the idea of annihilation after death scared the crap out of me, and so I avoided it.
That was one of the main things that held me (and, I guess, may others) back. That, and the promise of Hell (at least for Christians and Muslims).
No, really, Cessation Of Existence still scares the crap out of mem though I have accepted is as very very probable (barring the Singularity happening very soon). What about you guys?
In the mid- or late-morning, when I’m full of energy and eager to tackle the challenges and entertainments of the day, death looks like a terrible loss, a fun-stopper to be escaped at any cost.
Late at night, when my brain is exhausted and wavering, the bed is so warm and the silence blissful, never waking up again sounds like a fantastic deal.
No, really, Cessation Of Existence still scares the crap out of mem though I have accepted is as very very probable (barring the Singularity happening very soon). What about you guys?
To the best of my knowledge, it is well with my soul. I enjoy living and seek to continue doing so- but when it comes to lifespan, I start at the present and count up rather than starting at infinity and counting down.
For me, the prospect of ceasing to exist has a calming effect. Not pleasant, as such. I certainly don’t want to die. But the thought that someday, I will not exist at all puts all the day-to-day stresses and worries and regrets into perspective.
There’s an old ‘symmetry argument’ to the effect that life is a thin sliver of light bounded on the one side by an eternity of non-existence before you were born, and on the other by an eternity of non-existence after you die. The suggestion is that one is no worse than the other.
The cessation of existence holds very little fear for me. Existence really isn’t all that great, so it ending wouldn’t be all that bad.
The one thing I fear about it is that it should happen before I manage to make my net impact on the world positive. I don’t want to be one of the >50% of the population that the world would have been better off without.
Hmm. If you are currently below net neutral impact, then continued existence is at least as important as improving your impact on the world. If you are currently above net neutral impact, you should probably end your existence as soon as feasible to ensure you don’t accidentally cause or contribute to some event that brings your net impact way down to negatives.
I don’t aim solely to have a net positive impact. I aim to have as large a net positive impact as possible. My fear is not the only contributing factor to my utility function.
So, if I prove capable of pulling out of the significant pit of negative impact I have produced during childhood and adolescence, I will hopefully not commit suicide until senility, when there is good reason to expect my impact to go negative again.*
*(I also have a couple of mental blocks that make me committing suicide unlikely. I haven’t attempted it since producing them, although their purpose was unrelated.)
Not this time. According to the specified value system the approach is rational. (The sunk cost fallacy is fallacious due to the way it interacts with sane human values not ‘fear net negative’ craziness.)
Well, to start off, the reason I picked 50% is the belief that most people, had they not been born, would have been replaced by someone else. Slightly <50% of the world could expect, on average, to be replaced by someone better. (specifically, 0.5*[the proportion that would be replaced])
The reason I chose >50% is that I believe that the population at present is larger than the optimum population. I’m not sure by how much, but I suspect the optimum for our current technology level would be less than 1/3rd of our current population.
Would you like me to explain why I believe the population is above optimum?
I’m guessing you think the problem with mass murder is the effect on society of knowing that crazy people might kill you for doing things they don’t like, so that murder tends to be not simply a removal of human life, but a political act, a lynching.
Do you consider murdering a thousand people you don’t like to be better or worse than letting ten thousand randomly-selected people die because you can’t be arsed to do anything about it?
I’m guessing you think the problem with mass murder is the effect on society of knowing that crazy people might kill you for doing things they don’t like
Is that the only alternative to “The problem with mass murder is its effect on human population size” that you can think of? I always thought that the problem with mass murder was about the same as the problem with normal murder except multipled by a thousand or eleven million or however many victims there are.
I always thought that the problem with mass murder was about the same as the problem with normal murder except multipled by a thousand or eleven million or however many victims there are.
For a strict utilitarian, the main problem with non-torture murder can be seen as the fear it produces in the population.
Strict utilitarianism is quite common here, so guessing that wedrifid is one isn’t that much of a reach.
I don’t think “strict utilitarianism” refers to a specific, well-defined moral system, but my point still stands if you’re referring to the general class of moral systems and methods of moral reasoning that are popular here; involuntary death is bad, whether torturous or not, so killing ten million people is at least as bad as the sum of the individual badness of killing each of them. The “at least” part is to take into account any further negative effects of mass murder, such as the one that you mentioned, but compared to millions of people dying involuntarily, I really doubt that’s the dominating factor.
Well, I for one didn’t look at if from a deontological point of view. Unlike other victims of coercion, murdered people tend not to make much of a fuss about having been forced to die. However, their death tends to produce sorrow and anger on those emotionally and economically reliant on them (including their creditors, superiors, subordinates, clients) and causes the loss of a hub of social network and a repository of knowledge and skill accumulated over a lifetime. In other words, murder, for a stable, sedentary, densely structured society, is extremely wasteful and troublesome. And it leads to a shitton of paperwork. That’s for just one death.
However, from a Golden Rule/Reciprocal Altruism POV, committing murder is an extremely bad idea because, besides the aforementioned problems with each individual murder, the fact that people can get killed, for whatever reason, may make one fear for one’s safety among fellow humans ,raising stress levels to presumably unbearable heights and cause a limitless waste in resources in personal security, . Think of Israel-Palestine, where people constantly live in fear of being killed by some crazy suicide bomber or some trigger-happy teenage soldier. Despite what the actual risk of that happening might be compared to the risk of dying in a traffic accident, much more money ends up being spent on this sort of thing than on road safety. Car accidents, as the Joker would put it, are “all part of the plan”. I love how effectively that character uses The Dark Side and The Fallacy Of Grey. Does anyone know any examples of similarly eloquent villains? (Besides Nietzsche that is).
Hence why we are taught to heavily frown upon it.
A Mongol from Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde might see things differently, is all I’m saying. There are also countries like Colombia where murder is extremely common, and often absolutely senseless. Society functions, people get used to the fear. Humans can get used to a lot.
Deliberately murdering a mass of people causes the same effect
Do you consider murdering a thousand people you don’t like to be better or worse than letting ten thousand randomly-selected people die because you can’t be arsed to do anything about it?
