There is a pattern here, and part of it looks like this. You contemplate an idea X and it bothers you. You circulate your concerns among a number of people who are good at thinking and interested in ideas like X. None of them is bothered by it; none of them seems to see it the same way as you do. And, in every case, you conclude that all those people have failed to understand your idea.

Now, I think there are two kinds of explanation for this. First, we have (to put it crudely) the ones in which you are right and everyone else is wrong.

• These ideas are so horrifying that almost everyone flinches away from them mentally before they can really engage with them. The other people you talk to about X might be able to understand it, but they won't.
• You are super-abnormally good at understanding these things, and the other people you talk to about X simply don't have the cognitive horsepower to understand it.
• X is really hard to express (in general, or for you in particular) and on these occasions you have not been successful. So, while the other people could have understood X, they haven't yet had it explained clearly enough.

And then we have (to put it crudely, again) the ones in which... (read more)

Another arm-chair diagnosis here. Clearly far-out ideas affect you more than other, equally (or more) intelligent people. This is almost certainly a flaw in how your brain functions, not an indication of the problem's severity. If it were, some of those smart people you contacted would consider it seriously. If you concede that this is a problem with your brain, then you should consult the experts on fixing the brain, not fixing the future.

I think what you're doing is something that in psychology is called "Catastrophizing". In essence you're taking a mere unproven conjecture or possibility, exaggerating the negative severity of the implications, and then reacting emotionally as if this worst case scenario were true or significantly more likely than it actually is.

The proper protocol then is to re-familiarize yourself with Bayes Theorem (especially the concepts of evidence and priors), compartmentalize things according to their uncertainty, and try to step back and look at your actual beliefs and how they make you feel.

Rationality is more than just recognizing that something could be true, but also assigning appropriate degrees of belief to ideas that have a wide range of certainties and probability. What I am seeing repeatedly from your posts about the "dangers" of certain ideas, is that your assigning far too much fear to things which other people aren't.

To use an overused quote: "Fear is the mindkiller."

Try to look at the consequences of these ideas as dispassionately as possible. You cannot control everything that happens to you, but you can, to an extent, control your response t... (read more)

The next mistake was opening the door to solipsism and Brain-in-a-Vat arguments. This was so traumatic to me that I spent years in a manic depression.

Consider the possibility that the manic-depression was coincidental. When people have mental things happen for fundamentally biochemical reasons, they often misattribute them to the most plausible seeming non-biochemical cause they can think of. Exposure to ideas can exacerbate an existing problem, but it is unlikely that the lowest-hanging here has anything at all to do with the ideas themselves. Instead of looking at how you engage with stressful ideas, consider looking into other aspects of your life which might reduce your resilience.

With that said...

You started with a set of values and preferences and an ontology. When you encountered dust theory, you discovered that one of the definitions used to define your values - the notion of personal identity - wasn't fully coherent. You then tried to substitute a different definition in its place - an alternative notion of personal identity, which might not carry across a sleep/wake cycle. This alternate notion of identity is not the thing you care about. A small philosophically-minded portion of your brain has decided that it is what you care about, and is now in conflict with the other parts of your brain which don't accept the altered values. Listen to them; while those brain-parts aren't good at explaining things, they have knowledge and in this case they are right.

I am going to perpetrate a little bit of the sin of amateur psychological diagnosis over the Internet. Sorry about that.

I'm not sure that the substance of the philosophical and cosmological concepts here is what is afflicting you. After all, many people engage with cosmological horror recreationally — see, for instance, the continued popularity of writers such as Lovecraft, Stross, Banks, or the "SCP Foundation" folks.

Exposure to weird cosmological horror does not cause most humans to freak out, at least not for very long. Most people more-or-less instinctively take Egan's Law into account ("it all adds up to normality") — to the extent that this Law is only needed as a reminder for people who don't automatically do so.

It sounds like you are having trouble disengaging from these ideas. So you might want to go seek treatment specifically for anxiety. This doesn't mean "stop thinking about these issues and thereby give up any possibility of coming up with good solutions to them"; it means "become able to stop thinking about these issues when it's getting loopy and unproductive, and get back to ape mode — and remember, ape mode is acceptable; we've b... (read more)

I think what you need to realize is that it is not a question of proving that all of those things are false, but rather that it makes no difference whether they are or not. For example when you go to sleep and wake up it feels just the same whether it is still you or a different person, so it doesn't matter at all.

I think there should be a discussion about the more general idea of "needing a protocol for discussing dangerous or disconcerting ideas" in addition to the discussion of this specific circumstance.

I think that I understand your feelings. I had the same periods of existential fear about most of the things that you had. Two of them I discussed in the post about AI failures levels which didn't got any comments to my surprise.

