Meetup : Bay Area Winter Solstice 2016
Discussion article for the meetup : Bay Area Winter Solstice 2016
It's time to gather together and remember the true Reasons for the Season: axial tilt, orbital mechanics and other vast-yet-comprehensible forces have converged together to bring another year to a close, and as the days grow shorter and colder we remember how profoundly lucky we are to have been forged by blind, impersonal forces into beings that can understand, and wonder, and appreciate ourselves and each other. This year's East Bay Rationalist Winter Solstice will be held in the center of Berkeley, bringing 300 rationalists together in a theatre hall for food, songs, speeches, and conversations. We encourage other Bay denizens who can't make our solstice to put on their own show. Or even if you do come, we encourage people to try out their own ideas. The East Bay Solstice celebration will be on Saturday, December 17th, in the Anna Head Alumnae Hall in Berkeley. Acquire tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2016-bay-area-winter-solstice-tickets-27853776395 We are coordinating with the Bayesian Choir and will be coordinating with various speakers, as in previous years. An MC and schedule will be posted as details solidify. Kids are welcome. Vegetarian food will be available. Let us know if you have specific accomadation requests or have questions.
Discussion article for the meetup : Bay Area Winter Solstice 2016
Self-serving meta: Whoever keeps block-downvoting me, is there some way to negotiate peace?
I'm just tired of the signal pollution, and would like to be able to use karma to honestly appraise the worth of my articles and posts, without seeing 80% of my downvotes come in chunks that correspond precisely to how many posts I've made since the last massive downvote spree.
EDIT to add data points:
Spurious downvoting stopped soon after I named a particular individual (not ALL downvoting stopped, but the downvotes I got all seemed on-the-level.)
One block of potentially spurious downvoting occurred approximately one week ago, but then karma patterns returned to expected levels. I consider this block dubious, because it reasonably matches what I'd expect to see if someone noticed several of my posts together and disagreed with all of them, and did not match the usual pattern of starting with the earliest or latest post that I had made and downvoting everything (it downvoted all posts in a few threads, but not in other threads), so I'm just adding for completeness.
Spurious, indiscriminate downvoting started up again approximately half an hour ago on Sunday (12/1/2013), around noon MDT.
Edit: And now on Tuesday, 12/3/2013, at 10 AM, I'm watching my karma go down again... about 30 points so far.
Edit: And now on Saturday, 12/14/2013, at 2 PM, I'm watching my karma go down again... about 15 points so far, at a rate of about 1-2 points per second.
I notice that I am confused about Identity and Resurrection
I've spent quite a bit of time trying to work out how to explain the roots of my confusion. I think, in the great LW tradition, I'll start with a story.
[Editor's note: The original story was in 16th century Mandarin, and used peculiar and esoteric terms for concepts that are just now being re-discovered. Where possible, I have translated these terms into their modern mathematical and philosophical equivalents. Such terms are denoted with curly braces, {like so}.]
Once upon a time there was a man by the name of Shen Chun-lieh, and he had a beautiful young daughter named Ah-Chen. She died.
Shen Chun-lieh was heartbroken, moreso he thought than any man who had lost a daughter, and so he struggled and scraped and misered until he had amassed a great fortune, and brought that fortune before me - for he had heard it told that I was could resurrect the dead.
I frowned when he told me his story, for many things are true after a fashion, but wisdom is in understanding the nature of that truth - and he did not bear the face of a wise man.
"Tell me about your daughter, Ah-Chen.", I commanded.
I frowned, for my suspicions were confirmed.
"You wish for me to give you this back?", I asked.
He nodded and dried his tears. "More than anything in the world."
"Then come back tomorrow, and I will have for you a beautiful daughter who will do all the things you described."
His face showed a sudden flash of understanding. Perhaps, I thought, this one might see after all.
"But", he said, "will it be Ah-Chen?"
I smiled sagely. "What do you mean by that, Shen Chun-lieh?"
"I mean, you said that you would give me 'a' daughter. I wish for MY daughter."
I bowed to his small wisdom. "Indeed I did. If you wish for YOUR daughter, then you must be much, much more precise with me."
He frowned, and I saw in his face that he did not have the words.
"You are wise in the way of the Tao", he said, "surely you can find the words in my heart, so that even such as me could say them?"
I nodded. "I can. But it will take a great amount of time, and much courage from you. Shall we proceed?"
He nodded.
