This post was completely rewritten on July 17th, 2015, 6:10 AM. Comments before that are not necessarily relevant.

Assume that our minds really do work the way Unification tells us: what we are experiencing is actually the sum total of every possible universe which produces them. Some universes have more 'measure' than others, and that is typically the stable ones; we do not experience chaos. I think this makes a great deal of sense- if our minds really are patterns of information I do not see why a physical world should have a monopoly on it.

Now to prove that we live in a Big World. The logic is simple- why would something finite exist? If we're going to reason that some fundamental law causes everything to exist, I don't see why that law restricts itself to this universe and nothing else. Why would it stop? It is, arguably, simply the nature of things for an infinite multiverse to exist.

I'm pretty terrible at math, so please try to forgive me if this sounds wrong. Take the 'density' of physical universes where you exist- the measure, if you will- and call it j. Then take the measure of universes where you are simulated and call it p. So, the question become is j greater than p? You might be thinking yes, but remember that it doesn't only have to be one simulation per universe. According to our Big World model there is a universe out there in which all processing power (or a significant portion) as been turned into simulations of you.

So we take the amount of minds being simulated per universe and call that x. Then the real question becomes if j > px. What sort of universe is common enough and contains enough minds to overcome j? If you say that approximately 10^60 simulated human minds could fit in it (a reasonable guess for this universe) but that such universes are five trillion times rarer than the universe we live in, than it's clear that our own 'physical' measure is hopelessly lower than our simulated measure.

Should we worry about this? It would seem highly probable that in most universes where I am being simulated I once existed in, or humans did, since the odds of randomly stumbling upon me in Mind Space seem unlikely enough to ignore. Presumably they are either AIs gone wrong or someone trying to grab some of my measure, for whatever reason.

As way of protecting measure, pretty much all of our postsingularity universes would divide up the matter of the universe for each person living, create as many simulations as possible of them from birth, and allow them to go through the Singularity. I expect that my ultimate form is a single me, not knowing if he is simulated or not, with billions of perfect simulations of himself across our universe, all reasoning the same way (he would be told this by the AI, since there isn't any more reason for secrecy). This, I think, would be able to guard my measure against nefarious or bizarre universes in which I am simulated. It cannot just simulate the last few moments of my life because those other universes might try to grab younger versions of me. So if we take j to be safe measure rather than physical measure, and p to be unsafe or alien, it becomes jx > px, which I think is quite reasonable.

I do not think of this as some kind of solipsist nightmare; the whole point of this is to simulate the 'real' you, the one that really existed, and part of your measure is, after all, always interacting in a real universe. I would suggest that by any philosophical standard the simulations could be ignored, with the value of your life being the same as ever.

I have a talent for reasoning my way into terrifying and harmful conclusions. The first was modal realism as a fourteen-year-old. Of course I did not understand most of its consequences, but I disliked the fact that existence was infinite. It mildly depressed me for a few days. The next mistake was opening the door to solipsism and Brain-in-a-Vat arguments. This was so traumatic to me that I spent years in a manic depression. I could have been healed in a matter of minutes if I had talked to the right person or read the right arguments during that period, but I didn't.

Lesswrong has been a breeding ground of existential crisis for me. The Doomsday argument (which I thought up independently), ideas based on acausal trade (one example was already well known; one I invented myself), quantum immortality, the simulation argument, and finally my latest and worst epiphany: the potential horrible consequences of losing awareness of your reality under Dust Theory. I don't know that that's an accurate term for the problem, but it's the best I can think of.

This isn't to say that my problems were never solved; I often worked through them myself, always by refuting the horrible consequences of them to my own satisfaction and never through any sort of 'acceptance.' I don't think that my reactions are a consequence of an already depressed mind-state (which I certainly have anyway) because the moment I refute them I feel emotionally as if it never happened. It no longer wears on me. I have OCD, but if it's what's causing me to ruminate than I think I prefer having it as opposed to irrational suppression of a rational problem. Finding solutions would have taken much longer if I hadn't been thinking about them constantly.

I've come to realize that this site, due to perhaps a confluence of problems, was extremely unhelpful in working through any of my issues, even when they were brought about of Lesswrong ideas and premises. My acausal problem [1] I sent to about five or six people, and none of them had anything conclusive to say but simply referred me to Eliezer. Who didn't respond, even though this sort of thing is apparently important to him. This whole reaction struck me as disproportionate to the severity of the problem, but that was the best response I've had so far.

The next big failure was my resolution to the Doomsday argument. [2] I'm not very good yet at conveying these kind of ideas, so I'm not sure it was entirely the fault of the Lesswrongers, but still. One of them of them insisted that I needed to explain how 'causality' could be violated; isn't that the whole point of acausal systems? My logic was sound, but he substituted abstractly intuitive concepts in place of them. I would think that there would be something in the Sequences about that.

The other posters were only marginally more helpful. Some of them challenged the self-sampling assumption, but then why even bother if the problem I'm trying to solve requires it to be true? In the end, not one person even seemed to consider the possibility that it might work. Even though it is a natural extrapolation from other ideas which are taken very very seriously by Lesswrong. Instead of discussing my resolution, they discussed the DA itself, or AI, or whatever they found more interesting.

