The Blue Eyes Puzzle (solution) depicts a paradox: people engage in coordinated action despite having no new information, when "I know you know he knows" reaches a critical mass. Apparently the formal system invented to address this is called Common Knowledge.

Duncan Black complains:

I wonder if any serious investor could actually explain what new information "the market" has which could explain why DJIA should be worth 11% less than it was 2 weeks ago.

If you're a smart young teenager who plans on attending college, consider taking lots of AP Exams.

Certain kinds of philosophy and speculative fiction, including kinds that get discussed here all the time, tend to cause a ridiculous thing to happen: I start doubting the difference between existence and non-existence.  This bothers me, because it's clearly a useless dead end.  Can anyone help with this?

The two concepts that tend to do it for me are

* Substrate independence/strong AI: The idea that a simulation of my mind is still me.  That I could survive the process of uploading myself into a computer running Windows, a cellular automaton run by this guy, or even something that didn't look like a computer, mind, or universe at all to anyone in the outside world.  That we could potentially create or discover a simulated universe that we could have ethical obligations towards.  This is all pretty intuitive to me and largely accepted by the sort of people who think about these things.

* Multiverses: The idea that the world is bigger than the universe.

My typical line of thought goes something like this: suppose I run a Turing Machine that encodes a universe containing conscious beings.  That universe now exists as a simulation within my own.  It's just as real as mine, just more precarious because events in my reality can mess with its substrate.  If I died and nobody knew how it worked, it would still be real (so I should make provisions for that scenario).  Okay, but Turing Machines are simple.  A Turing Machine simulating a coherent universe containing conscious beings can probably arise naturally, by chance.  In that case, those beings are still real even if nobody on the outside, looking at the substrate, realizes what they're looking at.  Okay, but now consider Turing Machines like John Conway's Fractran, which are encoded into an ordered set of rational numbers and run by multiplication.  I think it's fair to say that rational numbers and multiplication occur naturally, everywhere.  Arithmetic lives everywhere.  But furthermore, arithmetic lives *nowhere*.  It's not just substrate-independent; it's independent of whether or not there is a substrate.  2+2=4 no matter whether two bottlecaps are being combined with two other bottlecaps to make four bottlecaps.  So every Turing-computable reality already exists to the extent that math itself does.

I think this is stupid.  Embarrassingly stupid.  But I can't stop thinking it.

Part 1:  Transparent Newcomb with your existence at stake

Related: Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality

Omega, a wise and trustworthy being, presents you with a one-time-only game and a surprising revelation.  

"I have here two boxes, each containing $100," he says.  "You may choose to take both Box A and Box B, or just Box B.  You get all the money in the box or boxes you take, and there will be no other consequences of any kind.  But before you choose, there is something I must tell you."

Omega pauses portentously.

"You were created by a god: a being called Prometheus.  Prometheus was neither omniscient nor particularly benevolent.  He was given a large set of blueprints for possible human embryos, and for each blueprint that pleased him he created that embryo and implanted it in a human woman.  Here was how he judged the blueprints: any that he guessed would grow into a person who would choose only Box B in this situation, he created.  If he judged that the embryo would grow into a person who chose both boxes, he filed that blueprint away unused.  Prometheus's predictive ability was not perfect, but it was very strong; he was the god, after all, of Foresight."

Do you take both boxes, or only Box B?

Edit: For an in-depth discussion of precisely this topic, see Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg's 2008 paper "The Wisdom of Nature: An Evolutionary Heuristic for Human Enhancement", available as a pdf here.  This post was written before reading the paper.

There doesn't seem to be a thread discussing Eliezer's short-short story X17.  While I enjoyed the story, and agreed with most of its points, I disagree with one assertion in it (and he's said it elsewhere, too, so I'm pretty sure he believes it).  Edit: The story was written over a decade ago.  Eliezer seems to have at least partially recanted since then.

Eliezer argues that there can't possibly be a simple surgical procedure that dramatically increases human intelligence.  Any physical effect it could have, he says, would necessarily have arisen before as a mutation.  Since intelligence is highly beneficial in any environment, the mutation would spread throughout our population.  Thus, evolution must have already plucked all the low-hanging fruit.

But I can think of quite a few reasons why this would not be the case.  Indeed, my belief is that such a surgery almost certainly exists (but it might take a superhuman intelligence to invent it).  Here are the possibilities that come to mind.

1. The surgery might introduce some material a human body can't synthesize.¹
2. The surgery might require intelligent analysis of the unique shape of a subject's brain, after it has developed naturally to adulthood.
3. The necessary mutation might simply not exist.  The configuration space for physically possible organisms must surely be larger than the configuration space for human-like DNA (I get the sense I'm taking sides in a longstanding feud in evolutionary theory with this one).
4. The surgery might have some minor side effect that would drastically reduce fitness in the ancestral environment, but isn't noticeable in the present day.  Perhaps it harnesses the computing power of the subject's lymphocytes, weakening the immune system.

It seems fitting that my first post here be an origin story, of sorts.  Like any origin story, it is overly reductionistic and attributes a single cause to an overdetermined phenomenon.  There's an old Spider-Man comic that claims that even if he hadn't been bitten by a radioactive spider, and even if he hadn't caused his uncle's death through inaction, Peter Parker would still have become a superhero thanks to his engineering talent and strong moral fiber.  Nevertheless, I find it compelling to say that I became a skeptic (and from there a rationalist and consequentialist) because from an early age I attended two different religious schools at the same time.

From age six, I spent my weekdays at a Christian independent school.  From around the same time, I went to a Jewish "Sunday school" (and to Jewish religious services some Saturday evenings).  I imagine this is a rare, bizarre-sounding way to grow up.  In Jewish communities in rural Pennsylvania it's quite common.

This led to a predictable phenomenon.  Adults, teachers in similar positions of respect and authority, were (confidently and earnestly!) making different, contradictory assertions about extremely important subjects.  People whom I respected equally had vastly different concepts of how the universe worked, and I was constantly reminded of this.  The inference was inescapable: teachers were often wrong and I would have to use my own judgement.  I remember briefly theorizing that there were simply two different gods, the Old Testament one and the New Testament one (who was also Gaia), which would certainly help reconcile everything.

By the time I was ten, I questioned everything a teacher said, in any subject, to a fault (e.g., I refused to learn the backhand in tennis because I couldn't see the point).   By the time I was twelve, I confidently identified as an atheist.  My parents were still religious Jews, but they didn't really care as long as they could bully me into performing the rituals.  We spent more time arguing about AI, as it happened, than the existence of God (my parents were both Searle-ists).  By the time I was fifteen, I had decided to drop out of school and educate myself, etc.

I think I would have gotten there anyway.  But I find it appealing to speculate that I got there much faster than I would have if I'd received a secular education.  I'm curious whether anyone here had a similar upbringing.  Might this be a good way for atheists to deliberately inoculate their children?  Might it be a good way, in general, to ensure that children grow up instinctively distrustful of authority?  I realize that may be a negative trait in an ideal world, but in this corrupt one I think it's essential.