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.
Yes, I agree with you - but when you tell some people that the question arises of what is in the big-money box after Omega leaves... and the answer is "if you're considering this, nothing."
A lot of others (non-LW people) I tell this to say it doesn't sound right. The bit just shows you that the seeming closed-loop is not actually a closed loop in a very simple and intuitive way** (oh and it actually agrees with 'there is no free will'), and also it made me think of the whole thing from a new light (maybe other things that look like closed loops can be shown not to be in similar ways).
** Anna Salamon's cutting argument is very good too but a) it doesn't make the closed-loop-seeming thing any less closed-loop-seeming and b) it's hard to understand for most people and I'm guessing it will look like garbage to people who don't default to compatibilist.
I suppose.
When dealing with believers in noncompatibilist free will, I typically just accept that on their view a reliable Predictor is not possible in the first place, and so they have two choices... either refuse to engage with the thought experiment at all, or accept that for purposes of this thought experiment they've been demonstrated empirically to be wrong about the possibility of a reliable Predictor (and consequently about their belief in free will).
That said, I can respect someone refusing to engage with a thought experiment at all, if they consi... (read more)