Scott Aaronson has a new 85 page essay up, titled "The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine". (Abstract here.) In Section 2.11 (Singulatarianism) he explicitly mentions Eliezer as an influence. But that's just a starting point, and he then moves in a direction that's very far from any kind of LW consensus. Among other things, he suggests that a crucial qualitative difference between a person and a digital upload is that the laws of physics prohibit making perfect copies of a person. Personally, I find the arguments completely unconvincing, but Aaronson is always thought-provoking and fun to read, and this is a good excuse to read about things like (I quote the abstract) "the No-Cloning Theorem, the measurement problem, decoherence, chaos, the arrow of time, the holographic principle, Newcomb's paradox, Boltzmann brains, algorithmic information theory, and the Common Prior Assumption". This is not just a shopping list of buzzwords, these are all important components of the author's main argument. It unfortunately still seems weak to me, but the time spent reading it is not wasted at all.
A better summary of Aaronson's paper:
EY is mentioned once, for his work in popularizing cryonics, and not for anything fundamental to the paper. Several other LW luminaries like Silas Barta and Jaan Tallinn show up in the acknowledgements.
If you have followed Aaronson at all in the past couple years, the new stuff begins around section 3.3, page 36. His definition of "freedom" is at first glance interesting, and may dovetail slightly with the standard reduction of free will.
Eh, I don't think I count as a luminary, but thanks :-)
Aaronson's crediting me is mostly due to our exchanges on the blog for his paper/class about philosophy and theoretical computer science.
One of them, about Newcomb's problem where my main criticisms were
a) he's overstating the level and kind of precision you would need when measuring a human for prediction; and
b) that the interesting philosophical implications of Newcomb's problem follow from already-achievable predictor accuracies.
The other, about average-human performance on 3SAT, where I was skeptic... (read more)