I should not answer that question. But will(1). ;)
The murdering of 1,000 people is far better. Especially if done one at a time in novel and humiliating ways. That will serve to lower the status of the group with negative value and so alter the behaviour of the rest of the population. Of course this requires ‘liking’ to be closely related to the consequentialist value of people whose identities fit that archetype.
That said I still wouldn’t murder people. Partly due to an irrational sense of morality and partly due to an ethical injunction.
(1) This message will self destruct upon the first disingenuous quotation by a future social aggressor. Unless this pre-emptive expression of contempt for said moraliser is sufficient for me to be satisfied with leaving the results.
I don’t think that would make sense unless you could somehow accomplish it, not only without people knowing you were responsible for the murders, but that the deaths were murders at all. Otherwise rather than lowering the status of the group, you would probably make the public view them as noble victims.
I don’t think that would make sense unless you could somehow accomplish it, not only without people knowing you were responsible for the murders, but that the deaths were murders at all. Otherwise rather than lowering the status of the group, you would probably make the public view them as noble victims.
Here we disagree on a matter of fact and expectation. Historically in cases where specific groups were the target of lynchings the resulting lowering of group status has been rapid. Even members of said groups lower their perceptions of their own status such that they avoid sending high status signals (acting as equal to the persecutors) and so making themselves the next target.
The same phenomenon can be observed in workplaces and other tribes within our culture, with respect to acts of humiliation, not death. The others in the tribe may view them as noble victims but victims are pitied, not respected. People, particularly ambitious people, will avoid doing things that affiliate them with the victim class. Status goes into free-fall.
I did mention ‘one at a time’ and ‘in humiliating ways’ so as to minimise any potential martyrdom bonuses. Something terrible happening once is an exception, a tragedy. Something happening a thousand times is a norm, the status quoe. In a certain instinctive sense it becomes legitimate.
The presence of humilitation and even the fact that it is a murder, not a valiant death in battle is also important. If the victims are raped, castrated and stoned then they just don’t look as cool as if they charge into battle screaming “you may take my life but you will never take my freedom!” People at times have even placed a lot of stock in whether they are killed by the sword or by hanging—and for good status relevant reason.
Here we disagree on a matter of fact and expectation. Historically in cases where specific groups were the target of lynchings the resulting lowering of group status has been rapid. Even members of said groups lower their perceptions of their own status such that they avoid sending high status signals (acting as equal to the persecutors) and so making themselves the next target.
Can you provide any examples? I can’t think of any cases where groups were targeted for lynchings where it’s clear that their status fell as a result rather than their low status causing the lynchings.
You do have two tendencies working at odds here; the just world fallacy could cause their status to decrease, but being victimized for one’s affiliation can also be a positive status symbol, hence why Christians will often frame themselves as being persecuted for beliefs in cases where it’s clearly not accurate. If you have someone clearly going around victimizing the group to an extreme extent with the purpose of humiliating them, I expect the martyrdom effect would win out.
Can you provide any examples? I can’t think of any cases where groups were targeted for lynchings where it’s clear that their status fell as a result rather than their low status causing the lynchings.
Given that the obvious examples are well known I suspect you would simply contradict them via a different chronological representation. I will note this, however: the motivation to lynch people exists for a reason. People do it because it works.
If you have someone clearly going around victimizing the group to an extreme extent with the purpose of humiliating them, I expect the martyrdom effect would win out.
I believe with considerable confidence that the reverse is true. Humiliating and victimizing a group will lower the status of that group.
Given that the obvious examples are well known I suspect you would simply contradict them via a different chronological representation. I will note this, however: the motivation to lynch people exists for a reason. People do it because it works.
I can think of plenty of cases of members of low status groups being lynched, but I can’t think of any examples that would appear to indicate that lynching resulted in a decrease of status, so I’m honestly not sure what you’re talking about.
As for whether it works, it certainly works at killing or harming the victims, and if it didn’t do that, people wouldn’t bother doing it, but that doesn’t mean that it works at reducing status.
I haven’t seen them, but point taken. Am I right in assuming though, that they were deliberately built up as unsympathetic prior to being gruesomely killed? If you want to lower the group’s status, it’s that build up, where their characters are given a systematically negative portrayal, that you want to aim for, not the gruesome comeuppance.
Do you consider murdering a thousand people you don’t like to be better or worse than letting ten thousand randomly-selected people die because you can’t be arsed to do anything about it?
It ought to be better. None of the factors of either option (murder, don’t like, allow to die, randomly-selected, death due to apathy) are worth more than one human life. Thus, it is a simple question of scale. All the possible consequences—such as ‘now people will be afraid if I don’t like them’, ‘well, I can’t be held socially or legally responsible for their deaths’ - just do not outweigh 9,000 human lives.
That said, if I ever encountered this situation in real life, I would be immediately convinced that I had made a mistake in my reasoning, and would spend as much time as I possibly could looking for the alternative where nobody dies.
On the other hand, there’s the consolation that if and when you do cease to exist, you will no longer be bothered by fear of failure or anything else. You will have no regrets, no regrets at all.
I prefer to exist with regret and be bothered by the fear of failure than non-exist.
And besides, the universe isn’t me-centric. If I invented the cure to all human diseases, solved poverty and prevented the world from blowing up by nukes, I wouldn’t “die happy knowing what a positive impact I’ve had.” In the scope of things, there would be that person who’s me who did all that, and then ceased to exist.
Why does the net impact = zero part matter? Certainly the only thing that matters is how much total good there is, not how much was done by you. Even if it is, wouldn’t +1 QALY be just as much better than 0 as 0 is from −1 QALY?
Cessation of Existence is incompatible with the leading models of “standard physics” as presented at the level of core grad school physics classes. Now, I don’t entirely subscribe to those models but I do understand them well enough to have aced all my core theory classes (lab was a shameful B...) so I actually have ‘more weight’ to my claim here than it might appear. “Conservation of information” is absolutely a thing in “the Standard Model”, it is just that the information becomes non-localized and (in the Everett interpretation) spread across timelines. But the information that was “you” (using the model that seems standard on LW that ‘you’ are a collection of organized data) should, in theory, persist indefinitely into the future. Many authors subscribe to the idea that information conservation is /more/ fundamental than ‘the laws of physics as we know them’ and said information should then even survive transitions like symmetry breaking events, aka ‘changes in the laws of physics’ that might happen.
