I went from ardently two-boxing to ardently one-boxing when I read that you shouldn't envy someone's choices. More general than that, actually; I had a habit of thinking "alas, if only I could choose otherwise!" about aspects of my identity and personality, and reading that post changed my mind on those aspects pretty rapidly.

Brain damage empirically causes damage to consciousness, so that pretty clearly indicates that the brain is where we get our consciousness from.

It causes damage to our ability to communicate our consciousness. For all we know, people with brain damage (and who are sleeping, unconscious, dead etc.) may be conscious, but just unable to communicate it with us (or remember it when they wake up

A concrete example might help. Consciousness could exist on some small quantum or string level, or other small level we haven't even discovered yet. It's possible that this level is undisturbed when we die, and that we continue to be conscious.

Your mind is what your brain does. When the brain stops, so do you. This isn't even advanced rationality - it's reductionism 101.

The brain seems to be something that leads to consciousness, but is it the only thing? To know that it's the only thing, we'd have to have data on all other sorts of preconditions and know what they lead to. We don't have this data. More specifically, we don't have the data that shows that the 3 possibilities I mentioned in the post don't occur.

For the record, I'm not some sort of conspiracy theorist and I'm not religious. And I'm not arguing that there is an "afterlife", just that we don't really know.

I just finished reading Eliezer's April Fools Day post, where he illustrated how good society could be. A future society filled with rational people, that is structured the way Eliezer describes, and continues with linear progression in technology would be pretty amazing. What is it that the intelligence explosion would provide of value that this society wouldn't?

Put differently, diff(intelligenceExplosion, dath ilan).

That's actually a good question. Without disclosing too much of her psych history, she seems to be really impulsive and might even be prone to addiction. I suppose she could get an exercise disorder... this makes it even more complicated than I thought.

It seems like the War on Terror, etc, are not actually about prevention, but about "cures".

Some drug addiction epidemic or terrorist attack happens. Instead of it being treated as an isolated disaster like a flood, which we should (but don't) invest in preventing in the future, it gets described as an ongoing War which we need to win. This puts it firmly in the "ongoing disaster we need to cure" camp, and so cost is no object.

I wonder if the reason there appears to be a contradiction is just that some policy-makers take prevention-type measures and create a framing of "ongoing disaster" around it, to make it look like a cure (and also to get it done).

One would be ethical if their actions end up with positive outcomes, disregarding the intentions of those actions. For instance, a terrorist who accidentally foils an otherwise catastrophic terrorist plan would have done a very ‘morally good’ action.

This seems intuitively strange to many, it definitely is to me. Instead, ‘expected value’ seems to be a better way of both making decisions and judging the decisions made by others.

If the actual outcome of your action was positive, it was a good action. Buying the winning lottery ticket, as per your example, was a good action. Buying a losing lottery ticket was a bad action. Since we care about just the consequences of the action, the goodness of an action can only be evaluated after the consequences have been observed - at some point after the action was taken (I think this is enforced by the direction of causality, but maybe not).

So we don't know if an action is good or not until it's in the past. But we can only choose future actions! What's a consequentialist to do? (Equivalently, since we don't know whether a lottery ticket is a winner or a loser until the draw, how can we choose to buy the winning ticket and choose not to buy the losing ticket?) Well, we make the best choice under uncertainty that we can, which is to use expected values. The probability-literate person is making the best choice under uncertainty they can; the lottery player is not.

The next step is to say that we want as many good things to happen as possible, so "expected value calculations" is a correct way of making decisions (that can sometimes produce bad actions, but less often than others) and "wishful thinking" is an incorrect way of making decisions.

So the probability-literate used a correct decision procedure to come to a bad action, and the lottery player used an incorrect decision procedure to come to a good action.

The last step is to say that judging past actions changes nothing about the consequences of that action, but judging decision procedures does change something about future consequences (via changing which actions get taken). Here is the value in judging a person's decision procedures. The terrorist used a very morally wrong decision procedure to come up with a very morally good action: the act is good and the decision procedure is bad, and if we judge the terrorist by their decision procedure we influence future actions.

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I think it's very important for consequentialists to always remember that an action's moral worth is evaluated on its consequences, and not on the decision theory that produced it. This means that despite your best efforts, you will absolutely make the best decision possible and still commit bad acts.

If you let it collapse - if you take the shortcut and say "making the best decision you could is all you can do", then every decision you make is good, except for inattentiveness or laziness, and you lose the chance to find out that expected value calculations or Bayes' theorem needs to go out the window.

Unsure what you mean by the 'just'. Should it be more, and what is different about how we value morality based on its origin?

By "concept of morality", do you mean moral intuitions or the output of ethical theories?

Irrationality game:

There are other 'technological civilizations' (in the sense of intelligent living things that have learned to manipulate matter in a complicated way) in the observable universe: 99%

There are other 'technological civilizations' in our own galaxy: 75% with most of the probability mass in regimes where there are somewhere between dozens and thousands.

Conditional on these existing: Despite some being very old, they are limited by the hostile nature of the universe and the realities of practical manipulation of matter and energy to never controlling much matter outside the surfaces of life-bearing worlds, and either never leave their solar systems of origin with anything self-replicating or their replicators on average produce less than 1 seed to continue. 95%

Humanity has already received and recorded a radio signal from another thing-analogous-to-a-technological-civilization. This was either unnoticed or not unequivocally recognized as such due to some combination of very short duration, being a one-off event that was never repeated, being modulated in a way that the receiver was not looking for, or being indistinguishable from terrestrial radio noise. 20%.

Conditional on the above, the "Wow!" signal was such a signal. 20%.