Hello from NZ. So I'm basically, I'm here to promote my... Jokes, I came across this website from a Wait But Why article I was doing research on (Cryonics). The comments here are next level awesome, people share ideas and I feel like the moderators aren't ruled by one discourse or another. So yeah I decided to jump on in and check it out.
I enjoy Science, Learning, Entrepreneur stuff, and better ways of looking at the world.
Menilik Dyer! I thought it might be you! We met at a Mum's Garage thing (I was the one wearing no shoes and a lot of grey). So cool to see you here. Welcome to the mouth of this bottomless rabbithole that is modern analytical futurism. I'd hazard you already have some sense of how deep it goes.
If anyone's reading this; Menilik is a badass. He once successfully built a business by picking a random market sector he knew nothing about and asking people on the ground what they might need.
Could you elaborate on what you mean? If you've already taken the survey prior to this post your results were counted and you don't need to take it again.
it's conceivable that data collected before alterations were made to the survey would be invalidated, or considered a confound for answer/no answer data, and thrown out. It's also conceivable that many additional questions were added, in which case retaking the survey would be valuable.
But I guess I wont then.
I was on the slack review team, apparently. Will my data be thrown out or should I take it again?
Hypothetical Independent Co-inventors, we're pretty sure you exist. Compat wouldn't be a very good acausal pact if you didn't. Show yourselves.
I'm one - but while the ideas have enough plausibility to be interesting, they necessarily lack the direct scientific evidence I'd need to feel comfortable taking them seriously. I was religious for too long, and I think my hardware was hopelessly corrupted by that experience. I need direct scientific evidence as an anchor to reality. So now I try to be extra-cautious about avoiding faith of any kind lest I be trapped again in a mental tarpit.
Understandable. You could definitely be right about that. Compat is a theory that boosts its own probability just for being thought about. Such theories are dangerous for rationalists with histories of spiritualism.
Which, unfortunately for me, is a category that includes a large number of rationalists.
Right now it's dangling by a few multiverse immortality precepts and some very extreme measure differentials and I'm not sure it's going to hold together in the end. You'll probably hear about it if it does. I might make a post even if it doesn't(could make an interesting parable about the tenacity of religion even under rationalism). Either way, when that happens, I'll update this thread. But don't check it too often. This can be practice for you in ignoring your triggers.
It may have discovered some property of physics which enabled it to expand more efficiently across alternate universes, rather than across space in any given universe. Thus it would be unlikely to colonize much of any universe (specifically, ours).
I am not a cosmologist so forgive me if this theory is deranged, but what about Dark Matter? Is it possible there are vast banks of usable energy there, and that the ability to transition one's body to dark-matter would make it easier for a civ to agree to turn away from the resources available in light matter?
If (1) is true the aliens should fear any type of life developing on other planets because that life would greatly increase the complexity of the galaxy. My guess is that life on earth has, for a very long time, done things to our atmosphere that would allow an advanced civilization to be aware that our planet harbors life.
Note, sending probes out any distance may increase computational requirements. Approximations are no longer sufficient when an agent's eye comes up very close to them. Unless we can expect the superintelligence to detect these signs from a great distance, from the home star, it might not afford to see them.
Also worth considering: Probes that close their eyes to everything but life-supporting planets, so that it wont notice the low grain of approximations and approximations can continue to be used in its presence.
2: All identical consciousnesses measures as 1 in anthropics . So if we have set of consciousness: 1xA,1xB and 1000000xC, it is still 1/3 chance, to perceive being C.
Why do you take this assumption? It depends on the relative measure of the consciousnesses. Each one is equally likely and occur at equal measure across the multiverse (or at least, quantum physics strongly hints that they do), if one timeline leads to A, another leads to B, and 1000000 others lead to C, the odds of finding yourself with C are 1000000:2. This does not seem controversial.
Imagine a cosnciousness as a binary string. If I told you that you were being assigned 1000002 binary strings, and that all but two of them were the pattern C, why would you not expect C?
Hofstadter's term Superrationality is a hell of an example of a word that's totally useless due to the way it violates this principle. If someone who doesn't know the official definition hears you using the term Superrationality, they'll probably imagine that it's just some kind of very strong form of rationality as they already know it, despite the fact that it is very much not rationality as they already know it. That unaired disagreement will quickly poison any discussion that invokes the term.
While I'll agree that the System X naming scheme does extraordinarily well at avoiding muddying the underlying definition with colloquial, poetic, or aesthetic baggage, I'm fucking astonished to see someone advocating it in a community that tends to take its cues from computer science. My kin, it's like calling a new datatype Object1. You don't do that. It's the most generic, meaningless, unmemorable conceivable name. The only name more generic would be "Thing", and System isn't much better than Thing, essentially meaning "Group of connected things"(a set which contains almost every class of thing aside from, maybe, Subatomic Particle. For now. (right? I'm not a physicist. I feel like I might be wrong about that.)).
I think the best way forward is to establish norms that encourage the creation of totally new words, portmantues or well abreviated compound words. For instance, a friend of mine came up with a theory he called Complex Patternism. We'd both read the right kind of science fiction, so he didn't have any objections to changing the name to Compat. This saved a lot of typing over the next few months. If you knew the original phrase, you would recognize the contraction. If you didn't, you would have to ask for a definition- people wouldn't bring any of their own baggage about the words "complex" or "patternism" along. It's kind of like an acronym, only pronounceable, and when we realized precepts of Patternism wern't really necessary for the theory to work, the original etymology fell away, it was still a lot better than an acronym would have been. It had become a word with no baggage at all.
So yeah, I'm a big advocate of portmantues. Compose them of highly abbreviated, vague atoms and you can take them a long way from their original meaning if you ever need to.
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I think I now understand what you're saying Harari means by "fiction", but I still think that's an abuse of the word, at least in present-day English. Zeus is not only different from direct sensory experience, but also from scientific explanations, yes. But he's also, and this is the key distinction usually wrapped up in the word "fiction", very different from Harry Potter.
If you dislike the way Harari abuses terms for myth, you're going to really dislike the way he abuses "religion". His definition is a very reductive "a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order". He also has a very reductive, non-theistic sense of Buddhism. He observes that Buddhism is considered a religion, so he overextends his sense of religion until it encompasses all political philosophies
Wittgenstein would kick his ass over these abuses.