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All of sh4dow's Comments + Replies

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition
sh4dow
30

If you press a thermometer against the flywheel, it will pretty quickly heat up... It just behaves like a "white body" in terms of radiation.

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How sure are you that brain emulations would be conscious?
sh4dow
10

But isn't it still possible that a simulation that lost its consciousness would still retain memories about consciousness that were sufficient, even without access to real consciousness, to generate potentially even 'novel' content about consciousness?

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2nshepperd
That's possible, although then the consciousness-related utterances would be of the form "oh my, I seem to have suddenly stopped being conscious" or the like (if you believe that consciousness plays a causal role in human utterances such as "yep, i introspected on my consciousness and it's still there"), implying that such a simulation would not have been a faithful synaptic-level WBE, having clearly differing macro-level behaviour.
Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality
sh4dow
10

I would play lotto: if I win more than 10M$, I take the black box and leave. Otherwise I'd look in the black box: if it is full, I also take the small one. If not, I leave with just the empty black box. As this should be inconsistent, assuming a time traveling Omega, it would either make him not choose me for his experiment or let me win for sure (assuming time works in similar ways as in HPMOR). If I get nothing, it would prove the Omega wrong (and tell me quite a bit about how the Omega (and time) works). If his prediction was correct though, I win 11.000.000$, which is way better than either 'standard' variant.

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1hairyfigment
While that sounds clever at first glance: * We're not actually assuming a time-traveling Omega. * Even if we were, he would just not choose you for the game. You'd get $0, which is worse than causal decision theory.