All of Tensor White's Comments + Replies

To phrase it better: You find yourself in room N, how many total rooms are there?

I know UDASSA accounts for the description length of the room address, but remember that given a number of rooms, each room will have the same description length. If there are 64 rooms, then room 1 will have address "000000" and not simply "0" or "1".

This way if you find yourself in a room, without knowing how many total rooms there are, and only knowing your room number, then you write it out in binary and take 2 to the bit-length of your room's address. For ex, you find your... (read more)

1ProgramCrafter
The experiment is commonly phrased in non-anthropic way by statisticians: there are many items getting sequential unique numbers, starting from 1. You get to see a single item's number n and have to guess how many items are there, and the answer is 2∗n. (Also, there are ways to guess count of items if you've seen more than one index)

I am a Christian. If you don't have a soul, then I can simply dismiss any persuasion you attempt on me. I don't owe "highly-specified arrangements of matter" anything. Also, it's weird why you would be motivated to promalgate your ideas. Do you owe arrangements of matter anything? No. When I used to think like you, I knew I didn't owe material-onlyism anything. My secular beliefs didn't make me more correct (or less wrong) than those with non-secular beliefs, even if my secular beliefs were true! Every belief is equal in the eyes of atoms.

Moreover, there a... (read more)

4Dagon
You're using some or all of those words differently than I do.  

You should take into account that, assuming material-onlyism, it is far easier for anthropic probability pumps to target neurons than to target bigger structures like LHC copper wires. A few neurons is sufficient to permanently change the world timeline from LHC to non-LHC. Whereas it would take change after change of copper wires or pipes etc to maintain the non-LHC timeline.

Conversely, if you maintain the LHC targeting mechanic over the neuron targeting mechanic, you necessarily have to bite either of whe following bullets, non-materialism (free will is ... (read more)

For me, the timelines where I am immortal are where I am supported by God.

2avturchin
In some Hegelian sense, Superintelligence is God which self-evolves from matter. 

I find it interesting that we're approaching a kind of singularity-singularity. Every genre of futurist projections coinciding around the year 2,030AD.

Examples of coinciding eschatalogical genres:

The 2,000-year anniversary of the Resurrection.

Population Singularity

[Anthropic (Measure) Singularity](Brandon Carter, can't find link now)

[Immortality](Ray Kurzweil)

[AI](Ray Kurzweil)

The Great Reset

...

and so on.

1Tensor White
Oh, and this

Parity-flip robustness.

Suppose an exact copy of you appeared in front of you. Would you successfully cooperate with him? (Imagine a portal 2 like situation, or a prisoners' dilemma.) It's a pretty trivial accomplishment; all you'd have to do is pick a leader and pre-commit to following your other's orders if you lost the leadership. Since anything you'd do in your other's situation is exactly what your copy will end up doing.

Now let's bump up the difficulty to rather than an exact copy presented to you, he was an exact copy of you but with one parameter fl... (read more)

As a Christian, I'm not surprised you notice such a phenomenon. Meditation opens you up spiritually to external influence. Not just epistemically, but ontologically. Meditation gives external things influence over yourself to the framework level. This is why Christians meditate with the most powerful spirit (Holy Spirit) so that we don't run into issues such as incorrect "programming" or "misalignment" or "over-fitting". The complete form of meditation is commonly called prayer to differentiate it from incomplete forms of meditation.

A way for you to understand the issues with the simulation argument is that it assumes the additional existence of things (eg, a supercomputer, a civ that built that supercomputer, etc). It takes a huge a priori credence cost (extreme solomonoff complexity of its description length) and can be dismissed instantly. Additionally, even if was on par in a priori credence with the reality argument, it's still dismissed because it's better to be wrong as a simulation that thinks it's real than to be wrong as a reality who thinks he's simulated. The later infinit... (read more)

1[anonymous]
Thanks for sharing your thoughts c:

This assumes there's equal measure for each timeline. Typically, there's no bias between a photon being polarized vertically vs being polarized horizontally after passing through a 45 degree polarization filter. But that only holds when the result's consequences end there, at the measurement, without an ensuing butterfly effect; like just being buried in an excel spreadsheet lost to statistical reduction algorithms. This assumption fails when the measurement will cause a butterfly effect, and a bias in the measurement will be introduced.

