You know the second causal link exists, because you’ve previously observed the general law implementing links of that type—previously observed that objects continue to exist and do not violate Conservation of Energy by spontaneously vanishing.
False, I have never observed that objects don’t spontaneously vanish when they’re out of my range.
I mean something different by “out of my range” than “out of my direct sensory experiences”. I mean more that they’re such that I can never have experiences from which I can deduce the existence of those other objects out of my sensory experiences. I do believe that objects outside of my sensory experience exist, but I don’t believe that objects which are so far away I can never interact with them either directly or indirectly exist. If they do exist, they don’t do so in any meaningful way.
Your beloved daughter tells you she wants to leave on a ship to found a colony outside your future cone. I claim that there is a meaningful difference between “She’ll keep existing, so it’s sad I’ll never see her again but I’m proud she’s following a cool dream” and “She’ll pop out of existence, why does my daughter want to die?”.
Nope. The outcome is functionally the same to me either way. I can’t tell the difference between whether she died on the verge of the cone, or if she made it out and lived forever, or if she made it out and died two days later. Therefore the difference is meaningless. People are only meaningful to me insofar as I can interact with them (directly or indirectly), otherwise they’re just abstract ideas with no predictive power.
Suppose that your daughter is leaving tomorrow and scheduled to cross your horizon next week. (It’s a fast ship.) I offer you a hundred dollars if you inject her with a poison that will remain inactive for a month, then kill her instantly and painlessly.
If your daughter was going to stay around, you would refuse: you prefer your daughter’s life to a hundred dollars. If Omega had promised to kill your daughter next week, you would accept: it will never affect your daughter, and you like having a hundred dollars.
You would refuse either way if you enjoy the fact that your daughter is alive, because she would not cease to exist to her own senses, only yours. Only if your sole reason for preferring her to be alive is to interact with you personally, then you would accept the offer, also assuming that you do not fear social repercussions for your decision.
I had an interesting conversation with my own daughter when she was 9 about being put into a virtual reality machine and whether it mattered if her friends outside the machine died as long as they were real and alive to her senses in the machine. She said she would be fine with that only if the machine could rewrite her pre-machine memories to erase any guilt.
What I’m saying is that although I enjoy the fact that my daughter is alive, that’s because my intuitions are broken. It’s more that I enjoy the idea of my daughter being alive than it is that I actually think she is alive. Poisoning her would make it harder for me to imagine her as alive, which is why my intuitions say I shouldn’t poison her. But I think those intuitions don’t correspond to reality.
The fact that you prefer this is not evidence for your claims about reality.
As a matter of fact it is. It just isn’t evidence anywhere near as strong those that have already been talked to death at various times on this site, most notably here.
In general, as all of reality is entangled with itself, it’s pretty rare for something to be precisely zero evidence for any hypothesis—it would indicate that P(H|E)=P(H|~E) which is by itself a very specific point in probability space—it’s much more common for something to be so weak evidence that for all practical purposes a person wouldn’t know how to evaluate impact and/or would be wasting time to attempt to do so...
E.g. “The baby I’m thinking of was born on a rainy day. Is this evidence for or against the baby being named ‘Alex’ ?”.
A really intelligent and informed agent would be able to correlate the average raininess of various regions in the world with the likelihood of the child being named Alex in said region, and thus the raininess would be evidence for the baby’s name...
In that case, the fact that I believe something different than wedrifid is evidence against his point.
Wedrifid’s preferences aren’t literally zero percent evidence for his view of the universe, but they’re probably less than one in a googol. My overall point is pretty clear. The nitpicking is annoying, and it seems to me like it’s being done because people don’t want to change their beliefs.
Your argument doesn’t really make sense. You say that although agents might not know how to evaluate the probability of an action’s occurrence, the evidence is still unlikely to be perfectly balanced. But probabilities are subjective, and so the fact that you don’t know how to evaluate a piece of evidence indicates that for all functional purposes the evidence is perfectly balanced.
Generally agreeing with your point—it is nitpicking. Still it may be good practice to remember to say and think “that’s not usable evidence” instead of “that’s not evidence”.
It’s ridiculously weak. Even mentioning it is an inefficient use of time and cognitive resources.
To elaborate a little bit more, humans believe all sorts of stuff that is dumb. I don’t have any particular reason to believe you’re invulnerable to this. I think that your arguments about the implied invisible don’t pay rent, and they complicate the way that I define things as real or unreal, so they’re not worth believing in. Your attempt to use emotionally laden thought experiments instead of real arguments about epistemology furthers my skepticism about your beliefs. The fact that you insist on using your own preferences as evidence for their justification makes your credibility go even lower, because that evidence is so obviously weak that the only reason you would mention it is if you’re extremely biased. Mentioning it is a waste of time; I get no predictive power out of the belief in my daughter who I will never see again.
