Also, the fact that Eliezer won't tell, however understandable, makes me fear that Eliezer cheated for the sake of a greater good, i.e. he said to the other player, "In principle, a real AI might persuade you to let me out, even if I can't do it. This would be incredibly dangerous. In order to avoid this danger in real life, you should let me out, so that others will accept that a real AI would be able to do this."

I'm pretty sure that the first experiments were with people who disagreed with him on the idea that AI boxing would work or not. The whole point of the experiments wasn't that he could convince an arbitrary person about it, but that he could convince someone who publicly disagreed with him on the (in)validity of the concept.

Given that, I find it hard to believe that a) someone of that mindset would be convinced to forfeit because they suddenly changed their minds in the pre-game warmup, and that b) that if it was "cheating", that they wouldn't have simply released the transcripts themselves.

It's impossible for me not to perceive time, to not perceive myself as myself, to not perceive my own consciousness.

You've never been so intoxicated that you "lose time", and woken up wondering who you threw up on the previous night? You've never done any kind of hallucinogenic drug? You don't ... sleep?

Those things you listed are only true for a fairly narrow range of operational paramaters of the human brain. It's very possible to not do those things, and we stop doing them every night.

The sensation of time passing only seems to exist because we have short term memory to compare new input against. Disrupt short term memory formation -- by, say, getting extremley drunk, or getting a head injury -- and you lose the sensation of time passing.

bambi: I think this would be related to Newcomb's Problem? Just because the future is fixed relative to your current state (or decision making strategy, or whatever), doesn't mean that a successful rational agent should not try to optimize it's current state (or decision making strategy) so that it comes out on the desired side of future probabilities.

It all sorts itself out in the end, of course -- if you're the kind of agent that gets paralyzed when presented with a deterministic universe, then you're not going to be as successful as your consciousness moves to a different part of the configuration as agents that act as if they can change the future.

If everything we know is but a simulation being run in a much larger world, then "everything we know" isn't a universe.

The question wasn't "what's outside the universe?", it was "where did the configuration that we are a part of come from?"

I don't think you can necessarily equate "configuration" (the mathematical entity that we are implicitly represented within), with "universe" (everything that exists).

You're not imaginative enough. If the latter is true, we're a lot more likely to see messages from outside the Matrix sometime. ("Sorry, guys, I ran out of supercomputer time.")

For various values of "a lot", I suppose. If something is simulating something the size of the universe, chances are it's not even going to notice us (unless we turn everything into paper clips, I suppose). Just because the universe could be a simulation doesn't mean that we're the point of the simulation.

Manon de Gaillande asked "Where does this configuration come from?" Seeing no answer yet, I'm also intrigued by this. Does it even make sense to ask it? If it doesn't, please help Manon and I dissolve the question.

It doesn't make sense in the strict sense, in that barring the sudden arrival of sufficiently compelling evidence, you aren't going to be able to answer it with anything but metaphysical speculation. You aren't going to come out less confused about anything on the other side of contemplating the question.

Furthermore, no answer changes any of our expectations -- whether or not we're a naturally occurring phenomenon or a higher-dimensional grad student's Comp Sci thesis has no effect on any of our experiences within this universe.

May 28, 2008 at 02:15 PM was me. Typekey lied to me.

I can't remember which, but one of Brian Greene's books had a line that convinced me that all the configurations do exist simultaneously: "The total loaf exists". How can anything that crazy-sounding not be right?

I'm not sure that taking the crazy-sound of a given statement as positively correlated with it's truth is a useful strategy (in isolation). :-)

I guess I'm not sure what "exists" even means in this context. Is this in the general sense that "all mathematical objects exist"? I don't know what sin(435 rad) is offhand, but I know that it's defined (i.e. that it exists). But that's very different from actually instantiating it in the memory of an HP48G.

I accept that all states of the universe are defined, in the mathematical sense (in that, given the parameters of existence, they couldn't be different than they are -- given that F(0)=0 and F(1)=1, F(20) can't not be 6765). But the mathematical definition of something, and the instantiation of it (or "real existence") seem to be distinctly different things.

I'm still trying to wrap my non-physicist brain around this.

Okay, so t is redundant, mathematically speaking. It would be as if you had an infinite series of numbers, and you were counting from the beginning. The definition of the series is recursive, and defined as such that (barring new revelations in number theory) you can guarantee it will never repeat. As a trivial example, { t, i } = { 1, 1.1 }, { 2, 1.21 }, { 3, 1.4641 }.... t is redundant, in the sense that you don't need it there to calculate the next item in the series, and subtracting it makes the definition of the series simpler.

I also keep thinking back to Conway's game of life -- the time parameter (or generation, at least in xlife) is superfluous to a description of the "universe". The cells automatize (?) identically regardless of the generation. It's only the actual description of the playfield, combined with the rules for creating the next generation, that could be said to "exist" (at least for a glider physicist).

But in both those things there's still a concept of "successive states", and a "before" and "after" situation. It's the (allegedly) objective label for progress through successive states that's redundant. The idea of a block or crystal universe being "real" seems like a map/territory confusion, at least the way I'm understanding it -- that you could statically load up all the states of the universe into the memory of a sufficiently powerful n-dimensional computer, and that alone (with no processing per se) would be sufficient to create our experiences of existing inside the universe.

bambi: "Logic bomb" has the current meaning of a piece of software that acts as a time-delayed trojan horse (traditionally aimed at destruction, rather than infection or compromise), which might be causing some confusion in your analogy.

I don't think I've seen the term used to refer to an AI-like system.