GrateGoo

My previous post resulted in 0 points, despite being very thoroughly thought-through. A comment on it, consisting of the four words "I know nothing! Nothing!" resulted in 4 points. If someone could please explain this, I'd be a grateful Goo.

Suppose sentient beings have intrinsic value in proportion to how intensely they can experience happiness and suffering. Then the value of invertebrates and many non-mammal vertebrates is hard to tell, while any mammal is likely to have almost as much intrinsic value as a human being, some possibly even more. But that's just the intrinsic value. Humans have a tremendously greater instrumental value than any non-human animal, since humans can create superintelligence that can, with time, save tremendous amounts of civilisations in other parts of the univers... (read more)

Hereinafter, "to Know x" means "to be objectively right about x, and to be subjectively 100 percent certain of x, and to have let the former 'completely scientifically cause' the latter (i.e. to have used the former to create the latter in a completely scientific manner), such that it cannot, even theoretically, be the case that something other than the former coincidentally and crucially misleadingly caused the latter - and to Know that all these criteria are met".

Anything that I merely know ("know" being defined as people us... (read more)

Is it plausible that evolution would gradually push those 70% down to 30% or even lower, given enough time? There may not yet have been enough time for a strong enough group selection in evolution to create such an effect, but sooner or later it should happen, shouldn't it? I'm thinking a species with such a great degree of selflessness would be more likely to survive than the present humanity is, because a larger percentage of them would cooperate about existential risk reduction than is the case in present humanity. Yet, 10-30% is still not 0%, so even w... (read more)

...Or, perhaps more correctly put, such a being (a non-all-knowing being who, however, "knows what you will do") could not know for sure that he knows what all of the copies of you will do - because in order to know that, he would have be all-knowing - and so any statement to the effect that "he knows what you will do" is a highly questionable statement.

Just like a being who doesn't know that he is all-knowing cannot reasonably be said to be all-knowing, a being who doesn't know that he knows what all of the copies of you will do (becau... (read more)

Any conclusions, about how things work in the real world, drawn from Newcomb's problem, crucially rest on the assumption that an all-knowing being might, at least theoretically, as a logically consistent concept, exist. If this crucial assumption is flawed, then any conclusions drawn from Newcomb's problem are likely flawed too.

To be all-knowing, you'd have to know everything about everything, including everything about yourself. To contain all that knowledge, you'd have to be larger than it - otherwise there would be no matter or energy left to perform th... (read more)