I'd like to better understand how compatibilists conceive of free will.[1] LW is a known hotbed of compatibilism, so here's my question: Suppose that determinism is true. When I face a binary choice,[2] there are two relevantly-different states of the world I could be in:[3] State A: Past events HA...
I may be wrong, but I think the following is a mainstream position in rationalist circles: even people who care about animal welfare don't have particularly strong moral reasons to personally switch to a vegan diet. I haven't seen a fully fleshed-out defence of this position. I can think of...
From my perspective, unless there is something akin to a soul or disembodied consciousness, there's simply no fact of the matter here beyond the more granular facts. I don't think "the same consciousness" means anything more than the prosaic ways in which we might define it, e.g. with reference to overlapping chains of experience and memory. We instinctively care about it, but I think that's fairly easy to explain as a byproduct of our self/other distinction and self-preservation instinct and so on.
When you ask "would this be the same conscious experience", do you have a clear idea of what "the same conscious experience" means, and you're wondering whether the world works in such a way that the concept would hold in these hypotheticals? Or is it a concept that feels important, but which you can't pin down, and your goal here is to analyse it?
I think that's a reasonable interpretation of the actual serious content of the post, and my understanding of Eliezer's position basically matches yours. But the post starts like this:
tl;dr: It's obvious at this point that humanity isn't going to solve the alignment problem, or even try very hard, or even go out with much of a fight. Since survival is unattainable, we should shift the focus of our efforts to helping humanity die with with slightly more dignity.
And it sticks with the 'death with dignity' framing, talking about doubling our chances of survival from 0% to 0%, striving to earn 'dignity points' to take to our graves, and so on. It's also... (read more)
... (read more)Harlan 0:17:13
A really repeated theme is the inevitability thing. It’s pretty frustrating to hear, as someone who’s spending effort trying to help with this stuff in some kind of way that we can, and for someone to characterize your camp as thinking doom is inevitable. If I thought it was inevitable, I would just be relaxing. I wouldn’t bother doing anything about it. There’s some sense in which if it was inevitable, that would be worse, but it would also mean that we didn’t really have to do anything about it.Liron 0:17:42
Just to repeat your point in case viewers don’t get the connection: Dario is saying that doomerism is so unproductive because
But you are implicitly assuming that you already know this process is in fact going to continue. So it's rather as if you asked Fred, and he told you yeah, there's always a big rush at the end of the day, few people get here as early as you.
I didn't mean to imply certainty, just uncertain expectation based on observation. Maybe I asked Fred, or the other customers, but I didn't receive any information about 'the end of the day' -- only confirmation of the trend so far.
(I'm not trying to be difficult for the sake of it, by the way! I just want to think these things through carefully and genuinely... (read more)
But that's not how I'm thinking of it in the first place -- I'm not positing any random selection process. I just don't see an immediately obvious flaw here:
And I still don't quite understand your response to this formulation of the argument. I think you're saying 'people who have ever lived and will ever live' is obviously the wrong reference class, but your arguments mostly target beliefs that I don't hold (and that I don't think I am implicitly assuming).
Sorry about the double reply, and it's been a while since I thought seriously about these topics, so I may well be making a silly mistake here, but --
There's a shop that uses a sequential ticketing system for queueing: each customer takes a numbered ticket when they enter, starting with ticket #1 for the first customer of the day. When I enter the shop, I know that it has been open for a couple of hours, but I have absolutely no idea when it closes (or even whether its 'day' is a mere 24 hours). I take my ticket and see that it's #20. I have also noticed that the customer flow... (read more)
"viewed from an achronous perspective, a low probability event has occurred — just like they always do right at the start of anything"
What's the 'low probability event'? I think this is the kind of framing I was disagreeing with in my original reply; there seems to be an implicit dualism here. So your reply isn't, from my perspective, addressing my reasons for finding anthropic reasoning difficult to completely dismiss.
If I roll a million-sided die, then no individual number rolled on it is more surprising than any other, not even a roll of 1 or 1,000,000 — UNLESS I'm playing an adversarial game where me rolling a 1 is uniquely good for my opponent. Then if I roll a 1 I should wonder if the die was fixed.
Yes, but if you haven't looked at the die yet, and the question of whether it's showing a number lower than 100 is relevant for some reason, you're going to strongly favour 'no'.
(That's not quite how I think about anthropic problems, though, because I don't think there's anything analogous to the dice roll -- hence my original complaint about smuggled dualism.)
I'd like to better understand how compatibilists conceive of free will.[1] LW is a known hotbed of compatibilism, so here's my question:
Suppose that determinism is true. When I face a binary choice,[2] there are two relevantly-different states of the world I could be in:[3]
State A: Past events HA have happened, current state of the world is A, I will choose CA, future FA will happen.
State B: Past events HB have happened, current state of the world is B, I will choose CB, future FB will happen.
When I make my choice (CA or CB), I'm choosing/revealing which of those two states of the world are (my) reality. They're package deals: CA follows from HA just... (read more)
I may be wrong, but I think the following is a mainstream position in rationalist circles: even people who care about animal welfare don't have particularly strong moral reasons to personally switch to a vegan diet.
I haven't seen a fully fleshed-out defence of this position. I can think of a few possible arguments, but none seem convincing:
We don't need to deny that there's a meaningful first-person perspective, only that any particular first-person perspective is special (in this case, special in that it's the 'true' continuation of the original). When a perfect copy is made, two meaningful first-person perspectives exist, they both see themselves as continuations of the original, and neither is more right or wrong than the other in any deep sense.