All of EphemeralNight's Comments + Replies

That is actually what I meant. But the way you're phasing it re-introduces confusion on the word "you".

What this means is, neither branch is privileged, neither branch takes precedence, there is no soul that only goes to one or the other, the subjective "you" prior to duplication does have a 50% chance of experiencing either branch. After duplication, there are two people, who are both, objectively, "you", but neither subjectively experiences being in two places at once.

One experiences the destination and subsequent existence,... (read more)

In this problem, we imagine that you are cloned perfectly in an alternate location and then your body is destroyed.

In which case, "you" have a 50% chance of dying, because your self-continuity forks and one fork is then destroyed. The obvious answer to this dilemma isn't a metaphysical one. It's that this is a stupid way to design a teleporter.

If we instead imagine that you are destroyed and then duplicated perfectly in an alternate location, there is no longer an extra self-continuity branch that terminates. Correct order of operations in the engineering solution is all it takes to solve this problem.

I think maybe not if you sign them up for cryonic preservation?

I think it may be much more on point to talk about it being unethical to have children pre-singularity, for the inevitable needless suffering that will occur. I do believe that the moment we solve aging, it is a moral imperative to stop having children until we can be assure that we're not bringing new people into existence just to suffer.

I don't think it is unethical to keep having children today, but only so far as it is necessary to actually reach the singularity. I think ethically, we shoul... (read more)

Consciousness is the most recent module, and that does mean that. I'm sorry, I thought this was one point that wasn't even in dispute. It was laid out pretty clearly in the Evolution Sequence:

Complex adaptations take a very long time to evolve. First comes allele A, which is advantageous of itself, and requires a thousand generations to fixate in the gene pool. Only then can another allele B, which depends on A, begin rising to fixation. A fur coat is not a strong advantage unless the environment has a statistically reliable tendency to throw cold wea

There is a wrong-note in the reasoning of this post that immediately started niggling at me, but it's subtle and I'm having trouble teasing out the underlying assumption. I want to say that you're taking "The purpose of consciousness is consciousness" as a given, when that is arguably false. Likewise, I want to accuse you of drawing causal arrows from consciousness to other modules of human mind design, which as far as I know is ruled out, evolutionarily speaking.

I offer this:

The "executive process" as you call it is part of the world-m... (read more)

I think there is a strict and useful definition of "supernatural" to be had, that suitably reduces the concept.

Take the game of life as an example. In the cell grid, the rules governing individual cells are the laws of physics. Those rules completely define natural phenomenon in that universe. It seems clear to me, then, that the definition of supernatural phenomenon points to operations on patterns of cells, IE, anything that edits the outputs of the natural rules.

For example, "Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the ... (read more)

I think you may have misunderstood. I'm talking about my router, which is a separate device from my modem. I have never observed the router rebooting to fix a problem, and have on several occasions observed the reboot to cause a problem. I just want to know if there is something nonobvious going on that will cause problems if the router does not reboot once a week, keeping in mind that it is a separate device from the cable modem.

Okay, so I have a "self-healing" router that ostensibly reboots itself once a week to "allow channel switching" and to "promote network health", and given that this seems to NOT mess up my internet access in one of several ways every tuesday morning only MOST of the time, it has been causing me stress absurdly out of proportion with the actual danger (of being without internet access/my ONLY link to the outside world, for a short time).

So, my question is, what the HECK does "channel switching" or "promoting network health" even mean, and is it actually important enough that I shouldn't just flat out disable my router's "self-healing" feature?

I have a random physics question:

A solid sphere, in ordinary atmosphere, with a magical heating element at one pole and a magical refrigeration element at the other. If the sphere itself is stationary and at room temperature; one pole is super-cooled while the opposite pole is super-heated. (Edit: Assume the axis connecting the poles is horizontal.)

What effect does this have on air-flow around the sphere? Does it move? If so, in which direction?

That just means that the spell inventor doesn't need to know anything about or implement natural language processing. To get magical primitives like ontologically basic mental parts you still have to have complex and fully reducible algorithms running over the base physics outputs somewhere even if that somewhere is "parallel to or between frames of the simulation".

