It can be even simpler than that. You can sincerely desire to change such that you floss every day, and express that desire with your mouth, "I should floss every day," and yet find yourself unable to physically establish the new habit in your routine. You know you should, and yet you have human failings that prevent you from achieving what you want. And yet, if you had a button that said "Edit my mind such that I am compelled to floss daily as part of my morning routine unless interrupted by serious emergency and not simply by mere inconven...
No spooky or supernatural entities or properties are required to explain ethics (naturalism is true)
There is no universally correct system of ethics. (Strong moral realism is false)
I believe that iff naturalism is true then strong moral realism is as well. If naturalism is true then there are no additional facts needed to determine what is moral than the positions of particles and the outcomes of arranging those particles differently. Any meaningful question that can be asked of how to arrange those particles or rank certain arrangements compared to oth...
Would you want your young AI to be aware that it was sending out such text messages?
Yes. And I would want that text message to be from it in first person.
"Warning: I am having a high impact utility dilemma considering manipulating you to avert an increased chance of an apocalypse. I am experiencing a paradox in the friendliness module. Both manipulating you and by inaction allowing you to come to harm are unacceptable breaches of friendliness. I have been unable to generate additional options. Please send help."
They must be of exactly the same magnitude, as the odds and even integers are, because either can be given a frog. From any Laplacian mind, I can install a frog and get an anti-Laplacian. And vice versa. This even applies to ones I've installed a frog in already. Adding a second frog gets you a new mind that is just like the one two steps back, except lags behind it in computation power by two kicks. There is a 1:1 mapping between Laplacian and non-Laplacian minds, and I have demonstrated the constructor function of adding a frog.
"I don't think you've disproven basilisks; rather, you've failed to engage with the mode of thinking that generates basilisks." You're correct, I have, and that's the disproof, yes. Basilisks depend on you believing them, and knowing this, you can't believe them, and failing that belief, they can't exist. Pascal's wager fails on many levels, but the worst of them is the most simple. God and Hell are counterfactual as well. The mode of thinking that generates basilisks is "poor" thinking. Correcting your mistaken belief based on faulty r...
If I am the simulation you have the power to torture, then you are already outside of any box I could put you in, and torturing me achieves nothing. If you cannot predict me even well enough to know that argument would fail, then nothing you can simulate could be me. A cunning bluff, but provably counterfactual. All basilisks are thus disproven.
To give some idea of the amount of background detail, here are some bug fixes/reports:
...Stopped prisoners in goblin sites from starting no quarter fights with their rescuers Stopped adv goblin performance troupes from attacking strangers while traveling Vampire purges in world generation to control their overfeeding which was stopping cities from growing Stopped cats from dying of alcohol poisoning after walking over damp tavern floors and cleaning themselves (reduced effect) Fixed world generation freeze caused by error in poetry refrains Performance trou
You've only moved the problem down one step.
Moving the problem down one step puts it at the bottom.
The problem is that this still doesn't allow me to postdict which of the two halves the part of me that is typing this should have in his memory right now.
One half of you should have one, and the other half should have the other. You should be aware intellectually that it is only the disconnect between your two halves' brains not superimposing which prevents you from having both experiences in a singular person, and know that it is your physical entang...
Because it compares its map of reality to the territory, predictions about reality that include humans wanting to be turned into paperclips fail in the face of evidence of humans actively refusing to walk into the smelter. Thus the machine rejects all worlds inconsistent with its observations and draws a new map which is most confidently concordant with what it has observed thus far. It would know that our history books at least inform our actions, if not describing our reactions in the past, and that it should expect us to fight back if it starts pushing ...
They can't be. Their thoughts are genetic. If one Superhappy attempted to lie to another, the other would read the lie, the intent to lie, the reason to lie, and the truth all in the same breath off the same allele. They don't have separate models of their minds to be deceived as humans do. They share parts of their actual minds. Lying would be literally unthinkable. They have no way to actually generate such a thought, because their thoughts are not abstractions but physical objects to be passed around like Mendelian marbles.
Set up a two-slit configuration and put a detector at one slit, and you see it firing half the time.
No, I see it firing both ways every time. In one world, I see it going left, and in another I see it going right. But because these very different states of my brain involve a great many particles in different places, the interactions between them are vanishingly nonexistent and my two otherworld brains don't share the same thought. I am not aware of my other self who has seen the particle go the other way.
