Many folk here on LW take the simulation argument (in its more general forms) seriously. Many others take Singularitarianism1 seriously. Still others take Tegmark cosmology (and related big universe hypotheses) seriously. But then I see them proceed to self-describe as atheist (instead of omnitheist, theist, deist, having a predictive distribution over states of religious belief, et cetera), and many tend to be overtly dismissive of theism. Is this signalling cultural affiliation, an attempt to communicate a point estimate, or what?
I am especially confused that the theism/atheism debate is considered a closed question on Less Wrong. Eliezer's reformulations of the Problem of Evil in terms of Fun Theory provided a fresh look at theodicy, but I do not find those arguments conclusive. A look at Luke Muehlhauser's blog surprised me; the arguments against theism are just not nearly as convincing as I'd been brought up to believe2, nor nearly convincing enough to cause what I saw as massive overconfidence on the part of most atheists, aspiring rationalists or no.
It may be that theism is in the class of hypotheses that we have yet to develop a strong enough practice of rationality to handle, even if the hypothesis has non-negligible probability given our best understanding of the evidence. We are becoming adept at wielding Occam's razor, but it may be that we are still too foolhardy to wield Solomonoff's lightsaber Tegmark's Black Blade of Disaster without chopping off our own arm. The literature on cognitive biases gives us every reason to believe we are poorly equipped to reason about infinite cosmology, decision theory, the motives of superintelligences, or our place in the universe.
Due to these considerations, it is unclear if we should go ahead doing the equivalent of philosoraptorizing amidst these poorly asked questions so far outside the realm of science. This is not the sort of domain where one should tread if one is feeling insecure in one's sanity, and it is possible that no one should tread here. Human philosophers are probably not as good at philosophy as hypothetical Friendly AI philosophers (though we've seen in the cases of decision theory and utility functions that not everything can be left for the AI to solve). I don't want to stress your epistemology too much, since it's not like your immortal soul3 matters very much. Does it?
Added: By theism I do not mean the hypothesis that Jehovah created the universe. (Well, mostly.) I am talking about the possibility of agenty processes in general creating this universe, as opposed to impersonal math-like processes like cosmological natural selection.
Added: The answer to the question raised by the post is "Yes, theism is wrong, and we don't have good words for the thing that looks a lot like theism but has less unfortunate connotations, but we do know that calling it theism would be stupid." As to whether this universe gets most of its reality fluid from agenty creators... perhaps we will come back to that argument on a day with less distracting terminology on the table.
1 Of either the 'AI-go-FOOM' or 'someday we'll be able to do lots of brain emulations' variety.
2 I was never a theist, and only recently began to question some old assumptions about the likelihood of various Creators. This perhaps either lends credibility to my interest, or lends credibility to the idea that I'm insane.
3 Or the set of things that would have been translated to Archimedes by the Chronophone as the equivalent of an immortal soul (id est, whatever concept ends up being actually significant).
Yes, and this tradeoff exists today with some rough mix between general processors and more specialized ASICs.
I think this will hold true for a while, but it is important to point out a few subpoints:
If moore's law slows down this will shift the balance farther towards specialized processors.
Even most 'general' processors today are actually a mix of CISC and vector processing, with more and more performance coming from the less-general vector portion of the chip.
For most complex real world problems algorithms eventually tend to have much less room for improvement than hardware - even if algorithmic improvements intially dominate. After a while algorithmic improvements end within the best complexity class and then further improvements are just constants and are swamped by hardware improvement.
Modern GPUs for example have 16 or more vector processors for every general logic processor.
The brain is like a very slow processor with massively wide dedicated statistical inference circuitry.
As a result of all this (and the point at the end of my last post) I expect that future AGIs will be built out of a heterogeneous mix of processors but with the bulk being something like a wide-vector processor with alot of very specialized statistical inference circuitry.
This type of design will still have huge flexibility by having program-ability at the network architecture level - it could for example simulate humanish and various types of mammalian brains as well as a whole range of radically different mind architectures all built out of the same building blocks.
We have pretty good maps of the low-level circuitry in the cortex at this point and it's clearly built out of a highly repetitive base circuit pattern, similar to how everything is built out of cells at a lower level. I don't have a single good introductory link, but it's called the laminar cortical pattern.
Yes, there are slight variations, but slight is the keyword. The cortex is highly general - the 'visual' region develops very differently in deaf people, for example, creating a entirely different audio processing networks much more powerful than what most people have.
The flexibility is remarkable - if you hook up electrodes to the tongue that send a rough visual signal from a camera, in time the cortical regions connected to the tongue start becoming rough visual regions and limited tongue based vision is the result.
I stand corrected on prime factorization - I saw the exp(....) part and assumed exponential before reading into it more.
This is a good point, but note the huge difference between the abilities or efficiency of an entire human mind vs the efficiency of the brain's architecture or the efficiency of the lower level components from which it is built - such as the laminar cortical circuit.
I think this discussion started concerning your original point:
The cortical algorithm appears to be a pretty powerful and efficient low level building block. In evolutionary terms it has been around for much longer than human brains and naturally we can expect that it is much closer to optimality in the design configuration space in terms of the components it is built from.
As we go up a level to higher level brain architectures that are more recent in evolutionary terms we should expect there to be more room for improvement.
The mammalian cortex is not specialized for particular tasks - this is the primary advantage of it's architecture over it's predecessors (at the cost of a much larger size than more specialized circuitry).
How do you reconcile this claim with the fact that some people are faceblind from an early age and never develop the ability to recognize faces? This would suggest that there's at least one aspect of humans that is normally somewhat hard-wired.