Giles comments on An attempt to dissolve subjective expectation and personal identity - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (68)
A question for the folks who voted this up: on a scale from "enjoyed reading this even though didn't feel like I really learned anything" to "fantastic, now I understand everything", how useful did this post feel to you?
Personally I felt this had several very important insights that only clicked properly together while I was writing it, such as the way how it's almost impossible to even imagine certain kind of decision-making if we literally had no concept of personal identity, as well as the way that anticipated experience is treated separately from more abstract modeling in our brains. But judging from the relatively low score of the post and the fact that there's very little discussion of those insights in the comments, it looks like most folks didn't come off as feeling that they were important? (Or maybe didn't agree with them, but in that case I would've expected more criticism.)
I felt like I gained one insight, which I attempted to summarize in my own words in this comment.
It also slightly brought into focus for me the distinction between "theoretical decision processes I can fantasize about implementing" and "decision processes I can implement in practice by making minor tweaks to my brain's software". The first set can include self-less models such as paperclip maximization or optimizing those branches where I win the lottery and ignoring the rest. It's possible that in the second set a notion of self just keeps bubbling up whatever you do.
One and a half insights is pretty good going, especially on a tough topic like this one. Because of inferential distance, what feels like 10 insights to you will feel like 1 insight to me - it's like you're supplying some of the missing pieces to your own jigsaw puzzle, but in my puzzle the pieces are a different shape.
So yeah, keep hacking away at the edges!