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.
It is completely not about being more or less impressive.
If you can throw out the fMRI data and get better predictive power, something is wrong with the fMRI data.
The fMRI results are not relevant, because quantum effects in the brain are noise on an fMRI. Aaronson explicitly locates any Knightian noise left in the system to be at the microscopic level; see the third paragraph under section 3.
TL;DR: 2.12 is about forestalling a bad counterargument (that being the heading of 2.12) and does not give evidence against Knightian upredictability.
Care to elaborate? Because otherwise I can say "it totally is!", and we leave at that.
Absolutely not. You can always add the two and get even more predictive power.
Notice in particular that the algorthm Scott uses looks at past entries in the button pressing game, while fMRI data concerns only the incoming entry. They are two very different kind of prior information, and of cours... (read more)