Fivehundred

I've been anesthetized twice. I don't remember any dreams whatsoever, but I had the distant feeling that I did dream upon waking (though they may have happened as the drug was loosening its hold).

Replying toLooking for answers about quantum immortality.

But you still experience things when you sleep, hence are observing. Also, quantum insomnia should exist if you're correct, but it doesn't.

I don't see how a Boltzmann brain spontaneously forming could ever be more likely than existing in a universe with all the infrastructure necessary to support a natural brain - even if that infrastructure beats some amazing odds, it only has to maintain itself. The theory further requires that mind unification be true.

Replying toLooking for answers about quantum immortality.

And I don't see how a death being "natural" makes it OK.

That's not what I said (though it is a good reason to be suspicious of attempts to remove it.) I'll just leave it that I have some philosophical opinions which lead me to believe it is not annihilation.

Also, the baseball example is not a natural phenomenon. If it were, I'd consider it rational to accept it as a good thing.

Replying toLooking for answers about quantum immortality.

Actually, I just realized there's no reason you would remain conscious in QI. Surely the damage to your brain and body would put you into a coma - a fate I'd like to avoid, but definitely better than Literally Hell.

Also, what is all this talk about suicide? All I said was that I plan to die normally. You guys are reading weird things into that...

Replying toLooking for answers about quantum immortality.

...and here's about when I realize what a mistake it was setting foot in Lesswrong again for answers.

-5

Replying toLooking for answers about quantum immortality.

To be clear: your argument is that every human being who has ever lived may suffer eternally after death, and there are good reasons for not caring...?

That requires an answer that, at the very least, you should be able to put in your own words. How does our subjective suffering improve anything in the worlds where you die?

Replying toLooking for answers about quantum immortality.

Yes, you either lose or you win. Two choices.

Replying toLooking for answers about quantum immortality.

No, it isn't. The same thing will happen to everyone in your branch (you don't see it, of course, but it will subjectively happen to them).

Perhaps you don't understand what the argument says. You, as in the person you are right now, is going to experience that. Not a infinitesimal proportion of other 'yous' while the majority die. Your own subjective experience, 100% of it.

Replying toLooking for answers about quantum immortality.

Why wouldn't it create random minds if it's trying to grab as much 'human-space' as possible?

EDIT: Why focus on the potential of quantum immortality at all? There's no special reason to focus on what happens when we *die*, in terms of AI simulation.

Replying toLooking for answers about quantum immortality.

By "essentially impossible" I meant "extremely improbable". The word "essentially" was meant to distinguish this from "physically impossible".

I don't see how it refutes the possibility of QI, then.

There is a useful distinction between knowing the meaning of an idea and knowing its truth. I'm disagreeing with the claim that "all of our measure is going into those branches where we survive", understood in the sense that only those branches have moral value (see What Are Probabilities, Anyway?), in particular the other branches taken together have less value. See the posts linked from the grandparent comment for a more detailed discussion (I've edited it a

Can anyone refute these arguments that we live on the interior of a hollow Earth?

I've been recently been obsessing over the risks of quantum torment, and in the course of my research downloaded this article: https://philpapers.org/rec/TURFAA-3

Here's a quote:

"4.3 Long-term inescapable suffering is possible

If death is impossible, someone could be locked into a very bad situation where she can’t die, but also can’t become healthy again. It is unlikely that such an improbable state of mind will exist for too long a period, like millennia, as when the probability of survival becomes very small, strange survival scenarios will dominate (called “low measure marginalization” by (Almond 2010). One such scenario might be aliens arriving with a cure for the illness, but more likely, the suffering person will... (read 815 more words →)

You are (mostly) a simulation.

I found a website run by an interesting fellow called 'Wild Heretic' and it seems incredibly intricate and comprehensive. I've yet to see any other person argue as well for half so radical a claim. Think of this as an opportunity to examine arguments for highly unpopular views.

Wild Heretic believes that we live on the inside of a hollow sphere, lit by a half-light half-dark Sun at its center (he claims that light bends in order to produce the effect of rising and setting), that the moon is an optical illusion, that manmade satellites don't really exist, that the stars are light artifacts produced in the atmosphere and can never be seen... (read 203 more words →)

-4

I need a protocol for dangerous or disconcerting ideas.

11y

This post was completely rewritten on July 17th, 2015, 6:10 AM. Comments before that are not necessarily relevant.

Assume that our minds really do work the way Unification tells us: what we are experiencing is actually the sum total of every possible universe which produces them. Some universes have more 'measure' than others, and that is typically the stable ones; we do not experience chaos. I think this makes a great deal of sense- if our minds really are patterns of information I do not see why a physical world should have a monopoly on it.

Now to prove that we live in a Big World. The logic is simple- why would something finite... (read 484 more words →)

103

-7

The Consequences of Dust Theory.

11y

I have a talent for reasoning my way into terrifying and harmful conclusions. The first was modal realism as a fourteen-year-old. Of course I did not understand most of its consequences, but I disliked the fact that existence was infinite. It mildly depressed me for a few days. The next mistake was opening the door to solipsism and Brain-in-a-Vat arguments. This was so traumatic to me that I spent years in a manic depression. I could have been healed in a matter of minutes if I had talked to the right person or read the right arguments during that period, but I didn't.

Lesswrong has been a breeding ground of existential crisis for... (read 1075 more words →)

156

Is this evidence for the Simulation hypothesis?

11y

Dust theory implies that everything outside of my perception is in flux. Your experiences have to find themselves in a world in which they could have conceivably formed. Of course, you exist in every possible world which would produce that mindstate, but some are 'vaster' than others, leading you down the most probable courses.

Suppose that going to sleep or losing grasp of your surroundings opens a wider space of worlds you could exist in, which jumps you into another reality along with consistent memories of it. I can't figure out if this would be the case, or if my consciousness would most likely just dissolve, with only those beating trillion-to-one odds waking... (read more)

-1

A resolution to the Doomsday Argument.

11y

I haven't come across this particular argument before, so I hope I'm not just rehashing a well-known problem.

"The universe displays some very strong signs that it is a simulation.

As has been mentioned in some other answers, one way to efficiently achieve a high fidelity simulation is to design it in such a way that you only need to compute as much detail as is needed. If someone takes a cursory glance at something you should only compute its rough details and only when someone looks at it closely, with a microscope say, do you need to fill in the details.

This puts a big constraint on the kind of physics you can have... (read 485 more words →)

Misdiagnosed Asperger's syndrome is ruining my life.

11y

A self-modifying AI is built to serve humanity. The builders know, of course, that this is much riskier than it seems, because its success would render their own observations extremely rare. To solve the problem, they direct the AI to create billions of simulated humanities in the hope that this will serve as a Schelling point to them, and make their own universe almost certainly simulated.

Plausible?

-2

I may have just had a dangerous thought.

11y

So I've been rejected for conscription in the IDF because the psychiatrist thinks the Asperger's diagnosis I received as a child means that there is something wrong with me. Never mind that I've been examined very recently and been recommended for enlistment, he thinks that even though I probably don't have Asperger's, there must be something wrong with me because in the past I've had trouble socially. Of course I have no such problems now, but it's not as if he's going to risk his job in the face of anything less than perfection.

(This, btw, is what I meant when I said there was no such thing as a competent mental health... (read more)

-8

Learning languages efficiently.

11y

I'm interested in discussing this with someone, non-publicly. It's safe to know about personally, but it's not something I'd like people in general to know.

I'm really not sure if there is a protocol for this sort of thing.