All of ME3's Comments + Replies

ME320

I think it doesn't make sense to suggest that 2 + 3 = 5 is a belief. It is the result of a set of definitions. As long as we agree on what 2, +, 3, =, and 5 mean, we have to agree on what 2 + 3 = 5 means. I think that if your brain were subject to a neutrino storm and you somehow felt that 2 + 3 = 6, you would still be able to verify that 2 + 3 = 6 by other means, such as counting on your fingers.

I think once you start asking why these things are the way they are, don't you have to start asking why anything exists at all, and what it means for anything to ... (read more)

8gwern
We keep going back to the Greeks because the paradoxes of the Eleatics (such as Zeno) and the Skeptics have never been satisfactorily addressed; they apply as well to the modern formal systems you laud as to the old syllogisms. Thinking in that vein may sharpen & formalize the paradoxes in such forms as Godel's theorems, but they won't dissolve them; we need different approaches to resolving the many Skeptical arguments about, say, circularity, like this metacircular approach.
ME300

Isn't a silicon chip technically a rock?

Also, I take it that this means you don't believe in the whole, "if a program implements consciousness, then it must be conscious while sitting passively on the hard disk" thing. I remember this came up before in the quantum series and it seemed to me absurd, sort of for the reasons you say.

3DanielLC
Rocks are naturally formed. It's not physically impossible for natural processes to form silicon into a working computer, but it's certainly not likely.
ME3-10

If everything I do and believe is a consequence of the structure of the universe, then what does it mean to say my morality is/isn't built into the structure of the universe? What's the distinction? As far as I'm concerned, I am (part of) the structure of the universe.

Also, regarding the previous post, what does it mean to say that nothing is right? It's like if you said, "Imagine if I proved to you that nothing is actually yellow. How would you proceed?" It's a bizarre question because yellowness is something that is in the mind anyway. There is simply no fact of the matter as to whether yellowness exists or not.

4thomblake
A propos: Magenta isn't a color.
ME320

Presumably, morals can be derived from game-theoretic arguments about human society just like aerodynamically efficient shapes can be derived from Newtonian mechanics. Presumably, Eliezer's simulated planet of Einsteins would be able to infer everything about the tentacle-creatures' morality simply based on the creatures' biology and evolutionary past. So I think this hypothetical super-AI could in fact figure out what morality humans subscribe to. But of course that morality wouldn't apply to the super-AI, since the super-AI is not human.

ME310

I agree with the basic points about humans. But if we agree that intelligence is basically a guided search algorithm through design-space, then the interesting part is what guides the algorithm. And it seems like at least some of our emotions are an intrinsic part of this process, e.g. perception of beauty, laziness, patience or lack thereof, etc. In fact, I think that many of the biases discussed on this site are not really bugs but features that ordinarily work so well for the task that we don't notice them unless they give the wrong result (just like op... (read more)

ME320

talk as if the simple instruction to "Test ideas by experiment" or the p

I think you're missing something really big here. There is such a thing as an optimal algorithm (or process). The most naive implementation of a process in much worse than the optimal, but infinitely better than nothing. Every successive improvement to the process asymptotically brings us closer to the optimal algorithm, but they can't give you the same order of improvement as the preceding ones. Just because we've gone from O(n^2) to O(n log(n)) in sorting algorithms doesn't... (read more)

ME300

I think that the "could" idea does not need to be confined to the process of planning future actions.

Suppose we think of the universe as a large state transition matrix, with some states being defined as intervals because of our imperfect knowledge of them. Then, any state in the interval is a "possible state" in the sense that it is consistent with our knowledge of the world, but we have no way to verify that this is in fact the actual state.

Now something that "could" happen corresponds to a state that is reachable from any o... (read more)

ME300

In other words, the algorithm is,

explain_box(box) { if(|box.boxes| > 1) print(boxes) else explain_box(box.boxes[0]) }

which works for most real-world concepts, but gets into an infinite loop if the concept is irreducible.

ME330

Isn't causality strictly a map of a world strictly governed by physical laws? If a billiard ball strikes another ball, causing it to move, that is just our way of describing the motions of the balls. And besides, the universe doesn't even split the world up into individual "objects" or "events," so how can causality really exist?

By the way, any physical system is defined not just by its positions, but by its derivatives and second derivatives as well (I believe this is enough to describe the complete state of a system?). So when you ta... (read more)

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ME300

Isn't causality strictly a map of a world strictly governed by physical laws? If a billiard ball strikes another ball, causing it to move, that is just our way of describing the motions of the balls. And besides, the universe doesn't even split the world up into individual "objects" or "events," so how can causality really exist?

