I don't think that even Buddhism allows that.

Of course, 'utter destruction' is not a well-defined term. Depending on who you ask, nothing in Buddhism is ever actually destroyed. Or in the Dust hypothesis, or the Library of Babel... the existence of the mind never ends, because we've never beaten our wives in the first place.

I live with this awareness.

"In sober historical fact", clear minds could already see in 1919 that the absurdity of the Treaty of Versailles (with its total ignorance of economic realities, and entirely fueled by hate and revenge) was preparing the next war -- each person (in both nominally winning and nominally defeated countries) being put in such unendurable situations that "he listens to whatever instruction of hope, illusion or revenge is carried to him on the air".

This was J.M. Keynes writing in 1919, when A. Hitler was working as a police spy for the Rechswehr, infiltrating a tiny party then named DAP (and only later renamed to NDA); Keynes' dire warnings had nothing specifically to do with this "irrelevant" individual, which he had no doubt never even heard about -- there were plenty of other matches ready to set fire to a tinderbox world, after all; for examle, at that time, Benito Mussolini was a much more prominent figure, a well known and controversial journalist, and had just founded the "Fasci Nazionali di Combattimento".

So your claim, that believing the European errors in 1919 made another great war extremely likely, "is an unreasonable belief",... (read more)

Given how widespread white nationalism is in America, (i.e. it's a common phenomenon) and how intimately tied to fascism it is, I think that there's a substantial chance that the leader that would have taken Hitler's place would have shared his predilection for ethnic cleansing, even if not world domination.

"I don't think that even Buddhism allows that."

Remove whatever cultural or personal contextual trappings you find draped over a particular expression of Buddhism, and you'll find it very clear that Buddhism does "allow" that, or more precisely, un-asks that question.

As you chip away at unfounded beliefs, including the belief in an essential self (however defined), or the belief that there can be a "problem to solved" independent of a context for its specification, you may arrive at the realization of a view of the world flippe... (read more)

By the way, I should clarify that my total disagreement with your thesis on WW2 being single-handedly caused by A. Hitler does in no way imply disagreement with your more general thesis. In general I do believe the "until comes steam-engine-time" theory -- that many macro-scale circumstances must be present to create a favorable environment for some revolutionary change; to a lesser degree, I also do think that mostly, when the macro-environment is ripe, one of the many sparks and matches (that are going off all the time, but normally fizz out b... (read more)

I thought I already knew all this, but this post has made me realize that I've still, deep down, been thinking as you describe - that the universe can't be that unfair, and that the future isn't really at risk. I guess the world seems like a bit scarier of a place now, but I'm sure I'll go back to being distracted by day-to-day life in short order ;).

As for cryonics, I'm a little interested, but right now I have too many doubts about it and not enough spare money to go out and sign up immediately.

Of course you are. It's still a probability game. But Eliezer's contention is that the probabilities for cryonics look good. It's worth rolling the dice.

Yes very very bad things can happen for little reason. But of course we still want positive arguments to convince us to assign large probabilities to scenarios about which you want us to worry.

Where is this noirish Eliezer when he's writing about the existence of free will and non-relativist moral truths?

Don't get bored with the small shit. Cancers, heart disease, stroke, safety engineering, suicidal depression, neurodegenerations, improved cryonic tech. In the next few decades I'm probably going to see most of you die from that shit (and that's if I'm lucky enough to persist as an observer), when you could've done a lot more to prevent it, if you didn't get bored so easily of dealing with the basics.

"If you want a sufficient response to optimism, consider: is the probability that you will persist forever 1? If not, it is 0. If there is any probability of your annihilation, no matter how small, you will not survive for an infinite amount of time. That is what happens in an infinite amount of time: everything possible. If all your backup plans can fail at once, even at P=1/(3^^^3), that number will come of eventually with infinite trials." Zubon, this seems to assume that the probabilities in different periods are independent. It could be that... (read more)

Without Hitler it's likely Ludendorf would have been in charge and things would have been even worse. So perhaps we should be grateful for Hitler!

I gather there are some Orthodox Jews involved in Holocaust denial and were in Iran for that, but this post gets me to thinking that there should be more of them if they really believe in a benevolent and omnipotent God that won't allow sufficiently horrible things to happen.

How widespread is white nationalism in America? I would think it's one of the least popular things around, although perhaps I'm taking the Onion too seriously.

