All of PedroCarvalho's Comments + Replies

Open Thread, June 16-30, 2013

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PedroCarvalho12y70

I have started writing a Death Note fanfiction where the characters aren't all as dumb as a bag of bricks (or one could say a rationalist fic) and... I need betas. The first chapter is available on http://www.fanfiction.net/s/9380249/1/Rationalising-Death and the second is pretty much written, but the first is confirmedly "funky" in writing and since I'm not a native English speaker I'm not sure I can actually pinpoint what exactly is wrong with it. Also I'd love the extra help.

Anyone interested? My email for contact is pedromvilar@gmail.com (and... (read more)

0ygert12y

I'll help out if you want. I sent you an email.

7gwern12y

Initial observations: you are cribbing too heavily from MoR, your Light is too much like Harry, the focus on utility seems silly, and jumping straight to crypto reasoning for randomness is completely unmotivated by anything foregoing.

2Baughn12y

Definitely interested. I'll send you an email.

MW is obviously much better in this regard than theism, but one of the problems with theism (it promises a simple reduction, but leaves the 'simple' undemonstrated) is interestingly analogous to the problem with MW (it promises a simple reduction, but leaves the 'reduction' undemonstrated). I don't take this to be a distinct argument against MW; I just wanted to call it to attention.

I guess we'll have to wait until we have interstellar travels to observe completely superposed civilisations so that we can actually see MW? That was a joke, by the way.

If

Yes, I'm sorry, by "lawful" I'd meant exactly that, universes that obey our particular set of physics.

Sure, but the theory with the simplest sound-bite axiomatization may not be the most parsimonious theory at the end of the day. And your confidence in that starting point will depend heavily on how confident you are in the prospects for extracting the Born probabilities from the Schrödinger equation on its lonesome. A theist will claim that his starting point is maximally simple relative to its explanatory power -- heck, one of his axioms is that his starting point is maximally simple! that's how simplicity works, right? -- but the difficulty of actually

... (read more)

4Rob Bensinger12y

Yes, I grok. My point was that some theists don't just think that God is simple partwise; they think that in some unknown (perhaps ineffable) way he's maximally conceptually simple, i.e., if we were smarter we could formulate God in something equation-like and suddenly understand why everything about him really flows forth elegantly from a profoundly simple and unitary property. (And if everything else flows forth inevitably from God, the theory as a whole is no more complex than its God-term. Of course, free-will-invoking variants will be explanatorily inelegant by design; sudden inexplicable 'choices' will function for libertarians like collapse functions for Copenhagenists.) Obviously, this promise of being able to formulate God in conceptually (and not just mereologically) simple terms is not credible. But this was the point of my (admittedly unkind) analogy; we should be wary of theories that promise an elegant, unimpeachably Simple reduction but have difficulty connecting that reduction to normality even in a sweeping, generic fashion. MW is obviously much better in this regard than theism, but one of the problems with theism (it promises a simple reduction, but leaves the 'simple' undemonstrated) is interestingly analogous to the problem with MW (it promises a simple reduction, but leaves the 'reduction' undemonstrated). I don't take this to be a distinct argument against MW; I just wanted to call it to attention. Fair enough. This perhaps is the fundamental question: The naive interpretation of data from EPR-style experiments is quite simply that nonlocal causation (albeit not of the sort that can be used to transmit information) is in effect between distant entangled states. If your commitment to locality is strong enough, then you can recover locality by positing that you've imperceptibly fallen into another world in interacting with one of the particles, dragging everything around you into a somehow-distinct component of a larger, quasi-dialetheist (rea

Does adding Magical Reality Fluid and an infinity of invisible Worlds sound simple, at the outset?

That's not at all what Relative State states... it just states that the Schrödinger Equation is all there is, full stop. The existence of a number of worlds is a consequence, not an assumption.