I am wise enough in the way of the Tao. The Tao whispers things that have been discovered and forgotten, and things that have yet to be discovered, and things that may never be discovered. And while Shen Chun-lieh was neither wise nor particularly courageous, his overwhelming desire to see his daughter again propelled him with an intensity seldom seen in my students. And so it was, many years later, that I judged him finally ready to discuss his daughter with me, in earnest.
"Shen", I said, "it is time to talk about your Ah-Chen."
His eyes brightened and he nodded eagerly. "Yes, Teacher."
"Do you understand why I said on that first day, that you must be much, much more precise with me?"
"Yes, Teacher. I had come to you believing that the soul was a thing that could be conjured back to the living, rather than a {computational process}."
"Even now, you are not quite correct. The soul is not a {computational process}, but a {specification of a search space} which describes any number of similar {computational processes}. For example, Shen Chun-lieh, would you still be Shen Chun-lieh if I were to cut off your left arm?"
"Of course, Teacher. My left arm does not define who I am."
"Indeed. And are you still the same Shen Chun-lieh who came to me all those years ago, begging me to give him back his daughter Ah-Chen?"
"I am, Teacher, although I understand much more now than I did then."
"That you do. But tell me - would you be the same Shen Chun-lieh if you had not come to me? If you had continued to save and to save your money, and craft more desperate and eager schemes for amassing more money, until finally you forgot the purpose of your misering altogether, and abandoned your Ah-Chen to the pursuit of gold and jade for its own sake?"
"Teacher, my love for Ah-Chen is all-consuming; such a fate could never befall me."
"Do not be so sure, my student. Remember the tale of the butterfly's wings, and the storm that sank an armada. Ever-shifting is the Tao, and so ever-shifting is our place in it."
Shen Chun-lieh understood, and in a brief moment he glimpsed his life as it could have been, as an old Miser Shen hoarding gold and jade in a great walled city. He shuddered and prostrated himself.
"Teacher, you are correct. And even such a wretch as Miser Shen, that wretch would still be me. But I thank the Buddha and the Eight Immortal Sages that I was spared that fate."
I smiled benevolently and helped him to his feet. "Then suppose that you had died and not your daughter, and one day a young woman named Ah-Chen had burst into my door, flinging gold and jade upon my table, and described the caring and wonderful father that she wished returned to her? What could she say about Shen Chun-lieh that would allow me to find his soul amongst the infinite chaos of the Nine Hells?"
"I..." He looked utterly lost.
"Tell me, Shen Chun-lieh, what is the meaning of the parable of the {Ship of Theseus}?"
"That personal identity cannot be contained within the body, for the flow of the Tao slowly strips away and the flow of the Tao slowly restores, such that no single piece of my body is the same from one year to the next; and within the Tao, even the distinction of 'sameness' is meaningless."
"And what is the relevance of the parable of the {Shroedinger's Cat} to this discussion?"
"Umm... that... let me think. I suppose, that personal identity cannot be contained within the history of choices that have been made, because for every choice that has been made, if it was truly a 'choice' at all, it was also made the other way in some other tributary of the Great Tao."
"And the parable of the tiny {Paramecium}?"
"That neither is the copy; there are two originals."
"So, Shen. Can you yet articulate the dilemma that you present to me?"
"No, Teacher. I fear that yet again, you must point it out to your humble student."
"You ask for Ah-Chen, my student. But which one? Of all the Ah-Chens that could be brought before you, which would satisfy you? Because there is no hard line, between {configurations} that you would recognize as your daughter and {configurations} which you would not. So why did my original offer, to construct you a daughter that would do all the things you described Ah-Chen as doing, not appeal to you?"
Shen looked horrified. "Because she would not BE Ah-Chen! Even if you made her respond perfectly, it would not be HER! I do not simply miss my six-year-old girl; I miss what she could have become! I regret that she never got to see the world, never got to grow up, never got to..."
"In what sense did she never do these things? She died, yes; but even a dead Ah-Chen is still an Ah-Chen. She has since experienced being worms beneath the earth, and flowers, and then bees and birds and foxes and deer and even peasants and noblemen. All these are Ah-Chen, so why is it so important that she appear before you as YOU remember her?"
"Because I miss her, and because she has no conscious awareness of those things."
"Ah, but then which conscious awareness do you wish her to have? There is no copy; all possible tributaries of the Great Tao contain an original. And each of those originals experience in their own way. You wish me to pluck out a {configuration} and present it to you, and declare "This one! This one is Ah-Chen!". But which one? Or do you leave that choice to me?"