By the way, any physical system is defined not just by its positions, but by its derivatives and second derivatives as well (I believe this is enough to describe the complete state of a system?). So when you ta... (read more)

ME300

iwdw: there has been some thinking about the universe as an actual game of life, Steven Wolfram's New Kind of Science is the one that comes to mind, but I'm sure there are more reputable sources that he stole the idea from. I believe that this thinking runs into trouble with special relativity.

Speaking of which, has anyone ever attempted to actually model space as a graph of relationships between points, in a computer program? Something like the distance-configuration-space in the last post? It occurs to me that this could actually be a more robust represe... (read more)

ME300

But the main thing that's different about time is that it has a clear direction whereas the space dimensions don't. This is caused by the fact that the universe started out in a very low-entropy state, and since then has been evolving into higher entropy. I don't know if it's even possible to answer the question of why the universe started out the way it did -- it's almost like asking why anything exists at all. But whatever the reason, the universe is very uniform in its space dimensions, but very non-uniform in its time dimension.

ME330

Doesn't the Lorentz invariant already pretty much take care of the relativity of time? As long as we're using the Lorentz invariant, we're free to reparameterize the universe any way we want, and our description will be the same. So I don't see what this Barbour guy is going on about, it seems like standard physics. Whether you write your function f(x,t) or f(y) where y = g(x,t) or even just f(x) where t = h(x) is totally irrelevant to the universe. It's just another coordinate transformation just like translating the whole universe by ten meters to the left.

Now, if you have a new invariant to propose, THAT would amount to an actual change in the laws of physics.

ME310

By the way, when the best introduction to a supposedly academic field is works of science fiction, it sets off alarm bells in my head. I know that some of the best ideas come from sci-fi and yada, yada, but just throwing that out there. I mean, when your response to an AI researcher's disagreement is "Like, duh! Go read some sci-fi and then we'll talk!" who is really in the wrong here?

ME3-20

Likewise the fact that the human brain must use its full power and concentration, with trillions of synapses firing, to multiply out two three-digit numbers without a paper and pencil.

Some people can do it without much effort at all, and not all of them are autistic, so you can't just say that they've repurposed part of their brain for arithmetic. Furthermore, other people learn to multiply with less effort through tricks. So, I don't think it's really a flaw in our brains, per se.

4rkyeun
Call back with that comment when Running, rather than Intelligence, is what allows you to construct a machine that runs increasingly faster than you intended your artificial runner to run. Because in a world where running fast leads to additional fastness of running, this thing is going to either destroy your world through kinetic release or break the FTL laws and rewrite the universe backwards to have always been all about running.
5faul_sname
It might be worth using .00000005% of the world GDP to make sure that the AR is not a threat, especially if modern theories say that it's likely to be.
ME330

I think that I have only now really understood what Eliezer has been getting at with the past ten or so posts, this idea that you could be a scientist if you generated hypotheses using a robot controlled Ouija board. I think other readers have already said this numerous times, but this strikes me as terribly wrong.

First of all, good luck getting research funding for such hypotheses (and it wouldn't be fair to leave out funding from the description of Science if you're including institutional inertia and bias).

And I think we all know that in general, someon... (read more)

2jwflesh
In real life a real scientist must test his own hypothesis and the hypotheses of others. They must devise and test a hypothesis which lends itself to specific predictions offering a means of testing its validity. All observation, in a special field of science, must be either for or against your hypothesis or my hypothesis, if the observation is to advance science. Science advances only by investigators who know how to disprove the empty theories and are already working on it. Science advances only by disproofs. It can take many years before the scientific community gets it.
ME320

First, I think this can be said for any field: the textbooks don't tell you what you really need to know, because what you really need to know is a state of mind that you can only arrive at on your own.

And there are many scientists who do in fact spend time puzzling over how to distinguish good hypotheses from bad. Some don't, and they spend their days predicting what the future will be like in 2050. But they need not concern us, because they are just examples of people who are bad at what they do.

There is this famous essay: http://www.quackwatch.com/01Qua... (read more)

ME320

P(A&B)<=P(A), P(A|B)>=P(A)

Isn't this just ordinary logic? It doesn't really require all of probability theory. I believe that logic is a fairly uncontroversial element of scientific thought, though of course occasionally misapplied.

ME330

Similarly, if the Bayesian answer is difficult to compute, that doesn't mean that Bayes is inapplicable; it means you don't know what the Bayesian answer is.

So then what good is this Bayes stuff to us exactly, us of the world where the vast majority of things can't be computed?

