In 2014, marriage is still the best economic arrangement for raising a family, but in most other senses it is like adding shit mustard to a shit sandwich. If an alien came to earth and wanted to find a way to make two people that love each other change their minds, I think he would make them live in the same house and have to coordinate every minute of their lives.

Scott Adams

It sometimes seems to me that those of us who actually have consciousness are in a minority, and everyone else is a p-zombie. But maybe that's a selection effect, since people who realise that the stars in the sky they were brought up believing in don't really exist will find that surprising enough to say, while everyone else who sees the stars in the night sky wonders what drugs the others have been taking, or invents spectacles.

I experience a certain sense of my own presence. This is what I am talking about, when I say that I am conscious. The idea that there is such an experience, and that this is what we are talking about when we talk about consciousness, appears absent from the article.

Everyone reading this, please take a moment to see whether you have any sensation that you might describe by those words. Some people can't see colours. Some people can't imagine visual scenes. Some people can't taste phenylthiocarbamide. Some people can't wiggle their ears. Maybe some people have no sensation of their own selves. If they don't, maybe this is something that can be learned, like ear-wiggling, and maybe it isn't, like phenylthiocarbamide.

Unlike the experiences reported by some, I do not find that this sensation of my own presence goes away when I stare at it. I do not even get the altered states of it that some others report.

I am also aware that I have no explanation for the existence of the phenomenon. Some philosophers have claimed that the apparent impossibility of an explanation proves that it does not exist, like a student demanding top marks for not having a clue in the exam. But for me, contemplating the seeming impossibility of the matter does not make the actual experience go away.

Here are some ideas about things that might be going on when people report that they have discovered they have no self. Discount this as you wish from typical mind fallacy, or compare it with your own experience, whatever it may be.

If you stare directly at a dim star in the night sky, it vanishes. (Try it.) Nevertheless, the star continues to exist.

If you stare directly at the sun all day, then for a different reason, you will experience disturbances of vision, and soon you will never be able to see it again. Yet it continues to exist, and after-images and blindness are not signs of enlightenment.

The sun appears to circle the Earth. When it was found that the Earth circles the sun, I doubt that anyone concluded that the sun does not exist, merely on the grounds that something we believed about it was false. (However, I would be completely unsurprised to find philosophers arguing about whether the sun that goes round the Earth and the sun that is gone round by the Earth are one thing or two.)

In the 19th century, Auguste Comte wrote that we could never know the constitution of the stars. Was any philosopher of the time so obtuse as to conclude that the stars do not exist?

Perhaps abiguity aversion is merely a good heuristic.

Well of course. Finite ideal rational agents don't exist. If you were designing decision-theory-optimal AI, that optimality is a property of its environment, not any ideal abstract computing space. I can think of at least one reason why ambiguity aversion could be the optimal algorithm in environments with limited computing resources:

Consider a self-modification algorithm that adapts to new problem domains. Restructuring (learning) is considered the hardest of tasks, and so the AI modifies scarcely. Thus, as it encounters new decision-theoretic problems, it often does not choose self-modification, instead clodging together old circuitry and/or answers to conserve compute cycles. And so when choosing answers to your 3 problems, it would fear solutions which, when repeating the answer multiple times, maximizes expected value in its environment, which includes its own source code.

Ambiguity aversion then would be commitment-risk aversion, where future compounded failures change the value of dollars per ulility. Upon each iteration of the problem, the value of a dollar can change, and if you don't maximize minimum expected value, you may end up with betting all of your $100, which is worth infinite value to you, versus gaining $100, which is worth far less, even if you started with $1000.

We see this in ourselves all the time. If you make a decision, expect to be more likely to make the decision in the future, and if you change your lifestyle, expect it to be hard to change back, even if you later know that changing back is the deletion of a bias.

And if so, do we need a different framework that can capture a broader class of "rational" agents, including maximizers of minimum expected utility?

Rational agents have source code whose optimality is a function of their environments. There is no finite cross-domain Bayesian in compute-space; only in the design-space that includes environments.

Shouldn't this post be marked [Human] so that uploads and AIs don't need to spend cycles reading it?

...I'd like to think that this joke bears the more subtle point that a possible explanation for the preparedness gap in your rationalist friends is that they're trying to think like ideal rational agents, who wouldn't need to take such human considerations.

I have a friend with Crohn's Disease, who often struggles with the motivation to even figure out how to improve his diet in order to prevent relapse. I suggested he should find a consistent way to not have to worry about diet, such as prepared meals, a snack plan, meal replacements (Soylent is out soon!), or dietary supplement.

As usual, I'm pinging the rationalists to see if there happens to be a medically inclined recommendation lurking about. Soylent seems promising, and doesn't seem the sort of thing that he and his doctor would have even discussed. My appraisal of his doctor consulations seem to be something along the lines of "You should track your diet according to these guidelines, and try to see what causes relapse" rather than "Here's a cure all solution not entirely endorsed by the FDA that will solve all of your motivational and health problems in one fell swoop." For my friend, drilling into sweeping diet changes and tracking seems like an insurmountable challenge, especially with the depression caused by simply having the disease.

I'd like to be able to purchase something for him that would let him go about his life without having to worry about it so much. Any ideas on whether Soylent could be the solution, in particular as to its potential for Crohn's?

That was the defect rate of software that meets current requirements and budgets.

There has been mathematically proven software and the space shuttle came close though that was not proven as such.

In most jobs, it's hard to change the number of hours a week you work in order to earn more or less money.

The film's trailer strikes me as being aware of the transhumanist community in a surprising way, as it includes two themes that are otherwise not connected in the public consciousness: uploads and superintelligence. I wouldn't be surprised if a screenwriter found inspiration from the characters of Sandberg, Bostrom, or of course Kurzweil. Members of the Less Wrong community itself have long struck me as ripe for fictionalization... Imagine if a Hollywood writer actually visited.

You're not alone with the cold water fascination, ice hole swimming is a thing in Finland.

Besides increasing cold tolerance, there's anecdata that cold showers can help you fall asleep if taken in the evening (lower body temperature is a sleep onset trigger), and that they can help with depression.

I can't guarantee you won't get blown up

Yes—this is part of what I'm driving at in this post! The kinds of problems that probability and decision theory work well for have a well-defined set of hypotheses, actions, and outcomes. Often the real world isn't like that. One point of the black box is that the hypothesis and outcome spaces are effectively unbounded. Trying to enumerate everything it could do isn't really feasible. That's one reason the uncertainty here is "Knightian" or "radical."

In fact, in the real world, "and then you get eaten by a black hole incoming near the speed of light" is always a possibility. Life comes with no guarantees at all.

Often in Knightian problems you are just screwed and there's nothing rational you can do. But in this case, again, I think there's a straightforward, simple, sensible approach (which so far no one has suggested...)