Bell's way of framing BM is very intuitive, I think:
"Is it not clear from the smallness of the scintillation on the screen that we have to do with a particle? And is it not clear, from the diffraction and interference patterns, that the motion of the particle i

... (read more)

-3Rob Bensinger12y

Sure, but the theory with the simplest sound-bite axiomatization may not be the most parsimonious theory at the end of the day. And your confidence in that starting point will depend heavily on how confident you are in the prospects for extracting the Born probabilities from the Schrödinger equation on its lonesome. A theist will claim that his starting point is maximally simple relative to its explanatory power -- heck, one of his axioms is that his starting point is maximally simple! that's how simplicity works, right? -- but the difficulty of actually extracting normality from theism without recourse to 'deep mysteries' undermines the project in spite of its promising convergences with the data. They aren't intuitive molds, in the system-1 sense; 'particle' and 'wave' are theoretical constructs, and we understand them via (and import them from) structurally similar macro-phenomena. 'Wave' and 'particle' are sufficiently simple ideas, as macro-phenomena go, that they may recur at multiple levels of organization. I don't assume that they must do so; but it's at least an idea worth assessing, if the resultant theory recaptures the whole of normality without paradox or mystery. The wave occurs at both positions (or with both spin components); the particle does not. Being made of particles, I have a determinate brain-state, not a superposed one; and I observe a determinate particle position, though the dynaymics of that particle (and of my brain-state) are guided by the wave function. Many Worlds seems to predict that I will both see a spin-up measurement result and a spin-down measurement result, when I observe the superposed state. But in fact I seem to either see spin-up or spin-down, not both. So at this simple stage, Bohm correctly predicts our observation, and Many Worlds does not. That's why the challenge for Many Worlds is to make sense of the probabilistic element of QM. The Schrödinger dynamics leave no room for probability; they are, as you note, determin

PedroCarvalho12y20

I have read about Bohmian Mechanics before, and it failed to convince me. This article keeps talking about 'non-determinism' inherent to Q.M. but I'm pretty sure Relative State is quite very deterministic. Also, adding the specification of a particle's position to a description doesn't sound at all to me like the simplest explanation possible.

Maybe this is just me saying I prefer locality to counterfactual definiteness, but... Relative State still wins my favour.

5Rob Bensinger12y

Read: traditional Q.M. Arguments for BM and for MW are both largely still responding to Copenhagenism's legacy of collapse theorists. The next stage in the dialectic should be for them to set aside the easy target of collapse and start going for each others' throats directly. Does adding Magical Reality Fluid and an infinity of invisible Worlds sound simple, at the outset? MW seems simple and elegant because it's familiar; this tempts us to forget just how much remains unresolved by the theory, and just how much it demands that we posit beyond the experimental observations. Let's be careful not to let unfamiliarity tempt us into treating BM in an asymmetric way. Bell's way of framing BM is very intuitive, I think: "Is it not clear from the smallness of the scintillation on the screen that we have to do with a particle? And is it not clear, from the diffraction and interference patterns, that the motion of the particle is directed by a wave? De Broglie showed in detail how the motion of a particle, passing through just one of two holes in screen, could be influenced by waves propagating through both holes. And so influenced that the particle does not go where the waves cancel out, but is attracted to where they cooperate. This idea seems to me so natural and simple, to resolve the wave-particle dilemma in such a clear and ordinary way, that it is a great mystery to me that it was so generally ignored." Actually, I'm somewhat grateful that it was ignored (except by de Broglie), since its intuitiveness might otherwise have become such a firm orthodoxy that we wouldn't have the rich debate between MW theorists of today. Given our human tendency to fix on our first solution, it is very useful that the weakest theory (collapse) is the one people started with. "Prefer" as in it sounds more elegant, or as in it seems more likely to be true? Untangling those two is the real problem. We also need to keep in mind that the MW style of locality is a rather strange one. (Cons

It was mentioned that if you were to make a continuous analog of the Bayesian Network, you'd end up with space and time, or some such. Maybe if you have a probabilistic Bayesian Network you get QM out of it? As in, any given parent node has a number of child nodes, each happening with a certain probability... and then if you make the continuous analog of such you'll get Quantum Mechanics and Many-Worlds.

Mr. Yudkowsky has thoroughly convinced me of the reality of Many-Worlds (and my ongoing study of Q.M. has not yet even suggested otherwise), so... so what, then?

0Rob Bensinger12y

See SEP on Bohmian Mechanics for the main rival view.

