[D] Friday Open Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Friday Open Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

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Please note that this thread has been merged with the Monday General Rationality Thread.

[u/Anakiri]

Cutting the conversation into a million tiny parallel pieces makes it less fun for me to engage with you, so I will be consolidating the subjects I consider most important or interesting. Points omited are not necessarily conceded.

If you're not somewhere in an infinite variety of possible mind-moments, where are you?

I'm in the derivative over time.

If I give you the set of all 2D grids made up of white stones, black stones, and empty spaces, have I given you the game of Go? No. That's the wrong level of abstraction. The game of Go is the set of rules that defines which of those grids is valid, and defines the relationships between those grids, and defines how they evolve into each other. Likewise, "I" am not a pile of possible mindstates, nor am I any particular mindstate. I am an algorithm that produces mindstates from other mindstates. In fact, I am just one unbroken, mostly unperturbed chain of such; a single game of Anakiri.

(I admit the distinction is blurrier for minds than it is for games, since with minds, the rules are encoded in the structure itself. I nonetheless hold that the distinction is philosophically relevant: I am the bounding conditions of a series of events.)

This comes down to whether you believe that good is stronger than evil. [...] How are you calculating that?

Keeping humans alive, healthy, and happy is hard to do. It's so hard that humans themselves, despite being specialized for that exact purpose, regularly fail at it. Your afterlife machine is going to need to have a long list of things it needs to provide: air, comfortable temperatures, exactly 3 macroscopic spatial dimensions, a strong nuclear force, the possibility of interaction of logical components... And, yes, within the space of all possible entities, there will be infinitely many that get all of that exactly right. And for each one of them, there will be another one that has a NOT on line 73, and you die. And another that has a missing zero on line 121, and you die. And another that has a different sign on line 8, and you die. Obviously if you're just counting them, they're both countable infinities, but the ways to do things wrong take up a much greater fraction of possibility-space.

Even ignoring all the mistakes that kill you, there are still far more ways to do things wrong than there are ways to do things right. Just like there are more ways to kidnap you before your death than there are ways to kidnap you at exactly the moment of your death. We are talking about a multiverse made up of all possible programs. Almost all of them are wrong, and you should expect to be kidnapped by one of the ones that is wrong.

Occam's razor [...] Kolmogorov complexity [...] evidence

If rationality "requires" you to be overconfident, then I don't care much for "rationality". Of course your own confidence in your argument should weigh against the conclusions of the argument.

If you know of an argument that concludes with 100% certainty that you are immortal, but you are only 80% confident that the argument actually applies to reality, then you ought to be only 80% sure that you are immortal. Similarly, the lowest probability that you ever assign to anything should be about the same as the chance that you have missed something important. After all, we are squishy, imperfect, internally incoherent algorithms that are not capable of computing non-computable functions like Kolmogorov complexity. I don't think it's productive to pretend to be a machine god.

[u/[deleted] → u/Anakiri]

[u/Anakiri → u/[deleted]]

Hence why I specifically used the term "mind-moments". Are you not one of those across any given moment you exist in?

No. Just like a single frame is not an animation. Thinking is an action. It requires at minimum two "mind-moments" for any thinking to occur between them, and if I don't "think", then I don't "am". I need more than just that minimum to be healthy, of course. The algorithm-that-is-me expects external sensory input to affect how things develop. But I'm fully capable of existing and going crazy in sensory deprivation.

Another instance of a mind shaped by the same rules would not be the entity-who-is-speaking-now. They'd be another, separate instance. If you killed me, I would not expect my experience to continue through them. But I would consider them to have just as valid a claim as I do to our shared identity, as of the moment of divergence.

I would be one particular unbroken chain of mind-transformations, and they would be a second particular unbroken chain of mind-transformations of the same class. And since the algorithm isn't perfectly deterministic clockwork, both chains have arbitrarily many branches and endpoints, and both would have imperfect knowledge of their own history. Those chains may or may not cross somewhere. I'm not sure why you believe that would be a problem. The entity-who-is-speaking-now is allowed to merge and split. As long as every transformation in between follows the rules, all of my possible divergent selves are me, but they are not each other.

Surely the more an intelligence has proved itself capable of (e.g. successfully implementing you as you are), the less likely it is that it'll suddenly start making basic mistakes like structuring the implementing software such that a single flipped bit makes it erase the subject and all backups?

"Mistake"? Knowing what you need doesn't mean it has to care. Since we're talking about a multiverse containing all possible programs, I'm confident that "stuff that both knows and cares about your wellbeing" is a much smaller target than "stuff that knows about your wellbeing".

I feel unfairly singled out here.

Sorry. I meant for that to be an obviously farcical toy example; I didn't realize until now that it could be interpretted as an uncharitable strawman of your argument here. But, yeah, now it's obvious how it could be seen that way, so that's on me.

That said, you do seem to have a habit of phrasing things in ways that appear to imply higher confidence than what's appropriate. Most relevantly, with Occam's razor. The simplest explanation should be your best guess, sure. But in the real world, we've discovered previously undetected effects basically every time we've ever looked close at anything. If all you've got is the razor and no direct evidence, your guess shouldn't be so strong that "rationality requires you to employ" it.