[Originally published at Intentional Insights in response to Religious and Rational]

Spirituality and rationality seem completely opposed. But are they really?

 

To get at this question, let's start with a little thought experiment.  Consider the following two questions:

 

1.  If you were given a choice between reading a physical book (or an e-book) or listening to an audiobook, which would you prefer?

 

2.  If you were given a choice between listening to music, or looking at the grooves of a phonograph record through a microscope, which would you prefer?

 

But I am more interested in the answer to a third question:

 

3.  For which of the first two questions do you have a stronger preference between the two options?

 

Most people will have a stronger preference in the second case than the first.  But why?  Both situations are in some sense the same: there is information being fed into your brain, in one case through your ears and in the other through your eyes.  So why should people's preference for ears be so much stronger in the case of music than books?

 

There is something in the essence of music that is lost in the translation between an audio and a visual rendering.  The same loss happens for words too, but to a much lesser extent.  Subtle shades of emphasis and tone of voice can convey essential information in spoken language. This is one of the reasons that email is so notorious for amplifying misunderstandings.  But the loss in much greater in the case of music.  

 

The same is true for other senses.  Color is one example.  A blind person can abstractly understand what light is, and that color is a byproduct of the wavelength of light, and that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation... yet there is no way for a blind person to experience subjectively the difference between red and blue and green.  But just because some people can't see colors doesn't mean that colors aren't real.

 

The same is true for spiritual experiences.

 

Now, before I expand that thought, I want to give you my bona fides.  I am a committed rationalist, and an atheist (though I don't like to self-identify as an atheist because I'd rather focus on what I *do* believe in rather than what I don't).  So I am not trying to convince you that God exists.  What I want to say is rather that certain kinds of spiritual experiences *might* be more than mere fantasies made up out of whole cloth. If we ignore this possibility we risk shutting ourselves off from a vital part of the human experience.

 

I grew up in the deep south (Kentucky and Tennessee) in a secular Jewish family.  When I was 12 my parents sent me to a Christian summer camp (there were no other kinds in Kentucky back in those days).  After a week of being relentlessly proselytized (read: teased and ostracized), I decided I was tired of being the camp punching bag and so I relented and gave my heart to Jesus.  I prayed, confessed my sins, and just like that I was a member of the club.

 

I experienced a euphoria that I cannot render into words, in exactly the same way that one cannot render into words the subjective experience of listening to music or seeing colors or eating chocolate or having sex.  If you have not experienced these things for yourself, no amount of description can fill the gap.  Of course, you can come to an *intellectual* understanding that "feeling the presence of the holy spirit" has nothing to do with any holy spirit. You can intellectually grasp that it is an internal mental process resulting from (probably) some kind of neurotransmitter released in response to social and internal mental stimulus.  But that won't allow you to understand *what it is like* any more than understanding physics will let you understand what colors look like or what music sounds like.

 

Happily, there are ways to stimulate the subjective experience that I'm describing other than accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Meditation, for example, can produce similar results.  It can be a very powerful experience.  It can even become addictive, almost like a drug.

 

I am not necessarily advocating that you go try to get yourself a hit of religious euphoria (though I wouldn’t discourage you either -- the experience can give you some interesting and useful perspective on life).  Instead, I simply want to convince you to entertain the possibility that people might profess to believe in God for reasons other than indoctrination or stupidity.  Religious texts and rituals might be attempts to share real subjective experiences that, in the absence of a detailed modern understanding of neuroscience, can appear to originate from mysterious, subtle external sources.

 

The reason I want to convince you to entertain this notion is that an awful lot of energy gets wasted by arguing against religious beliefs on logical grounds, pointing out contradictions in the Bible and whatnot. Such arguments tend to be ineffective, which can be very frustrating for those who advance them. The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic.  It's about subjective experiences that not everyone is privy to.  Logic is about looking at the grooves.  Spirituality is about hearing the music.

