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What is the goal of this document? If it is significantly contributing to the dialogue about rationality expressed by the community, then why would you put it behind an arbitrary paywall?
Whether you have multiple possible entries into the loop is irrelevant, what is important is whether you have possible exits.
As to your second point, does that mean it is ethical to run a simulation of someone being tortured as long as that simulation has already been run sometime in the past?
Possible exits could emerge from whatever the loop gets embedded in. (see 3 below)
Assuming a Tegmarkian multiverse, if it is mathematically possible to describe an environment with someone being tortured, in a sense it "is happened". Whether or not a simulation which happens to have someone being tortured is ethical to compute is hard to judge. I'm currently basing my hypothetical utility function on the following guidelines:
If your universe is casually necessary to describe theirs, you are probably responsible for the moral consequences in their universe.
If your universe is not casually necessary to describe theirs, you are essentially observing events which are independent of anything you could do. Merely creating an instance of their universe is ethically neutral.
One could take information from an casually independent universe and put it towards good ends; e.g. someone could run a simulation of our universe and "upload" conscious entities before they become information theoretically dead.
Of course, these guidelines depend on a rigorous definition of casual necessity that I currently don't have, but I don't plan to run any non-trivial simulations until I do.
What if you get trapped in a loop of mind-states, each horrible state leading to the next until you are back where you started?
You probably could/would subjectively end up in a non-looping state. After all, you had to have multiple possible entries into the loop to begin with. Besides, it's meaningless to say that you go through the loop more than once (remember, your mind can't distinguish which loop it is in, because it has to loop back around to an initial state).
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[link] SMBC on utilitarianism and vegatarianism.
On the other hand, this is just flat out wrong.
EDIT: (I'm referring to another comic which assigns atoms individual identities.)
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Just a reminder, for everyone that signed up for the intro to AI class, it's started.
The server seems to be in a bit of a clusterfuck, but unit 1 was interesting. Rot13: V npghnyyl zrffrq hc ba gur Puvarfr "fbhc/zvk" pbeerfcbaqrapr dhrfgvba, naq nz srryvat dhvgr flzcngurgvp sbe Tbbtyr Genafyngr evtug abj. :)
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[gooey request-for-help] I don't know what to do.
- See a professional about mental health: Tried this, absolutely useless.
Please elaborate on your experiences with this. This certainly sounds like an ugh field.
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Specific Fiction Discusion (April 2011)
Author: Vernor Vinge
Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_vinge
Notable works include:
- The Peace War
- Marooned in Realtime
- A Fire Upon the Deep
- A Deepness in the Sky
- Across Realtime
'Children of the Sky', sequel to 'A Fire Upon the Deep' and thus 'A Deepness in the Sky', comes out on October 15th, and the excerpts so far have been promising.
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Atheism & the autism spectrum
Well, no wonder they are trying to exorcise us. :)
I am impressed that a political dialogue occurred without the throwing of epithets about the motives of the parties involved. I think I might have even... actually learned something. This feels very weird. :)
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The question is "what's the special thing we can learn from this?", because decision making failures happen all the time. In order to upvote this article, I'd like to see some original elaboration on decision making with high stakes and under time pressure.
When guessing the teacher's password, always go with the optimal fit for syntax?