Now, whether that distributed information is ‘experiencing’ anything is arguable, but I can tell you that it is a theorem in quantum mechanics that physical information channels are in some sense symmetrical (again, there are variations which I think might be true that espouse breaks in this symmetry—but not in standard QM). This means you can’t say (in quantum information theory) “Collection of information A learns about collection of information B, but not vice versa”, only “Collections of information A and B become more entangled, in a quantifiable way”. So if you lean calculus or classical physics or alchemy or biblical chronology from readings derived from the collection of information called “Sir Isaac Newton”, then, if standard QM is valid, the collection of information called “Sir Isaac Newton” learns just as much about you, in real time!
Maybe Isaac Newton doesn’t /need/ a meat body any more; he’s uploaded as a continuous process into what David Bohm calls “the holomovement” and he influences the world every day, ask any freshman physics student about their homework problems and you’ll see his influence in action.
Note this is not mysticism or nonsense, this is Vanilla Quantum Mechanics. I’m not claiming that the current collection of information we call “Sir Isaac Newton” is experiencing a mode of consciousness like that of a meat human right now, but rather that the collection still exists and is interacting with the world at large, becoming more entangled with some collections and less entangled (by some measure) with others, even as the Newtonsphere, current around 371 light years in radius, continues to expand.
Note that the Gentle Reader of this piece might be a human, or an AI, or a Searles Chinese Room type entity, or something else. If you are a living meat human reading this (or a sim that thinks it’s a living meat human) you likely have some ‘memories’ pertaining to ‘coming into existence’ that date back less than two centuries. Unless you are like the author of this comment, you might not identify very hard with your 350-year-ago ‘self’, a collapsing ‘incoming’ wave of information that will eventually converge on your meat body and in some sense, supervise its construction and operation. There is no obligation to do so, and I predict with a moderate degree of confidence that people will consider you rather odd if you say things like “I am an immortal pattern of information in configuration space” but, to physicists of the ‘timeless physics’ school, that is pretty much what you appear to be. (I myself am happy to accept whatever self-definition you care to advertise to the world, so if you say “I am a human who did not exist before Month Day, Birthyear (or if RC, ConceptionYear)” I’m happy to accept that and say “This person is from a universe where the timeless formulation of quantum mechanics does not apply. How interesting.” rather than “This entity’s self-narrative is at variance with my very limited understanding of actual physics, so therefore THEY MUST BE CONFUSED, DELUDED, OR LYING and MY LIMITED KNOWLEDGE OF PHYSICS proves them to be so”.
So.. as a Standard Physical Human Body Expressed As A Process In Time. cessation of existence not only doesn’t scare me, it intrigues me, what would it be like to have that option? I have no idea how I would halt my evolution in the Schrodinger picture, or change my state vector in the Heisenberg (i.e. more or less timeless) picture.
I don’t really believe that standard QM is 100 percent correct, it seems unlikely that what I was taught in grad school is the Correct Final Theory (I think ‘nothing’ is the most likely CFT actually, like asking “What is the last integer?” (spoiler: it’s −1) because “there isn’t one”. However the usual thing to do on LW is to accept the current ’best known model of the laws of physics” as “tentatively true unless you’re explicitly speculating about fringe theories or future developments” and so I post this offering as “my understanding of what the best current consensus among physicists tells us about Cessation of Existence”.
Another time, if there is interest, I will discuss where new information seems to come from in a (multi? uni?)-verse where information is conserved, but that would be rambling.
That all being said, Cessation of Existence still does scare me and I want to avoid it, even if the best current physics indicates that it is actually impossible :) I’m also afraid of dragons materializing and challenging me to the Duel Draconic, which is almost equally improbable, but not quite impossible. (A quantum fluctuation of very low but distinctly non-zero probability could manifest as a draconic duelist gunning for me in my sensorium, according to standard QM, while the event described by “The Universe loses the collection of information that constitutes a given individual” has exactly zero probability, as it violates the premises of the system by which we calculate probabilities.
Cessation of Existence is incompatible with the leading models of “standard physics” as presented at the level of core grad school physics classes. Now, I don’t entirely subscribe to those models but I do understand them well enough to have aced all my core theory classes (lab was a shameful B...) so I actually have ‘more weight’ to my claim here than it might appear. “Conservation of information” is absolutely a thing in “the Standard Model”, it is just that the information becomes non-localized and (in the Everett interpretation) spread across timelines. But the information that was “you” (using the model that seems standard on LW that ‘you’ are a collection of organized data) should, in theory, persist indefinitely into the future.
Quantum information is a very different thing from what you’re thinking of as “information” (ie: data stored on a hard-disk or connection strengths in a neural net). For one thing, turning quantum information into “normal” information actually requires becoming entangled (in causal contact) with the quantum information, which is an entropic process. Particularly, the disequilibriating entropic process composing your consciousness is, you know, entropic, so it requires fresh sources of unentangled information and mechanical energy in order to operate (luckily, stored chemical energy in food can provide both).
Sorry for being vague; I wish I had the mathematical knowledge to explain this more clearly.
Cessation of Existence is incompatible with the leading models of “standard physics” as presented at the level of core grad school physics classes. [...] the information that was “you” (using the model that seems standard on LW that ‘you’ are a collection of organized data) should, in theory, persist indefinitely into the future. [...] Now, whether that distributed information is ‘experiencing’ anything is arguable,
As far as I know, the latter is what people are worrying about when they worry about ceasing to exist. While it’s true that their information would be still out there somewhere (so they still exist in that sense), they’d no longer be/have a conscious mind within any given branch (assuming MWI). Even if universal information obliteration is incompatible with physics, minds turning into non-minds is very much compatible with physics, and the latter is quite sufficient to disturb people. (Which is presumably a reason why your comment’s been downvoted a bunch; most readers would see it as missing the point.)
Edit: on reflection, “within any given branch” is too strong. Substitute “within almost any given branch” — I think my point still goes through.
Now, whether that distributed information is ‘experiencing’ anything is arguable,
As far as I know, the latter is what people are worrying about when they worry about ceasing to exist.
Ahhh… that never occurred to me. I was thinking entirely in terms of risk of data loss.