Finally, we come to an absolutely terrifying idea I had a few days ago, which I naively assumed would catch the attention of any rational person. An extrapolation of Dust Theory [3] implied that you might die upon going to sleep, not immediately, but through degeneration, and that the person who wakes up in the morning is simply a different observer, who has an estimated lifespan of however long he remains awake. Rationally anyone should therefore sign up for cryonics and then kill themselves, forcing their measure to continue into post-Singularity worlds that no longer require him to sleep (not that I would have ever found the courage to do this). [4] In the moments when I considered it most plausible I gave it no more than a 10% chance of being true (although it would have been higher if I had taken Dust Theory for granted), and it still traumatized me in a way I've never experienced before. Always during my worst moments sleep came as a relief and escape. Now I cannot go to sleep. Only slightly less traumatizing was the idea that during sleep my mind declines enough to merge into other experiences and I awake into a world I would consider alien, with perfectly consistent memories.

My inquiries on different threads were almost completely ignored, so I eventually created my own. After twenty-four hours there were nine posts, and now there are twenty-two. All of them either completely miss the point (always not realizing this) or show complete ignorance about what Dust Theory is. The idea that this requires any level of urgency does not seem to have occurred to anyone. Finally, the second part of my question, which asked about the six-year-old post "getting over Dust Theory" was completely ignored, despite having ninety-five comments on it by people who seem to already understand it themselves.

I resolved both issues, but not to my own satisfaction: while I now consider the death outcome unlikely enough to dismiss, the reality-jumping still somewhat worries me. I now will not be able to go to sleep without fear for the next few months; maybe longer, and my mental and physical health will deteriorate. Professional help or a hotline is out of the question because I will not inflict these ideas on people who are not equipped to deal with them, and also because I regard psychologists as charlatans or, at best, practitioners of a deeply unhealthy field. The only option I have to resolve the issues is talking to someone who can discuss it rationally.

This post [5] by Eliezer, however unreliable he might be, convinced me that he might actually know what he is talking about (though I still don't know how Max Tegmark's rebuttal to quantum immortality is refuted, because it seems pretty airtight to me). More disappointing is Nick Bostrom's argument that mind-duplicates will experience two subjective experiences; he does not understand the idea of measure, i.e. that we exist in all universes that account for our experiences, but more in some than others. Still, I think there has to be someone out there who is capable of following my reasoning- all the more frustrating, because the more people misapprehend my ideas, the clearer and sharper they seem to me.

Who do I talk to? How do I contact them? I doubt that going around emailing these people will be effective, but something has to change. I can't go insane, as much as that would be a relief, and I can't simply ignore it. I need someone sane to talk to, and this isn't the place to find that.

Sorry if any of this comes off as ranting or incoherent. That's what happens when someone is pushed to all extremes and beyond. I am not planning on killing myself whatsoever and do not expect that to change. I just want help.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0y/i_may_have_just_had_a_dangerous_thought/ (I don't think that the idea is threatening anymore, though.)

[2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/m8j/a_resolution_to_the_doomsday_argument/

[3] http://sciencefiction.com/2011/05/23/science-feature-dust-theory/

[4] http://lesswrong.com/lw/mgd/the_consequences_of_dust_theory/

[5] http://lesswrong.com/lw/few/if_mwi_is_correct_should_we_expect_to_experience/7sx3

(The insert-link button is greyed out, for whatever reason.)

Dust theory implies that everything outside of my perception is in flux. Your experiences have to find themselves in a world in which they could have conceivably formed. Of course, you exist in every possible world which would produce that mindstate, but some are 'vaster' than others, leading you down the most probable courses.

Suppose that going to sleep or losing grasp of your surroundings opens a wider space of worlds you could exist in, which jumps you into another reality along with consistent memories of it. I can't figure out if this would be the case, or if my consciousness would most likely just dissolve, with only those beating trillion-to-one odds waking up in the morning. Or maybe my pool of 'experience' stays active when I sleep, even if I'm not aware of it. Either way (though I think Dust Theory is probably false) I'm afraid to go to sleep anymore.

I also do not understand the argument being made here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1jm/getting_over_dust_theory/. Can someone explain to me please?

I posted these questions on other threads but I didn't get many answers. Sorry.

EDIT: Look, the first question boils down to: does my unconscious mind affect my measure? If so, than it isn't much different from being awake. If not, then all my problems seem to apply.

It occurs to me that not only would signing up for cryonics and then killing yourself before you could sleep is rational under these circumstances, but that the death of the universe can be escaped by simply rearranging your mind to believe it is in a universe where eternal life is possible, then ceasing its activity.

I haven't come across this particular argument before, so I hope I'm not just rehashing a well-known problem.

"The universe displays some very strong signs that it is a simulation.

As has been mentioned in some other answers, one way to efficiently achieve a high fidelity simulation is to design it in such a way that you only need to compute as much detail as is needed. If someone takes a cursory glance at something you should only compute its rough details and only when someone looks at it closely, with a microscope say, do you need to fill in the details.