You might as well argue for the weak existence of an afterlife by saying that you prefer the idea that your daughter still exists somewhere. I suppose that this should make me update my probability that there’s an afterlife by about one in a googol, but it’s also pretty clear that you’re privileging a hypothesis that doesn’t deserve it.
I think that your arguments about the implied invisible don’t pay rent
Eliezers, not mine. And they may not “Pay Rent” but they do, evidently, stand between you and the murdering of your siblings. They also constitute a strictly simpler model for reality than the one you advocate.
Your attempt to use emotionally laden thought experiments
Again, not my attempt, it was multiple other people who were all patiently trying to explain the concepts in a way you might understand.
instead of real arguments about epistemology furthers my skepticism about your beliefs.
The arguments were real. They are what you rejected in the previous sentence. This may or may not mean you actually read them.
The fact that you insist on using your own preferences as evidence for their justification makes your credibility go even lower, because that evidence is so obviously weak that the only reason you would mention it is if you’re extremely biased.
I wasn’t, and I included careful disclaimers to that effect in both comments. I was merely making an incidental technical correction regarding misuse of the word ‘evidence’. You made a point of separating your “intuitive judgement” from your abstract far-mode ideals. When people do this it isn’t always the case that the abstract idealized reasoning is the correct part. I often find that people’s intuitions have better judgement—and that is what I see occurring here. Your intuitions were correct and also happen to be the side of you that is safer to be around without risk of being murdered.
Mentioning it is a waste of time; I get no predictive power out of the belief in my daughter who I will never see again.
Fortunately, current engineering technology is such that your particular brand existence-denial does not pose an imminent threat. As has been mentioned, if we reached the stage where we were capable of significant interstellar travel this kind of thing does start to matter. If there were still people who believed that things magically disappeared once they were sufficiently far enough away from that person then such individuals would need to be restrained by force or otherwise prevented from taking actions that they sincerely believe would not be murder—in the same way that any other murder attempt is prevented if possible.
Eliezers, not mine. And they may not “Pay Rent” but they do, evidently, stand between you and the murdering of your siblings. They also constitute a strictly simpler model for reality than the one you advocate.
Stop begging the question / appealing to emotion. Also, if you’re bringing up Eliezers arguments, then defend them yourself. Don’t hide behind his authority and pretend that you’re not responsible for the words you speak.
This model requires me to waste cognitive space on things that are the same whether or not they’re true. I don’t understand why you believe that it is any simpler to assert that things beyond the Cosmological Horizon exist than it is to assert that they do not. I think the best answer is to say that the concept of existence itself is only worthwhile in some cases; my approach is more pragmatic than yours.
Why should I care whether or not my daughter is dead or alive if I can’t experience her either way? She is just as abstract either way. I don’t understand why you keep thinking that this sort of argument is a knock-down argument.
Again, not my attempt, it was multiple other people who were all patiently trying to explain the concepts in a way you might understand.
I understand the concepts, but I disagree with them. People should stop bringing them up unless they present sold epistemic arguments for their belief. Examples about the daughter just make things more confusing. And you’ve clearly been saying that my intuitions are wrong, don’t try to back out of that now.
The arguments were real. They are what you rejected in the previous sentence. This may or may not mean you actually read them.
Thought experiments are not arguments. They beg the question and muddle the issue with unjustified intuitions.
I wasn’t, and I included careful disclaimers to that effect in both comments. I was merely making an incidental technical correction regarding misuse of the word ‘evidence’. You made a point of separating your “intuitive judgement” from your abstract far-mode ideals. When people do this it isn’t always the case that the abstract idealized reasoning is the correct part. I often find that people’s intuitions have better judgement—and that is what I see occurring here. Your intuitions were correct and also happen to be the side of you that is safer to be around without risk of being murdered.
In other words, 1. you nitpicked instead of making a substantive point 2. you asserted that my intuitions were incorrect.
Fortunately, current engineering technology is such that your particular brand existence-denial does not pose an imminent threat. As has been mentioned, if we reached the stage where we were capable of significant interstellar travel this kind of thing does start to matter. If there were still people who believed that things magically disappeared once they were sufficiently far enough away from that person then such individuals would need to be restrained by force or otherwise prevented from taking actions that they sincerely believe would not be murder—in the same way that any other murder attempt is prevented if possible.
This matters in the same way that the possible existence of an invisible afterlife matters.
I notice I am very confused. Are you some form of solipsist? Do you endorse selfishness? Or believe that “altruism” just means “I care about my own mental state of believing my decisions make others happy”?
Does that apply only to people you can’t interact with in principle, or to everyone you don’t interact with? E.g., if I tell you “Someone on the other side of the planet is being tortured, if you press this button a rescue team will be sent”, do you pay $1 to get access to the button, or do you stare at me blankly and say “I’ll never meet this ‘victim’ or ‘rescue team’, they don’t meaningfully exist.” and go donate to a charity that sends donors pictures of the kids they’ve helped?