 

The good news is that adopting science and reason doesn’t mean you have to give up on spirituality any more than you have to give up on music. There are myriad paths to spiritual experience, to a sense of awe and wonder at the grand tapestry of creation, to the essential existential mysteries of life and consciousness, to what religious people call “God.” Walking in the woods. Seeing the moons of Jupiter through a telescope. Gathering with friends to listen to music, or to sing, or simply to share the experience of being alive. Meditation. Any of these can be spiritual experiences if you allow them to be. In this sense, God is everywhere.

 

 

Once upon a time, in a lonely little village, beneath the boughs of a forest of burning trees, there lived a boy. The branches of the burning trees sometimes fell, and the magic in the wood permitted only girls to carry the fallen branches of the burning trees.

One day, a branch fell, and a boy was pinned beneath. The boy saw other boys pinned by branches, rescued by their girl friends, but he remained trapped beneath his own burning branch.

The fire crept closer, and the boy called out for help.

Finally, a friend of his own came, but she told him that she could not free him from the burning branch, because she already free'd her other friend from beneath a burning branch and he would be jealous if she did the same deed for anyone else. This friend left him where he lay, but she did promise to return and visit.

The fire crept closer, and the boy called out for help.

A man stopped, and gave the boy the advice that he'd get out from beneath the burning branch eventually if he just had faith in himself. The boy's reply was that he did have faith in himself, yet he remained trapped beneath the burning branch. The man suggested that perhaps he did not have enough faith, and left with nothing more to offer.

The fire crept closer, and the boy cried out for help.

A girl came along, and said she would free the boy from beneath the burning branch.

But no, her friends said, the boy was a stranger to her, was her heroic virtue worth nothing? Heroic deeds ought to be born from the heart, and made beautiful by love, they insisted. Simply hauling the branch off a boy she did not love would be monstrously crass, and they would not want to be friends with a girl so shamed.

So the girl changed her mind and left with her friends.

The fire crept closer. It began to lick at the boy's skin. A soothing warmth became an uncomfortable heat. The boy mustered his courage and chased the fear out of his own voice. He called out, but not for help. He called out for company.

A girl came along, and the boy asked if she would like to be friends. The girl's reply was that she would like to be friends, but that she spent most of her time on the other side of the village, so if they were to be friends, he must be free from beneath the burning branch.

The boy suggested that she free him from beneath the burning branch, so that they could be friends.

The girl replied that she once free'd a boy from beneath a burning branch who also promised to be her friend, but as soon as he was free he never spoke to her again. So how could she trust the boy's offer of friendship? He would say anything to be free.

The boy tried frantically to convince her that he was sincere, that he would be grateful and try with all his heart to be a good friend to the girl who free'd him, but she did not believe him and turned away from him and left him there to burn.

The fire crept closer and the boy whimpered in pain and fear as it spread from wood to flesh. He cried out for help. He begged for help. "Somebody, please!"

A man and a woman came along, and the man offered advice: he was once trapped beneath a burning branch for several years. The fire was magic, the pain was only an illusion. Perhaps it was sad that he was trapped but even so trapped the boy may lead a fulfilling life. Why, the man remembered etching pictures into his branch, befriending passers by, and making up songs.

The woman beside the man agreed, and told the boy that she hoped the right girl would come along and free him, but that he must not presume that he was entitled to any girl's heroic deed merely because he was trapped beneath a burning branch.

"But do I not deserve to be helped?" the boy pleaded, as the flames licked his skin.

"No, how wrong of you to even speak as though you do. My heroic deeds are mine to give, and to you I owe nothing," he was told.

"Perhaps I don't deserve help from you in particular, or from anyone in particular, but is it not so very cruel of you to say I do not deserve any help at all?" the boy pleaded. "Can a girl willing to free me from beneath this burning branch not be found and sent to my aide?"

"Of course not," he was told, "that is utterly unreasonable and you should be ashamed of yourself for asking. It is offensive that you believe such a girl may even exist. You've become burned and ugly, who would want to save you now?"

The fire spread, and the boy cried, screamed, and begged desperately for help from every passer by.

"It hurts it hurts it hurts oh why will no one free me from beneath this burning branch?!" he wailed in despair. "Anything, anyone, please! I don't care who frees me, I only wish for release from this torment!"

