hemisphere, does that also mean that nothing but my left hemisphere is me? Does it mean there are two of me that don't share an identity? I'm not sure that question even means anything.)
[comment deleted]
Good point...
And for very similar reasons, anyone who gave a lower probability to the cryonics question than to the many worlds question is inconsistent. Wonder how many people did that?
EDIT Surprised a bit by the downvotes here. Did the many worlders interpret "probability of being revived at some point in the future" as "fraction of future worlds in which the person is revived" (or more technically, something like, "quantum measure of future revival across worlds containing humans in a state consistent with our present knowledge"). Rather than "probability of being revived in any future world"? If so, it is consistent to assign a high probability to many worlds, but a low probability to revival.
I would also love there to be a question on probability that Santa exists among the religion ones, and then compare answers to that with many worlds. Santa exists in some worlds, after all, even though his measure is miniscule...
EDIT: Same issue here. Does a many-worker typically interpret P(Santa Exists) as "measure across worlds consistent with our knowledge in which Santa exists" rather than "probability Santa exists in any world"?