"We don't need the t.
It's redundant.
The r never repeats itself."
While this seems to be true given the expansion of the universe, is it strictly necessary? What if some value R does repeat, throwing the universe into an endless loop? At some point, the chains of r's leading up to R0 and R1 would differ; wouldn't we need another variable to encode that?
...throwing the universe into an endless loop? At some point, the chains of r's leading up to R0 and R1 would differ...
The point of an endless loop is that it is endless and R never will differ outside of that loop, how could it? Everything happens exactly the same way it did last time, and for exactly the same reasons. A universe also can't enter such a loop starting outside (given reversible physics), and there wouldn't be any seem where it is all stiched together.
I'm not sure how this would go together with many-worlds. But if one considers two branches, where one branch eventually gets into exactly the same configuration at some point of the other (extremely unlikely, obviously, but consider all possible branches...), we could compress our model of reality without loosing information by treating them as one. This is quite similar to the endless loop above.
(I am not a phycisist!)
Among other problems, how do you know when you have found the shortest possible way of expressing something in ones and zeroes?
You don't. That's uncomputable in the general case, and in most nontrivial special cases as well. You can, however, put upper bounds on it.
That was my point exactly.
Z. M. Davis: All this talk of "simpler computer program" seems pretty meaningless to me. A regex matcher in C is long and complex, but in PHP all you have to do is use the built-in preg_match function. (Does the language the universe was written in have a built-in copenhagen_interpretation function?)
One might claim that PHP is a more complicated language than C, but how is that measured? The only way to see how complicated a language is is by a complete description of it - an implementation. And the complexity of an implementation depends on the kind of CPU it must run on, and the complexity of a CPU architecture depends on the laws of physics it must exist in. Self reference: this is the stuff paradoxes are made of.
I'd interpret "shortest computer program" more like " the shortest string of ones and zeroes that gets the job done on an idealistic Turing machine" or some such. High-level programming languages are for the convenience of programmers, not computers. Thus, to use the built-in preg_match function of PHP, you'd first of all need to represent PHP's built-in implementation of that, and also the rest of PHP, plus some environment. If you did that I think it would turn out to be longer than if you did the same in C.
This is only to be used as a way of guiding your thoughts in the right direction, a rule of thumb, rather than an actual experiment to determine between hypothesis. Among other problems, how do you know when you have found the shortest possible way of expressing something in ones and zeroes?
It is widely said that some primitive tribe or other once feared that photographs could steal their souls.
My dad is a photographer, but he has a strange avertion to being photographed, and use to describe how when he was little he thought that a camera must somehow capture some small part of him to stick in the photo, and he didnt like the thought of that, and that feeling never really left...
To expand on that point, we also measure energy in hertz, and temperatures in Joules, and ultimately everything in pure numbers. :)
Imagine an alien civilisation that has, say, fourteen colours. Calling two adjacent ones by the same name would be as ridiculous to them as someone here calling green and yellow the same thing.
I don't think you need alien civilizations for this. Not all human languages have color words that map 1:1 to English color words. (I seem to recall that the word for "red" in Korean includes what English speakers would call "copper". I could be mistaken.)
Eliezer, isn't reading a good fantasy story like being transported into another world?
Jed Harris: I agree... Our world seems to have the rule: "you are not significant". You can't design and build an airplane in your backyard, no one can. Even if you've got enough money, you haven't got enough time for that. In magical worlds (including Star Trek, Asimov, etc) that is what seems to be normal. (And I've never read about a committee which coordinates the work of hundreds of sorcerers, who create new spells 8 hours a day...)
rfriel: Yes, we could build the technology to do the things magic can do, but even with our current technology we also can do things which magic can't. And these limitations are which make magic so "nice", not only the features.
Martin: to be the best, you only have to make your world small. (I was one of the best in math in our secondary school, and it didn't bother me that I wasn't the best in the whole country, or that I was quite bad in history...) But it would have been soo good to be the one who makes the best operating systems in the whole school...
You can't design and build an airplane in your backyard, no one can.
But thats exactly how it did happen! If magic was possible in 1903, then surely it is possible now.