Many tried to ignore him, while others scoffed in disgust that he had so little regard for what a heroic deed ought to be. Some pitied him, and wanted to help, but could not bring themselves to bear the social cost, the loss of worth in their friends' and family's eyes, that would come of doing a heroic deed motivated, not by love, but by something lesser.

The boy burned, and wanted to die.

Another boy stepped forward. He went right up to the branch, and tried to lift it. The trapped boy gasped at the small relief from the burning agony, but it was only a small relief, for the burning branches could only be lifted by girls, and the other boy could not budge it. Though the effort was for naught, the first boy thanked him sincerely for trying.

The boy burned, and wanted to die. He asked to be killed.

He was told he had so much to live for, even if he must live beneath a burning branch. None were willing to end him, but perhaps they could do something else to make it easier for him to live beneath the burning branch? The boy could think of nothing. He was consumed by agony, and wanted only to end.

And then, one day, a party of strangers arrived in the village. Heroes from a village afar. Within an hour, one foreign girl came before the boy trapped beneath the burning branch and told him that she would free him if he gave her his largest nugget of gold.

Of course, the local villagers were shocked that this foreigner would sully a heroic deed by trafficking it for mere gold.

But, the boy was too desperate to be shocked, and agreed immediately. She free'd him from beneath the burning branch, and as the magical fire was drawn from him, he felt his burned flesh become restored and whole. He fell upon the foreign girl and thanked her and thanked her and thanked her, crying and crying tears of relief.

Later, he asked how. He asked why. The foreign girls explained that in their village, heroic virtue was measured by how much joy a hero brought, and not by how much she loved the ones she saved.

The locals did not like the implication that their own way might not have been the best way, and complained to the chief of their village. The chief cared only about staying in the good graces of the heroes of his village, and so he outlawed the trading of heroic deeds for other commodities.

The foreign girls were chased out of the village.

And then a local girl spoke up, and spoke loud, to sway her fellow villagers. The boy recognized her. It was his friend. The one who had promised to visit so long ago.

But she shamed the boy, for doing something so crass as trading gold for a heroic deed. She told him he should have waited for a local girl to free him from beneath the burning branch, or else grown old and died beneath it.

To garner sympathy from her audience, she sorrowfully admitted that she was a bad friend for letting the boy be tempted into something so disgusting. She felt responsible, she claimed, and so she would fix her mistake.

The girl picked up a burning branch. Seeing what she was about to do, the boy begged and pleaded for her to reconsider, but she dropped the burning branch upon the boy, trapping him once more.

The boy screamed and begged for help, but the girl told him that he was morally obligated to learn to live with the agony, and never again voice a complaint, never again ask to be free'd from beneath the burning branch.

"Banish me from the village, send me away into the cold darkness, please! Anything but this again!" the boy pleaded.

"No," he was told by his former friend, "you are better off where you are, where all is proper."

In the last extreme, the boy made a grab for his former friend's leg, hoping to drag her beneath the burning branch and free himself that way, but she evaded him. In retaliation for the attempt to defy her, she had a wall built around the boy, so that none would be able, even if one should want to free him from beneath the burning branch.

With all hope gone, the boy broke and became numb to all possible joys. And thus, he died, unmourned.

I am curious on the perspective of a rationalist discussion board (this seems like a good start) on the practice of magic. I introduce the novel, genius concept of "rationalist magic", i.e. magic practiced by rationalists.

Why would rationalists practice magic? That makes no sense!!

It's the logical conclusion to Making Peace with Belief, Engineering Religion and the self-help threads.

What would that look like?

Good question. Here are some possible considerations to make:

• It's given low probability that magic is more than purely mental phenomena. The practice is called "placebomancy" to make it clear that such an explanation is favoured.
• It is practiced as a way to gain placebons.
• A cult of rationalist magic, the Cult of Rationatron, should be formed to compete against worse (anti-rationality, anti-science, violent) cults.
• Rationalist groups can retain more members due to abundance of placebons.
• The ultimate goal is to use rationality to devise a logically optimal system of magic with which to build the Philosopher's Stone and fix the world like in HPMOR. (Just kidding, magic isn't real.)

