I feel we have a deep communicational barrier here. You probably didn't read "Rationality A-Z" (the canonical LW text).

I have not read that.

On the other hand, I have no idea what you mean by "matrix"

Virtual reality, as in the movie Matrix.

"context"

This is a bit harder to explain, imagine everything said is out of context from the subjective experience. Context can only be found within the subjective experience.

"awareness" and other stuff, and you don't bother to explain. (By "no idea" I actually mean I could imagine hundred different things under each of these labels, and I don't know which one of them is close to the one you mean. That makes the communication difficult.)

Awareness is the separation of thoughts from awareness. You can be aware of thoughts, that's awareness, and aware of thoughts which you think is you.

From my point of view, it seems like you are "in love" with some words; you associate strong positive emotions with certain nebulous concepts. These are all typical mistakes people make while reasoning; even very highly intelligent people! A part of the mission of this website is to help people overcome making this mistakes.

It would be better if I could reason for my point without making a mistake, but unfortunately, that's very hard to do. It's also up to the rationalist to consider opening up to the possibility everything they think is true, is wrong. By this I mean, being able to reason properly will spread more truth, meanwhile it might be futile depending how close-minded rationalists can be. But that's on my current data.

Maybe I am wrong about you here, but you don't provide enough information for me to judge otherwise. You posted a video of a smug person accusing everyone else, especially "scientists" and "rationalists" of being stupid and having lesser awareness. That's all there is, as far as I see. Color me unimpressed.

The only way to know you have lesser awareness is by having higher awareness. Then, it repeats itself.

There are some things that... uhm, are you familiar with the "motte and bailey" concept? Essentially: there are some statements which taken literally are true but trivial, but they can be interpreted more generally, which makes them interesting but false. I suspect this is one of the traps you fell into.

I don't understand, you don't have to be afraid of criticising properly.

This is nothing trivial, this is the truth, and if you are serious about it can see for yourself.

So, here we are... each side convinced that the other side is missing something important, relatively simple, but kinda tricky. Saying "dude, you are just confused!" is obviously not going to help, when the other side is thinking the same thing. Any other idea? From my side, I recommend reading "Rationality A-Z", there is free download.

How many pages is it, how do you use the information and how, what, should you remember?

I got the following ideas about the spark.

The laws of our universe are such that they enable creation of something out of nothing. QM with its fluctuations and GR with its singularity describe the world which appeared from nothing.

Not any set of possible laws allow it. These laws are math objects, but they allow creation of something from nothing (most laws don’t do it). So only a subset of all math universe is able to create things. It creates natural cutoff between all possible math objects - only rather simple laws allow such type creation.

I would illustrate it with following example: Newtonian laws are not describing appearing of matter from nothing. So while purely Newtonian universe is conceivable and mathematically possible, it doesn't exist as it existence would contradict its own laws.

But there is another set of laws: QM+GR - it describes how something could appear from nothing, and so existence of something doesn't contradict these laws.

I think that there are other possible combinations of laws which internally consistently explain how something could appear from nothing. But such set may be very small, as more complex laws results in more contradictions.

So we have very natural cutoff in math universe - lets name it Generational Universe hypothesis (GUH). It said that only those universes exist which laws describes how they appear from nothing and also don't have contradictions. GUH has stronger restrictions than CUH.

Logical universe hypothesis (LUH), which said that if nothing exists than 1 doesn't exist and if 1 doesn't exist than 2 doesn't exist is also similar GUH, as it describes the generation of math objects. But it doesn't explain properties of our universe.

Has anyone else tried the new Soylent bars? Does anyone who has also tried MealSquares/Ensure/Joylent/etc. have an opinion on how they compare with other products?

My first impression is that they're comparable to MealSquares in tastiness. Since they're a bit smaller and more homogeneous than MealSquares (they don't have sunflower seeds or bits of chocolate sticking out of them), it's much easier to finish a whole one in one sitting, but more boring to make a large meal out of them.

Admittedly, eating MealSquares may have a bit more signalling value among rationalists, and MealSquares cost around a dollar less per 2000 kcal than the Soylent bars do. I'll probably stick with the Soylent bars, though; they're vegan, and I care about animals enough for that to be the deciding factor for me.

Oddly enough, part of what set my thoughts in this particular direction was watching the Gene Wilder movie, "The Frisco Kid", about an observant Jew travelling across the Wild West; which made me start thinking about people who perform regular religious observances. For many people, failing to perform a regular ritual on one day doesn't mean they give it up entirely - they may do something corrective about the lapse, but simply resume the regular ritual on its next scheduled time. I'm hoping I can leverage a secular version of that mindset for my own purposes, at such time as it becomes necessary.