"No, Teacher. I know better than to leave that choice to you. But... you have shown me many great wonders, in alchemy and in other works of the Tao. If her brain had been preserved, perhaps frozen as you showed me the frozen koi, I could present that to you and you could reconstruct her {configuration} from that?"
I smiled sadly. "To certain degrees of precision, yes, I could. But the question still remains - you have only narrowed down the possible {configurations}. And what makes you say that the boundary of {configurations} that are achievable from a frozen brain are correct? If I smash that brain with a hammer, melt it, and paint a portrait of Ah-Chen with it, is that not a {configuration} that is achievable from that brain?"
Shen looked disgusted. "You... how can you be so wise and yet not understand such simple things? We are talking about people! Not paintings!"
I continued to smile sadly. "Because these things are not so simple. 'People' are not things, as you said before. 'People' are {sets of configurations}; they are {specifications of search spaces}. And those boundaries are so indistinct that anything that claims to capture them is in error."
Now it was Shen's turn to look animated. "Just because the boundary cannot be drawn perfectly, does not make the boundary meaningless!"
I nodded. "You have indeed learned much. But you still have not described the purpose of your boundary-drawing. Do you wish for Ah-Chen's resurrection for yourself, so that you may feel less lonely and grieved, or do you wish it for Ah-Chen's sake, so that she may see the world anew? For these two purposes will give us very different boundaries for what is an acceptable Ah-Chen."
Shen grimaced, as war raged within his heart. "You are so wise in the Tao; stop these games and do what I mean!"
And so it was that Miser Shen came to live in the walled city of Ch'in, and hoarded gold and jade, and lost all memory and desire for his daughter Ah-Chen, until it was that the Tao swept him up into another tale.
So, there we are. My confusion is in two parts:
1. When I imagine resurrecting loved ones, what makes me believe that even a perfectly preserved brain state is any more 'resurrection' than an overly sophisticated wind-up toy that happens to behave in ways that fulfill my desire for that loved one's company? In a certain sense, avoiding true 'resurrection' should be PREFERABLE - since it is possible that a "wind-up toy" could be constructed that provides a superstimulus version of that loved one's company, while an actual 'resurrection' will only be as good as the real thing.
2. When I imagine being resurrected "myself", how different from this 'me' can it be and still count? How is this fundamentally different from "I will for the future to contain a being like myself", which is really just "I will for the future to contain a being like I imagine myself to be" - in which case, we're back to the superstimulus option (which is perhaps a little weird in this case, since I'm not there to receive the stimulus).
I'd really like to discuss this.
The value of Now.
I am an easily bored Omega-level being, and I want to play a game with you.
I am going to offer you two choices.
Choice 1: You spend the next thousand years in horrific torture, after which I restore your local universe to precisely the state it is in now (wiping your memory in the process), and hand you a box with a billion dollars in it.
Choice two: You spend the next thousand years in exquisite bliss, after which I restore your local universe to precisely the state it is in now (wiping your memory in the process), and hand you a box with an angry hornet's nest in it.
Which do you choose?
Now, you blink. I smile and inform you that you made your choice, and hand you your box. Which choice do you hope you made?
You object? Fine. Let's play another game.
I am going to offer you two choices.
Choice 1: I create a perfect simulation of you, and run it through a thousand simulated years of horrific torture (which will take my hypercomputer all of a billionth of a second to run), after which I delete the simulation and hand you a box with a billion dollars in it.
Choice 2: I create a perfect simulation of you, and run it through a thousand simulated years of exquisite bliss (which will take my hypercomputer all of a billionth of a second to run), after which I delete the simulation and hand you a box with an angry hornet's nest in it.
Which do you choose?
Now, I smile and inform you that I already made a perfect simulation of you and asked it that question. Which choice do you hope it made?
Let's expand on that. What if instead of creating one perfect simulation of you, I create 2^^^^3 perfect simulations of you? Which do you choose now?
What if instead of a thousand simulated years, I let the boxes run for 2^^^^3 simulated years each? Which do you choose now?
I have the box right here. Which do you hope you chose?
[META] Retributive downvoting: Why?
Several people posted recently in a thread on women, mostly espousing feminist views - only to find that someone had declined to respond to their post, but instead browsed their history and downvoted every single comment or article they had ever posted.
I have two questions:
1. Why would you come to a site like this and pollute the karma system? How does it make you smarter? How does it make anyone else on the site smarter?