(Which is presumably a reason why your comment’s been downvoted a bunch; most readers would see it as missing the point.)
I don’t understand the voting rules or customs. Downvoting people who see things from a different perspective is… a custom designed to keep out the undesirables? I am sorry I missed the point but I learned nothing from the downvoting. I learned a great deal from your helpful comment—thank you.
I thought one of the points of the discussion was to promote learning among the readership.
Substitute “within almost any given branch” — I think my point still goes through.
Ah… see, that’s where I think the ‘lost’ minds are likely hiding out, in branches of infinitesimal measure.
Which might sound bad, unless you have read up on the anthropic principle and realize that /we/ seem to be residing on just such a branch. (Read up on the anthropic principle if our branch of the universal tree seems less than very improbable to you.)
I’m not worried that there won’t be a future branch that what passes for my consciousness (I’m a P-zombie, I think, so I have to say “what passes for”) will surivve on. I’m worried that some consciousnesses, equivalent in awareness to ‘me’ or better, might be trapped in very unpleasant branches. If “I ” am permanently trapped in an unpleasant branch, I absolutely do want my consciousness shut down if it’s not serving some wonderful purpose that I’m unaware of. If my suffering does serve such a purpose then I’m happy to think of myself as a utility mine, where external entities can come and mine for positive utilons as long as they get more positive utlions out of me than the negative utilons they leave me with.
My perceived utility function often goes negative. When that happens, I would be extremely tempted to kill my meat body if there were a guarantee it would extinguish my perceived consciousness permanently. That would be a huge reward to me in that frame of mind, not a loss. This may be why I don’t see these questions the way most people here do.
P.S. Is there a place the rating system is explained? I have looked casually and not found it with a few minutes of effort; it seems like it should be explained prominently somewhere. Are downgradings intended as a punitive training measure (“don’t post this! bad monkey!”) or just a guide to readers (don’t bother reading this, it’s drivel, by our community standards). I was assuming the latter.
My perceived utility function often goes negative. When that happens, I would be extremely tempted to kill my meat body if there were a guarantee it would extinguish my perceived consciousness permanently. That would be a huge reward to me in that frame of mind, not a loss. This may be why I don’t see these questions the way most people here do.
!
If (all that | most of what)’s keeping you from “killing your meat body” is that being no guarantee of permanent death, stay away from this community (because we’d probably convince you such perma-death would be the highly probable outcome) and seek professional help! Instead of puzzling over the karma system.
(Just to lay that question to rest, this is a diverse community and the downvote button means many things to many people. However, in general it’s less of “this is not my opinion, so I have to downvote this because this is not my opinion” than e.g. Reddit, and more of “this argument is flawed / this comment adds too much noise to the discussion”. You can assume that most people have a good reason to downvote, but that reason can stem from various considerations.)
stay away from this community
I responded to this suggestion but deleted the response as unsuitable because it might embarass you. I would be happy to email my reply if you are interested.
we’d probably convince you such perma-death would be the highly probable outcome
Try reading what I said in more detail in both the post I made that you quoted and my explanation of how there might be a set of worlds of very small measure. Then go read Eliezer Yudkowsky’s posts on Many Worlds (or crack a book by Deutsch or someone, or check Wikipedia.) Then reread the clause you published here which I just quoted above, and see if you still stand by it, or if you can see just how very silly it is. I don’t want to bother to try to explain things again that have already been very well explained on this site.
I am trying to communicate using local community standards of courtesy, it is difficult. I am used to a very different tone of discourse.
To add to Kawoomba’s comment, there isn’t a comprehensive voting rubric that pretty much everyone agrees on, but a rule of thumb which seemsrelativelypopular is to upvote what one wants more of and downvote what one wants less of. (Ideally one tries to be fair-minded about this, putting more weight on objective features of the post, like its correctness.)
Downvoting people who see things from a different perspective is… a custom designed to keep out the undesirables?
To a degree! Eliezer gave a rationale for this in “Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism”. Seeing things from a different perspective may be a good thing or a bad thing; it depends on the perspective. While some novel perspectives are productive and reveal powerful new insights, others are intellectual dead ends, and not a few of those are intellectual dead ends which have been discussed on Less Wrong multiple times before. When the latter rear their head for the nth time it can bring down the usefulness of the discussion here, in which case burying the conversation in downvotes can prove useful. (Quoting myself, “[s]ometimes the most efficient way to handle a crappy comment is to hit it with a downvote and move on, rather than getting bogged down in an argument.”)
I am sorry I missed the point but I learned nothing from the downvoting. I learned a great deal from your helpful comment—thank you.
No problem. The big upside of downvoting is that it’s far less work than having to explain what might be wrong with someone’s comment. (Instead of using introspection to pinpoint why my immediate reaction to your comment was “this seems like it’s missing the point”, then putting that belief into words, then adjusting what I wrote for brevity, clarity & politeness, then posting what I wrote, then reflecting on it, then editing in a correction, I could’ve just hit the little downward thumb.) The big downside of downvoting is that it communicates far less information than a verbal disagreement.
So when I encounter a comment that I think confuses things more than it clarifies things, I face a tradeoff; do I downvote and move on, at the risk of being opaque, or do I put in the time to articulate what’s wrong with it? I figured the second route was worth taking here because I didn’t see any of the usual warning signs that explaining my disagreement would be a waste of time: (1) you mentioned taking theoretical physics classes, so you weren’t one of those people who simply pontificates about a field they’re utterly ignorant of; (2) having studied physics, you probably had more of a reductionist, pro-empirical point of view than a goofy anti-reductionist and/or anti-empirical one; and (3) you don’t have a track record here of being unreceptive to disagreement.
Ah… see, that’s where I think the ‘lost’ minds are likely hiding out, in branches of infinitesimal measure. Which might sound bad, unless you have read up on the anthropic principle and realize that /we/ seem to be residing on just such a branch.