Academic Publishing without Journals

By setting up the journals with a bitcoin type blockchain, you could reward reviewers, and citations. SciCred !

just a stub to think about

https://hack.ether.camp/#/idea/academic-publishing-without-journals

I can post less if that's what people tell me that they want. I recognised the problem of low-volume writing and am trying to solve it.

The relation thing is really appealing. But as Tegmark said all mathematical universe is about relation, so in a nutshell relation universe is Math universe hypothesis (MUH). If we use Kolmogorov complexity as the measure, it results in Computable universe (CUH). But still most problems of MUH and СГР are unresolved here, and most of the are still about measure and our mediocracy.

Because measure is the same spark of existence which we tried to explain from the start, and if we need it at the end, we didn't explained anything.

For example, in CUH only computable universes exist. But still it would favour very complex AIs with infinitely large minds and field of perception.

It also favour somekind of dust minds which I would name "axiomatic brains". We could postulate any complex mind as an axiom, and it is enough to its existence, and from such minds most will be very complex and very random.

There is also a problem with measure in math world - in it can't be several copies of something. There is no many copies of number 151. It is just one number, even if it appear many times in different ways of calculation. So something can't be "rare".

My attempt to patch it was "logic universe", in which all relations are logic consequences of non existence. In it all very complex thing also exist but they should be logical consequences of simpler things. And now it starts to look like our universe which starts from simple singularity and evolves towards the zoo of very complex possible AIs.

I feel like the answer is something like "existence is relative". As an intuition pump, if you read a story, the characters in the story do exist relative to each other, but they don't exist relative to you.

This idea is typically used together with an assumption that somewhere "at the top" is some kind of top-level existence (for example God), that creates all lesser existences by simulating them. However, this answer has two problems: First, it doesn't actually answer anything; it's circular. We got from "why is there this universe instead of nothing" towards "why is there the top-level something instead of nothing". Second, it assumes that the top-level existence has some mysterious essence, which suggests confused thinking.

Instead, I think there is no such thing as the top-level existence, no mysterious substance of reality. Instead, all realities are... without any inherent existence. Words fail me here; I am simply trying to say that none of these realities is real relative to some outside standard, simply because there is no such thing as an ourside standard. A more poetic way would be to say that all realities are potential; they are stories without any external reader (or sometimes stories with an external reader that also exists only in a story without a reader; or sometimes in an infinite chain which is no more or less real than any other infinite chain of stories).

However, a reality is real relative to itself. Something like a zero divided by zero -- there is nothing outside this reality that would make this reality real, but this reality is real enough to itself (and therefore to us, who exist within it). Other realities are unreal to us, and we are unreal to them.

Of course this whole argument avoids the question of measure -- if there are many realities, what is the experience of an average observer in an average reality, and how are the averages even calculated. I think the answer is that the more simple universes (with smaller Kolmogorov complexity) have higher measure, but I have no idea how something like that could be proved.

But "rationalism" or "rationality" in, say, the sense commonly used on LW does not in fact mean denying any of that.

But that's what you're mostly doing in your post. I will bring this up below.

The guy in the video comes across (to me at least) as smugly superior even while uttering a succession of trivialities, which doesn't do much to encourage me to watch more.

I don't think everyone shares that view, at least it's not for me. I don't know if I am contradicting myself, though. If someone was similar but in differing in opinion then me. The contradiction would then lie under if I told you the world is your mirror.

So I thought "maybe it gets more interesting later on" and skipped to 50:00. At which point he isn't bothering to make any arguments, merely preening over how he understands the world so much more deeply than rationalists, who will come and bother him with their "arguments" and "contradictions" and he can just see that they "haven't got any awareness" and trying to engage with them would be like trying to teach calculus to a dog, and that the mechanism used to brainwash suicide bombers and fundamentalists are "the exact same mechanism that very intelligent scientists use to prove their theories of space and time and whatever else". OK, then.

That's what he said, of course it's kind of harsh, but it's his way of going on these things I think, I don't know why or what's most effective but for myself I am unaffected or in the positive. That might be just because I agree.

Since I obviously wasn't enlightened enough for minute 50 of this thing, I went back to 40:00. He says it's important to connect with your emotions and not deny they're there (OK), and then he says that "rational people just assume that, well, we don't need any of that emotional stuff". OK, then. (And rational people like scientists get emotional when they argue with highly irrational people because they're attached to their rational models of the world and don't want to hear anything contrary to those models because of cognitive dissonance; they close their eyes and ears to the arational because they demonize it as irrational.)

By becoming aware of the emotions that you are suppressing, not the "feeling emotions" rationally because the reason of emotion is rational.

OK, clearly still too advanced for me. Back to 30:00. Apparently, if your "awareness" is low then you think thinking is great (OK...), you think thinking is all there is (huh?)

There is awareness of thoughts, not only thoughts, and the awareness is not a thought. That is a definition game of what is a thought, consider it being different from awareness.

