Suppose I'm destructively uploaded. Let's assume also that my consciousness is destroyed, a new consciousness is created for the upload, and there is no continuity. The upload of me will continue to think what I would've thought, feel what I would've felt, choose what I would've chosen, and generally optimize the world in the way I would've. The only thing it would lack is my "original consciousness", which doesn't seem to have any observable effect in the world. Saying that there's no conscious continuity doesn't seem meaningful. The only actual observation we could make is that the process I tend to label "me" is made of different matter, but who cares?

I think a lot of the confusion about this is treating consciousness as an actual entity separate from the process it's identified with, which somehow fails to transfer over. I think that if consciousness is something worth talking about, then it's a property of that process itself, and is agnostic toward what's running the process.

I expect that most people are biased when it comes to judging how attractive they are. Asking people probably doesn't help too much, since people are likely to be nice, and close friends probably also have a biased view of ones attractiveness. So is there a good way to calibrate your perception of how good you look?

One thing that helped me a lot was doing some soul-searching. It's not so much about finding something to protect so much as realizing what I already care about, even if there are some layers of distance between my current feelings and that thing. I think that a lot of that listless feeling of not having something to protect is just sort of being distracted from what we actually care about. I would recommend just looking for anything you care about at all, even slightly, and just focusing on that feeling.

At least that makes sense and works for me.

This is a crazy idea that I'm not at all convinced about, but I'll go ahead and post it anyway. Criticism welcome!

Rationality and common sense might be bad for your chances of achieving something great, because you need to irrationally believe that it's possible at all. That might sound obvious, but such idealism can make the difference between failure and success even in science, and even at the highest levels.

For example, Descartes and Leibniz saw the world as something created by a benevolent God and full of harmony that can be discovered by reason. That's a very irrational belief, but they ended up making huge advances in science by trying to find that harmony. In contrast, their opponents Hume, Hobbes, Locke etc. held a much more LW-ish position called "empiricism". They all failed to achieve much outside of philosophy, arguably because they didn't have a strong irrational belief that harmony could be found.

If you want to achieve something great, don't be a skeptic about it. Be utterly idealistic.

The fermi paradox is not a paradox. We have not sent out enough signal to be very noticeable, and we do not have the instruments to detect almost any alien signals. Due to signal attenuation, we would be pretty much unable to notice anything further than around 10 lightyears, and even within that range only if the signal was being beamed directly at us. The same problem applies to any aliens, only the paradox there is delayed by a further time problem: the speed of light. We've only been emitting radio for around 100 years, so there's a radius of only 100 light years within which aliens could've detected us and decided to send a signal, and an even smaller 50 lightyear radius in which we might have a chance of noticing it.

A doctrine is something like a rule or principle or concept. The point is that when you claim that something is a motte and bailey doctrine you don't just attack one argument, but rather the whole body of thought that argues about that thing using those concepts.

Not the motte and bailey argument, a motte and bailey doctrine. But yeah, it sounds a lot like what is called a motte and bailey doctrine everywhere except in the Scottosphere.

I wonder if the following is covered in the sequences... I could not find it.

There is a specific kind of argument which is not really an argument, because it is not just used in debates but people really seem to believe. It is a bit similar to motte and bailey, but that is a debate tactic, but this one is not, this is really believed.

The broad outline is statements that can have multiple interpretations, broader and narrower. And the broader interpretation is almost trivially true, while the narrower not and they get confused.

The latest example I saw was hedonism in the sense that everybody is a hedonist. Sure, someone working their ass off to be a champion do it because they think winning it gives them pleasure. Sure, the patriot selflessly fighting for his country and doing his duty is doing it because not doing so would give him a kind of psychological pain. This really really broad sense of hedonism is trivially true. But hedonism has a narrower, "sex and drugs and rock and roll" sense, let's call it instant gratification, and no, it is not true that everybody is chasing that.

The point I am trying to make is that I think I need to sort it out in my head whether I believe in the broader and almost trivally true definitions of some things, or in the narrower ones, and if I believe in the former, do I abuse that belief to justify the later?

I have managed to sort out a few things already. I am a broad atheist (no magic sky man) but not a narrow atheist (don't think religious mores and customs are predominantly harmful). Broad hedonist, not narrow hedonist - or let's say I keep trying to fight that in me (booze).

It is even in science! Aether theory was totally wrong and one of the biggest blunders of physics! No, wait, if you look at the Dirac quote here it seems if you define aether reeeeally broadly it is still true or at least was in 1951. Just be aware not to use the broad definition to justify the narrow one that got disproved.

But is there a general name for this?

A single world language should be designed and promoted. Previous attempts have been too Eurocentric to take advantage of all useful grammatical features that are available.

Alternative option: English is already a de facto world language, and it is well suited to borrowing foreign terms when it needs to, but humanity should be ashamed that it conducts its main scientific, commercial and diplomatic operations in a language with such a defective writing system. Spelling reform (or a completely new, purely phonetic alphabet) is urgent. I would advocate adapting Hangul for that purpose.

If humanity did this, at least some of us would still want to spread out in the real universe, for instance to help other civilizations. (Yes, the world inside the computer is infinitely more important than real civilizations, but I don't think that matters.)

Also, if these super-Turing machines are possible, and the real universe is finite, then we are living in a simulation with probability 1, because you could use them to simulate infinitely many observer-seconds.