"I'm not moving. You move. Bastard."

Fine, we'll both move to different Everett branches.

Weirdtopia: A deeper understanding of anthropics leads us to consider quantum immortality valid, as long as the death is instantaneous. We prepare an electron in a spin up state, and measure its angular momentum on the x axis. Left, your faction terminates, right, mine.

Zubon - Forgive my rudeness, there was totally supposed to be a "but thanks very much for the rec." in there somewhere.

Zubon - This may be drifting off topic, but I'm sure I don't have to tell you that some girls (and probably some guys too) use poly as nothing more than a cheap, easy escape route from a relationship with which they've grown displeased. I had this done to me last summer, and it was quite simply the most miserable experience of my life. The depression and feelings of worthlessness with which it left me have only just begun to abate, and it will probably be some time before I can deal with the level of trust necessary for a vanilla relationship, let alone seriously consider choosing poly.

I've been thinking about roughly this question a lot the past few weeks. My best guess is the end of sexual fidelity and/or self modification to remove sexual jealousy. Were I to be frozen and then thawed, and find that poly was now the norm I would honestly be disgusted and afraid. The kind of love that I had hoped and dreamed of would be effectively dead. None the less, I know that even with our current mind design there are people today who are poly and seem very happy with it. It seems at least plausible that without the complication of jealousy, romantic love could be that much more Fun.

I don't want this to happen, not at all, but if forced to make a guess, that would be mine.

Is it possible that Eliezer has indirectly answered Robin's question about gifting from a few days ago? That is, is it possible that I gain more benefit from a copy of Tropic Thunder given to me by my brothers than from one I purchase myself? By giving it to me as a gift, they have removed from me the necessity of comparing it to other films I could purchase, as well as the thought that I could have spent the money in a more "responsible" fashion.

Chances are, it would look like most of what they found good and righteous in the world is gone. Would you inflict that on someone?

How about you let him quickly experience the last 200 years for himself. As quickly or as slowly as necessary, maybe even actually living through each subjective day, or maybe doing the whole thing in five years. Allow his mind to reconfigure itself to our newer (improved) understanding of morality by the same process by which ours did.

I'd like to be a little more clear on this, I've heard a few different things.

Are there arrangements I can make which will ensure that a week after my death, my head will be full of cryopreserving fluid and my heart will be beating in someone else's chest?

Somebody let me know if I'm pushing my allowed post rate?

Tim: I'm not sure about that definition. Are we saying unexplainable by natural law as understood by humans at the time - ie quantum tunneling was supernatural 100 years ago, but is no longer?

Or would that mean unexplainable by the natural laws that exist? I just don't like this one because then we've simply defined the supernatural out of existence. The set of supernatural things and the set of real things would be non-overlapping by definition.

Z. M. Davis: But if you think about the things that the homunculus tends to do, I think you would find yourself needing to move to levels below the homunculus to do it. To give it a coherent set of actions it is likely to take, and not to take, at any given time, you would have to populate it with wants, with likes, with beliefs, with structures for reasoning about beliefs.

I think eventually you would come to an algorithm of which the homunculus would have to be an instantiation, and you would have to assume that that algorithm was represented somewhere.

I just don't see how you can make sensible predictions about ontologically basic complicated things. And I know people will go on about how you can't make predictions about a person with free will, but that's a crock. You expect me to try to coherently answer your post. I expect a cop to arrest me if I drive too fast. More to the point, we *don't* expect neurologically intact humans to spend three years walking backwards, or talk to puddles, or remove their clothing and sing "I'm a little teapot" in Times Square.

And the same goes for gods, incidentally. Religious folk will say that their gods' ways are ineffable, that they can't be predicted. But they still expect their gods to answer prayers, and forgive sins, and torture people like me for millennia, and they don't expect them to transform mount everest into a roast beef sandwich, or thunder forth nursery rhymes from the heavens.

They have coherent expectations, and for those expectations to make sense you have to open the black box and put things in there. You have to postulate structure, and relationships between parts, and soon you haven't got something ontologically basic anymore.

Marshall I think that's a bit of a cop-out. People's lives are at stake here and you have to do something. If nothing else, you can simply choose to play defect, worst case the PM does the same, and you save a billion lives (in the first scenario). Are you going to phone up a billion mothers and tell them you let their children die so as not to deal with a character you found unsavory? The problem's phrased the way it is to take that option entirely off the table.

Yes, it will do evil things, if you want to put it that way. Your car will do evil things without a moment's hesitation. You put a brick on the accelerator and walk away, it'll run over and kill a little girl. Your car is an evil potential murderer. You still voluntarily interact with it. (unless you are carfree in which case congrats, so am I, but that's entirely irrelevant to my metaphor)

Besides that, what do you mean calling the PM chaotic? It's quite a simple agent that maximizes paperclips. You're the chaotic agent, you want to maximize happiness and fairness, love and lust, aesthetic beauty and intellectual challenge. Make up your mind already and decide what you want to maximize!