EphemeralNight

Replying toThe Fable of the Burning Branch

Well, first, I'll admit up front that I logged off and metaphorically hid for a day after posting this, so I would not be tempted to engage in a pointless argument in the comments. And yet, I was somehow still too optimistic about what I'd find when I looked.

First point of order, this isn't about me. I've been on this site a while, it should be obvious by now that I have no qualms sharing gooey personal details about myself. So. Stop making it about me. If it was about me, you'd know.

Second point of order, the pronouns assigned to the characters do not matter and I think it says more about... (read more)

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The Fable of the Burning Branch

EphemeralNight

10y

Once upon a time, in a lonely little village, beneath the boughs of a forest of burning trees, there lived a boy. The branches of the burning trees sometimes fell, and the magic in the wood permitted only girls to carry the fallen branches of the burning trees.

One day, a branch fell, and a boy was pinned beneath. The boy saw other boys pinned by branches, rescued by their girl friends, but he remained trapped beneath his own burning branch.

The fire crept closer, and the boy called out for help.

Finally, a friend of his own came, but she told him that she could not free him from the burning branch, because she... (read 1457 more words →)

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Replying toConsciousness and Sleep

EphemeralNight10y

Consciousness and Sleep

That is actually what I meant. But the way you're phasing it re-introduces confusion on the word "you".

What this means is, neither branch is privileged, neither branch takes precedence, there is no soul that only goes to one or the other, the subjective "you" prior to duplication does have a 50% chance of experiencing either branch. After duplication, there are two people, who are both, objectively, "you", but neither subjectively experiences being in two places at once.

One experiences the destination and subsequent existence, the other experiences a split second of dawning horror and then oblivion. Each time a "you" steps into the badly designed dupli-teleporter, that "you" has a 50% chance of either experience.

Replying toConsciousness and Sleep

EphemeralNight10y

Consciousness and Sleep

In this problem, we imagine that you are cloned perfectly in an alternate location and then your body is destroyed.

In which case, "you" have a 50% chance of dying, because your self-continuity forks and one fork is then destroyed. The obvious answer to this dilemma isn't a metaphysical one. It's that this is a stupid way to design a teleporter.

If we instead imagine that you are destroyed and then duplicated perfectly in an alternate location, there is no longer an extra self-continuity branch that terminates. Correct order of operations in the engineering solution is all it takes to solve this problem.

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Replying toStupid Questions June 2015

EphemeralNight11y

Stupid Questions June 2015

I think maybe not if you sign them up for cryonic preservation?

I think it may be much more on point to talk about it being unethical to have children pre-singularity, for the inevitable needless suffering that will occur. I do believe that the moment we solve aging, it is a moral imperative to stop having children until we can be assure that we're not bringing new people into existence just to suffer.

I don't think it is unethical to keep having children today, but only so far as it is necessary to actually reach the singularity. I think ethically, we should be trying to minimize the portion of human mind-space that must experience pre-singularity existence, but not to the point of delaying the singularity.

Replying toEphemeral correspondence

EphemeralNight11y

Ephemeral correspondence

Consciousness is the most recent module, and that does mean that. I'm sorry, I thought this was one point that wasn't even in dispute. It was laid out pretty clearly in the Evolution Sequence:

Complex adaptations take a very long time to evolve. First comes allele A, which is advantageous of itself, and requires a thousand generations to fixate in the gene pool. Only then can another allele B, which depends on A, begin rising to fixation. A fur coat is not a strong advantage unless the environment has a statistically reliable tendency to throw cold weather at you. Well, genes form part of the environment of other genes, and if B depends on A, B will not have a strong advantage unless A is reliably present in the genetic environment

Evolutions Are Stupid (But Work Anyway)

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Replying toEphemeral correspondence

EphemeralNight11y

Ephemeral correspondence

There is a wrong-note in the reasoning of this post that immediately started niggling at me, but it's subtle and I'm having trouble teasing out the underlying assumption. I want to say that you're taking "The purpose of consciousness is consciousness" as a given, when that is arguably false. Likewise, I want to accuse you of drawing causal arrows from consciousness to other modules of human mind design, which as far as I know is ruled out, evolutionarily speaking.

I offer this:

The "executive process" as you call it is part of the world-modeler. It is the world-modeling module that evolved in response to a very unique world-modeling challenge. There is a critical difference... (read more)

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Replying toThe "supernatural" category

EphemeralNight11y

The "supernatural" category

I think there is a strict and useful definition of "supernatural" to be had, that suitably reduces the concept.

Take the game of life as an example. In the cell grid, the rules governing individual cells are the laws of physics. Those rules completely define natural phenomenon in that universe. It seems clear to me, then, that the definition of supernatural phenomenon points to operations on patterns of cells, IE, anything that edits the outputs of the natural rules.

For example, "Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation." is natural, while "If glider for x iterations, then pulsar" is supernatural.

Replying toStupid Questions April 2015

EphemeralNight11y

Stupid Questions April 2015

I think you may have misunderstood. I'm talking about my router, which is a separate device from my modem. I have never observed the router rebooting to fix a problem, and have on several occasions observed the reboot to cause a problem. I just want to know if there is something nonobvious going on that will cause problems if the router does not reboot once a week, keeping in mind that it is a separate device from the cable modem.