But it is also possible to have existential euphoria. First one I got than proved for my self the idea of quantum immortality. Second is that than I understood that I will become a god in my own branch of the universe. The last needs more complex explanation, which I would omit for now.

But as I became older I got less and less fe... (read more)

Today's blog post by Yvain starts:

Anxiety disorders are the most common class of psychiatric disorders. Their US prevalence is about 20%. They’re also among the least recognized and least treated...

the idea that during sleep my mind declines enough to merge into other experiences and I awake into a world I would consider alien, with perfectly consistent memories.

An entity with self-consistent memories is astronomically more likely to be found in a world which matches those memories, than in some mismatched world. The latter has a complexity penalty equal to all the extra mismatched complexity.

Finally, we come to an absolutely terrifying idea I had a few days ago, which I naively assumed would catch the attention of any rational person. An extrapolation of Dust Theory [3] implied that you might die upon going to sleep, not immediately, but through degeneration, and that the person who wakes up in the morning is simply a different observer, who has an estimated lifespan of however long he remains awake. Rationally anyone should therefore sign up for cryonics and then kill themselves, forcing their measure to continue into post-Singularity worlds

My logic was sound, but he substituted abstractly intuitive concepts in place of them.

Sound logic doesn't help when you start of with bad assumptions.

One of them of them insisted that I needed to explain how 'causality' could be violated; isn't that the whole point of acausal systems?

No, it isn't. The fact that the word acausal exists on LW, doesn't mean that those people who use it don't believe in causality. It's used when speaking about agents that use a specific decision theory.

You furthermore simply pointed at arguments without being explicit... (read more)

Let X be something bad. If X is true it is something you and nearly every other person should rightly fear. If, however, no one but you fears X than either (1) you are mistaken, or (2) you have some special information or insight that everyone else lacks. Logically, it's almost certainly (1). So if you fear X but Eliezer, Bostrom, and Hanson don't appear to, take comfort from their lack of fear even if you don't understand it.

Thank you for all the responses. I'm trying to contact Yudkowsky, does anyone know if how often he responds to his email? Or does the email address given here still work?

Like many people I felt compelled to distinguish myself by solving your problem while playing by your rules (rules which aren't completely clear). But after all ... and I guess I should offer an apology if this doesn't help, but, why should any of that change anything? Picture someone who for his whole life thought he had free will, then discovered that the universe is deterministic, with all that entails about ideas like "free will" as normal people envision it. This sounds pretty similar to your situation. You discovered that you may at any poi... (read more)

I have a talent for reasoning my way into terrifying and harmful conclusions.

I often worked through them myself, always by refuting the horrible consequences of them to my own satisfaction

This is a good start. Assemble your data.

Catalogue the terrifying conclusions which have troubled you, and record the life cycle of each.

Currently still terrified? If not, how was the terror resolved? How long after the thought first terrified you until the terror was resolved?

Stop reasoning and take data. Often patterns becomes obvious once data is tidily assembled... (read more)

I have the exact same problem. It's nice to know I'm not alone. I've been scared to mention my fears on lesswrong because I didn't think anyone would understand.

I'm mainly concerned about many worlds interpretation being true. I don't take dust theory seriously. Unless I understand it wrongly, it removes causation and just assumes the information itself is what is important. I really recommend you read Causal Universes. It's one of my favorite Lesswrong posts.

I also think dust theory leads to absurd and obviously wrong conclusions. Like how do interpret so... (read more)

An extrapolation of Dust Theory [3] implied that you might die upon going to sleep, not immediately, but through degeneration, and that the person who wakes up in the morning is simply a different observer, who has an estimated lifespan of however long he remains awake.

If that were true, wouldn't a lot of people be dying in their sleep so that we'd be seeing their corpses?

You are talking about rationality and about fear. Your protocol could have several independent layers. You seems to think that your ideas produce your fear, but it could be also opposite. Your fear could produce your ideas (and it is definitely very probable that fear has impact on your ideas (at least on contents)). So you could analyze rational questions on lesswrong and independently solve your irrational part (=fear etc) with terapeuts. There could be physical or chemical reasons why you are concerning more than other people. Your protocol for dangerou... (read more)

The next big failure was my resolution to the Doomsday argument.

Are you aware of the self-indication assumption.

Why think about these sorts of things?

Personally, death really messes with my mind, and I try not to think about it (and related bad things) in the short-mid term. I don't see that I'm in a position to do much to avoid death/related bad things right now, and so I don't see that there's much benefit to thinking about it right now. The cost to me is that it makes me mildly unhappy and risks moments of extreme unhappiness.

Do you have a link to Max Tegmark's rebuttal? What I've read so far seemed like a confused dodge.