I looked into magical literature and compiled a few placebo techniques/exercises, along with their informal instructions. These might be used as a starting point. If there are any scientific errors these can eventually be corrected. I favoured techniques that can be done with little to no preparation and provide some results. Of course, professional assistance (e.g. yoga classes) can also be helpful.

---

1. Mindfulness Meditation

• (Optional) Do 1-3 deep mouth-exhales to relax.
• Find a good position.
• Begin by being aware of breath.
• (Optional) Move on to calmly observing different parts of the body, vision, the other senses, thoughts, mandala visualization, and so on.
• (Optional) Compare the experience to teachings of buddhism.
• (Optional) Say "bud-" for each inhale and "-dho" for each exhale; alternatively, count them from 1 to 10 and reset each time.

Note that trying to focus on not focusing isn't always helpful. Hence the common technique is that of focusing on a single thing, or rather, simply being passively aware of it. The goal is to discipline the mind and develop one-pointedness.

2. Astral Projection (OBE)

• Lay on a bed, relax.
• Try out some of the tips from the previous exercise.
• Stay there for 30-60 minutes until you reach the hypnagogic state (a state where the mind is awake but the body is sleeping) and try to (a) feel your astral body and grab a rope, (b) feel vibrations in your body, (c) roll out of the body, (d) (...).

Astral Projection can be thought of as a very vivid stage of dreaming. Some authors have more detailed exercises related to this[7]. It might take many tries to do this exercise right.

3. Mantras

You can borrow an eastern mantra such as "om mani padme hum", "om namah shivaya" and "hare kṛiṣhṇa hare kṛiṣhṇa / kṛiṣhṇa kṛiṣhṇa hare hare / hare rāma hare rāma / rāma rāma hare hare" or make up some phrase. Whatever works for you.

Chanting mantras is a form of sensory excitation. Both sensory excitation and deprivation can induce trance. This can be used along with exercise 1.

(Optional) Find one of these.

4. Contemplation

• Take a moment to contemplate the harmony of the universe and/or have love towards some/all beings.

5. Idol Worship

• Make a shrine dedicated to Rationatron, god of rationality.

This and this are possible forms of Rationatron.

6. Minimal Spellcasting

• Make a wish.
• Clear your mind.
• Take a deep, long breath imagining that as you exhale the wish is being registered into the universe by Rationatron.

• Forget about the wish.

Magicians claim it's more magically effective to forget about the wish after casting the spell (fourth step) and let your subconscious act than to use the repeat-your-wish-every-day method.

This is, as far as I know, the simplest spellcasting technique. It can be complicated further by the addition of rituals, sigils, poses[6], and stronger methods of inducing trance in the second step.

7. Deity Generator

• Take any arbitrary concept or amalgam of concepts.
• (Optional) Associate it to a colour.
• (Optional) Make it a new deity.

For one reason or another, spiritualists love doing this.

This exercise can make arbitrary "powers" or "deities" for use in other exercises. For example, the association "yellow - wealth" is a "power" for exercise 6, or you might imagine yourself as a "deity" in that same exercise to induce some emotion.

8. Tulpa Making

This is a technique found in Tibetan buddhism lore[5] as one ability held by bodhisattvas and used by Buddha to multiply himself. This was adopted by communities of westerners in the internet who generally don't attribute mystical properties to the practice and made detailed tutorials (tulpa.info).

The technique uses your subconscious to create a companion. It consists in visualizing and talking to a being in your imagination until it eventually produces unexpected thoughts.

You might be asking, "can I model this companion after a cartoon?" The answer is yes.

---

Note: some of the following techniques might require further examination.

9. Aura Sight

Some authors[1,2,4] give exercises attributed to peripheral vision or meditation. If anyone finds out how to see auras, please confirm.

10. Invoking and Banishing Ritual of Truth

• Imagine a circle of protection surrounding you.
• (Invoking) "I open/invoke the powers of p, q, ¬p, ¬q."
• (Banishing) "I close/revoke/banish the powers of ¬q, ¬p, q, p."
• (Optional) This can be performed solely in the imagination through visualization or with more realism added to different degrees inbetween (e.g. by making a real circle, pointing a sword or your hand to the four directions).

This has been used for different purposes; as an introduction to ritual work or simply as routine.