"The standard rebuttal is that evil is Man's own fault,"

There is no evil. There is neutrality. The universe isn't man's fault; it isn't anyone's fault.

I'm not at all saddened by these facts. My emotional state is unaltered. It's because I take them neutrally.

I've experienced severe pain enough to know that A) Torture works. Really. It does. If you don't believe it, try it. It'll be a short lesson. B) Pain is not such a big deal. It's just an avoid-this-at-all-cost -signal. Sure, I'm in agony, sure, I'd hate to remain in a situation where that signal doesn't go away, but it still is just a signal.

Perhaps as you look at some spot in the sky, they've already - neutrality allowing - tamed neutrality there; made it Friendly.

We've got a project to finish.

Good post, but how to deal with this information so that it is not so burdensome: Conway himself, upon creating The Game of Life, didn't believe that the cellular automaton could 'live' indefinitely, but was proven wrong shortly after his games creation by the discovery of the glider gun. We cannot assume that the cards were dealt perfectly and the universe or our existence is infinite, but we can hope that the pattern we have put down will continue to stand the test of time. Belief that we are impervious to extinction or that the universe will not ultimat... (read more)

I don't understand why the end of the universe bugs people so much. I'll just be happy to make it to next decade, thanks very much. When my IQ rises a few thousand points, I'll consider things on a longer timescale.

Would Camus agree with you Eliezer?

"What can a twelfth-century peasant do to save themselves from annihilation? Nothing."

She did something. She passed on a religious meme whose descendents have inspired me, in turn, to pass on the idea that we should engineer a world that can somehow reach backward to save her from annihilation. That may not prove possible, but some possibilities depend on us for their realization.

A Jewish prophet once wrote something like this: "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: And he sha... (read more)

And I do quite fancy well-written, well-researched "alternate history" fiction, such as Turtledove's, so I'd love to read a novel about what happens in 1812 to the fledgling USA if the British are free to entirely concentrate on that war, not distracted by Napoleon's last hurrahs in their backyard, because Napoleon was never around...

Nitpick:

The "War of 1812" was basically an offshoot of the larger Napoleonic Wars; Britain and France were both interfering with the shipping of "neutral" nations, such as the United States, in or... (read more)

I should note that I actually intend to fix the universe [...]

I was not aware that the universe was broken. If so, can we get a replacement instead? ;-)

It is a strange thing. I often feel the impulse to not believe that something would really be possible - usually when talking about existential risks - and I have to make a conscious effort to suppress that feeling, to remind myself that anything the laws of physics allow is possible. (And even then, I often don't succeed - or don't have the courage to entirely allow myself to succeed.)

Consequentialist: Is it a fair universe where the wealthy live forever and the poor die in the relative blink of an eye? It seems hard for our current society to look past that when setting public policy. This doesn't necessarily explain why there isn't more private money put to the purpose, but I think many of the intelligent and wealthy at the present time would see eternal life quests as a millennial long cliche of laughable selfishness and not in tune with leaving a respectable legacy.

...Can someone explain why?

Many people believe in an afterlife... why sign up for cryonics when you're going to go to Heaven when you die?

That's probably not the explanation, since there are many millions of atheists who heard about cryonics and/or extinction risks. I figure the actual explanation is a combination of conformity, the bystander effect, the tendency to focus on short term problems, and the Silliness Factor.

There's a corallary mystery category which most of you fall into: why are so few smart people fighting, even anonymously, against policy grounded in repugnancy bias that'll likely reduce their persistence odds? Where's the fight against a global ban on reproductive human cloning? Where's the fight to increase legal organ markets? Where's the defense of China's (and other illiberal nations)rights to use prisoners (including political prisoners) for medical experimentation? Until you square aware your own repugnancy bias based inaction, criticisms of that of... (read more)

To show that hellish scenarios are worth ignoring, you have to show not only that they're improbable, but also that they're improbable enough to overcome the factor (utility of oblivionish scenario - utility of hellish scenario)/(utility of heavenish scenario - utility of oblivionish scenario), which as far as I can tell could be anywhere between tiny and huge.

As for global totalitarian dictatorships, I doubt they'd last for more than millions of years without something happening to them.