Clearly, you're mor... (read more)

1[anonymous]
does this apply to the site linked? if so, can you source this?  (p.s not sure who downvoted you, but it wasn't me, and i probably won't downvote others on my shortform in principle to encourage engagement)

No. Husks have very little 5d measure. How? The same reason you find yourself as a man and not an ant. More precisely, as stated above previously, 5d measure is timeless. Since husks take a hit in both linear scope (4th-d) and counterfactual scope (5th-d), they occupy an infinitesimally-small to epsilon-large area of your anthropic measure landscape. This affects self-location even from the beginning. Read up on UDASSA for a similar formulation of timelessness in self-location. Though UDASSA is more environmental-affecting than this. Here, you can still fi... (read more)

1dr_s
This only holds if there is any alternative to husks which is also compatible with the laws of physics as a whole. A whole civilisation that just happens to keep drawing its energy from an ever higher entropy universe seems a lot less likely, for example, because the improbabilities compound for the whole size. Seems to me that the most likely state would always be one that requires the bare minimum. Anyway I didn't know about UDASSA so I'll check that out, seems interesting. I'll maybe get back at this after having gone through it properly.

Also, survival in QI/AS is "timeless". As in, rather than surviving a Russian Roulette round, you'll junt find yourself as having avoided playing to begin with. This is because your 5D measure is greater when you avoid such activities (plus survive for free) than if you don't and survive. Such activities aren't begun in a counterfactual vacuum.

One more thing, QI invokes a notion of your consciousness "shifting" to youn surviving timeline, but that's unnecessary. Since survival is timeless, you'll simply find yourself in the longer timeline from the get go ... (read more)

2avturchin
Check my new post which favors the longest and thickest timelines https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hB2CTaxqJAeh5jdfF/quantum-immortality-a-perspective-if-ai-doomers-are-probably?commentId=aAzrogWBqtFDqMMpp
2dr_s
I mean, wouldn't that timeline be more like "my consciousness keeps somehow hanging onto a husk of a body out of increasingly unlikely coincidences as the universe approaches heat death"? Quantum Immortality strikes me as a terrible world that I really hope isn't true.
3avturchin
There is a possible bad decision theory consequence of this.  Imagine a person suffers a bad event like having a serious accident in which he damages other people. If he assumes '5D measure' or "retrospective selection of thickest timelines" to be valid, he decides to commit suicide.  As a result he-tomorrow will find himself only in timelines where the accident didn't happen.  This actually happens rather often (e.g. Epstein committed suicide after going to jail)

conscience is epiphenomenal, and consequently arises from the autonomous physical reality, so (subjective) choice is real, but as the rest of the Universe, mechanistically determined.

You're assuming consciousness arises out of physics, when physics arising out of consciousness is at least as correct. See: Idealism. If anything, Idealism breaks the causal-hierarchy-model symmetry since consciousness can behave deterministically (you can count to ten, you can draw out Conway's Game of Life, you can simulate a pendulum in your mind, etc), but the reverse r... (read more)

Pascal's Wager tends to be dismissed because he originally only looked at Christianity vs Atheism. But the logic holds even if you generalize Pascal's Wager by expanding the considered options to include every existing religion, every past religion, and even possible religions; Christianity still dominates the cost-benefit-chance analysis. Funnily enough, in this Generalized Pascal's Wager (GPW), the only threat to Christianity is another Abrahamic religion: Islam. Mainly due to the doctrine in Islam that if you attrubute partners to God (ie, the Holy Trin... (read more)

Fun physics fact: humans are at the center of the universe (qua scale). This anthro-centrism holds for length, duration, and mass at least.

Mass is the easiest: the Planck mass is 0.021764 milligrams, the mass of an eyebrow hair. Small, but very human. The Planck mass is the boundary to QM (a system more massive than the PM won't exhibit quantum behavior since its Compton wavelength is smaller than the Planck Length).

Length: the smallest length in physics is the Planck Length (1.6163×10^-35 meters), the largest length in physics is the universe diameter (8.... (read more)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertiginous_question

Benj Hellie's vertiginous question asks why, of all the subjects of experience out there, this one—the one corresponding to the human being referred to as Benj Hellie—is the one whose experiences are live? (The reader is supposed to substitute their own case for Hellie's.)

This question has already been answered. Intuitively, you can ask "why am I a human instead of a fish?"

That's symmetrical with: if a future version of yourself was convinced that it deserved to not exist forever, you would infinitely prefer that your future self be unsatisfied than have its ("your") new existence terminated.

Minimizing suffering (NegUtilism) is an arbitrary moral imperative. A moral imperative to maximize happiness (PosUtilism) is at least as valid.

2Tamsin Leake
as for me, i'm happy to break that symmetry and say that i'm fairly negative-utilitarian. i'd override a future me's wish to suffer, sooner than i'd override a future me's wish to be not happy.
2Shiroe
I'm not a negative utilitarian, for the reason you mention. If a future version of myself was convinced that it didn't deserve to be happy, I'd also prefer that its ("my") values be frustrated rather than satisfied in that case, too.