Phil_Goetz

Matthew C -

You are advocating nonreductionism and psi at the same time.

Supposing that you are right requires us to suppose that there is both a powerful argument against reductionism, and a powerful argument in favor of psi.

Supposing that you are a crank requires only one argument, and one with a much higher prior.

In other words, if you were advocating one outrageous theory, someone might listen. The fact that you are advocating two simultaneously makes dismissing all of your claims, without reading the book you recommend, the logical response. We thus don't have to read it to have a rational basis to dismiss it.

Religion is the classic example of a delusion that might be good for you. There is some evidence that being religious increases human happiness, or social cohesion. It's universality in human culture suggests that it has adaptive value.

See last week's Science, Oct. 3 2008, p. 58-62: "The origin and evolution of religious prosociality". One chart shows that, in any particular year, secular communes are four times as likely to dissolve as religious communes.

I think Einstein is a good example of both bending with the wind (when he came up with relativity)

I'm not sure what you mean by bending with the wind. I thought it was the evidence that provided the air pressure, but there was no evidence to support Einstein's theory above the theories of the day. He took an idea and ran with it to its logical conclusions. Then the evidence came, he was running ahead of the evidential wind. You do know roughly what I mean, which is that strenuous effort is only part of the solution; not clinging to ideas is the other part of the solution. Focusing on the strenuous effort part can lead to people making strenuous effort to justify bad ideas. Who makes the most strenuous effort on the question of evolution? Creationists.

Einstein had evidence; it just wasn't experimental evidence. The discovery that your beliefs contain a logical inconsistency is a type of evidence.

@Phil_Goetz: Have the successes relied on a meta-approach, such as saying, "If you let me out of the box in this experiment, it will make people take the dangers of AI more seriously and possibly save all of humanity; whereas if you don't, you may doom us all"?

That was basically what I suggested in the previous topic, but at least one participant denied that Eliezer_Yudkowsky did that, saying it's a cheap trick, while some non-participants said it meets the spirit and letter of the rules.

It would be nice if Eliezer himself would say whether he used meta-arguments. "Yes" or "no" would suffice. Eliezer?

Tim - I'm asking the question whether competition, and its concomitant unpleasantness (losing, conflict, and the undermining of CEV's viability), can be eliminated from the world. Under a wide variety of assumptions, we can characterize all activities, or at least all mental activities, as computational. We also hope that these computations will be done in a way such that consciousness is still present.

My argument is that optimization is done best by an architecture that uses competition. The computations engaged in this competition are the major possible loci for consciousness. You can't escape this by saying that you will simulate the competition, because this simulation is itself a computation. Either it is also part of a possible locus of consciousness, or you have eliminated most of the possible loci of consciousness, and produced an active but largely "dead" (unconscious) universe.

In theory, competition looks very bad. Fighting with each other can't possibly be efficient. Almost always, battles should be done under simulation - so the winner can be determined early - without the damage and waste of a real fight. There's a huge drive towards cooperation - as explained by Robert Wright.

We're talking about competition between optimization processes. What would it mean to be a simulation of a computation? I don't think there is any such distinction. Subjectivity belongs to these processes; and they are the things which must compete. If the winner could be determined by a simpler computation, you would be running that computation instead; and the hypothetical consciousness that we were talking about would be that computation instead.