This sounds like reasoning I’ve detected in past discussions here of “quantum immortality”, “quantum suicide” and “Quantum Russian Roulette”, which runs along the lines of, “I can destroy myself in as many branches as I like, as long as I’m still standing in at least one branch, because in all the branches where I destroy myself I won’t be around to regret it”. This philosophy has never really felt right to me; if I die in branch A, the version of me in branch B may live on, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m still dead in branch A and no longer exert any influence on it, contrary to the preferences of the version of myself previously existing in branch A. (For that reason, I’m also not worried by the prospect of being trapped by quantum immortality in a torturous branch. It might be inevitable in the sense that I’ll have to experience it in at least one branch, but in any randomly selected branch my chance of escaping quantum immortal torment is nigh on 100%.)
P.S. Is there a place the rating system is explained? I have looked casually and not found it with a few minutes of effort; it seems like it should be explained prominently somewhere.
Are downgradings intended as a punitive training measure (“don’t post this! bad monkey!”) or just a guide to readers (don’t bother reading this, it’s drivel, by our community standards). I was assuming the latter.
Mostly, but it is also feedback to commenters. You have some latitude to interpret that feedback as you see fit, since downvotes don’t convey much beyond “a person didn’t like this”.
Note that I anticipate not Cessation of Existence but “occasional interruptions of my linear consciousness, which may last up till or beyond the Omega Point”, if the current leading models of physical law prove to be for real in the long run. One or more of these interruptions may look exactly like death to the naive observer, but since I’ve experienced many previous interruptions in consciousness without too much inconvenience, I expect I can get used to death as well.
That was one of the main things that held me (and, I guess, may others) back. That, and the promise of Hell (at least for Christians and Muslims).
No, really, Cessation Of Existence still scares the crap out of mem though I have accepted is as very very probable (barring the Singularity happening very soon). What about you guys?
In the mid- or late-morning, when I’m full of energy and eager to tackle the challenges and entertainments of the day, death looks like a terrible loss, a fun-stopper to be escaped at any cost.
Late at night, when my brain is exhausted and wavering, the bed is so warm and the silence blissful, never waking up again sounds like a fantastic deal.
I hope to die at night.
To the best of my knowledge, it is well with my soul. I enjoy living and seek to continue doing so- but when it comes to lifespan, I start at the present and count up rather than starting at infinity and counting down.
For me, the prospect of ceasing to exist has a calming effect. Not pleasant, as such. I certainly don’t want to die. But the thought that someday, I will not exist at all puts all the day-to-day stresses and worries and regrets into perspective.
There’s an old ‘symmetry argument’ to the effect that life is a thin sliver of light bounded on the one side by an eternity of non-existence before you were born, and on the other by an eternity of non-existence after you die. The suggestion is that one is no worse than the other.
The cessation of existence holds very little fear for me. Existence really isn’t all that great, so it ending wouldn’t be all that bad.
The one thing I fear about it is that it should happen before I manage to make my net impact on the world positive. I don’t want to be one of the >50% of the population that the world would have been better off without.
I fear failure, rather than death.
Hmm. If you are currently below net neutral impact, then continued existence is at least as important as improving your impact on the world. If you are currently above net neutral impact, you should probably end your existence as soon as feasible to ensure you don’t accidentally cause or contribute to some event that brings your net impact way down to negatives.
I don’t aim solely to have a net positive impact. I aim to have as large a net positive impact as possible. My fear is not the only contributing factor to my utility function.
So, if I prove capable of pulling out of the significant pit of negative impact I have produced during childhood and adolescence, I will hopefully not commit suicide until senility, when there is good reason to expect my impact to go negative again.*
*(I also have a couple of mental blocks that make me committing suicide unlikely. I haven’t attempted it since producing them, although their purpose was unrelated.)
Isn’t this just the Sunk Cost fallacy applied in reverse?
Not this time. According to the specified value system the approach is rational. (The sunk cost fallacy is fallacious due to the way it interacts with sane human values not ‘fear net negative’ craziness.)
Ah, right. I should have attended more carefully to context.
Why do you think >50% of people are net losses?
Well, to start off, the reason I picked 50% is the belief that most people, had they not been born, would have been replaced by someone else. Slightly <50% of the world could expect, on average, to be replaced by someone better. (specifically, 0.5*[the proportion that would be replaced])
The reason I chose >50% is that I believe that the population at present is larger than the optimum population. I’m not sure by how much, but I suspect the optimum for our current technology level would be less than 1/3rd of our current population.
Would you like me to explain why I believe the population is above optimum?
I would. Is it just the number, or is it the composition, or maybe the geographical distribution?
I understand your fear. In fact, I have the same fear.
I don’t agree that the world would be better off without 50% of it. If anything, it’s underpopulated.
There’s a reason why only way of doing worse than doing nothing is to be causing mass murders.
I would be interested in hearing your reasoning for this position.
As such I precommit to upvoting an explanatory post, no matter how much I disagree with its content.
And I commit to at least leaving it neutral even if I disagree with its content. And I will disagree. :)
I posted it into discussion, because it’s a long explanation.
Probably unnecessarily long. Do tell.
I don’t even claim to try to be rational (I’m not), so I’m not the one to judge, but at least try to keep an open mind?
Of course, I’d appreciate your feedback even if you do disagree.
True. Also, depends on how massive.
The problem with mass murders is not the effect on population.
I’m guessing you think the problem with mass murder is the effect on society of knowing that crazy people might kill you for doing things they don’t like, so that murder tends to be not simply a removal of human life, but a political act, a lynching.
Do you consider murdering a thousand people you don’t like to be better or worse than letting ten thousand randomly-selected people die because you can’t be arsed to do anything about it?
Is that the only alternative to “The problem with mass murder is its effect on human population size” that you can think of? I always thought that the problem with mass murder was about the same as the problem with normal murder except multipled by a thousand or eleven million or however many victims there are.
Is that the only alternative that you can think of?
No, of course not. I just thought it was the most likely to be the one e had in mind.
For a strict utilitarian, the main problem with non-torture murder can be seen as the fear it produces in the population.
Strict utilitarianism is quite common here, so guessing that wedrifid is one isn’t that much of a reach.
I don’t think “strict utilitarianism” refers to a specific, well-defined moral system, but my point still stands if you’re referring to the general class of moral systems and methods of moral reasoning that are popular here; involuntary death is bad, whether torturous or not, so killing ten million people is at least as bad as the sum of the individual badness of killing each of them. The “at least” part is to take into account any further negative effects of mass murder, such as the one that you mentioned, but compared to millions of people dying involuntarily, I really doubt that’s the dominating factor.