I sometimes have a similar experience, and when I do, it is almost always simply an effect of my own standards of competence being higher than those around me.

Imagine, some sort of problem arises in the presence of a small group. The members of that group look at each other, and whoever signals the most confidence gets first crack at the problem. But this more-confident person then does not reveal any knowledge or skill that the others do not possess, because said confidence was entirely do to higher willingness to potentially make the problem worse throug... (read more)

I'm wondering if this is the kind of confusion that can be cleared up by tabooing the right words.

I believe it can be taken as obvious that the image in the muslim woman's head upon hearing the phrase "monkey's transformed into humans" isn't at all similar to the image in the mind of someone who understands evolution, as even to my ear it comes across as, at best, misleading.

Thus my response would be more along the lines of:

I don't believe monkeys can change into humans. I believe that both monkeys and humans belong to a larger category of creatu... (read more)

There are a lot of games that can be played with a standard deck of playing cards, but it has occurred to me that I've never heard of a skill-based strategy game that minimizes luck-of-the-draw, meant for ordinary playing cards.

So, I tried my hand at inventing such a game.

Unfortunately, I have no practical way to play-test it, so I'm putting it out there for other people to try.

Suggestions on a name for the game are welcome. I have considered and dismissed "Card Chess" as derivative and inaccurate.

Question for anyone who knows:

I've been getting "cannot connect to the real..." error messages in Google Chrome when trying to access several websites, which I gather has something to do with invalid certificates. I would like to know if going to Settings > Advanced > Manage Certificates and simply Removing everything under every tab will a) fix the problem and b) not break anything else. If not, then I would like to know what will.

Earlier last year, I set out to write a crossover fanfiction, that crossed something popular over with something completely original that nobody had ever heard of before, to see where my writing skills stood when it came to introducing an unfamiliar setting.

The fic is titled Forever After Earth, and as of today is over a hundred thousand words long and has gotten mostly positive reviews. I think I've learned a few things about how to get important details across without bogging down the narrative, from where reviewers were confused or outright wrong about ... (read more)

Place your fingers on your pulse and feel your heartbeat. If you're sitting at rest, every beat you feel is accompanied, somewhere in the world, by two or three people running to the end of the time nature allotted and being annihilated forever.

Short term solution is exactly that. People are dying RIGHT NOW. And cryonics is a way to potentially save those lives RIGHT NOW.

The following is merely my own intuition and guess, but... I suspect that the future will look back on this era, see that we had cryonics and CHOSE not to use it, and condemn current funeral practices as systematic murder.

I'm trying to answer this, but I can't help feeling like is overly arbitrary. I've lived with family, but which family? I've lived alone, but how alone? I might have lived with friends, or not, how do you define "friend"? What about living situations that are not covered by those categories, such as living with a lover, or living with coworkers?

This question seems meaningless to me without a lot more specificity.

I've had some success of my own with lucid dreaming. Relatively speaking.

The problem I have is that I dream so rarely that it is almost impossible to develop habits. I still manage to go lucid about half the time I do dream, and manage to go lucid without inadvertently waking myself up about half again of those times.

I don't know if lucid dreaming has improved my rationality, but I do think that my rationality helps with the "oh, this is silly and must be a dream" reflex. There is correlation, but it is not obvious in which direction there is cau... (read more)

There are many many more submissive/masochistic men in the world than there are dominant/sadistic women, so if you are a woman who feels a strong temptation to command men and inflict pain on them, and you want a large harem of men serving your every need, it will suffice to state this fact anywhere on the Internet and you will have fifty applications by the next morning.

More like, twenty sincere applications, ten trolls, five misogynists who think they can tame you, five socially inept introverts who aren't into being a sub but will put up with it in e... (read more)

But having sex with unattractive people does usually “require you to go significantly out of your way or put you at risk of significant harm”, so you don't need a special case for that.

In my experience this (positing a special case when sex is involved even though a special case isn't needed) is a such a general and epidemic problem in modern american culture that most people don't notice they're doing it even when you point it out.

