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"human eyes function the same way that camera lenses do, and that you make an image of a thing every time you look at it."
Cameras make a visible image of something. Eyes don't.
In response to
Three Dialogues on Identity
I'd think they do. Surely in principle someone could see the image of whatever you're looking at reflected off the retina from the inside of your eye. It's only not visible in the sense that nobody's inside your eyeball and the image is probably very dim.
In response to
Universal Law
Only 80%? I hope you've brushed up on your physics in the past three years.
The speed of light isn't some arbitrary speed limit. The speed of light is the speed of masslessness. Everything without mass (prime example: photons), must travel at that speed. Further, anything traveling at that speed does not witness the passage of time, experiencing the entirety of its trajectory at once.
Stated even better, everything travels at the speed of light; it is merely that massive particles divert most of that velocity into traveling through time. There is an intimate connection between spacetime and mass; note that no amount of electric charge bends spacetime.
The speed of light barrier exists absolutely with a probability easily exceeding 99%.
Hey, go easy on him. For a brief moment of insanity I considered the probability of anti-gravity being discovered greater than a LW poster thinking the law of gravity was s=4.9t^2
In response to
Universal Law
"The law of gravity holds precisely only in a perfect vacuum."
This is another case of confusing the law with the scientific model of it, the equations. The law holds precisely, everywhere, the equations describing it are too difficult to solve except in the simplest cases.
I was totally shocked when I read that, thinking that there'd been some discovery that anti-gravity had been discovered, and matter is in fact made up of (net positively charged) gravitational dipoles.
In response to
Existing Absurd Technologies
The whole idea of public key cryptography. Take a message, put it through a certain algorithm, but the algorithm doesn't work in reverse.
Rockets in space. A flying vehicle that seems to move forwards by pushing on nothing.
The absolute speed limit of special relativity. Not quite technology, but the experiments could be described.
Algorithms that are hard to reverse is pretty simple to understand. Every Schoolboy Knows that division is "harder" than multiplication, and I'm still not entirely sure how to find roots in my head.
The exciting thing about snowboarding isn't the challenge it's being able to do air time with little effort or at least I think so.
The appeal to me is based on engineering intuitions. Skis, seriously? Hook up a great big lever to apply torque to a single joint that is not intended to twist that way at all? Something seems wrong when I do that.
I'm not sure, but I think skis were designed for moving across mountainous terrain. I find the whole idea of "cross country snowboard" somewhat absurd, but have seen alpine troops chasing each other down on skis in WW2 documentaries.
The overwhelming majority of humans do, in fact, want to be human, much to the annoyance of the transhumanist minority.
Putting that aside, though, I see what I think is a different problem, though perhaps I'm overgeneralizing from my own motivations. Human endeavors tend to feel worthwhile because they are a challenge. Assuming that we do develop the ability to self-modify, recursively improving our physical and mental abilities, I worry that things will seem better and better -- until suddenly they seem worse. When anyone can be as strong or as fast as they want, there will be no such thing as athletics or martial arts. When anyone can be as smart as they want, there will be no such thing as puzzles or games. Etc. When all the hard questions have been answered, what will be left, except wireheading?
I still see martial arts and athletics existing, extrapolation from our present situation. Ignoring artificial handicaps and rules, these could well end up being status symbols (depending on the economic system) with people who have the resources to be able to juggle planets being seethingly envious of those rich bastards who can afford bodies and cerebrums strong enough to juggle stars.
That's close, but the object of concern isn't religious artwork but instead states of mind that are highly irrational but still compelling. Many (most?) people do a great deal of reasoning with their emotions, but rationality (justifiably) demonizes it.
Can you truly say you can communicate well with someone who is contemplating suicide and eternal damnation versus the guilt of killing the man responsible for the death of your significant other? It's probably a situation that a rationalist would avoid and definitely a state of mind far different from one a rationalist would take.
So how do you communicate with a person who empathizes with it and relates those conundrums to personal tragedies? I feel rather incapable of communicating with a deeply religious person because we simply appreciate (rightfully or wrongfully) completely different aspects of the things we talk about. Even when we agree on something actionable, our conceptions of that action are non-overlapping. (As a disclaimer, I lost contact with a significant other in this way. It's painful, and motivating of some of the thoughts here, but I don't think it's influencing my judgement such that it's much different than my beliefs before her.)
In particular, the entire situation is not so different from Eliezer's Three Worlds Collide narrative if you want to tie it to LW canon material. Value systems can in part define admissible methods of cognition and that can manifest itself as inability to communicate.
What were the solutions suggested? Annihilation, utility function smoothing, rebellion and excommunication?
Tosca sounds like it has some strange theology. Surely most people who believe in Hell also believe in Absolution?
In response to
Remaining human
My thinking of late is that if you embrace rationality as your raison d'etre, you almost inevitably conclude that human beings must be exterminated. This extermination is sometimes given a progressive spin by calling it "transhumanism" or "the Singularity", but that doesn't fundamentally change its nature.
To dismiss so many aspects of our humanity as "biases" is to dismiss humanity itself. The genius of irrationality is that it doesn't get lost in these genocidal cul-de-sacs nor in the strange loops of Godelian undecidability in trying to derive a value system from first principles (I have no idea what this sentence means). Civilizations based on the irrational revelations of prophets have proven themselves to be more successful and appealing over a longer period of time than any rationalist society to date. As we speak, the vast majority of humans being born are not adopting, and never will adopt, a rational belief system in place of religion. Rationalists are quite literally a dying breed. This leads me to conclude that the rationalist optimism of post-Enlightenment civilization was a historical accident and a brief bubble, and that we'll be returning to our primordial state of irrationality going forward.
It's fun to fantasize about transcending the human condition via science and technology, but I'm skeptical in the extreme that such a thing will happen -- at least in a way that is not repugnant to most current value systems.
Civilizations based on the irrational revelations of prophets have proven themselves to be more successful and appealing over a longer period of time than any rationalist society to date.
Depends what you mean by "based on" (and to a lesser extent "prophet" if you want to argue about North Korea, China and the old USSR). People seem to prefer, for example, America over Iran as a place to live.
As we speak, the vast majority of humans being born are not adopting, and never will adopt, a rational belief system in place of religion. Rationalists are quite literally a dying breed.
Hang on, that's a bit of a non-sequiter. Just because rationalists won't become a majority within the current generational cohort doesn't mean we're shrinking in number, or even in proportion. I haven't seen the statistics for other countries (where coercion and violence likely play some role in religious matters) but in Western nations non religious people have been increasing in number. In my own nation we're seeing the priesthood age and shrink (implying that the proportion of "religious" people committed enough to make it their career is falling) and in my city Adelaide, the "City of Churches", quite a few have been converted into shops and nightclubs.
This is off-topic, but I think Death Note is practically begging to be re-written as rationalist fanfiction
Good grief, please no. Don't ruin yet another franchise.
Ruin? Or make better?
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According to Peter Watt's blog toxoplasmosis doesn't actually reduce fear in rats, but instead causes the odor of cat urine to activate sexual arousal pathways as well as fear pathways. The overall effect causes them to approach the smell of cat urine.