I notice I am very confused. Are you some form of solipsist? Do you endorse selfishness? Or believe that “altruism” just means “I care about my own mental state of believing my decisions make others happy”?
I’m a solipsist in the sense that I don’t think it makes sense to believe in things that I can’t see or touch or hear or deduce the existence of from things that I can see or touch or hear. That seems like realism, to me. It involves solipsist elements only insofar as existence isn’t an absolute state but is amenable to probabilities, as a consequence of the fact that probabilities are fundamentally subjective, as is evidence.
I endorse a broad form of selfishness. It makes me happy to make others happy or to see others happy or to know that my actions made others happy. I don’t really care to define altruism right now. I don’t think that will be relevant?
I have a broad definition of interaction in mind here. If they connect to me through a chain of variables, then that is interaction. I think the more direct the chain the more interaction that is and the more valuable the person becomes, this is why I care more for family members than people in other universes who I will never meet. So, I will interact with the victim and rescue team, under my understanding of interaction. And $1 is cheap. So I help them.
You can prefer that state, sure. But that doesn’t mean that it is an accurate reflection of reality. The abstract idea of my daughters existence beyond the light cone is comforting, and would make me happy. But the abstract idea of my daughters existence in heaven is also comforting and would make me happy. I wish it were true that she existed. But I don’t believe things just because they would be nice to believe.
This is what I meant when I said that thought experiments were a bad way to think about these things. You’ve confused values and epistemology as a result of the ludicrously abstract nature of this discussion and the emotionally charged thought experiment that I had thrust upon me.
I am not saying, “You value her continued existence, therefore you should believe in it.” I am rather saying that your values may extend to things you do not (and will not, ever) know about, and therefore it may be necessary to make estimations about likelihoods of things that you do not (and will not, ever) know about. In this case, the epistemological work is being done by an assumption of regularity and a non-privileging of your particular position in the physical laws of the universe, which make it seem more likely that there is not anything special about crossing your light cone as opposed to just moving somewhere else where she will happen to have no communication with you in the future.
I am rather saying that your values may extend to things you do not (and will not, ever) know about, and therefore it may be necessary to make estimations about likelihoods of things that you do not (and will not, ever) know about.
It seems like a waste of time to think about things I can’t ever know about. It seems like make-believe to place objective value on the existence of things that I’ll never be able to experience or interact with. I don’t understand why I should care about things that I will never ever know or experience. My values are broken insofar as they lead me to value abstract concepts in and of themselves, as opposed to physical things that I can interact with.
I’d like to point out that my interpretation means I’ll fight like hell to keep my daughter inside my light-cone, because I don’t want to lose her. Your interpretation means you’ll be content with the idea of your daughters existence in the abstract, and to me that’s no different than belief in an afterlife. I point this out because I think the initial example emphasizes the “downsides” to my position while ignoring any corresponding “upsides” that it might entail.
In this case, the epistemological work is being done by an assumption of regularity and a non-privileging of your particular position in the physical laws of the universe, which make it seem more likely that there is not anything special about crossing your light cone as opposed to just moving somewhere else where she will happen to have no communication with you in the future.
I thought about this. It turns out I’ve been using a modified version of Hume’s problem of induction as the basis for my argument, in the back of my head. When it comes to real life and my future, I’m willing to temporarily discard the problem of induction because doing so brings me rewards. When it comes to things beyond my light cone and my experiences, I’m not, because there is no such reward and never could be.
In other words, I have a heuristic in my head that says paradoxes only go away when it is pragmatic to ignore them, because otherwise you sacrifice mental accuracy. This heuristic means that I’m not willing to discard the problem of induction when it comes to experiences and existences beyond my range of interaction.
Hopefully that makes my position clearer to you. It’s not that I’m privileging my own position; it’s that my position is the only one I have to work from and that I have no idea how things would work outside my light cone.
False, I have never observed that objects don’t spontaneously vanish when they’re out of my range.
A convenient implication of the “things past the Cosmological Horizon don’t exist anymore” belief occurs to me. All it takes to utterly annihilate any enemy you have is a fast ship. Fly as fast as you can away from them and poof, you’ve caused them to cease to exist! The “Ignore Them And They Will Go Away For Real” doomsday device.
You’re trying to come up with examples of my belief that seem silly, instead of focusing on rational arguments. You’re so focused on this goal that you ignore that flying beyond the Cosmological Horizon solves your problem even under your interpretation. If your enemies can never get you ever again, then isn’t it safe to say you’ve ended the war? Why would you be upset that your enemies exist somewhere in some other impossibly far away region of the galaxy, how would this be any different than having destroyed them or banished them to a different dimension?