Well, I for one didn’t look at if from a deontological point of view. Unlike other victims of coercion, murdered people tend not to make much of a fuss about having been forced to die. However, their death tends to produce sorrow and anger on those emotionally and economically reliant on them (including their creditors, superiors, subordinates, clients) and causes the loss of a hub of social network and a repository of knowledge and skill accumulated over a lifetime. In other words, murder, for a stable, sedentary, densely structured society, is extremely wasteful and troublesome. And it leads to a shitton of paperwork. That’s for just one death.
However, from a Golden Rule/Reciprocal Altruism POV, committing murder is an extremely bad idea because, besides the aforementioned problems with each individual murder, the fact that people can get killed, for whatever reason, may make one fear for one’s safety among fellow humans ,raising stress levels to presumably unbearable heights and cause a limitless waste in resources in personal security, . Think of Israel-Palestine, where people constantly live in fear of being killed by some crazy suicide bomber or some trigger-happy teenage soldier. Despite what the actual risk of that happening might be compared to the risk of dying in a traffic accident, much more money ends up being spent on this sort of thing than on road safety. Car accidents, as the Joker would put it, are “all part of the plan”. I love how effectively that character uses The Dark Side and The Fallacy Of Grey. Does anyone know any examples of similarly eloquent villains? (Besides Nietzsche that is).
Hence why we are taught to heavily frown upon it.
A Mongol from Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde might see things differently, is all I’m saying. There are also countries like Colombia where murder is extremely common, and often absolutely senseless. Society functions, people get used to the fear. Humans can get used to a lot.
Deliberately murdering a mass of people causes the same effect
I should not answer that question. But will(1). ;)
The murdering of 1,000 people is far better. Especially if done one at a time in novel and humiliating ways. That will serve to lower the status of the group with negative value and so alter the behaviour of the rest of the population. Of course this requires ‘liking’ to be closely related to the consequentialist value of people whose identities fit that archetype.
That said I still wouldn’t murder people. Partly due to an irrational sense of morality and partly due to an ethical injunction.
(1) This message will self destruct upon the first disingenuous quotation by a future social aggressor. Unless this pre-emptive expression of contempt for said moraliser is sufficient for me to be satisfied with leaving the results.
I don’t think that would make sense unless you could somehow accomplish it, not only without people knowing you were responsible for the murders, but that the deaths were murders at all. Otherwise rather than lowering the status of the group, you would probably make the public view them as noble victims.
Here we disagree on a matter of fact and expectation. Historically in cases where specific groups were the target of lynchings the resulting lowering of group status has been rapid. Even members of said groups lower their perceptions of their own status such that they avoid sending high status signals (acting as equal to the persecutors) and so making themselves the next target.
The same phenomenon can be observed in workplaces and other tribes within our culture, with respect to acts of humiliation, not death. The others in the tribe may view them as noble victims but victims are pitied, not respected. People, particularly ambitious people, will avoid doing things that affiliate them with the victim class. Status goes into free-fall.
I did mention ‘one at a time’ and ‘in humiliating ways’ so as to minimise any potential martyrdom bonuses. Something terrible happening once is an exception, a tragedy. Something happening a thousand times is a norm, the status quoe. In a certain instinctive sense it becomes legitimate.
The presence of humilitation and even the fact that it is a murder, not a valiant death in battle is also important. If the victims are raped, castrated and stoned then they just don’t look as cool as if they charge into battle screaming “you may take my life but you will never take my freedom!” People at times have even placed a lot of stock in whether they are killed by the sword or by hanging—and for good status relevant reason.
Can you provide any examples? I can’t think of any cases where groups were targeted for lynchings where it’s clear that their status fell as a result rather than their low status causing the lynchings.
You do have two tendencies working at odds here; the just world fallacy could cause their status to decrease, but being victimized for one’s affiliation can also be a positive status symbol, hence why Christians will often frame themselves as being persecuted for beliefs in cases where it’s clearly not accurate. If you have someone clearly going around victimizing the group to an extreme extent with the purpose of humiliating them, I expect the martyrdom effect would win out.
Given that the obvious examples are well known I suspect you would simply contradict them via a different chronological representation. I will note this, however: the motivation to lynch people exists for a reason. People do it because it works.
I believe with considerable confidence that the reverse is true. Humiliating and victimizing a group will lower the status of that group.
Being a victim is not cool.
I can think of plenty of cases of members of low status groups being lynched, but I can’t think of any examples that would appear to indicate that lynching resulted in a decrease of status, so I’m honestly not sure what you’re talking about.
As for whether it works, it certainly works at killing or harming the victims, and if it didn’t do that, people wouldn’t bother doing it, but that doesn’t mean that it works at reducing status.
Fictional evidence, but the victims in the SAW movies weren’t seen as noble.
I haven’t seen them, but point taken. Am I right in assuming though, that they were deliberately built up as unsympathetic prior to being gruesomely killed? If you want to lower the group’s status, it’s that build up, where their characters are given a systematically negative portrayal, that you want to aim for, not the gruesome comeuppance.
Yes. The method of murder bore some (often ironic) link to flaws in the victim’s psyche or character.
It ought to be better. None of the factors of either option (murder, don’t like, allow to die, randomly-selected, death due to apathy) are worth more than one human life. Thus, it is a simple question of scale. All the possible consequences—such as ‘now people will be afraid if I don’t like them’, ‘well, I can’t be held socially or legally responsible for their deaths’ - just do not outweigh 9,000 human lives.
That said, if I ever encountered this situation in real life, I would be immediately convinced that I had made a mistake in my reasoning, and would spend as much time as I possibly could looking for the alternative where nobody dies.
On the other hand, there’s the consolation that if and when you do cease to exist, you will no longer be bothered by fear of failure or anything else. You will have no regrets, no regrets at all.
I prefer to exist with regret and be bothered by the fear of failure than non-exist.
And besides, the universe isn’t me-centric. If I invented the cure to all human diseases, solved poverty and prevented the world from blowing up by nukes, I wouldn’t “die happy knowing what a positive impact I’ve had.” In the scope of things, there would be that person who’s me who did all that, and then ceased to exist.