Replying toHow has lesswrong changed your life?

EphemeralNight11y

How has lesswrong changed your life?

I've gone from rock-bottom self-esteem and hopeless crying, to... rock-bottom self-esteem and StepfordSmiling. LessWrong has helped me become much less self-centered by providing the skills to quantify exactly how I am not, in fact, worth anything to anyone, and am, in fact, entitled to nothing.

I talk about transhumanism and cryonics instead of nihilism and suicide.

I went from feeling like I'm always in hostile territory waiting to die, to feeling like I'm always out in the cold looking in on something beautiful that will never include me.

I get much less enjoyment and relaxation from my passtimes because I've internalized the fact that escapism isn't.

It took an hour to compose this post instead of ten minutes, because I have a more realistic expectation of the results.

Replying toStupid Questions April 2015

EphemeralNight11y

Stupid Questions April 2015

Okay, so I have a "self-healing" router that ostensibly reboots itself once a week to "allow channel switching" and to "promote network health", and given that this seems to NOT mess up my internet access in one of several ways every tuesday morning only MOST of the time, it has been causing me stress absurdly out of proportion with the actual danger (of being without internet access/my ONLY link to the outside world, for a short time).

So, my question is, what the HECK does "channel switching" or "promoting network health" even mean, and is it actually important enough that I shouldn't just flat out disable my router's "self-healing" feature?

[LINK] "Junk" DNA revealed as information processing system?

EphemeralNight

13y

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/test-and-measurement/re-imagining-our-genes-encode-project-reveals-genome-as-an-information-processing-system/?utm_source=techalert&utm_medium=email&utm_camp

Just a few years ago, the prevailing wisdom said that the genome comprises 3 percent or so genes and 97 percent “junk” (with 2 or 3 percent of that junk consisting of the fossilized remains of retroviruses that infected our ancestors somewhere along the line). After a decade of painstaking analysis by more than 200 scientists, the new ENCODE data show that indeed 2.94 percent of the genome is protein-coding genes, while 80.4 percent of sequences regulate how those genes get turned on, turned off, expressed, processed, and modified.

This fundamentally changes how most biologists understand the master instruction set of life: we are, in short, 3 percent input/output and 80 percent logic. (Though perhaps a surprise to biologists, the finding will hardly astound anyone who has designed a complex interactive system.)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a really big deal, right?

Euclidean - Computer Graphics Breakthrough

EphemeralNight

14y

A 9-person Australian company called Euclidean has a new software technology that blows all the previously-believed limitations of real-time rendering right out the window.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVB1ayT6Fdc

It really makes you appreciate the phrase "efficient use of resources." Their tech demo is mind-bogglingly impressive all by itself, but the further implications of what is actually possible with current computer hardware are reality shaking.

It really makes me wonder where else (besides AI) current technology is vastly undershooting its potential in a similar way, using brute force (successfully or unsuccessfully) to accomplish something when there's a vastly more efficient way to do it that nobody's thought of yet.

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Several Topics that May or May Not deserve their own Post

EphemeralNight

14y

Topic the First - Asking "Why?"

There is a certain cliche of a young child asking "why?", getting an answer, asking "why?" to that, and so on until the adult finally dismisses them out of frustration. And we all smile and laugh at how ignorant the child is and pat ourselves on the back for being so grown up.

But I don't think this story is very funny. This story, told in countless variations, has the rather repugnant moral that it is rude and childish to ask that most important of questions. "Why?"

So why do parents near-universally admonish their children when they persist with the questions? What is motivating parents all over the world... (read 589 more words →)

Convincing my dad to sign up for Alcor: Advice?

EphemeralNight

14y

Since it came to my attention that signing up for cryonics is not as pointless as I'd once thought, I've been pondering how to sell my dad on the idea.

This is somewhat urgent for a couple of reasons. First, he's already pushing sixty and would meet increased resistance in acquiring another life insurance policy at a much steeper rate than myself. Second, even given his age, he could afford to sign us both up easily, and after some consideration, convincing him seems like the more efficient path to being signed up myself than trying to arrange it for myself alone. And, well, he's my dad, and while he has his flaws, he's kind of... (read more)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Several Topics that May or May Not deserve their own Post

Convincing my dad to sign up for Alcor: Advice?

[LINK] "Junk" DNA revealed as information processing system?

Euclidean - Computer Graphics Breakthrough

EphemeralNight

The Fable of the Burning Branch

[LINK] "Junk" DNA revealed as information processing system?

Euclidean - Computer Graphics Breakthrough

Several Topics that May or May Not deserve their own Post

Convincing my dad to sign up for Alcor: Advice?

EphemeralNight

Several Topics that May or May Not deserve their own Post

Convincing my dad to sign up for Alcor: Advice?

[LINK] "Junk" DNA revealed as information processing system?

Euclidean - Computer Graphics Breakthrough

EphemeralNight

The Fable of the Burning Branch

[LINK] "Junk" DNA revealed as information processing system?

Euclidean - Computer Graphics Breakthrough

Several Topics that May or May Not deserve their own Post

Convincing my dad to sign up for Alcor: Advice?