Caledonian: 1) Why is it laughable? 2) If hemlines mattered to you as badly as a moral dilemma, would you still hold this view?

I'm pretty sure you're doing it wrong here.

"What if the structure of the universe says to do something horrible? What would you have wished for the external objective morality to be instead?" Horrible? Wish? That's certainly not according to objective morality, since we've just read the tablet. It's just according to our intuitions. I have an intuition that says "Pain is bad". If the stone tablet says "Pain in good", I'm not going to rebel against it, I'm going to call my intuition wrong, like "Killing is good", "I'm always right and others are wrong" and "If I believe hard enough, it will change reality". I'd try to follow that morality and ignore my intuition - because that's what "morality" *means*.

I can't just choose to write my own tablet according to my intuitions, because so could a psychopath.

Also, it doesn't look like you understand what Nietzsche's abyss is. No black makeup here.

I'm surprised no one seems to doubt HA's basic premise. It sure seems to me that toddlers display enough intelligence (especially in choosing what they observe) to make one suspect self-awareness.

I'm really glad you will write about morality, because I was going to ask. Just a data dump from my brain, in case anyone finds this useful:

Obviously, by "We should do X" we mean "I/We will derive utility from doing X", but we don't mean only that. Mostly we apply it to things that have to do with altruism - the utility we derive from helping others.

There is no Book of Morality written somewhere in reality like the color of the sky and about which you can do Bayesian magic as if it were a fact, though in extreme circumstances it can be a good idea. E.g., if almost everyone values human life as a terminal value and someone doesn't, I'll call them a psychopath and mistaken. Unlike facts, utility functions depend on agents. We will, if we are good Bayesian wannabes, agree on whether doing X will result in A, but I can't see why the hell we'd agree on whether A is terminally desirable.

That's a big problem. Our utility functions *are* what we care about, but they were built by a process we see as outright evil. The intuition that says "I shouldn't torture random people on the street" and the one that says "I must save my life even if I need to kill a bunch of people to survive" come from the same source, and there is no global ojective morality to call one good and the other bad, just another intuition that also comes from that source.

Also, our utility functions differ. The birth lottery made me a liberal ( http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/articles/haidt.graham.2007.when-morality-opposes-justice.pdf ). It doesn't seem like I should let my values depend on such a random event, but I just can't bring myself to think of ingroup/outgroup and authority as moral foundations.

The confusing part is this: we care about the things we care about for a reason we consider evil. There is no territory of Things worth caring about out there, but we have maps of it and we just can't throw them away without becoming rocks.

I'll bang my head on the problem some more.

kevin: Eliezer has written about that already. The AI could convice any human to let it out. See the AI box experiment ( http://yudkowsky.net/essays/aibox.html ). If it was connected to the Internet, it could crack the protein folding problem, find out how to build protein nanobots (to, say, build other nanobots), order the raw material (such as DNA strings) online) and convice some guy to mix it ( http://www.singinst.org/AIRisk.pdf ). It could think of something we can't even think of, like we could use fire if we were kept in a wooden prison (same paper).

Your main argument is "Learning QM shouldn't change your behavior". This is false in general. If your parents own slaves and you've been taught that people in Africa live horrible lives and slavery saves them, and you later discover the truth, you will feel and act differently. Yet you shouldn't expect your life far away from Africa to be affected: it still adds up to normality.

Some arguments are convincing ("you can't do anything about it so just call it the past" and "probability"), but they may not be enough to support your conclusion on their own.

Why does the area under a curve equal the antiderivative? I've done enough calculus to suspect I somehow know the reason, but I just can't quite pinpoint it.

For some reason, this view of time fell nicely in place in my mind (not "Aha! So that's how it is?" but "Yes, that's how it is."), so if it's wrong, we're a lot of people to be mistaken in the same way.

But that doesn't dissolve the "What happened before the Big Bang?" question. I point at our world and ask "Where does this configuration come from?", you point at the Big Bang, I ask the same question, and you say "Wrong question.". Huh?

Eliezer: "A little arrow"? Actual little arrows are pieces of wood shot with a bow. Ok, amplitudes are a property of a configuration you can map in a two-dimensional space (with no preferred basis), but *what* property? I'll accept "Your poor little brain can't grok it, you puny human." and "Dunno - maybe I can tell you later, like we didn't know what temperature was before Carnot.", but a real answer would be better.

*I* am not smarter than that. But *you* might (just might) be. "Eliezer says so" is strong evidence for anything. I'm too stupid to use the full power of Bayes, and I should defer to Science, but Eliezer is one of the few best Bayesian wannabes - he may be mistaken, but he isn't crazily refusing to let go of his pet theory. Still not enough to make me accept MWI, but a major change in my estimate nonetheless.

As a side note, what actually happens in a true libertarian system is Europe during the Industrial Revolution.

I don't believe you.

I don't believe most scientists would make such huge mistakes. I don't believe you have shown all the evidence. This is the only explaination of QM I've been able to understand - I would have a hard time checking. Either you are lying for some higher purpose or you're honestly mistaken, since you're not a physicist.

Now, *if* you have really presented all the relevant evidence, and you have not explained QM in a way which makes some interpretation sound more reasonable than it is (*what* is an amplitude exactly?), then the idea of a single world is preposterous, and I really need to work out the implications.