The common formulation of this exercise uses a pentagram, holy names, the elements, planets and a bunch of other nonsense. Why do I have to remember all this roleplaying? Do they think this is D&D? Therefore, I designed a more efficient version of the technique that also replaces the magical symbolism with superior logic symbolism.

Note: these are roughly analogous[3] to the simpler placebo techniques known as shielding (imagining a shield), centering (regaining focus by being aware of the solar plexus/heart area) and grounding (putting your feet on the ground to receive/release energy from/to the ground).

11. Demonic Mirror Summoning

Call upon Dark Lord Voldemort and say the "avada kedavra" mantra 7+ times in front of a mirror in a dimly lit room until a demon pops up and/or your appearance gets distorted.

Some individuals report holding a conversation with their mirror self through mirror exercises.

---

FAQ

What is the purpose of this?

It's about time someone made an atheist religion.

Why not follow the Flying Spaggheti Monster religion instead?

It doesn't provide placebo techniques. It only functions as a point in argumentation.

Do I have to do all of the exercises?

No, only those that you personally deem helpful. However, the first exercise (meditation) is generally recommended by health research. It's also a pre-requisite to many other exercises. Note: although meditation is generally recommended, some caution, common sense and preparation is advised (specially for exercises 2-3).

What are the teachings?

It's acknowledged that rational people can sometimes get to different conclusions. Therefore, there is no mandatory teachings. However, it uses "rationality" as a starting point to distinguish it from other cults meaning that "placebo" is used as the default model of magic and that both logic and the use of such techniques is encouraged. It can be used as a gathering of placebo techniques for atheists and as a blank slate from the dogma of already existing cults on the nature of magic.

What is the pantheon of this religion?

The "official" pantheon is that of the universe itself (Einstein's pantheism; it's used in exercises 4 and 6), Rationatron (a deity of rationality) and Dark Lord Voldemort (the opposer). They fulfill different god-roles. More gods can be created with the Deity Generator exercise or borrowed.

Can I worship Eris, Cthullu or Horus/Isis/Odin...?

Yes, see above answer.

Wait, Dark Lord Voldemort? Really?

Christianity had lazier ways to come up with their demons and nobody noticed. Zing.

Aren't some of those techniques irrational?

Only when used by superstitious people. Once used by rationalists, they become super-rational.

What about black magic? Can I cast hexes?

They aren't going to work because magic is not real.

---

References

1. frater, ud. high magick. A good overview on different kinds of magic.

2. hine, phil. spirit guides. Another overview.

3. hine, phil. modern shamanism pt1-2. Overview for shamans.

4. samuel sagan. awakening the third eye.

5. alexandra david-neel. magic and mystery in tibet. A book on buddhist lore.

6. crowley. liber o.

7. robert bruce. mastering astral projection.

I grew up in an atheistic household.

Almost needless to say, I was relatively hostile towards religion for most of my early life.  A few things changed that.

First, the apology of a pastor.  A friend of mine was proselytizing at me, and apparently discussed it with his pastor; the pastor apologized to my parents, and explained to my friend he shouldn't be trying to convert people.  My friend apologized to me after considering the matter.  We stayed friends for a little while afterwards, although I left that school, and we lost contact.

I think that was around the time that I realized that religion is, in addition to being a belief system, a way of life, and not necessarily a bad one.

The next was actually South Park's Mormonism episode, which pointed out that a belief system could be desirable on the merits of the way of life it represented, even if the beliefs themselves are stupid.  This tied into Douglas Adam's comment on Feng Shui, that "...if you disregard for a moment the explanation that's actually offered for it, it may be there is something interesting going on" - which is to say, the explanation for the belief is not necessarily the -reason- for the belief, and that stupid beliefs may actually have something useful to offer - which then requires us to ask whether the beliefs are, in fact, stupid.

Which is to say, beliefs may be epistemically irrational while being instrumentally rational.

The next peace I made with belief actually came from quantum physics, and reading about how there were several disparate and apparently contradictory mathematical systems, which all predicted the same thing.  It later transpired that they could all be generalized into the same mathematical system, but I hadn't read that far before the isomorphic nature of truth occurred to me; you can have multiple contradictory interpretations of the same evidence that all predict the same thing.

