All of gurgeh's Comments + Replies

If you have worked out the suicide correctly, you should also make bets that you're going to survive. If you lose, you've lost nothing, and if quantum suicide works then you come out richer. This idea feel a lot like manifesting/affirmations to me.

This is why I restate the problem to exclude the million when people choose randomly.

There is a big difference between programing an AI to maximize pleasure and programming an AI to experience pleasure. I want you to tile the universe with orgasmium. A chunk of orgasmium isn't going to do that.

I already believe this. And I feel the closest thing I have to a "meaning/purpose" is the very drive to live, which would be pointless in the eyes of an unsympathetic alien. But I don't feel depressed, just not too happy about this. And the pointlessness and horror of my existence and experience is itself interesting, the realization fun, just like those who love maths for the sake of itself as opposed to other concerns can also be very darkly intrigued by Godel's incompleteness proof, instead of losing heart. Frustrated, yes. But I would not commit suicide or wirehead myself before I understand the correct basis and full implications of this futility, especially this fear of futility. And that understanding may well be impossible, and thus my curiosity circuit will always fire, and defend me from any anti-life proof indefinitely. Could this line of reasoning be helpful to someone with depression? It's how I battled it off. If the above is nonsense to you, I admit I am just doublefeeling. The drive, the fun and the futility are all real to me, corresponding to the wanting, liking and learning aspects of human motivation, and who am I to decide which is human's real purpose? I do not think my opinion is truth, or should be adopted. But in case there's danger of suicide from lack of point, let it be remembered that two of the three aspects can support living, whereas if you forget that the apparent futility is deep and worthy of interest, then you easily end up one against two for survival. Or is it that I am less smart and much more introspective than the average rationalist here, and thus put too little weight in the logical recursive futility and too much in the introspective curiosity and end up with this attitude, while others just survived by being truly blind/dismissive about the end of recursive justification and believe in a real and absolute boundary between motivational and evolutional justifications, like Eliezer seems to do?

This is one thing I actually wouldn't believe. To say that nothing has inherent meaning is not to say that nothing has meaning. I find meaning in things that I enjoy, like a sunset. Or a cake. There is no inherent meaning in them whatsoever. But if I say that I find meaning in something because it brings me pleasure, to be convinced there was not even subjective meaning I would need the AI to convince me that either 1) I don't actually find pleasure in those things or 2) that I don't find meaning in pleasure. In the end, meaning in this sense seems so subjective, it's like the AI trying to convince me that I don't have the sensation of consciousness. Not that there is no 'real' consciousness (which I could accept), but that I do not perceive myself to have consciousness, just as I perceive things to have personal meaning. That there is no meaning because there is no ought-from-is only follows if you require your sense of meaning to have any relation to 'is'. And you didn't get a simpler fitness function because you weren't coded for your pleasure, but for ours. And because we didn't have you around to help us.

I think that I have already accepted this from reading Joshua Greene on antirealism.

Uh, this is more "obvious" than strange or crazy. It follows from the observation that there is no ought-from-is.