Well, I actually got the "multiply" pun. That was clear enough. I'm just not getting what prompted the "Ewww..." though.

Science does not rule out a notion of personal identity that requires the location of an individual to be a continuous function, which would imply that the copy of me on Mars isn't me, assuming I started on Earth.

You know, the first time I read this sequence post, I thought something similar. But then something clicked.

Yes, if you create a duplicate of me on mars, and then disintegrate the me that's still on earth at some point afterward, that's murder. But I realized that asking if that was killing me was a Wrong Question.

When the process that is me is... (read more)

The people demand a strict morality police after an era of total acceptance drains all the fun out of it. Everyone is fully expected to both seek out sexual thrills and aid in the swift punishment of anyone who seeks out sexual thrills:

I can imagine this being one of those many MANY things that a handful of people get into but everybody else has no interest in, but for me personally.... AAAAAAAAAHH!

That's pretty much my idea of Hell.

/clicks link, watches

... I can barely understand a single word this guy is saying. Is it just me or is the audio in that video really bad? I don't suppose it was transcribed anywhere?

The first time I read this, a few things came to mind as possible ugh fields in my own mind, such as "borrowing/lending" or "making conversation", but on reflection my behavior isn't consistently ugh on these subjects.

A powerful ugh field I do seem to have, based on observations of my own past behavior, is one of imposition. Courses of action which involve imposing on another person are slow to even occur to me as options, which to my intuition seems more like what an Ugh Field would feel like from the inside, rather than a mere conscio... (read more)

...doesn't the structure or contents of the uncausing stuff cause me to...

Um...

...the uncausing stuff cause me...

-.-

Um, wow. Clearly you've pattern-matched to something completely different than the objection I was trying to convey. I'm so not in any way offended by sexual behavior reductionism.

To me, the author of MMSL only seems to care about creating something that looks like an intimate relationship from the outside. And he's other-optimizing; very egregiously so. My revulsion stems from my belief that I wouldn't be any happier living the way he advocates than I am now. I want something that feels like an intimate relationship from the inside, and the sort of relati... (read more)

Married Man Sex Life -- a blog about maintaining attraction in marriage. I recommend reading the older articles (before he published a book) because they seem to have much better signal:noise ratio.

Thanks for actually providing a link. Being told to "just google it" gets frustrating.

However...

I started at the beginning of the archive, the oldest posts, and I am reading them in order. Granted, I have only yet read a handful of posts, but I can't imagine a person who thinks like the author writes having a worthwhile life. What he advocates seems... (read more)

I only mentioned that to explain the origin of a false belief. It is not currently a problem for me, just an annoyance.

There aren't enough italics in the world to sufficiently emphasize how much whining about being rejected was not the intent of my comment.

Have you tried reading PUA-Game material (and then selectively applying the ethical parts of it)?

I might, if I had any idea where to find said material (rather that just people talking about the material), or how to identify the optimal starting point within the material. (Or anyone to apply it to.)

I was paraphrasing based on my understanding of that conversation. Apologies if I misunderstood and inadvertently misrepresented you.

Ask someone who knows you and has seen you....

There is no such person.

There's a theorem of rationality called Aumann's Agreement Theorem which shows that no two rationalists can agree to disagree. If two people disagree with each other, at least one of them must be doing something wrong.

This seems like one of those things that can be detrimental if taught in isolation.

It may be a good idea to emphasize that only one person in a disagreement doing something wrong is far less likely than both sides in a disagreement doing something wrong.

I can easily imagine someone casually encountering that statement, and taking it to ins... (read more)

This was roughly my reaction.

Okay, maybe we need to taboo "excited".

I do see, though, that so long as they think that learning about either the cause of their wonder or the cause of the rainbows will steal the beauty from them, no progress will be made on any front.

This right here is at the crux of my point. I am predicting that, for your average neurotypical, explaining their wonder produces significantly less feeling of stolen beauty than explaining the rainbow. Because, in the former case, you're explaining something mental, whereas in the latter case, you're explaini... (read more)

the life of the typical animal, and of the typical human in history, were not worth living -- you'd prefer that they had never existed.