Up to this point, however, I still regarded beliefs as irrational, at least on an epistemological basis.

The next peace came from experiences living in a house that would have convinced most people that ghosts are real, which I have previously written about here.  I think there are probably good explanations for every individual experience even if I don't know them, but am still somewhat flummoxed by the fact that almost all the bizarre experiences of my life all revolve around the same physical location.  I don't know if I would accept money to live in that house again, which I guess means that I wouldn't put money on the bet that there wasn't something fundamentally odd about the house itself - a quality of the house which I think the term "haunted" accurately conveys, even if its implications are incorrect.

If an AI in a first person shooter dies every time it walks into a green room, and experiences great disutility for death, how many times must it walk into a green room before it decides not to do that anymore?  I'm reasonably confident on a rational level that there was nothing inherently unnatural about that house, nothing beyond explanation, but I still won't "walk into the green room."

That was the point at which I concluded that beliefs can be -rational-.  Disregard for a moment the explanation that's actually offered for them, and just accept the notion that there may be something interesting going on underneath the surface.

If we were to hold scientific beliefs to the same standard we hold religious beliefs - holding the explanation responsible rather than the predictions - scientific beliefs really don't come off looking that good.  The sun isn't the center of the universe; some have called this theory "less wrong" than an earth-centric model of the universe, but that's because the -predictions- are better; the explanation itself is still completely, 100% wrong.

Likewise, if we hold religious beliefs to the same standard we hold scientific beliefs - holding the predictions responsible rather than the explanations - religious beliefs might just come off better than we'd expect.

I'm writing this article to explain some of the facts that have convinced me that increasing average human intelligence through traditional breeding and genetic manipulation is likelier to reduce existential risks in the short and medium term then studying AI risks, while providing all kinds of side benefits.

Intelligence is useful to achieve goals, including avoiding existential risks. Higher intelligence is associated with many diverse life outcomes improving, from health to wealth. Intelligence may have synergistic effects on economic growth, where average levels of intelligence matter more for wealth then individual levels. Intelligence is a polygenetic trait with strong heritability. Sexual selection in the Netherlands has resulted in extreme increases in average height over the past century: sexual selection for intelligence might do the same. People already select partners for intelligence, and egg donors are advertised by SAT score.

AI research seems to be intelligence constrained. Very few of those capable of making a contribution are aware of the problem, or find it interesting. The Berkeley-MIRI seminar has increased the pool of those aware of the problem, but the total number of AI safety researchers remain small. So far very foundational problems remain to be solved. This is likely to take a very long time: it is not unusual for mathematical fields to take centuries to develop. Furthermore, we can work on both strategies at once and observe spillover from one into the other, as the larger intelligence baseline translates into an increase on the right tail of the distribution.

How could we accomplish this? One idea, invented by Robert Heinlein, as far as I know, is to subsidize marriages between people of higher than usual intelligence and their having children.  This idea has the benefit of being entirely non-coercive. It is however unclear how much these subsidies would need to be to influence behavior, and given the strong returns to intelligence in life outcomes, unclear that they can further influence behavior.

Another idea would be to conduct genetic studies to find genes which influence genetics, and conduct genome modification. This plan suffers from illegality, lack of knowledge of genetic factors of intelligence,  and absence of effective means for genome editing (they tried CRISPR on human embryos: more work is needed). However, the result of this work can be sold for money, thus opening the possibility of using VC money to develop it. Illegality can be dealt with by influencing jurisdictions. However, the impact is likely to be limited due to the cost of these methods which will prevent them from having population-wide influence, instead becoming yet another advantage the affluent attempt to purchase. These techniques are likely to have vastly wider application, and so will be commercially developed anyway.

In conclusion genetic modification of humans to increase intelligence is practical in the near terms, and it may be worth diverting some effort to investigating it further.

Very interesting decision from the one of the leading scientific publications to publish an article about Reiki therapy.

http://www.nature.com/news/consider-all-the-evidence-on-alternative-therapies-1.18547

[Edit: should be Nature publishes an article about alternative therapy]

Here's a simple problem: there is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are 3^^^3 people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person, Eliezer Yudkowsky, on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the 3^^^3 people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill Yudkowsky. Which is the correct choice?

