I've read a fair amount on Less Wrong and can't recall much said about the plausibility of some sort of afterlife. What do you guys think about it? Is there some sort of consensus?
Here's my take:
- Rationality is all about using the past to make predictions about the future.
- "What happens to our consciousness when we die?" (may not be worded precisely, but hopefully you know what I mean).
- We have some data on what preconditions seem to produce consciousness (ie. neuronal firing). However, this is just data on the preconditions that seem to produce consciousness that can/do communicate/demonstrate its consciousness to us.
- Can we say that a different set of preconditions doesn't produce consciousness? I personally don't see reason to believe this. I see 3 possibilities that we don't have reason to reject, because we have no data on them. I'm still confused and not too confident in this belief though.
- Possibility 1) Maybe the 'other' conscious beings don't want to communicate their consciousness to us.
- Possibility 2) Maybe the 'other' conscious beings can't communicate their consciousness to us ever.
- Possibility 3) Maybe the 'other' conscious beings can't communicate their consciousness to us given our level of technology.
- And finally, since we have no data, what can we say about the likelihood of our consciousness returning/remaining after we die? I would say the chances are 50/50. For something you have no data on, any outcome is equally likely (This feels like something that must have been talked about before. So side-question: is this logic sound?).
Edit: People in the comments have just taken it as a given that consciousness resides solely in the brain without explaining why they think this. My point in this post is that I don't see why we have reason to reject the 3 possibilities above. If you reject the idea that consciousness could reside outside of the brain, please explain why.
"This equation describes how they fall" is a sensible thing to say. "Because of gravity" is only sensible if it refers to that mathematics. The usage I intended to refer to is when someone says that who doesn't know the mathematics and is therefore not referring to it -- a member of the general public doing nothing but repeating a word he has learned.
I do reject some of them, and have done so here in the past. Not all of these thought experiments make any sense. Omega works great for formulating Newcomb's problem. After that it's all downhill.
Turing machines do not perform arbitrary computations instantly.
I think there is reason to answer "yes". (I assume these model-builders are looking at human civilisation, and not at intelligent octopuses swimming in the methane lakes of Titan.) Less parochially, they will come up with integers, real numbers, calculus, atoms, molecules, fluid dynamics, and so on. Is "group" (in the mathematical sense) merely a computational hack over the "base level" of ZF (or some other foundation for mathematics)?
What does it actually mean to claim that something is "just a computational hack", in contrast to being "fundamental to the territory"? What would you be discovering, when you discovered that something belonged to one class rather than the other? Nobody has seen a quark, not within any reasonable reading of "to see". Were atoms just a computational hack before we discovered they were made of parts? Were protons and neutrons just a computational hack before quarks were thought of? How can we tell whether quarks are just a computational hack? Only in hindsight, after someone comes up with another theory of particle physics?
That's rather a barrage of questions, but they are intended to be one question, expressed in different ways. I am basically not getting the distinction you are drawing here between "base-level things" and "computational hacks", and what you get from that distinction.
Well, that's where we disagree (I'd agree with "useful" instead of "sensible"). The mathematical description is just a more precise way of describing what we see, of describing what a thing does. It is not providing any "justification". The experimental result needs no justification. It just is. And we describe that result, the conditions, the intermediate steps. No matter how precise that description, no matter what language we clad it in, the... (read more)