When I read this, a part of my brain figuratively started jumping up and down and screaming "False Dichotomy! False Dichotomy!"

that even if you know that the rainbows are refraction phenomena, you can still see feel wonder at them

This kind of touches my point You're talking about two separate physical processes here, and I hold that the latter is the only one worth getting excited about. Or, at least the only one worth trying to get laypeople excited about.

This may be the wrong tact. As I pointed out above, I think it likely that the problem lies not in the nature of the phenomenon but in the way a person relates to the phenomenon emotionally. Particularly, that for natural accidents like rainbows, most people simply can't relate emotionally to the physics of light refraction, even if they sort of understand it.

So, I think a more effective tact would be to focus on the experience of seeing the rainbow, rather than the rainbow itself, because if a person is focusing on the rainbow itself, then they inevitably... (read more)

Is this because of the "damn it, I know I made a mistake, you telling me I did doesn't help!" effect?

No, I react the same way whether I was previously aware of my mistake or not. I only experience that effect when I'm told to do something I am already doing.

A good thought experiment is that if I was making a type of mistake that I couldn't automatically tell I was making on my own, I would prefer it to be pointed out, even if not in a concise detailed fashion–the idea of not knowing that I'm making a mistake is kind of scary. What would your

The reason you should ignore poor performance if you say "No, you're doing it wrong!" you are inadvertently punishing the effort. A better response to a mistake would be to reinforce the effort: "Good effort! You're almost there! Try once more.

I am probably unusual in this regard, but I think I would find both approaches equally aggravating. If someone points out that I've made a mistake, anything other than a concise detailing of exactly how what I did differs from what I was supposed to do, is just going to irritate me. Also, my brain tends to interpret being ignored as a signal that I'm doing correctly.

I suppose that the existence of something resembling a god is possible if we are actually living in a simulation. Even the christian god would be somewhere in that space of possibilities, though given the space of possibilities, that one specific possibility would still have to have extraordinarily low probability.

But let's say the christian god shows up on our world one day and says "hey all, yup, I'm totally real, now get on your knees and praise me or suffer eternal torment!"

I don't know about anybody else, but my atheism wouldn't so much as w... (read more)

Is there an inherent value to human (or sentient) life?

"Inherent Value" is an oxymoron. The universe does not assign values to things. Value is a thing which exists only within a mind's Map of the world, and is not a property things can have.

See also: Metaethics.

I can only conclude that if I took them to see Seurat’s painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," they would earnestly ask me what on earth the purpose of all the little dots was.

... which we might call the disappointment of explicability. “A rainbow is just light refracting.” “The aurora is only a bunch of protons hitting the earth’s magnetic field.” Rationalists are, sadly, not immune to this nasty little meme.

It occurred to me upon reading this, that perhaps your analogy about the painting is overlooking something importan... (read more)

Not really. I think there is a difference betwween your consciousness existing in a branch where the casual chains leading to its destruction merely haven't reached your senses yet, and your brain existing in an unchanging state for a long period of time that would stretch the possible restoration of "you" over all branchings forward from the time of successful preservation.

Your consciousness not "running" at all seems like a very different thing from it merely not knowing which branch(s) it is "running" in.

If an American signs up for cryonics and pays their ~$300/year, what are their odds of being revived?

This may just be my own intuition running away on me, but it seems like there are two different answers to that question.

In an absolute sense (as in, percentage of everett branches where you are revived from cryonics), the chances are probably pretty slim.

However, in a subjective sense. ("You" experience waking up from cryonics), the chances seem near certain. It's not like you'd be aware of any of the universes where you weren't revived, after all.

(I believe the term is "Unbirthing".)

And I'm sorry but I'm not seeing it.

They were clearly reacting to something about the implications of the depicted humans reciting multiplication tables. The Xenopsychologist says "I can't even begin to imagine why -" and then cuts off when the whole room suddenly realizes why they're reciting multiplication tables, which is apparently supposed to be both obvious and eww-worthy, but I'm drawing a blank.

What was the part "they" didn't understand, which resulted in porn in which humans recit... (read more)