The desire for vengeance has always seemed like another broken intuition to me. It increases the probability that someone will act on sunk costs. If you meant to talk about punishment as deterrence aimed at stopping bad actions from occurring, then flying away arguably achieves this end by making their bad actions cease to exist from your reference point. According to other views, it doesn’t. That would bring us back to the initial conflict.
My larger point is that we shouldn’t try using thought experiments or examples on things like this because they sneak moral and metaphysical assumptions into the argument without justifying those assumptions, and they also increase the prevalence of emotional biases. Although his specific example fails to help his point, and although it fails to help mine, I think that using any examples at all on problems like this should be avoided as much as possible.
Lightcone only makes sense as a concept if FTL is impossible. If impossible, you can never get far enough away to get the enemy outside your lightcone (without cooperation from your enemy). If possible, the limit of what you could ever see / interact with is unconnected from speed of light.
If FTL is impossible, then so is your travel-to-get-enemy-out-of-lightcone scenario.
No. This is actually a curious feature of living on an expanding universe. If you travel far enough away from something the expansion will be sufficient for light to be unable to reach it. My future light cone as of {now} actually contains things that my future light cone as of {now} does not. The status of the matter that has been taken out of our reach like that is the focus of the discussion.
Ok, I’ve thought about it, and I’m still confused about the terminology.
Suppose Alice and Bob agree to try to escape each other’s lightcone—so they start traveling away from each other at .5c (relative to the resting frame they started in). I’m a lawyer and can’t do the transformations, but I know that the speed Alice perceives Bob traveling at is less than c—let’s call that speed X.
If Alice breaks the agreement, turns around, and starts traveling towards Bob at a speed greater than X (relative to the mutual starting frame), she’ll eventually catch up with Bob.
Given that, either (a) I’ve made a mistake about how relativity works, or (b) it seems impossible for Bob to get outside of Alice’s lightcone. Please help.
You forgot that space itself is expanding. In theory, it’s possible for Alice and Bob to travel far enough apart that the space between them expands faster than light, meaning the distance between them continues to increase even if they travel toward each other at the speed of light.
Isn’t that violating the lightspeed limit? As you describe it, there’s a frame of reference in which Alice and Bob are moving away from each other faster than the photons they are traveling near.
The lightspeed limit is a local notion. Something whizzing by you cannot be clocked to travel at or faster than light, but there is no clear definition of the relative velocity of two spatially separated objects in a curved spacetime.
Putting this here to help passers-by. My basic confusion appears to have been caused by not realizing that the universe is stretching. Thus, we aren’t in an inertial frame with respect to other galaxies.
Inertial frame is a local notion, as well, so “inertial frame with respect to other galaxies” is not a meaningful statement. In GR inertial frame is generalized to a geodesic. There is also the concept of comoving frame, that in which the expansion rate looks the same in all directions.
It’s not so much ‘violating’ the lightspeed limit as laughing in its face because it isn’t constrained by it. Stuff within space travels at or less than the speed of light, space itself can do as it pleases (as determined by weirder stuff than just special relativity).
As you describe it, there’s a frame of reference in which Alice and Bob are moving away from each other faster than the photons they are traveling near.
I’m not sure on the appropriate terminology here. Do they call it “moving away from” when neither thing has moved but have simply become further away from due to space changing?
I guess the second {now} was supposed to be {later} or something?
No, if spoken the temporally separated ’now’s would be spoken such that it was obvious to the speaker that it was referring to the time between the first mark and the second mark—about a second and a half I’d guess. Similar to the usage when syncronyzing watches with “12:30 as of… now”. I had expected the formatting to convey to most readers a similar message but for reading—so a bit under a second. But not all readers have the same intuitions regarding ad hoc markup.
You have observed that objects tend conserve energy. You have also observed that the cosmological horizon isn’t absolute, but is in fact centered on you. You have also observed that time is symmetric (charge and parity flipped). You have observed that a model of the universe without any absolute coordinates is more likely. Thus we induce that were you put on a spaceship, you would never cross the cosmological horizon, from your own point of view. Similarly it is very likely that some other person would have the same experiences.
You have observed that objects tend conserve energy.
Objects inside the cosmological horizon are the ones I observe tend to conserve energy.
You have also observed that the cosmological horizon isn’t absolute, but is in fact centered on you.
I think you said this backwards, or else I don’t know what you mean by saying the horizon is centered on me.
You have also observed that time is symmetric (charge and parity flipped).
I don’t know what you mean by this.
You have observed that a model of the universe without any absolute coordinates is more likely.
Your terminology is unfamiliar to me.
Thus we induce that were you put on a spaceship, you would never cross the cosmological horizon, from your own point of view.
I’m uncertain how we induce this from the previous statements.
Similarly it is very likely that some other person would have the same experiences.
I can’t agree to this statement until I understand the ones previous to it.
