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Squark comments on Open thread, 24-30 March 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Recently I changed some of my basic opinions about life, in large part because of interaction with LessWrong (mostly along the axes Deism -> Atheism, ethical naturalism -> something else (?)).
It inspired me to try to summarize my most fundamental beliefs. The result is as follows:
1.1. Epistemic truth is to be determined solely by the scientific method / Occam's razor.
1.2. The worldview of mainstream science is mostly correct.
1.3. The many religious / mystical traditions are wrong.
2.1. Consciousness is the result of computing processes in the brain. In particular, if a machine would implement the same computations it would be conscious. However, in general I don't know what consciousness is.
2.2. Identity is not fundamentally meaningful. However, there might be useful "fuzzy" variants of the concept.
3.1. Humans are agents with (approximately) well-defined utility functions.
3.2. The moral value of an action is the expectation value of the utility function of the respective agent.
3.3. I should take actions with as much value as possible. This is the only meaningful interpretation of "should".
4.1. Human utility functions are complex.
4.2. I cannot give anything close to a full description of my utility function, but it seems to involve terminal values such as: beauty, curiosity, humor, kindness, friendship, love, sexuality / romance, pleasure... These values are computed on all sufficiently human agents (but I don't know what "sufficiently human" means). The weights for myself and my friends / loved ones might be higher but I'm not sure.
Less fundamental and less certain are:
5.1. UDT is the correct decision theory.
5.2. Epistemic questions don't make fundamental sense (I realize the apparent contradiction with 1.1 but 1.1 is still a useful approximation and there's also a meta-epistemic level on which UDT itself follows from Occam's razor) as opposed to decision-theoretic questions. Subjective expectations are ill-defined.
5.3. Temark's level IV multiverse is real, or at least as "real" as anything is.
I'm curious to know how many LessWrongers have similar vs different worldviews.
1.1- Disagree, but I may not understand the claim (what's 'epistemic truth'?). 1.2- Agree. 1.3- Agree. 2.1- Agree that consciousness is the result of computing processes in the brain, disagree that a machine implementing the same computations would necessarily be conscious. (i.e. agree with physicalism, don't agree with functionalism). 2.2- I don't understand the claim. But I think I disagree. 3.1- Agnostic. 3.2- Disagree. 3.3- Disagree, especially with the claim that this is the only meaningful interpretation of 'should'. 4.1- Agnostic. 5.1- Agnostic. 5.2- I don't understand this at all. 5.3- I don't understand your use of the word 'real'.
By "epistemic truth" I mean truth regarding the physical universe. Maybe that is a poor choice of words. Physical truth?
So do you mean 'the only grounds for knowledge about the physical universe is the scientific method/Occam's razor'?
Yep. Although under a UDT / multiverse interpretation it becomes "knowledge about the region of the multiverse in which I am located".
What is UDT?
Updateless decision theory.
Is this an epistemic truth?
No :) See below.