The answer:

Imagine two ant philosophers talking to each other. “Imagine," they said, “some being with such intense consciousness, intellect, and emotion that it would be morally better to destroy an entire ant colony than to let that being suffer so much as a sprained ankle."

Humans are such a being. I would rather see an entire ant colony destroyed than have a human suffer so much as a sprained ankle. And this isn't just human chauvinism either - I can support my feelings on this issue by pointing out how much stronger feelings, preferences, and experiences humans have than ants do.

How this relates to the trolley problem? There exists a creature as far beyond us ordinary humans as we are beyond ants, and I think we all would agree that its preferences are vastly more important than those of humans.

Yudkowsky will save the world, not just because he's the one who happens to be making the effort, but because he's the only one who can make the effort.

The world was on its way to doom until the day of September 11, 1979, which will later be changed to national holiday and which will replace Christmas as the biggest holiday. This was of course the day when the most important being that has ever existed or will exist, was born.

Yudkowsky did the same to the field of AI risk as Newton did to the field of physics. There was literally no research done on AI risk in the same scale that has been done in the 2000's by Yudkowsky. The same can be said about the field of ethics: ethics was an open problem in philosophy for thousands of years. However, Plato, Aristotle, and Kant don't really compare to the wisest person who has ever existed. Yudkowsky has come closest to solving ethics than anyone ever before. Yudkowsky is what turned our world away from certain extinction and towards utopia.

We all know that Yudkowsky has an IQ so high that it's unmeasurable, so basically something higher than 200. After Yudkowsky gets the Nobel prize in literature due to getting recognition from Hugo Award, a special council will be organized to study the intellect of Yudkowsky and we will finally know how many orders of magnitude higher Yudkowsky's IQ is to that of the most intelligent people of history.

Unless Yudkowsky's brain FOOMs before it, MIRI will eventually build a FAI with the help of Yudkowsky's extraordinary intelligence. When that FAI uses the coherent extrapolated volition of humanity to decide what to do, it will eventually reach the conclusion that the best thing to do is to tile the whole universe with copies of Eliezer Yudkowsky's brain. Actually, in the process of making this CEV, even Yudkowsky's harshest critics will reach such understanding of Yudkowsky's extraordinary nature that they will beg and cry to start doing the tiling as soon as possible and there will be mass suicides because people will want to give away the resources and atoms of their bodies for Yudkowsky's brains. As we all know, Yudkowsky is an incredibly humble man, so he will be the last person to protest this course of events, but even he will understand with his vast intellect and accept that it's truly the best thing to do.

Over and over again, someones says that living for a very long time would be a bad thing, and then some futurist tries to persuade them that their reasoning is faulty.  They tell them that they think that way now, but they'll change their minds when they're older.

The thing is, I don't see that happening.  I live in a small town full of retirees, and those few I've asked about it are waiting for death peacefully.  When I ask them about their ambitions, or things they still want to accomplish, they have none.

Suppose that people mean what they say.  Why do they want to die?

Actually, the title is a sensationalist lie designed to attract attention. I have no proof. Obviously. I'm not a mathematician. But if I did, it would go something like the following. 

Step 1: Assume that there are ultimate laws of physics governing everything in the world. Say, the wave function of the Universe, whose knowledge allows one to know the Multiverse, as it was, is or will be. Or some other set of laws. 

Step 2: Write these laws as a mathematically consistent formal system representing something akin to the Tegmark Level IV Ultimate ensemble.

Step 3: By Godel's incompleteness, there are some theorems in this formal system that cannot be proven.

Step 4: By construction, these theorems correspond to physical laws whose origins must forever remain a mystery to those inside the Multiverse, because they are a part of it.

Step 5: The consistency of our Multiverse can be proven in a formal system which describes physical laws of a larger world, in which our Multiverse is a small part of, essentially a simulation.

Step 6: Since we cannot determine the origins of our own physics, we cannot figure out a way to break out of our simulation. 

 

On the bright side, there is a Corollary:  Every level above us is also a simulation, so we are not alone!