In general, picking the highest EV option makes sense, but in the context of what sounds like a stupid/lazy economics experiment, you have a moral duty to do the wrong thing. Perhaps you could have flipped a coin twice to choose among the first 4 options? That way you are providing crappy/useless data and they have to pay you for it!

I don't understand it, but from reading the wikipedia summary it seems to me it measures a complexity of the system. A complexity is not necessarily consciousness.

According to this theory, what is the key difference between a human brain, and... let's say a hard disk of the same capacity, connected to a high-resolution camera? Let's assume that the data from the camera are being written in real time to pseudo-random parts of the hard disk. The pseudo-random parts are chosen by calculating a checksum of the whole hard disk. This system obviously is not conscious, but seems complex enough.

I participated in an economics experiment a few days ago, and one of the tasks was as follows. Choose one of the following gambles where each outcome has 50% probability Option 1: $4 definitely Option 2: $6 or $3 Option 3: $8 or $2 Option 4: $10 or $1 Option 5: $12 or $0

I choose option 5 as it has the highest expected value. Asymptotically this is the best option but for a single trial, is it still the best option?

I don't know of a human-independent definition of consciousness, do you?

Integrated Information Theory is one attempt at a definition. I read about it a little, but not enough to determine if it is completely crazy.

I am interested. What software did you use? I am trying to learn NEURON but it feels like Fortran and I have trouble navigating around the cobwebs.

Original research? CONGRATU-FREAKIN-LATIONS!

Assuming, of course, that the whole things ends up being something cool.

I'm an undergraduate student, and I recently completed a holiday research project in computational neuroscience. During the project I found some interesting properties about connection properties in matrices which may not be a currently known.

Think it is really good using maths like this in the real world to improve skills.

I would presume what assume that arrival time would follow a normal distribution and be slanted further to the right (As there will be a minimum time to get somewhere, but no maximum time taken value that occurs) so not sure whether using the percentages is necessary.

Agree that this post should be on the main page.

I just finished reading about game theory which I found interesting.

Hi, welcome to Less Wrong !

For things that you should read, I can give you three very classical (for LW) hints :

1. The book Goedel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

2. Read the Sequences, they are really worth it.

3. The Less Wrong list (started by lukeprog, expanded by others) of the best textbooks on every subject