Yes, you don't have a thought of a thought, you have awareness of thought. Otherwise, you're trapped in thinking and don't know that there is something else.

, you think thinking is a powerful tool for understanding reality (OK...), but as you gain in "awareness" you realise that thinking is a system of symbols, and "this gulf between the map and the territory just grows wider and wider and wider, until you see that the map is just a complete fiction, a complete illusion", and once you realise this you see "the gross limitations of thinking".

Einstein's theory of gravity isn't revealing anything deep about the world, it's just a set of sounds and symbols on paper. "That's what it literally is, except your awareness is too low to actually see that". And then he pulls an interesting move where he complains about people with "low" "awareness" getting "sucked into the content" of a theory because they don't see the "larger context".

See how he never mentions the larger context of an understanding of relativity itself? But the context of which sounds and symbols make up our "reality".

You might think he's now going to explain what the larger context is and how it should affect our understanding of relativity. Ha, ha. What a silly idea. Only someone with low awareness would expect that. What he actually does is to tell us how when rationalists criticize him they're doing it "on the level of thoughts" while he is "on the level of awareness, which is a much higher level". Bleh.

You missed the point, there was nothing said about affecting the understanding of relativity, you fell into the exact paradigm which the video said.

The larger context of the symbols and sounds on the paper. Not the theory itself according to physicists. That's the matrix.

Oh, wait, he has something resembling an actual point somewhere around 35:00. Rationalists give too much credit to logic, he says, because logic "has no teeth", because it depends on its premises and the premises are doing the real work, and if your premises are dodgy then so are your conclusions, and "most of them are very very wrong". Cool, he's going to tell us what wrong premises we have. ... Oh, no, silly me, he isn't. He just says they're very wrong but gives no specifics.

He gave the specifics right after that, rationality itself. Asking about the premises which make rationality possible.

Saying things that are true but elementary and not in fact denied by rationalists. For some of these, he actually gives some kind of justification.

It seems like you disagree on numerous points, but not being aware of it. Like Einstein's equation is simply symbols and sounds (and pretty much everything else which you give attribute to)

Saying that rationalists are wrong in various ways (giving too much weight to X, having wrong premises, ...). In every instance of this I heard (though I have not listened to the whole dreary thing) either the claim is flatly wrong, or he offers no sort of support for it, or both.

Let's say the rational mind cannot understand something, why continue to use the rational mind? Is there something else? Maybe awareness? There might be something worth pursuing there.

Now I know I am not responding to my quote of your text. Rationality is wrong because of rationality itself. It cannot be right without the right context. The context of which rationality exists. Where thinking exists. Which is "outside" the subjective experience according to you. That's the whole point. It's right under your nose if you'd bother to meditate and separate awareness from thoughts.

Saying smugly how much more "aware" he is than rationalists are, and how this puts him on a higher level than them. If there's anything actually useful there, I missed it. And now I've listened to enough of this without any sign that he has anything useful to teach me, and I'm going to go and do something else. My apologies for not sitting through all 82 minutes of it.

Well. You're capable of becoming aware as well. It's not a radical difference. :)

I am not sure whether "universe is rational" is supposed to mean that (a) the universe has a relatively short description which could be understood by a mind, or that (b) the universe itself is a mind, specifically a rational one. Seems like the meaning was switched in the middle of an argument, using a sleight of hand.

Regarding the "Universe is rational"-strawman: I think the mistake which the video is trying to point out, is the mistake that a description of the universe is the universe. When it is only a description, same with anything. It is language and that is the limitation.

So for those that believe the universe is for example physics, instead of our projection, that's the flaw I think. It's simple, ask a person if gravity is real, after they respond "yes" ask them, is this not a human projection (your projection) upon the universe? What is the real universe?

What I wonder is what lesswrongers think of this strawman if it wasn't one, an actual argument towards someone (rationalist in this context) who made the statement gravity is real and not a projection of mind: "G R A V I T Y and everything else which is occurring to me in consciousness"

(b) the universe itself is a mind, specifically a rational one. Seems like the meaning was switched in the middle of an argument, using a sleight of hand.

I'm not sure what you mean with this, because "Universe is a mind" seems more of an argument then stating the opponent believes the "universe is rational" (the strawman) like "What you think is the universe is your mind projection of labels and symbols yet you're not aware of it"

In summary, my impression is of muddled thinking, and of feeling superior to the imaginary opponents.

Well. I think usually what we see in others is just a projection of our own mind. "The world is your mirror"

Actually, maybe the opponents are not imaginary -- there are many fools of various kinds out there -- it just has nothing to do with the kind of "rationality" that we use here, such as described e.g. by Stanovich.

But is there someone who can refute the argument made in the video, if you had the argument which the strawman was?

Otherwise it seems to me "Only fools would make the argument of which the strawman was targeted towards".