HA,

"why are so few smart people fighting, even anonymously, against policy grounded in repugnancy bias that'll likely reduce their persistence odds?" Here's a MSM citation of Gene Expression today: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20081004.WORDS04//TPStory/Science

Steve Sailer is also widely read among conservative (and some other) elites, and there's a whole network of anonymous bloggers associated with him.

"Where's the fight against a global ban on reproductive human cloning?" Such bans have been fought, primarily throu... (read more)

I can only speak for myself on this, but wouldn't sign up for cryonics even if it were free, because I don't want to be revived in the future after I'm dead.

I would probably sign up for cryonics if it were free, with a, "do not revive sticker" and detailed data about me so that future brain studiers would have another data point when trying to figure out how it all works.

I don't wish that I hadn't been born, but I figure I have a part to play a purpose that no one else seems to be doing. Once that has been done, then unless something I see need doing and is important and sufficiently left field for no one else to be doing, I'll just potter along doing random things until I die.

"I figure I have a part to play a purpose that no one else seems to be doing"

How do you figure that? Aren't you a materialist? Or do you just mean that you might find a niche to fill that would be satisfying and perhaps meaningful to someone? I'm having trouble finding a non-teleological interpretation of your comment.

"If you look at the rules for Conway's Game of Life (which is Turing-complete, so we can embed arbitrary computable physics in there), then the rules are really very simple. Cells with three living neighbors stay alive; cells with two neighbors stay the same, all other cells die. There isn't anything in there about only innocent people not being horribly tortured for indefinite periods."

While I of course I agree with the general sentiment of the post, I don't think this argument works. There is a relevant quote by John McCarthy:

"In the 195... (read more)

Doug, Will: There is no fundamental difference between being revived after dying, waking up after going to sleep, or receiving neurotransmitter in a synapse after it was released. There is nothing special about 10^9 seconds as opposed to 10^4 seconds or 10^-4 seconds. Unless, of course, these times figure into your morality, but these are considerations far out of scope of ancestral environments humans evolved in. This is a care where unnatural category meets unnatural circumstances, so figuring out a correct answer is going to be difficult, and relying on intuitively reinforced judgment would be reckless.

"So invoking them do not give us any more information."

I do think we get a little: if such constraints exist, they are a property of the patterns themselves, and not a property of the low-level substrate on which they are implemented. If such a thing were true in this world, it would be a property of people and societies, not a metaphysical property. That rules out a lot of religion and magical thinking, and could be a useful heuristic.

Great post and discussion. Go Team Rational!

Eliezer, I think there's a slight inconsistency in your message. On the one hand, there are the posts like this, which can basically be summed up as: "Get off your asses, slackers, and go fix the world." This is a message worth repeating many times and in many different ways.

On the other hand are the "Chosen One" posts. These posts talk about the big gaps in human capabilities - the idea being that some people just have an indefinable "sparkliness" that gives them the power to do inc... (read more)

"So, what I'd like to see is a discussion of what the rank-and-file members of Team Rational should be doing to help (and I hope that involves more than donating lots of money to SIAI)." How 'rank-and-file' are we talking here? With what skillset, interests, and level of motivation?

Writing papers like Nick Bostrom's can be valuable:

http://www.nickbostrom.com/

I have an analogy: "justice is like cake, it's permitted to exist but someone has to make it".

Can you be happier sheltering in ignorance? I'm not convinced. I think that's a strategy that only works while you're lucky.

It is extraordinarily difficult to figure out how to use volunteers. Almost any nonprofit trying to accomplish a skilled-labor task has many more people who want to volunteer their time than they can use. The Foresight Institute has the same problem: People want to donate time instead of money, but it's really, really hard to use volunteers. If you know a solution to this, by all means share.

I'm surprised by the commenters who cannot conceive of a future life that is more fun than the one they have now - who can't imagine a future they would want to stick around for. Maybe I should bump the priority of the Fun Theory sequence.

"The Foresight Institute has the same problem: People want to donate time instead of money, but it's really, really hard to use volunteers. If you know a solution to this, by all means share."

There's always Amazon's Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome). It's an inefficient use of people's time, but it's better than just telling people to go away. If people are reluctant to donate money, you can ask for donations of books- books are actually a fairly liquid asset (http://www.cash4books.net/).

Eliezer: Does the law allow just setting them to productive but entirely tangential work, and pocketing the profit for SIAI?

