I don't quite get the argument here; doesn't anthropic shadow imply we have nothing to worry about (except for maybe hyperexistential risks) since we're guaranteed to be living in a timeline where humanity survives in the end?
But it doesn't say we're guaranteed not to be living in a timeline where humanity doesn't survive.
If I had a universe copying machine and a doomsday machine, pressed the “universe copy” button 1000 times (for 2¹⁰⁰⁰ universes), then smashed relativistic meteors into Earth in all but one of them… would you call that an ethical issue? I ...
What could survive is a propensity to become the sort of person to sacrifice yourself to protect your family. given that no other family member has done so. Or, a propensity to sacrifice yourself that would normally kick in after you've had kids. But actually sacrificing yourself before you pass on your genes is a textbook example of "selected against".
A second, detailed reading might make it seem like this comment's has an error. However, the reasoning is sound; "you said the coin was heads" doesn't distinguish very well between "the coin was heads" and "the coin was tails but you lied about the bet", so doesn't provide much evidence.
Likewise, the dismissing of hearsay appears to be an error, but remember that humans have finite computational power. If you take into account (at least) the hypothesis that somebody's trying to deceive you about reality, you effectively end up dismissing the evidence anywa
...If you happen to have evolved a cognitive architecture that permits storing information about the state of the world in the same format as information about how to build new members of the species, transferring that information would grant an evolutionary advantage over not. The only "just so" assumption is in such a cognitive architecture having developed, but they're allowed that assumption given that the Super Happies already exist.
They look like it, but its some sort of emergent behaviour,
I agree with this assessment. It almost feels like a hive mind; I've dipped into the peripherals of online mobs before, and have felt "hey, this action is a good idea" thoughts enter my head unbidden. I'd probably participate in such things often, if I didn't have a set of heuristics that (coincidentally) cancels out most of this effect, and a desire not to associate with the sorts of people who form mobs.
If the barrier-to-entry is increased to "requires two minutes of unrewarded drudgery, where it
...How much have you read about the idea from its proponents?
Loads from angry mean people on the internet, very little from academics (none, if reading the Wikipedia article doesn't count). So I'm probably trying to learn anarchocommunism from Stalin. (I haven't heard much about it from its detractors, either, except what I've generated myself – I stopped reading the Wikipedia article before I got to the "criticism" section, and have only just read that now.)
In case this is the reason for disagreement, I might be criticisi...
I was with you until "paraphilia". I don't see how "wanting to see a world without strict gender roles" has anything to do with sexuality… and did you seriously just link to the Wikipedia article for autogynephilia‽ That's as verifiable as penis envy. (By which, I mean "probably applies to some people, somewhere, but certainly isn't the fully-general explanation they're using it as". And no, I don't think I'm doing the idea a disservice by dismissing it with a couple of silly comics;...
Thanks for commenting! (Strong-upvoted.) It's nice to get new discussion on old posts and comments.
probably applies to some people, somewhere
Hi!
I don't think I'm doing the idea a disservice
How much have you read about the idea from its proponents? ("From its proponents" because, tragically, opponents of an idea can't always be trusted to paraphrase it accurately, rather than attacking a strawman.) If I might recommend just one paper, may I suggest Anne Lawrence's "Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Contro
...there are no photons traveling from the sun to us
Woah, where did this assertion come from?
which in fact means that one photon fills up our universe.
This doesn't follow.
And how do we get away from that? By saying that they were 'probabilities' :)
Who's saying that? This post is talking about amplitudes. (And so on for the next paragraph.)
This implies a solution to the "weak" Ship of Theseus problem: yes, it's the same ship.
I think this also implies a solution to the "strong" Ship of Theseus problem: "a new ship is created from the old parts" – but I'm less confident both that it implies this, and that it's the right conclusion to make. Consider also: mitosis. Which one is "the bacterium"™? But it doesn't quite make sense (to my fuzzy intuition) to say "the bacterium doesn't exist any more".
I think any ...
If our universe did not have the kind of structure that appears in a causal model, then our reasoning would not function properly. Induction would fall completely flat, and I don't think our brains would work right. We probably wouldn't exist in such a world, but if we're taking into account anthropic effects… well, I'm not even sure a human could survive long enough for a single conscious thought, since their state at time t+1 wouldn't follow from their state at time t.
After skimming others' replies, I've realised...
The only problem with epiphenomenalist theories of consciousness is that the thing we call consciousness does have an effect on our actions (proof: answer the question "how do you know you're conscious?" out loud), so the thing they call "consciousness" must be something different. However, these rules don't say that this thing is impossible or meaningless; by definition, it's caused by neurons, and so (if it actually happens) would be causally linked to reality, and hence meet the criteria for being "real".
Written in a somewhat fake wisdom manner, without reading other replies:
If you chose a different card, would he not say a different card's name? Therefore, the card he says is causally linked to your choice of card. And would you not hear different words if he said something different? Therefore, your observations are causally linked to the card he says. Just because we do not know how something works – nay, even if it is Unknowable™ – that doesn't make it causally unshackled from reality.
they would say that we should stop burning fossil fuels right now.
And would that be so hard?
I have had a couple of experiences in which intense study of math and physics led me to some pretty dark psychological places,
One way of dealing with this problem is to get that out of the way when you're young (i.e., 6–11). Then you've learned coping mechanisms (which will end up used regularly), but don't have a distinct recollection of the horrible thought patterns that you might just fall back into if you think about them too hard, by the time you're older.
Considering how much wealth can be generated at the moment by running a computer program shifting (numbers loosely representing) money around, and the ever-more-sophisticated ways that this can be done (obviously, to the detriment of many of the humans involved), I think it's already in the process of substrate jumping. These things aren't limited to human minds and tax law any more.
Also, why would we kill our creators?
We might not. But if they were paperclip maximisers or pebble sorters, we might not see any value in their existence, and lots of harm. Heck, we're working to kill evolution's effect on us, and betray its "inclusive genetic fitness" optimisation criterion, and nobody cares, because we don't view it as having intrinsic worth. (Because it doesn't have intrinsic worth; it's just an emergent phenomenon of imperfectly-self-replicating stuff in an environment, and has no more value than the ...
You're right, it is (2)! If we build an artificial intelligence that smart, with such absurd resources, then we _will_ be in danger. Doing this thing implies we lose.
However, that does not mean that not doing this thing implies we do not lose. A ⇒ B doesn't mean ¬A ⇒ ¬B. Just because simulating trillions of humans then giving them internet access would be dangerous, that doesn't mean that's the only dangerous thing in the universe; that would be absurd. By that logic, we're immune from nuclear weapons or nan...
The trouble is, any utility function where 1 doesn't hold is vulnerable to intuition pumps. If you can't say which of A, B and C is better (e.g. A > B, B > C, C > A), then I can charge you a penny to switch from C → B, then B → A, then A → C, and you're three pennies poorer.
I really, really hope my utility function's "set B" can be mapped to the reals. If not, I'm screwed. (It's fine if what I want varies with time, so long as it's not circular at a given point in time.)
I think the bigger problem with the argument is: if Jesus rose from the dead for the same reasons that a randomly-selected human would, then Jesus is just an arbitrary human who got lucky, and mainstream Christianity is false. So if you're invoking that to try to estimate whether Christianity is true or not, you're clearly asking the wrong question.