My overall impression of your arguments is that you made the same argument over again, just using more complicated terminology and breaking it down into smaller parts. I think my initial line of argument stands against this sort of attack. Everything that I know is derived from my experiences. By definition I cannot have had experiences or been effected by things outside the cosmological horizon. Therefore I cannot know anything about what happens outside the cosmological horizon.
Things don’t exist in any meaningful sense except a relational one. Yudkowsky’s arguments here seem reminiscent of certain Kantian concepts or of Plato’s idea of eternal forms, and those sort of arguments have always annoyed me. It’s useless to make predictions or judgements about things that you will never encounter in any way. I don’t understand why it’s so important to Yudkowsky to insist that we can know things about the universe external to ourselves. Even if we could, so what? Why would I even care?
You have observed that objects tend conserve energy.
Objects inside the cosmological horizon are the ones I observe tend to conserve energy.
Yes, exactly.
You have also observed that the cosmological horizon isn’t absolute, but is in fact centered on you.
I think you said this backwards, or else I don’t know what you mean by saying the horizon is centered on me.
The cosmological horizon is defined in terms of a distance from a given observer. It is the distance beyond which you cannot observe anything, due to the expansion of the universe.
You have also observed that time is symmetric (charge and parity flipped).
I don’t know what you mean by this.
If you run the universe backwards, flipping all charges (positive to negative and vice versa) and parity (like a mirror image of the universe, I think) then the laws of physics, as we know them, remain unchanged at the atomic level. (Don’t ask about all those eggs suddenly unscrambling in this reversed universe).
You have observed that a model of the universe without any absolute coordinates is more likely.
Your terminology is unfamiliar to me.
This is one of the foundational assumptions of relativity—that there is no absolute rest frame. That a set of coordinates using any one non-accelerating object as the origin is just as useful as the set of coordinates using any other non-accelerating object as the origin; you can use the same equations to describe the universe, regardless of the velocity of the origin. (Note that the acceleration of the origin still has an effect). For argument in support of this point, I recommend “On The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” by A. Einstein (it’s more readable than most people think).
Thus we induce that were you put on a spaceship, you would never cross the cosmological horizon, from your own point of view.
I’m uncertain how we induce this from the previous statements.
Accelerate the spaceship to near-lightspeed, then shut off the engines and coast along
Define a reference frame using the (now non-accelerating) spaceship as the origin. The spaceship thus remains at the origin—it does not move. (Note that in this reference frame, the Earth is moving backwards at pretty close to the speed of light).
Recall that the cosmological horizon is defined in terms of a distance from yourself. In this newly defined reference frame, it is not moving. Nor is your spaceship.
Hence, the spaceship will never cross your cosmological horizon (though it will eventually cross Earth’s cosmological horizon)
Similarly it is very likely that some other person would have the same experiences.
I can’t agree to this statement until I understand the ones previous to it.
My confusion was a result of me not recognizing that the Cosmological Horizon would be different if two people existed in different locations. It was also a result of taking a post-warp perspective instead of one which would apply equally well both post and pre warp, which caused me to misunderstand the way that some of those arguments were meant to function.
I don’t think the point about absolute coordinates was relevant, or else I still might be misunderstanding it. The position I’m trying to defend doesn’t say that “nothing exists outside of me”, it takes a more agnostic approach and says that I shouldn’t bother trying to decide whether things exist outside of me or whether or not I’m justified in assuming that everything there is the same as here. I don’t say that the universe actually has a giant sphere built into it, centered on me; I just contend that I don’t know anything about things that I’ll never interact with and that I’m not much interested in them.
Thus we induce that were you put on a spaceship, you would never cross the cosmological horizon, from your own point of view.
I’m uncertain how we induce this from the previous statements.
The Cosmological Horizon was named well. It’s a horizon. Walk a couple of hundred miles and look again and the horizon is still going to be just as far away as you started. (This is without even considering living on a planet that is expanding at an accelerating rate.)
I don’t understand why it’s so important to Yudkowsky to insist that we can know things about the universe external to ourselves. Even if we could, so what? Why would I even care?
You don’t have to care about most of physics. Get an intuitive grasp on Newtonian physics, take it on faith that the guys who made your GPS know something about something called “Relativity” and you are set. Oh, and if folks invent space travel sufficiently powerful that horizon issues come into it don’t start acting as folks who are going to be far away are going to die just because at some time in the future it will be theoretically impossible to contact them. That could get awkward and make straightjackets necessary.
Oh, and if folks invent space travel sufficiently powerful that horizon issues come into it don’t start acting as folks who are going to be far away are going to die just because at some time in the future it will be theoretically impossible to contact them. That could get awkward and make straightjackets necessary.
This argument begs the question by assuming that it is morally wrong to not value the lives of people who are functionally abstractions, which is the assumption that I am questioning. Because of vagueness, I’m unsure whether or not this would be accurate, but I also get the feeling that you might be conflating convenient societal conventions with actual individual moralities.