ME3-10

Nick: Not any more ridiculous than throwing out an old computer or an old car or whatever else. If we dispense with the concept of a soul, then there is really no such thing as death, but just states of activity and inactivity for a particular brain. So if you accept that you are going to be inactive for probably decades, then what makes you think you're going to be worth reactivating?

ME320

If you accept that there is no "soul" and your entire consciousness exists only in the physical arrangement of your brain (I more or less believe this), then it would be the height of egotism to require someone to actively preserve your particular brain pattern for an unknown number of years until your body can be reactivated. Simply because better ones are sure to come along in the meantime.

I mean, think about your 70-year-old uncle with his outdated ways of thinking and generally eccentric behavior -- now think of a freezer full of 700-year-old... (read more)

ME350

I also think you are taking the MWI vs. Copenhagen too literally. The reason why they are called interpretations is that they don't literally say anything about the actual underlying wave function. Perhaps, as Goofus in your earlier posts, some physicists have gotten confused and started to think of the interpretations as reality. But the idea that the wave function "collapses" only makes sense as a metaphor to help us understand its behavior. That is all that a theory that makes no predictions can be -- a metaphor.

MWI and Copenhagen are differen... (read more)

ME3160

Seriously, agreeing with Caledonian.

I remember Eliezer wrote an earlier essay to the effect that GR is a really simple theory, in some information-theoretic sense, and therefore we should optimize our theories based on their information-theoretic complexity. But what's being missed here is that GR (and SR and Newtonian physics and arithmetic . . .) are simple stated on its own terms. That's WHY it's a paradigm shift. If you tried to state GR strictly as a modification of Newtonian mechanics in a global coordinate system, you would either fail, or you would... (read more)

ME330

1) Can someone tell me to what extent this many-worlds interpretation is really accepted? I mean, nobody told me the news that the collapse interpretation was no longer accepted, and I think I read such things in a recent physics textbook. So, can physicists remark on their experience?

2) I think the notion that the QM equations don't mean anything refers to the fact that nobody knows what the real substrate is in which QM takes place. It's a bit analogous to the pre-QM situation with light. People asked, what does light travel in? But since nobody was able... (read more)

ME310

As I understand it (someone correct me if I'm wrong), there are two problems with the Born rule: 1) It is non-linear, which suggests that it's not fundamental, since other fundamental laws seem to be linear

2) From my reading of Robin's article, I gather that the problem with the many-worlds interpretation is: let's say a world is created for each possible outcome (countable or uncountable). In that case, the vast majority of worlds should end up away from the peaks of the distribution, just because the peaks only occupy a small part of any distribution.

Rob... (read more)

1AgentME
The observer's consciousness is still involved. Imagine that the Born rule isn't a law of the universe itself, but of consciousness. The universe evaluates all branches. Consciousness follows the branches in weights following the Born rule. The conscious observer always finds themselves down a series of branches that were selected by the Born rule, and it's easy for them to take measurements to confirm this. The Mathematica 5000 machine that's come down this series of branches has made measurements from experiments and has found that the Born rule has held. It only comes up with this result because this is the version of the machine that has followed the observer's consciousness through the branches. In the raw universe, most worlds have the Mathematica 5000 machine finding that Born's rule does not hold; these aren't the worlds that conscious observers usually find themselves in though.
ME300

mitchell: As the Buddhists pointed out a long time ago, the flow of time is actually an illusion. All that you actually experience at any given moment is your present sensory input, plus the memories of the past. But there are any number of experiences involving loss of consciousness that will show that the flow of time as we perceive it is completely subjective (not to say that there is no time "out there," just that we don't directly perceive it).

So while I agree that "something is happening," it does not necessarily consist of one th... (read more)

ME310

Eliezer, you are right, what I really meant to say was, once a person finds a locally optimal solution using whatever algorithm, they then have a threshold for changing their mind, and it is that threshold that is similar to temperature.

ME300

The metaphor can be made mathematically precise if we first make the analogy between human decision-making and optimization methods like simulated annealing and genetic algorithms. These optimization methods look for a locally optimal solution, but add some sort of "noise" term to try to find a globally optimal solution. So if we suppose that someone who wants to stay in his own local minimum has a lower "noise" temperature than someone who is open-minded, then the metaphor starts to make sense on a much more profound level.

ME300

I am also struck by the correlation-vs.-causation issue in the canadian voters study. Moreover, how do we know that the attractiveness rating isn't actually a reflection of the qualities the voters claim to be looking for? I.e. a more confident, intelligent, eloquent candidate would probably appear more attractive than one who isn't, all other things being equal.