I refuse to exept your premise that it is impossible to have enough time and/or money to persue ones dreams; indeed, I challenge it. I personaly have a low income job, and also a small, old and used sailboat, that I'm trying to renovate and make seaworty again, with the hope of one day sailing far and explore the world. I know this is possible, for my parents did it, and brought me and my brother along 10 years ago, when I was 12.
Nobody has any idea of what it implies except "really, really big", so when your concepts get up there, people have to do the math, since the numbers mean nothing.
This applies just as much to numbers such as million and billion, which people mixes up regularly; the problem though is that people dont do the math, despite not understanding the magnitudes if the numbers, and those numbers of people are actually around.
Personaly, if I first try to visualize a crowd of a hundred people, and then a crowd of a thousand, the second crowd seems about three times as large. If I start with a thousand, and then try a hundred, this time around the hundred people crowd seems a lot bigger than it did last time. And the bigger numbers I try with, the worse it gets, and there is a long way to go to get to 7'000'000'000(# of people of earth). All sorts of biases seems to be at work here, anchoring among them. Result: Shut up and multiply!
[Edit: Spelling]
This is further evidenced by the fact that most people dont know about the long and short scales, and never noticed.
"Way to dismiss the rest of the human species out of hand. It's people like you 'wot cause evaporative cooling. Nice little ingroup vibe there, sure to P.O. everyone who isn't already in the cult."
Forgive me for having the audacity to state the obvious out loud. We know from a huge number of precedents that, even if SIAI is wildly successful, 99% of the human species *isn't going to help*. 99% of America doesn't involve itself in something as popular and easily understood as national politics; what chance does transhumanism have? This is true regardless of how many people it P.O.'s.
Consider a book series as popular and well-written as the Feynman Lectures on Physics. How many people became physicists because they read Feynman's lectures? The books were certainly read by a large number of physicists, but I doubt you would have seen any major decrease in the number of professional physicists had Feynman never lived. A lot of people can point to one or two books they read that first got them involved in whatever field they studied, but so far as I know, there's no one, single book that got a lot of young people into any specific career. The closest things I can think of are TV dramas like CSI and ER, and they have millions of viewers nationwide.
"I can hire researchers who read the popular book as grad students, went on to read the massive tome, and then read a few dozen technical math books while refining their practice of rationality until they became ready to think about FAI without their head exploding"
This is a legitimate strategy, but again, this demographic is going to be *much smaller* than the total number of people who buy the book. You must know this. People don't read dozens of additional books or study rationality intensively unless they have some compelling reason to- you mention this yourself (http://lesswrong.com/lw/nb/something_to_protect/). The two compelling reasons you mentioned, transhumanism and making millions, aren't going to attract a lot of people (the first due to future shock and sparsity in the memepool, the second due to skepticism over get-rich-quick schemes).
"Most of SIAI's human intake today is from people who read stuff I wrote ten years ago."
Most of the stuff you wrote ten years ago is on transhumanism, which *does* give people a compelling reason to stay involved.
"Even if the book was just a re-hash of the blog posts that are readily available, I'd buy it anyway"
I was talking about the ratio of people who help save the world/people who read the book, not the absolute number of people who read the book (which will probably be rather large).
"Almost nobody (relatively) will be rediscovering them in a few years. That's simply the nature of blogging. Who's reading 3 years old BoingBoing posts right now?"
This is a very good point.
I agree with you that it is a hard problem to make the rest of humanity see and care about these things, to which I say: All the more reason to try!
That it's no point becouse it'll probably not change the world all that much anyway, strikes me as a close-to fully general counterargument.
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I think Horgan's questions were good in that they were a straight forward expression of how many sceptics think. My own summary of this thinking goes something like this:
The singularity idea sounds kind of crazy, if not plain out ridiculous. Super intelligent machines and people living forever? I mean... come on! History is full of silly predictions about the future that turned out to be totally wrong. If you want me to take this seriously you're going to have to present some very strong arguments as to why this is going to happen.
Although I agree with most of what Eli said, rhetorically it sounded like he was avoiding this central question with a series of quibbles and tangents. This is not going to win over many sceptics' minds.
I think it's an important question to try to answer as directly and succinctly as possible -- a longish "elevator pitch" that forms a good starting point for discussion with a sceptic. I'll think about this and try to write a blog post.
Did you ever formulate anything good? I'd be interested to read it if so, I'm having trouble keeping the attention of my friends and family for long enough to explain...