This argument begs the question by assuming that it is morally wrong to not value the lives of people who are functionally abstractions, which is the assumption that I am questioning.
No it doesn’t. It expresses a position. One that is a necessary exception to the “well I suppose you don’t need to understand or care about physics if you really don’t want to” concession I had made in the preceding statements. It does convey the message that you disagree with—that physics doesn’t care about your disbelief, your sister in a long long time and a galaxy far away is an artifact of the same physics that your are made of and thereby it rejects “Why should I even care?” as an anomaly rather than a default.
For the purpose of the discussion your actual morality is barely relevant and a “prefer my sister to be alive assuming she actual was real according to the physics we operate on” morality is assumed merely for the sake of convenience. If you really want you can outright hate your counterfactual sister, in which case not murdering her could be the mistake you make. Or, you could conceivably construct a utility function that values configurations of the universe only when they happen to be spatially located sufficiently near to the future-object you call “you”. That allows you to “just not care” about such things.
I infer, by the way, that you don’t value anything in the universe after the time of your death. Some people (claim that they) have such a value system. For you it is implied because “outside your future light cone” isn’t defined if you don’t exist. As an illustration consider your brother flying at near light speed in the opposite direction to your sister. You can choose, if you follow your brother in your relativistic rocket you can keep him within your future light cone but lose your sister. If you follow your sister then you lose your brother. If you are dead then your utility function doesn’t specify which sibling you followed and sophistmagically allowed to remain ‘real’.
I suppose you could propose a hack to your utility function such that when you die the “stuff that matters and is considered real” part of reality could become fixed to “stuff that is within the light cone of you at the time of your death”. But then that would imply that your sister and brother are both ‘real’ but that they aren’t ‘real’ to each other.
Because of vagueness, I’m unsure whether or not this would be accurate, but I also get the feeling that you might be conflating convenient societal conventions with actual individual moralities.
Not remotely. Merely assuming one of the must uncontroversial of societal conventions (and human instinct) out of (perceived) convenience. Again, your morality, ethics and values can be as arbitrary as you like for the purpose of this conversation.
I understand that morality and physics are different, but I think you might underestimate the connection. My personal epistemology says that in order to avoid an infinite regress we need to place some sort of foundation on our concept of what is true or not. I use my internal values as this foundation, and only consider a concept to be true or meaningful if that concept achieves my values, whether directly or indirectly. I don’t think this is as unreasonable as you like to portray it.
Concepts which do not pay rent do not exist for me; I don’t bother wasting my time or cognitive space pondering their existence or nonexistence. Believing in the existence of physics outside the Cosmological Horizon doesn’t do anything useful for me, because it doesn’t lead me to make any new predictions about what my experiences will be. The only reason it would possibly matter to me is if I valued peoples’ existence as an abstract thought rather than as a tangible interaction. Even then, I don’t think it would deserve the status of a truth, it would be more of a convenient fiction that it makes me feel happy to believe in.
When you talked about future societies that have to deal with problems related to the horizon, and said that those societies would need to have a rule saying they should believe in the existence of people beyond their horizon, that is what I felt was conflating convenient societal convention and individual morality.
If the terminology is unfamiliar I suggest reading some physics textbooks about relativity.
What I inretrospect seem to be trying to communicate is that of the solomonoffian anti-solipsist: It is a much simpler hypothesis that you are in fact not the center of the universe in any meaningful sense. The so-called cosmological horison is a strictly observer centric phenomenon in general relativity.
My hypothesis is a mathematical construction that doesn’t mention the cosmological horison directly, but has it as a deduced property of the universe; to my best abilities it seems your’s have it as a basic truth.
If the terminology is unfamiliar I suggest reading some physics textbooks about relativity.
I feel as though this is a slight, or something? Telling me to go read some physics textbooks is just a way for you to shut the conversation down without actually addressing my arguments. Your phrasing was often unclear, with odd parentheticals and verbose rhetoric, so I asked you to reexplain what you were saying. If you can’t explain the ideas that you’re defending then you probably shouldn’t defend them.
I am the center of my own universe, which is the only one that I have access to. The idea of existence doesn’t apply to things that I can’t interact with because things are only meaningful insofar as they can be touched or seen or smelled.
I’m don’t believe the laws of physics are different when I’m not around; I just don’t believe anything about them because there’s no way for me to know what happens when I’m not around. Solomonoff and Occam’s Razor aren’t answers to the problem of induction, which is really what this comes down to. There’s no justification for your extrapolation because they’re illogical insofar as the problem of induction applies, and there’s no benefit to your belief, so I allow the problem of induction to discard your belief.
I’m willing to ignore sophistry when I get some benefit out of it. But the belief that my daughter exists beyond the cosmological horizon doesn’t pay rent, so I’m perfectly justified in treating myself as the center of my experiences and values and beliefs.
