You make a lot of interesting points, but how do you apply them to the question at hand: what should you have for dinner, and why?
This is a fascinating topic, and I hope it attracts more commentary. As Bentarm says, it is important and relevant to each of us, yet the topic is fraught with uncertainty, and it is expensive to try to reduce the uncertainty.
I do not believe Taubes. No one book can outweigh the millions of pages of scientific research which have led to the current consensus in the field. Taubes is polemical, argumentative, biased, and one-sided in his presentation. He makes no pretense of offering an objective weighing of the evidence for and against various nutritional hypotheses. He is selling a point of view, plain and simple. No doubt he felt such a forceful... (read more)
Here is a remarkable variation on that puzzle. A tiny change makes it work out completely differently.
Same setup as before, two private dice rolls. This time the question is, what is the probability that the sum is either 7 or 8? Again they will simultaneously exchange probability estimates until their shared estimate is common knowledge.
I will leave it as a puzzle for now in case someone wants to work it out, but it appears to me that in this case, they will eventually agree on an accurate probability of 0 or 1. And they may go through several rounds of agreement where they nevertheless change their estimates - perhaps related to the phenomenon of "violent agreement" we often see.
Strange how this small change to the conditions gives such different results. But it's a good example of how agreement is inevitable.
I thought of a simple example that illustrates the point. Suppose two people each roll a die privately. Then they are asked, what is the probability that the sum of the dice is 9?
Now if one sees a 1 or 2, he knows the probability is zero. But let's suppose both see 3-6. Then there is exactly one value for the other die that will sum to 9, so the probability is 1/6. Both players exchange this first estimate. Now curiously although they agree, it is not common knowledge that this value of 1/6 is their shared estimate. After hearing 1/6, they know that the other die is one of the four values 3-6. So actually the probability is calculated by each as 1/4, and this is now common knowledge (why?).
And of course this estimate of 1/4 is not what they would come up with if they shared their die values; they would get either 0 or 1.
Let me give an argument in favor of #4, doing what the others do, in the thermometer problem. Now we seem to have them behaving badly. I think in practice many people would in fact look at other thermometers too in making their guesses. So why aren't they doing it? Two possibilities: they're stupid; or they have a good reason to do it. An example good reason: some thermometers don't read properly from a side angle, so although you think you can see and read all of them, you might be wrong. (This could be solved by #3, writing down the average of the cards, but that doesn't work if everyone tries... (read more)
Actually if Omega literally materialized out of thin air before me, I would be amazed and consider him a very powerful and perhaps supernatural entity, so would probably pay him just to stay on his good side. Depending on how literally we take the "Omega appears" part of this thought experiment, it may not be as absurd as it seems.
Even if Omega just steps out of a taxi or whatever, some people in some circumstances would pay him. The Jim Carrey movie "Yes Man" is supposedly based on a true story of someone who decided to say yes to everything, and had very good results. Omega would only appear to such people.
When I signed up for cryonics, I opted for whole body preservation, largely because of this concern. But I would imagine that even without the body, you could re-learn how to move and coordinate your actions, although it might take some time. And possibly a SAI could figure out what your body must have been like just from your brain, not sure.
Now recently I have contracted a disease which will kill most of my motor neurons. So the body will be of less value and I may change to just the head.
The way motor neurons work is there is an upper motor neuron (UMN) which descends from the motor cortex of the... (read more)
Like others, I see some ambiguity here. Let me assume that the substrate includes not just the neurons, but the glial and other support cells and structures; and that there needs to be blood or equivalent to supply fuel, energy and other stuff. Then the question is whether this brain as a physical entity can function as the substrate, by itself, for high level mental functions.
I would give this 95%.
That is low for me, a year ago I would probably have said 98 or 99%. But I have been learning more about the nervous system these past few months. The brain's workings seem sufficiently mysterious and counter-intuitive that I wonder if maybe there is something fundamental we are missing. And I don't mean consciousness at all, I just mean the brain's extraordinary speed and robustness.
Another sample problem domain is crossword puzzles:
Don't stop at the first good answer - You can't write in the first word that seems to fit, you need to see if it is going to let you build the other words.
Explore multiple approaches simultaneously - Same idea, you often can think of a few different possible words that could work in a particular area of the puzzle, and you need to keep them all in mind as you work to solve the other words.
Trust your intuitions, but don't waste too much time arguing for them - This one doesn't apply much because usually people don't fight over crossword puzzles.
Go meta - This is... (read more)
A man goes in to see his doctor, and after some tests, the doctor says, "I'm sorry, but you have a fatal disease."
Man: "That's terrible! How long have I got?"
Doctor: "Ten."
Man: "Ten? What kind of answer is that? Ten months? Ten years? Ten what?"
The doctor looks at his watch. "Nine."
Recently I received some bad medical news (although not as bad as in the joke). Unfortunately I have been diagnosed with a fatal disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease. ALS causes nerve damage, progressive muscle weakness and paralysis, and ultimately death. Patients lose the ability to talk, walk, move, eventually even to breathe, which is usually the end... (read 575 more words →)
Years ago, before coming up with even crazier ideas, Wei Dai invented a concept that I named UDASSA. One way to think of the idea is that the universe actually consists of an infinite number of Universal Turing Machines running all possible programs. Some of these programs "simulate" or even "create" virtual universes with conscious entities in them. We are those entities.
Generally, different programs can produce the same output; and even programs that produce different output can have identical subsets of their output that may include conscious entities. So we live in more than one program's output. There is no meaning to the question of what program our observable universe is actually... (read more)