Well, whether probability and number exist or not is moot. The point of fact is that when you look at any quantum system there is a probability of finding it in any given (continuous set of) state(s) equals the squared modulus of the amplitude for it to be in such state. As mr. Yudkowsky once put, and I paraphrase, "I still want to know the nonexistent laws that coordinate my meaningless Universe".

And my point is: assuming Quantum Physics is completely correct, without us adding the additional postulates, do all combinations of universes exist, s... (read more)

I have no problem thinking of myself as a Boltzmann Brain. Since most (if not all) such Brains will die an instant after existing, I guess my existence could be accurately described as a string of Boltzmann Brains in different regions of spacetime, each containing a small (not sure how small) slice of my existence. Perhaps th... (read more)

PedroCarvalho12y30

I have had this question in my mind for ages. You say that these counterfactual universes don't actually exist. But, according to Many-Worlds, don't all lawful Universes actually really really exist? I mean, isn't there some amplitude for Mr. Oswald to not have shot Kennedy, and then you get a blob where Kennedy didn't get murdered?

I've been banging my head against a wall on this and still can't come to a conclusion. Are the decoherent blobs actually capable of creating multiple histories on the observable level, up here? It looks, to me, that they should ... (read more)

2ArisKatsaris12y

Nitpick: All the Many-Worlds of QM still follow our particular set of physics. For "all lawful universes" to really really exist, you probably have to go to Tegmark IV or something like that....

-1drnickbone12y

I had the same reaction... Can this be the same Eliezer who authored the sequences, and gave such strong support for the reality of Many Worlds? I was half-expecting the other shoe to drop somewhere in the article... namely that if you are prepared to accept that the Many Worlds really exist, it makes the Great Reductionist Project a whole lot easier. Statements about causality reduce to statements about causal graphs, which in turn reduce to statements about counterfactuals, which in turn reduce to statements of actual fact about different blobs of the (real) quantum state vector. Similarly, statements about physical "possibility" and "probability" reduce to complicated statements about other blobs and their sizes as measured by the inner product on the state space. Maybe Eliezer will be leading that way later... If he isn't I share your confusion.

1NancyLebovitz12y

Maybe the way out is that counterfactuals don't exist in their home universes.

2Rob Bensinger12y

Abstractions like probability and number are constructed by us; they don't strictly exist, but it's useful to act as though they do, since they help organize our reasoning. It could be that by coincidence that some part of the Real World corresponds precisely to the structure of our modal or mathematical reasoning; for instance, the many-worlds interpretation of QM could be true, or we could live in a Tegmark ensemble. But this would still just be an interesting coincidence. It wouldn't change the fact that our abstractions are our own; and if we discovered tomorrow that a Bohmian interpretation of QM is correct, rather than an Everettian one, it would have no foundational implications for such a high-level, anthropocentric phenomena as probability theory. Thinking in this way is useful for two reasons. First, it insulates our logical fictions from metaphysical skepticism; our uncertainty as to the existence of a Platonic realm of Number need not undermine our confidence that 2 and 2 make 4. Second, it keeps us from being tempted to slide down the slippery slope to treating all our fictions (like currency, and intentionality, and qualia, and Sherlock Holmes) as equally metaphysically committing.

0PedroCarvalho12y

I just read Mr. Yudkowsky's articles on Boltzmann Brains and the Anthropic trilemma... and I had thought of those questions a while ago. While they're not directly related to this comment, I guess I should comment about them here, too. I have no problem thinking of myself as a Boltzmann Brain. Since most (if not all) such Brains will die an instant after existing, I guess my existence could be accurately described as a string of Boltzmann Brains in different regions of spacetime, each containing a small (not sure how small) slice of my existence. Perhaps they all exist at the same time. And the Anthropic Principle would explain the illusion of continuity, somewhat. My main thoughts on the Boltzmann Brain idea is that any hypothesis that has no way to be tested even in principle is equivalent to the Null hypothesis. I guess what I mean is, if I found out right now, with P ~ 1, that my existence is a string of Boltzmann Brains, that would not affect my predictions. I'm not sure I should be thinking this... because this whole matter confuses the hell out of me, but that's my current mental state. As for the Anthropic Trilemma... well, I guess it pretty much means mr. Yudkowsky has the same doubts as I do. Very, very confusing business indeed. Sometimes I think I should just quit thinking and become a stripper. That was a joke, by the way.