I feel as though this is a slight, or something? Telling me to go read some physics textbooks is just a way for you to shut the conversation down without actually addressing my arguments. Your phrasing was often unclear, with odd parentheticals and verbose rhetoric, so I asked you to reexplain what you were saying. If you can’t explain the ideas that you’re defending then you probably shouldn’t defend them.
It can be appropriate to point people towards physics resources when ignorance of physics and ability to not understand terminology or explanation is being pushed aggressively as a debate tactic. “Verbose!”, “Odd!”, “Unclear!” and “You can’t explain!” are sometimes accurate but can be used as fully general counter-arguments if necessary. Similar in nature to “La la la. I’m not listening.”
How should one distinguish between cases where his response is legitimate and cases where it is not? Obviously it’s fine in some cases, but to me this doesn’t seem like a legitimate usage. I have no idea why the symmetry of time would be relevant to his overall point, but I think that’s mostly the fault of his comment and not the fault of a lack of knowledge on my part.
I’ve read technical explanations of things that still make sense to me despite unfamiliarity with the underlying reading material. However, his comment specifically is impenetrable because it’s basically a bullet list of big words without reference to the underlying concepts, or attempts to justify those concepts, or explanations of their interactions, or an explanation of the ultimate underlying conclusion. Hypothetically, these big words might be a great argument that I would understand if only I had more physics knowledge, but why should I believe that? How is his post responsive to my point?
His comment, despite its verbosity, was something I could roughly follow, and from what I understand of it he was overcomplicating the issue. He broke down the initial argument into smaller and more technical responses, without actually addressing the points I was making. Going into the specific mechanisms of the way the universe works doesn’t refute the basic argument I’ve made about how existence without interaction is a wholly abstract concept that can never pay rent, nor does it refute the argument I’ve made about how the problem of induction applies here. It also fails to refute the more general assumption connecting the two arguments which is that difficult and possibly unsolvable logical problems shouldn’t be discarded or ignored unless there’s some kind of pragmatic reward for doing so.
Given that, his comment still seems worthless and pedantic to me; it seems like he’s trying to rehearse the evidence, except that the evidence he’s rehearsing isn’t really even relevant to what I’m saying; it also might be that he was intentionally trying to be confusing and hoping I believed that Scientific Terminology is Magically True, or that I was too intimidated to continue. It’s not that I find anything he did suspicious in itself, but given each specific questionable action in the context of all of the others, a general pattern emerges that I don’t like.
The reason I asked for him to explain his terminology wasn’t an attempt to ignore his argument, and I’m a bit annoyed that you claim that. It was because I didn’t think he really had made a new argument, but I was trying to be charitable and give him a chance to explain whatever new ideas he might have failed to get across, and a large reason for this charity is because I’m usually reluctant to challenge claims that I don’t understand. Having asked for an explanation, and received none, I feel more confident that I’m right and that his comment didn’t add anything to this discussion.
He believes that we should extrapolate from our current experiences towards belief in things which we will never experience, and I think my arguments are responsive to that general point because they contest the underlying assumptions of his argument, on both a pragmatic level (why does it matter?) and on a logical level (how do you justify extrapolating these concepts?). I’ve already explained this elsewhere; no one has yet addressed those points, but I continue to receive lots of bad karma and people continue to repeat the same refrain instead of engaging in some actual clash. This is annoying.
Perhaps what I’m really objecting to here is the idea of the Cosmological Horizon itself. Or perhaps I’m misunderstanding what the Cosmological Horizon is. My understanding of it is that the Cosmological Horizon is the distance from me that something would have to be so that I could never be effected by it again. If the Cosmological Horizon means something different than that, then maybe I don’t disagree at all.
I thought it might have been serving as placeholder for “past this distance it’s impossible to communicate or interact”. Technically, I don’t have a problem with the faster than light version, because then with enough time I would be able to interact with my daughter. But insofar as it’s a placeholder for “impossibly far away”, I have a problem with it.
… assuming a constant or accelerating inflation of the universe.
If the inflation of the universe slows down or stops, it won’t be the case anymore. And while it seems currently that the inflation is accelerating, we don’t know much about why it is doing so, nor if it’ll continue to accelerate or if it’ll slows down later on.
Even if the inflation stops or slows down, that’s still what “cosmological horizon” means.
This merely implies that if the inflation does stop or slow down, the cosmological horizon will also happen to coincide with “how far a signal could possibly travel until the complete death of the universe / the end of time”, for c-bound velocities. If there’s an upper bound on the spatial size of the universe, then the cosmological horizon might not exist in reality at this point. If there isn’t but it turns out we will never reach maximum entropy, then the cosmological horizon also doesn’t exist here.