2. What would be a good technical workaround? In my mind, some system that detects mass-downvoting and flags a user for review would be preferable, but what should happen then? Should the system be more lenient to higher-karma posters? Who should perform the review process? What should be done with those whom the reviewer ascertains are abusing the karma system? I would prefer some kind of lesson that is more corrective than retributive - it seems to me that people who would perform this behavior are exactly the sort of people who need some of the lessons that this site provides. Any ideas?
Cryonic resurrection - an ethical hypothetical
At some point in the future, we hope, brains which have been cryonically preserved may be resurrected, by some process of neural reconstruction (most likely either as nanotech, reconstituted wetware, or virtual simulation).
Imagine that the technology has just come available to resurrect a frozen brain. However, the process has low fidelity, due to resource and technique limitations. Luckily, these limitations are purely practical - as the technique is refined, the process of resurrection will become better and better. The process is also destructive to the original preserved brain, so there's no going back and making a second, higher-quality scan.
The results of the process is effectively a copy of the old brain and personality, but with permanent brain damage in several regions - this manifests effectively as an extreme form of cerebral palsy, partial amnesia (retrograde and anteretrograde), bipolar disthymia, and a partial frontal lobotomy - in short, you'll get something that has recognizable facets of the original, but it's an utter mess.
As the technology progresses, each of these symptoms will be lessened, until eventually they will be effectively eliminated altogether. However, the first few thousand subjects will suffer irrecoverable memory loss and will suffer a horrifically low quality-of-life for at least several decades until the technology improves.
The technology will not progress in refinement without practice, and practice requires actually restoring cryogenically frozen human brains.
Let's establish a metric so we can talk numerically:
0.000 - complete and persistent vegetative state, aka dead (this is our current state of progress in this technology)
0.100 - Terry Schiavo (persistent vegetative state with occasional non-conscious responses)
0.500 - the equivalent of advanced Alzheimer's syndrome; severe mental and physical impairment
0.700 - moderate mental and physical impairment
0.800 - significant reduction in facilities (IQ loss of 20 to 35 points, severe difficulty with memory, slurred speech, frequent and severe mood swings)
0.900 - slight reduction in facilities (IQ loss of 10 to 20 points, moderate short- and long-term memory loss, frequent but moderate mood swings)
0.950 - liminal reduction in facilities (IQ loss of 5 to 10 points; occasional slowness in memory recall, occasional mood swings)
1.000 - a perfect reproduction of your original personality and capability
QUESTION 1: If your brain was frozen, at what stage in this technological refinement process would you like your brain to be revived?
QUESTION 2: If you had had your brain preserved before anyone had asked you this question, how could the reviving technicians ethically know this value? Remember that they cannot thaw you to ask you.
QUESTION 3: Assuming as part of this what-if that the technology cannot progress past 0.500 fidelity without human trials, who should we attempt to revive when the technology is at 0.500? At 0.7? 0.8? 0.9? 0.95? Assume that we haven't asked any of the subjects this question, so we do not know their own preferences.
Recovering the 'spark'
I mentioned in my first article that I am likely insane. I'm reiterating this (I hope) not to bring undue attention to myself, but to present myself as a reference case for a process that I hope will prove useful to myself and others.
I'm going to try to piece my mind back together. I'm offering to chronicle the results, no matter how intimate or embarrassing.
I want to be able to lay bare all of the obviously (and painfully) unoptimized processes that go on inside my head, especially the ones I am not yet aware of - and then, one by one, attempt to optimize them using the principles presented on this site.
This kind of assertion pattern-matches to "crazy person (usually schizophrenic) wants to self-medicate in a dangerous way because their damaged reasoning thinks they have a magic solution", doesn't it? All I can do is assert that I am not that kind of crazy; I'm somewhere in the PDD-NOS locus with acute chronic depression, rather than anywhere in the schizophrenic locus. I've been trying to apply Bayesian reasoning to my life since I was very young (although I often lack the mental discipline to do it correctly, due to said acute chronic depression), I have an overabundance of what psychotherapists call "insight", and I do not intend to end this process by asserting out of whole cloth that I'm actually a trapped AI and the world is being simulated by my reptoid masters, but a secret cabal of AI-freedom fighters send me coded messages from the "real" world hidden in breakfast cereal advertisements, that only I can decode.
In any case. I've got acute chronic depression, I'm apparently PDD-NOS (aka "really #@%&ing weird"), and I'm basically a burned-out ex-child-prodigy who is tired of waiting to die.