Why does the net impact = zero part matter? Certainly the only thing that matters is how much total good there is, not how much was done by you. Even if it is, wouldn’t +1 QALY be just as much better than 0 as 0 is from −1 QALY?
You can do something about that. At least for your own bubble.
Cessation of Existence is incompatible with the leading models of “standard physics” as presented at the level of core grad school physics classes. Now, I don’t entirely subscribe to those models but I do understand them well enough to have aced all my core theory classes (lab was a shameful B...) so I actually have ‘more weight’ to my claim here than it might appear. “Conservation of information” is absolutely a thing in “the Standard Model”, it is just that the information becomes non-localized and (in the Everett interpretation) spread across timelines. But the information that was “you” (using the model that seems standard on LW that ‘you’ are a collection of organized data) should, in theory, persist indefinitely into the future. Many authors subscribe to the idea that information conservation is /more/ fundamental than ‘the laws of physics as we know them’ and said information should then even survive transitions like symmetry breaking events, aka ‘changes in the laws of physics’ that might happen.
Now, whether that distributed information is ‘experiencing’ anything is arguable, but I can tell you that it is a theorem in quantum mechanics that physical information channels are in some sense symmetrical (again, there are variations which I think might be true that espouse breaks in this symmetry—but not in standard QM). This means you can’t say (in quantum information theory) “Collection of information A learns about collection of information B, but not vice versa”, only “Collections of information A and B become more entangled, in a quantifiable way”. So if you lean calculus or classical physics or alchemy or biblical chronology from readings derived from the collection of information called “Sir Isaac Newton”, then, if standard QM is valid, the collection of information called “Sir Isaac Newton” learns just as much about you, in real time!
Maybe Isaac Newton doesn’t /need/ a meat body any more; he’s uploaded as a continuous process into what David Bohm calls “the holomovement” and he influences the world every day, ask any freshman physics student about their homework problems and you’ll see his influence in action.
Note this is not mysticism or nonsense, this is Vanilla Quantum Mechanics. I’m not claiming that the current collection of information we call “Sir Isaac Newton” is experiencing a mode of consciousness like that of a meat human right now, but rather that the collection still exists and is interacting with the world at large, becoming more entangled with some collections and less entangled (by some measure) with others, even as the Newtonsphere, current around 371 light years in radius, continues to expand.
Note that the Gentle Reader of this piece might be a human, or an AI, or a Searles Chinese Room type entity, or something else. If you are a living meat human reading this (or a sim that thinks it’s a living meat human) you likely have some ‘memories’ pertaining to ‘coming into existence’ that date back less than two centuries. Unless you are like the author of this comment, you might not identify very hard with your 350-year-ago ‘self’, a collapsing ‘incoming’ wave of information that will eventually converge on your meat body and in some sense, supervise its construction and operation. There is no obligation to do so, and I predict with a moderate degree of confidence that people will consider you rather odd if you say things like “I am an immortal pattern of information in configuration space” but, to physicists of the ‘timeless physics’ school, that is pretty much what you appear to be. (I myself am happy to accept whatever self-definition you care to advertise to the world, so if you say “I am a human who did not exist before Month Day, Birthyear (or if RC, ConceptionYear)” I’m happy to accept that and say “This person is from a universe where the timeless formulation of quantum mechanics does not apply. How interesting.” rather than “This entity’s self-narrative is at variance with my very limited understanding of actual physics, so therefore THEY MUST BE CONFUSED, DELUDED, OR LYING and MY LIMITED KNOWLEDGE OF PHYSICS proves them to be so”.
So.. as a Standard Physical Human Body Expressed As A Process In Time. cessation of existence not only doesn’t scare me, it intrigues me, what would it be like to have that option? I have no idea how I would halt my evolution in the Schrodinger picture, or change my state vector in the Heisenberg (i.e. more or less timeless) picture.
I don’t really believe that standard QM is 100 percent correct, it seems unlikely that what I was taught in grad school is the Correct Final Theory (I think ‘nothing’ is the most likely CFT actually, like asking “What is the last integer?” (spoiler: it’s −1) because “there isn’t one”. However the usual thing to do on LW is to accept the current ’best known model of the laws of physics” as “tentatively true unless you’re explicitly speculating about fringe theories or future developments” and so I post this offering as “my understanding of what the best current consensus among physicists tells us about Cessation of Existence”.
Another time, if there is interest, I will discuss where new information seems to come from in a (multi? uni?)-verse where information is conserved, but that would be rambling.
That all being said, Cessation of Existence still does scare me and I want to avoid it, even if the best current physics indicates that it is actually impossible :) I’m also afraid of dragons materializing and challenging me to the Duel Draconic, which is almost equally improbable, but not quite impossible. (A quantum fluctuation of very low but distinctly non-zero probability could manifest as a draconic duelist gunning for me in my sensorium, according to standard QM, while the event described by “The Universe loses the collection of information that constitutes a given individual” has exactly zero probability, as it violates the premises of the system by which we calculate probabilities.
Quantum information is a very different thing from what you’re thinking of as “information” (ie: data stored on a hard-disk or connection strengths in a neural net). For one thing, turning quantum information into “normal” information actually requires becoming entangled (in causal contact) with the quantum information, which is an entropic process. Particularly, the disequilibriating entropic process composing your consciousness is, you know, entropic, so it requires fresh sources of unentangled information and mechanical energy in order to operate (luckily, stored chemical energy in food can provide both).
Sorry for being vague; I wish I had the mathematical knowledge to explain this more clearly.
As far as I know, the latter is what people are worrying about when they worry about ceasing to exist. While it’s true that their information would be still out there somewhere (so they still exist in that sense), they’d no longer be/have a conscious mind within any given branch (assuming MWI). Even if universal information obliteration is incompatible with physics, minds turning into non-minds is very much compatible with physics, and the latter is quite sufficient to disturb people. (Which is presumably a reason why your comment’s been downvoted a bunch; most readers would see it as missing the point.)
Edit: on reflection, “within any given branch” is too strong. Substitute “within almost any given branch” — I think my point still goes through.
Ahhh… that never occurred to me. I was thinking entirely in terms of risk of data loss.