This puts a big constraint on the kind of physics you can have in a simulation. You need this property: suppose some physical system starts in state x. The system evolves over time to a new state y which is now observed to accuracy ε. As the simulation only needs to display the system to accuracy ε the implementor doesn't want to have to compute x to arbitrary precision. They'd like only have to compute x to some limited degree of accuracy. In other words, demanding y to some limited degree of accuracy should only require computing x to a limited degree of accuracy.

Let's spell this out. Write y as a function of x, y = f(x). We want that for all ε there is a δ such that for all x-δ<y<x+δ, |f(y)-f(x)|<ε. This is just a restatement in mathematical notation of what I said in English. But do you recognise it?

It's the standard textbook definition of a Continuous function. We humans invented the notion of continuity because it was an ubiquitous property of functions in the physical world. But it's precisely the property you need to implement a simulation with demand-driven level of detail. All of our fundamental physics is based on equations that evolve continuously over time and so are optimised for demand-driven implementation.

One way of looking at this is that if y=f(x), then if you want to compute n digits of y you only need a finite number of digits of x. This has another amazing advantage: if you only ever display things to a given accuracy you only ever need to compute your real numbers to a finite accuracy. Nature could have chosen to use any number of arbitrarily complicated functions on the reals. But in fact we only find functions with the special property that they need only be computed to finite precision. This is precisely what a smart programmer would have implemented.

(This also helps motivate the use of real numbers. The basic operations on real numbers such as addition and multiplication are continuous and require only finite precision in their arguments to compute their values to finite precision. So real numbers give a really neat way to allow inhabitants to find ever more detail within a simulation without putting an undue burden on its implementation.)

But you can do one step further. As Gregory Benford says in Timescape: "nature seemed to like equations stated in covariant differential forms". Our fundamental physical quantities aren't just continuous, they're differentiable. Differentiability means that if y=f(x) then once you zoom in closely enough, y depends linearly on x. This means that one more digit of y requires precisely one more digit of x. In other words our hypothetical programmer has arranged things so that after some initial finite length segment they can know in advance exactly how much data they are going to need.

After all that, I don't see how we can know we're not in a simulation. Nature seems cleverly designed to make a demand-driven simulation of it as efficient as possible."

http://www.quora.com/How-do-we-know-that-were-not-living-in-a-computer-simulation/answer/Dan-Piponi

A self-modifying AI is built to serve humanity. The builders know, of course, that this is much riskier than it seems, because its success would render their own observations extremely rare. To solve the problem, they direct the AI to create billions of simulated humanities in the hope that this will serve as a Schelling point to them, and make their own universe almost certainly simulated.

Plausible?

So I've been rejected for conscription in the IDF because the psychiatrist thinks the Asperger's diagnosis I received as a child means that there is something wrong with me. Never mind that I've been examined very recently and been recommended for enlistment, he thinks that even though I probably don't have Asperger's, there must be something wrong with me because in the past I've had trouble socially. Of course I have no such problems now, but it's not as if he's going to risk his job in the face of anything less than perfection.

(This, btw, is what I meant when I said there was no such thing as a competent mental health professional- the entire system works against evidence-based methods.)

There has to be something wrong with this, some way that I can appeal. I have no idea of the Israeli legal process and I'm not sure if I could just write a letter to someone, or if I might need a lawyer. I can definitely prove that there is nothing psychologically wrong with me. I just have no idea where to turn, no idea how to do anything, and have no allies whatsoever. I feel like my life is collapsing, and I do have very good reasons personally for wanting to join the army. It's not just something I felt like doing.

This community obviously has better things to do than this sort of thing. But I feel like I'm going to explode if I can't talk to anyone, or get some idea of what I can do. I feel almost as if I'm becoming mentally ill.

I'm interested in discussing this with someone, non-publicly. It's safe to know about personally, but it's not something I'd like people in general to know.

I'm really not sure if there is a protocol for this sort of thing.

I'm not at all sure how this site works yet (I've gone only on traditional forums), so bear with me please if I do something foolish. I'm being drafted to the IDF in a few months and I need to learn Hebrew very quickly if I want to avoid being put into a program for foreign speakers. I currently reside in the US, but I've previously lived in (and have citizenship of) both countries.

After experiencing the government-sponsored Hebrew programs, I totally refuse to accept such a ridiculously inefficient and traumatic method of teaching a language. When I get enlisted, I'll want to focus whatever little time I have left on studying more important things. Something that will damage me psychologically, not to mention take up huge amounts of time and effort, will take away any opportunity I might get.

I can speak a few basic phrases in Hebrew and and can understand a bit more. Immersion is not an option for me currently. My attempts at teaching myself the language have been stunningly misguided (which is to say, like reading Atlas Shrugged to get a proper understanding of Objectivism) and I'm not interested in a lengthy trial and error process. Obviously getting literature on language acquisition is out of the question. I wouldn't even know where to start.

So, I'd just like some methods or heuristics for picking up languages as fast as possible. (I am extremely literate, so there's that.)