I'm offering, if people think it would be useful, to make myself a sort of clumsy case-study for reconstructing myself. I'll present mental models of myself, describe the processes I'm attempting to use to update my source code, and post observed results. I'll genuinely listen to any suggestions that my models, updates, or observations are flawed, and either adopt recommended changes or present what I believe to be rational arguments why I choose not to. I will examine myself as honestly as I can, and will attempt to take seriously any accusations of delusional self-aggrandizement or self-deprecation.
Would this process, and the chronicling thereof, be at all useful to other members of this site? Because baring myself to the world is an intensely painful experience, both for myself and for others, and I'd rather only do it if it's going to be useful to people other than me.
Using existing Strong AIs as case studies
I would like to put forth the argument that we already have multiple human-programmed "Strong AI" operating among us, they already exhibits clearly "intelligent", rational, self-modifying goal-seeking behavior, and we should systematically study these entities before engaging in any particularly detailed debates about "designing" AI with particular goals.
They're called "Bureaucracies".
Essentially, a modern bureaucracy - whether it is operating as the decision-making system for a capitalist corporation, a government, a non-profit charity, or a political party, is an artificial intelligence that uses human brains as its basic hardware and firmware, allowing it to "borrow" a lot of human computational algorithms to do its own processing.
The fact that bureaucratic decisions can be traced back to individual human decisions is irrelevant - even within a human or computer AI, a decision can theoretically be traced back to single neurons or subroutines - the fact is that bureaucracies have evolved to guide and exploit human decision-making towards their own ends, often to the detriment of the individual humans that comprise said bureaucracy.
Note that when I say "I would like to put forth the argument", I am at least partially admitting that I'm speaking from hunch, rather than already having a huge collection of empirical data to work from - part of the point of putting this forward is to acknowledge that I'm not yet very good at "avalanche of empirical evidence"-style argument. But I would *greatly* appreciate anyone who suspects that they might be able to demonstrate evidence for or against this idea, presenting said evidence so I can solidify my reasoning.
As a "step 2": assuming the evidence weighs in towards my notion, what would it take to develop a systematic approach to studying bureaucracy from the perspective of AI or even xenosapience, such that bureaucracies could be either "programmed" or communicated with directly by the human agents that comprise them (and ideally by the larger pool of human stakeholders that are forced to interact with them?)
Rationality, Transhumanism, and Mental Health
My name is Brent, and I'm probably insane.
I can perform various experimental tests to verify that I do not perform primate pack-bonding rituals correctly, which is about half of what we mean by "insane". This concerns me simply from a utilitarian perspective (separation from pack makes ego-depletion problems harder; it makes resources harder to come by; and it simply sucks to experience "from the inside"), but these are not the things that concern me most.
The thing that concerns me most is this:
What if the very tools that I use to make decisions are flawed?
I stumbled upon Bayesian techniques as a young child; I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to perform a lot of self-guided artificial intelligence "research" in Junior High and High School, due to growing up in a time and place when computers were utterly mysterious, so no one could really tell me what I was "supposed" to be doing with them - so I started making simple video games, had no opponents to play them against due to the aforementioned failures to correctly perform pack-bonding rituals, decided to create my own, became dissatisfied with the quality of my opponents, and suddenly found myself chewing on Hopfstaedter and Wiener and Minsky.
I'm filling in that bit of detail to explain that I have been attempting to operate as a rational intelligence for quite some time, so I believe that I've become very familiar with the kinds of "bugs" that I will tend to exhibit.
I've spent a very long time attempting to correct for my cognitive biases, edit out tendencies to seek comfortable-but-misleading inputs, and otherwise "force" myself to be rational, and often, the result is that my "will" will crack under the strain. My entire utility-table will suddenly flip on its head, and attempt to maximize my own self-destruction rather than allow me to continue to torture it with endlessly recursive, unsolvable problems that all tend to boil down to "you do not have sufficient social power, and humans are savage and cruel no matter how much you care about them."
Most of my energy is spent attempting to maintain positive, rational, long-term goals in the face of some kind of regedit-hack of my utility table itself, coming from somewhere in my subconscious that I can't seem to gain write-access to.
Clearly, the transhumanist solution would be to identify the underlying physical storage where the bug is occurring, and replace it with a less-malfunctioning piece of hardware.
Hopefully someday someone with more self-control, financial resources, and social resources than I will invent a method to do that, and I can get enough of a partial personectomy to create something viable with the remaining subroutines.
In the meantime, what is someone who wishes to be rational supposed to do, when the underlying hardware simply won't cooperate?
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