I don’t understand the voting rules or customs. Downvoting people who see things from a different perspective is… a custom designed to keep out the undesirables? I am sorry I missed the point but I learned nothing from the downvoting. I learned a great deal from your helpful comment—thank you.
I thought one of the points of the discussion was to promote learning among the readership.
Ah… see, that’s where I think the ‘lost’ minds are likely hiding out, in branches of infinitesimal measure. Which might sound bad, unless you have read up on the anthropic principle and realize that /we/ seem to be residing on just such a branch. (Read up on the anthropic principle if our branch of the universal tree seems less than very improbable to you.)
I’m not worried that there won’t be a future branch that what passes for my consciousness (I’m a P-zombie, I think, so I have to say “what passes for”) will surivve on. I’m worried that some consciousnesses, equivalent in awareness to ‘me’ or better, might be trapped in very unpleasant branches. If “I ” am permanently trapped in an unpleasant branch, I absolutely do want my consciousness shut down if it’s not serving some wonderful purpose that I’m unaware of. If my suffering does serve such a purpose then I’m happy to think of myself as a utility mine, where external entities can come and mine for positive utilons as long as they get more positive utlions out of me than the negative utilons they leave me with.
My perceived utility function often goes negative. When that happens, I would be extremely tempted to kill my meat body if there were a guarantee it would extinguish my perceived consciousness permanently. That would be a huge reward to me in that frame of mind, not a loss. This may be why I don’t see these questions the way most people here do.
P.S. Is there a place the rating system is explained? I have looked casually and not found it with a few minutes of effort; it seems like it should be explained prominently somewhere. Are downgradings intended as a punitive training measure (“don’t post this! bad monkey!”) or just a guide to readers (don’t bother reading this, it’s drivel, by our community standards). I was assuming the latter.
!
If (all that | most of what)’s keeping you from “killing your meat body” is that being no guarantee of permanent death, stay away from this community (because we’d probably convince you such perma-death would be the highly probable outcome) and seek professional help! Instead of puzzling over the karma system.
(Just to lay that question to rest, this is a diverse community and the downvote button means many things to many people. However, in general it’s less of “this is not my opinion, so I have to downvote this because this is not my opinion” than e.g. Reddit, and more of “this argument is flawed / this comment adds too much noise to the discussion”. You can assume that most people have a good reason to downvote, but that reason can stem from various considerations.)
Try reading what I said in more detail in both the post I made that you quoted and my explanation of how there might be a set of worlds of very small measure. Then go read Eliezer Yudkowsky’s posts on Many Worlds (or crack a book by Deutsch or someone, or check Wikipedia.) Then reread the clause you published here which I just quoted above, and see if you still stand by it, or if you can see just how very silly it is. I don’t want to bother to try to explain things again that have already been very well explained on this site.
I am trying to communicate using local community standards of courtesy, it is difficult. I am used to a very different tone of discourse.
To add to Kawoomba’s comment, there isn’t a comprehensive voting rubric that pretty much everyone agrees on, but a rule of thumb which seems relatively popular is to upvote what one wants more of and downvote what one wants less of. (Ideally one tries to be fair-minded about this, putting more weight on objective features of the post, like its correctness.)
To a degree! Eliezer gave a rationale for this in “Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism”. Seeing things from a different perspective may be a good thing or a bad thing; it depends on the perspective. While some novel perspectives are productive and reveal powerful new insights, others are intellectual dead ends, and not a few of those are intellectual dead ends which have been discussed on Less Wrong multiple times before. When the latter rear their head for the nth time it can bring down the usefulness of the discussion here, in which case burying the conversation in downvotes can prove useful. (Quoting myself, “[s]ometimes the most efficient way to handle a crappy comment is to hit it with a downvote and move on, rather than getting bogged down in an argument.”)
No problem. The big upside of downvoting is that it’s far less work than having to explain what might be wrong with someone’s comment. (Instead of using introspection to pinpoint why my immediate reaction to your comment was “this seems like it’s missing the point”, then putting that belief into words, then adjusting what I wrote for brevity, clarity & politeness, then posting what I wrote, then reflecting on it, then editing in a correction, I could’ve just hit the little downward thumb.) The big downside of downvoting is that it communicates far less information than a verbal disagreement.
So when I encounter a comment that I think confuses things more than it clarifies things, I face a tradeoff; do I downvote and move on, at the risk of being opaque, or do I put in the time to articulate what’s wrong with it? I figured the second route was worth taking here because I didn’t see any of the usual warning signs that explaining my disagreement would be a waste of time: (1) you mentioned taking theoretical physics classes, so you weren’t one of those people who simply pontificates about a field they’re utterly ignorant of; (2) having studied physics, you probably had more of a reductionist, pro-empirical point of view than a goofy anti-reductionist and/or anti-empirical one; and (3) you don’t have a track record here of being unreceptive to disagreement.
This sounds like reasoning I’ve detected in past discussions here of “quantum immortality”, “quantum suicide” and “Quantum Russian Roulette”, which runs along the lines of, “I can destroy myself in as many branches as I like, as long as I’m still standing in at least one branch, because in all the branches where I destroy myself I won’t be around to regret it”. This philosophy has never really felt right to me; if I die in branch A, the version of me in branch B may live on, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m still dead in branch A and no longer exert any influence on it, contrary to the preferences of the version of myself previously existing in branch A. (For that reason, I’m also not worried by the prospect of being trapped by quantum immortality in a torturous branch. It might be inevitable in the sense that I’ll have to experience it in at least one branch, but in any randomly selected branch my chance of escaping quantum immortal torment is nigh on 100%.)
The FAQ on the wiki has a short section about it.
Mostly, but it is also feedback to commenters. You have some latitude to interpret that feedback as you see fit, since downvotes don’t convey much beyond “a person didn’t like this”.
Note that I anticipate not Cessation of Existence but “occasional interruptions of my linear consciousness, which may last up till or beyond the Omega Point”, if the current leading models of physical law prove to be for real in the long run. One or more of these interruptions may look exactly like death to the naive observer, but since I’ve experienced many previous interruptions in consciousness without too much inconvenience, I expect I can get used to death as well.
Also: right parenthesis that follows is not unmatched, but closes the left parenthesis from my first comment in this thread. )