thanks. will install and try them.

We don't know enough about brain operation to conclude that sensory stimuli are necessary for ethically sensitive processes to start.

As bad as the argument is, it's a little different when the brain has never ever been outside one.

re: time

smart watches as mentioned.

I would actually like a device that vibrated in every 5 minute window (or other settable window of time). To remind me to re-evaluate my progress on current tasks and confirm to myself that I am doing well. Essentially as a pattern-interrupt if I am in a bad pattern. It might end up interrupting good patterns as well, but I would still be interested to experiment if it works to be on par more helpful than unhelpful.

I wonder if anyone knows of an app to make my phone do it.

Wait. Perhaps one of such predictions would be that we should find universal laws involving higher-level entities, while it seems that at that level, we only find ceteris paribus laws. By contrast, at the lower level, we do find universal laws. This should be evidence in favour of the reductionist thesis.

Which would indicate that I was wrong in my initial claim.

I think I'm communicating a little poorly. So start with atomic level physics- it's characterized by energy scales of 13.6 eV or so. Making measurements at that scale will tell you a lot about atomic level physics, but it won't tell you anything about lower level physics- there is an infinite number of of lower level physics theories that will be compatible with your atomic theory (which is why you don't need the mass of the top quark to calculate the hydrogen energy levels- conversely you can't find the mass of the top quark by measuring those levels).

So you build a more powerful microscope, now you can get to 200*10^6 eV. Now you'll start creating all sorts of subatomic particles and you can build QCD up as a theory (which is one of the infinitely many theories compatible with atomic theory). But you can't infer anything about the physics that might live at even lower levels.

So you build a yet more powerful microscope, now you can get 10^14 eV, and you start to see the second generation of quarks,etc.

At every new level you get to, there might be yet more physics below that length scale. The fundamental length scale is maybe the planck scale, and we are still 13 orders of magnitude above that.

Edit: this author is sort of a dick overall, but this was a good piece on the renormalization group- http://su3su2u1.tumblr.com/post/123586152663/renormalization-group-and-deep-learning-part-1

The point of RG is that "higher level" physics is independent of most "lower level" physics. There are infinitely many low level theories that could lead to a plane flying.

There are infinitely many lower level theories that could lead to quarks behaving as they do,etc. So 1. you can't deduce low level physics from high level physics (i.e. you could never figure out quarks by making careful measurements of tennis balls), and you can never know if you have truly found the lowest level theory (there might be a totally different theory if you only had the ability to probe higher energies).

This is super convenient for us- we don't need to know the mass of the top quark to figure out the hydrogen atom,etc. Also, it's a nice explanation for why the laws of physics look so simple- the laws of physics are the fixed points of renormalization group flow.

The whole point of the renormalization group is that lower level models aren't more accurate, the lower level effects average out.

The multiple levels of reality are "parallel in a peculiar way" governed by RG. It might be "more complex" but it's also the backbone of modern physics.

EDIT: Typos.

I have been reading some of the sequences, and this entry shocked me a lot.

If the reductionist thesis is "we use multi-level models for computational reasons, but physical reality has only a single level", then what kind of evidence could support it against the thesis "we use multi-level models for computational reasons AND physical reality has multiple levels?" (let me call it 'anti-reductionist thesis' regardless of what actual anti-reductionists defend). I just can't think of how the world would be different if physical reality had multiple levels than if it had only one level.

In other words, the reductionist thesis, as it is presented here, does not lead me to anticipate differently than the anti-reductionst thesis. Accepting it just generates a floating belief, and as a result, I reject the reductionist thesis, and you should do the same.

Am I wrong? And why?

Consent seems to be an important ethical principle for many people and an FAI might well end up implementing it in some form.