@Hidden: just a "typical" OB reader, for example. I imagine there are lots of readers who read posts like this and say to themselves "Yeah! There's no God! If we want to be saved, we have to save ourselves! But... how...?" Then they wake up the next day and go to their boring corporate programming jobs.

@pdf23ds: This feels like tunnel vision. Surely the problem SIAI is working on isn't the ONLY problem worth solving.

@Eliezer: I recognize that it's hard to use volunteers. But members of Team Rational are not herd thinkers. They probabl... (read more)

The obvious example of a horror so great that God cannot tolerate it, is death - true death, mind-annihilation. I don't think that even Buddhism allows that.
This is sort of a surprising thing to hear from someone with a Jewish religious background. Jews spend very little attention and energy on the afterlife. (And your picture of Buddhism is simplistic at best, but other people have already dealt with that). I've heard the interesting theory that this stems from a reaction against their Egyptian captors, who were of course obsessed with death and the ... (read more)

Hopefully posthumans will be a little bit less stubborn in opposition to new scientific ideas.

"but on the other hand you're essentially saying that if a person is not a Chosen One, there's not much he can really contribute."

Do you think there aren't at least a few Neos whom Eliezer, and transhumanism in general, hasn't reached and influenced? I'm sure there are many, though I put the upper limit of number of people capable of doing anything worthwhile below 1M (whether they're doing anything is another matter). Perhaps the figure is much lower. But the "luminaries", boy, they are rare.

Millions of people are capable of hoovering money well in excess of their personal need. Projects aiming for post-humanity only need to target those people to secure unlimited funding.

"what makes you so damn important that you need to live forever? Get over yourself. After you die, there will be others taking over your work, assuming it was worth doing. Leave some biological and intellectual offspring and shuffle off this mortal coil and give a new generation a chance"

I vehemently disagree. What makes me so damn important, huh? What makes you so damn unimportant that you're not even giving it a try? The answer to both of these: You, yourself; you make yourself dman important or don't. Importance and significance are self-made. No one can give them to you. You must earn them.

There are damn important people. Unfortunately most of them were. Think of the joy if you could revive the best minds who've ever walked the earth. If you aren't one of them, try to become one.

Mtraven: "I truly have trouble understanding why people here think death is so terrible [...] [S]ince we are all hard-core materialists here, let me remind you that the flow of time is an illusion, spacetime is eternal [...]"

I actually think this one goes the other way. You choose to live right now, rather than killing yourself. Why not consistently affirm that choice across your entire stretch of spacetime?

"[W]hat makes you so damn important that you need to live forever?"

Important to whom?

Even if you're only capable of becoming an average, main sequence star, and not a quasistellar object outshining billions of others, what you must do is to become that star and not remain unlit. Oftentimes those who appear to shine brightly do so only because there's relative darkness around.

What if Eliezers weren't so damn rare; what if there were 100,000 x "luminaries"; which Eliezer's blog would you read?

"Important to whom?"
Important to the development of the universe. It's an open-ended project where we, its sentient part, decide what the rewards are, we decide what's important. I've come to the conclusion that optimizing, understanding, and controlling that which is (existence) asymptotically perfectly, is the most obvious goal. Until we have that figured out, we need to stick around.

"What if Eliezers weren't so damn rare"

The weird obsequiousness towards Eliezer makes yet another appearance on OB.

What the hell is supposed to be worth anything if life isn't?

Oh, and while I'm stirring up the pot, let me just say that this statement made me laugh: "But members of Team Rational are not herd thinkers." Dude. Self-undermining much?

Consequentialist: "I've come to the conclusion that optimizing, understanding, and controlling that which is (existence) asymptotically perfectly, is the most obvious goal."

You haven't been talking to Roko or Richard Hollerith lately, have you?

"The weird obsequiousness towards Eliezer makes yet another appearance on OB."

Quite the contrary. I'd prefer it be so that Eliezer is a dime a dozen. It's the relative darkness around that keeps him in the spotlight. Is suspect there's nothing special - in the Von Neumann sense - about this chap, just that I haven't found anyone like him so far. Care to point some others like him?

Eliezer, if that last comment was in response to mine it is a disappointingly obtuse misinterpretation which doesn't engage with any of the points I made. "Life" is worth something; that doesn't mean that striving for the infinite extension of individual lives should be a priority.