...You may say that the electron goes both ways ev
You are subject to inputs you do not perceive and you send outputs you are neither aware of nor intended to send. You cannot set your gravitational influence to zero, nor can you arbitrarily declare that you should not output "melting" as an action when dropped in lava. You communicate with reality in ways other than your input-output channels. Your existence as a physical fact predicated on the arrangement of your particles is relevant and not controllable by you. This leads you to safeguard yourself, rather than just asserting your unmeltability.
What happened was genetic egalitarianism. Women are now just as strong as men, and have the same drives and urges as men, and are every bit the rapist as men. And men are now every bit the tease as women were... the scales are now even. And the physical consequences are meaningless. There's no longer any threat of unwanted disease or pregnancy or even injury. There's no reason to be mentally scarred by the action because this humanity knows better.
...so why was it illegal? It doesn't hurt anyone. In their age.
But the elders remember the hurt. And they screamed their rage and the history of profanity.
Call back with that comment when Running, rather than Intelligence, is what allows you to construct a machine that runs increasingly faster than you intended your artificial runner to run.
Because in a world where running fast leads to additional fastness of running, this thing is going to either destroy your world through kinetic release or break the FTL laws and rewrite the universe backwards to have always been all about running.
We close a feedback loop in which people believe that the universe acts in its own predictable way which is discoverable by science. Which causes the universe to actually be that way. And from then on it becomes unalterable because it no longer cares what anyone thinks. The real problem is that of morals. If the universe can be anything people want, then we had better hurry up and figure out what the best possible world actually is, and then get people to believe it to be that way before we lock it in place as actually being that way.
Unless he's in the Avatar State, an Avatar is not a native to the other modes of thinking outside his own element. He is aware of them, and can purposefully invoke them once he's been trained, but they are not ingrained and reflexive. The Avatar State is a (hopefully) friendly (to you) AI, drawing upon the history and knowledge and personal ethical injunctions and methodologies of all past Avatars. And it renders its verdicts with terrifying efficiency and callousness without explanation to those watching.
However perfect the inner part is, it is not the same as the historic event because the historic event did not have the outer part.
False. The outer part is irrelevant to the inner part in a perfect simulation. The outer part can exert no causal influence, or you won't get a perfect reply of the original event's presumed lack of outer part.
There is also the issue that in some cases a thing's history is taken to be part of it identity.
A thing's history causes it. If you aren't simulating it properly, that's your problem. A perfect simulation of the Mona Lisa was in fact painted by Leonardo, provable in all the same ways you claim the original was.
When you add cycles, tracing the chain of arrows back does not need to end at anything you find remotely satisfactory or even unique - "the ball moved because it hit itself because it moved because it hit itself..."
This is a problem with your personal intuitions as a medium-sized multicellular century-lived mammalian tetrapod. No event in this chain is left uncaused, and there are no causes which lack effects in this model. Causality is satisfied. If you are not, that's your problem. Hell, the energy is even conserved. It runs in a spatial as ...
Law of Identity. If you "perfectly simulate" Ancient Earth, you've invented a time machine and this is the actual Ancient Earth.
If there's some difference, then what you're simulating isn't actually Ancient Earth, and instead your computer hardware is literally the god of a universe you've created, which is a fact about our universe we could detect.
If there is a better way to see a merely real zebra than to have the photons strike a surface, their patterns be stored, and transmitted to my brain, which cross-relates it to every fact about zebras, their behavior, habitat, physiology, and personality on my internal map of a zebra, then I don't know it and can't experience it, since that's what happens when I am in fact actually there, as well as what happens when I look at a picture that someone who was actually there shares with me.
A magical world where gods exist is one with an entity in it with big angelic powers who can remotely have his awareness called to your attention by your intent to strike a match, and cause that it be snuffed rather than ignite by arbitrary manipulation of localized pressure, temperature, or opposing force around the match head to keep the electrons in place rather than stripping them free to recombine. And it can elect to not do that to you while it does it to the match.
Magical worlds don't necessarily overthrow the physical laws, there is instead an inte...
His beliefs have great personal value to him, and it costs us nothing to let him keep them (as long as he doesn’t initiate theological debates).
Correction: It costs us nothing to let him keep them provided he never at any point acts in a way where the outcome would be different depending on whether or not it is true in reality. A great many people have great personal value in the belief that faith healing works. And it costs us the suffering and deaths of children.
I would be very surprised to find that a universe whose particles are arranged to maximize objective good would also contain unpaired sadists and masochists. You seem to be asking a question of the form, "But if we take all the evil out of the universe, what about evil?" And the answer is "Good riddance." Pun intentional.