Thanks. Then, if faster than light travel was possible, I wouldn’t be opposed to believing in things outside the Cosmological Horizon. Since that speed is impossible, I’m opposed to believing in things that leave here to go outside, or in things that were outside the entire time.
There is no way of knowing what things are like outside because we can never go outside and we have never been outside to observe, and we have no reason to believe that our current observations apply to the outside because there’s as much justification for the assumption that the outside is the same as the inside as there is for the assumption that the outside is fundamentally different.
(...) and we have no reason to believe that our current observations apply to the outside.
Not quite true.
Occam’s Razor says things are probably the same everywhere, whether inside or outside, which points towards our observations applying to the outside.
Since our observations apply to pretty much all of the inside, we should infer that they are also more likely to apply to pretty much any part of the outside because inference usually works with large samples (and the entire observable universe is something I’d consider a fairly large sample, if nothing within the observable universe goes against our current observations).
So we have two principles we could use to believe that our current observations apply to the outside. This requires that our priors for inference and Occam’s Razor working be set pretty high, obviously.
False, I have never observed that objects don’t spontaneously vanish when they’re out of my range.
Wanna play Peek-a-boo?
I mean something different by “out of my range” than “out of my direct sensory experiences”. I mean more that they’re such that I can never have experiences from which I can deduce the existence of those other objects out of my sensory experiences. I do believe that objects outside of my sensory experience exist, but I don’t believe that objects which are so far away I can never interact with them either directly or indirectly exist. If they do exist, they don’t do so in any meaningful way.
Your beloved daughter tells you she wants to leave on a ship to found a colony outside your future cone. I claim that there is a meaningful difference between “She’ll keep existing, so it’s sad I’ll never see her again but I’m proud she’s following a cool dream” and “She’ll pop out of existence, why does my daughter want to die?”.
Nope. The outcome is functionally the same to me either way. I can’t tell the difference between whether she died on the verge of the cone, or if she made it out and lived forever, or if she made it out and died two days later. Therefore the difference is meaningless. People are only meaningful to me insofar as I can interact with them (directly or indirectly), otherwise they’re just abstract ideas with no predictive power.
Suppose that your daughter is leaving tomorrow and scheduled to cross your horizon next week. (It’s a fast ship.) I offer you a hundred dollars if you inject her with a poison that will remain inactive for a month, then kill her instantly and painlessly.
If your daughter was going to stay around, you would refuse: you prefer your daughter’s life to a hundred dollars. If Omega had promised to kill your daughter next week, you would accept: it will never affect your daughter, and you like having a hundred dollars.
What do you do, and why?
You would refuse either way if you enjoy the fact that your daughter is alive, because she would not cease to exist to her own senses, only yours. Only if your sole reason for preferring her to be alive is to interact with you personally, then you would accept the offer, also assuming that you do not fear social repercussions for your decision. I had an interesting conversation with my own daughter when she was 9 about being put into a virtual reality machine and whether it mattered if her friends outside the machine died as long as they were real and alive to her senses in the machine. She said she would be fine with that only if the machine could rewrite her pre-machine memories to erase any guilt.
What I’m saying is that although I enjoy the fact that my daughter is alive, that’s because my intuitions are broken. It’s more that I enjoy the idea of my daughter being alive than it is that I actually think she is alive. Poisoning her would make it harder for me to imagine her as alive, which is why my intuitions say I shouldn’t poison her. But I think those intuitions don’t correspond to reality.
I prefer the you that you consider broken to the ideal that you believe you advocate.
The fact that you prefer this is not evidence for your claims about reality.
As a matter of fact it is. It just isn’t evidence anywhere near as strong those that have already been talked to death at various times on this site, most notably here.
I think we must have different definitions of evidence.
In general, as all of reality is entangled with itself, it’s pretty rare for something to be precisely zero evidence for any hypothesis—it would indicate that P(H|E)=P(H|~E) which is by itself a very specific point in probability space—it’s much more common for something to be so weak evidence that for all practical purposes a person wouldn’t know how to evaluate impact and/or would be wasting time to attempt to do so...
E.g. “The baby I’m thinking of was born on a rainy day. Is this evidence for or against the baby being named ‘Alex’ ?”. A really intelligent and informed agent would be able to correlate the average raininess of various regions in the world with the likelihood of the child being named Alex in said region, and thus the raininess would be evidence for the baby’s name...
In that case, the fact that I believe something different than wedrifid is evidence against his point.
Wedrifid’s preferences aren’t literally zero percent evidence for his view of the universe, but they’re probably less than one in a googol. My overall point is pretty clear. The nitpicking is annoying, and it seems to me like it’s being done because people don’t want to change their beliefs.
Your argument doesn’t really make sense. You say that although agents might not know how to evaluate the probability of an action’s occurrence, the evidence is still unlikely to be perfectly balanced. But probabilities are subjective, and so the fact that you don’t know how to evaluate a piece of evidence indicates that for all functional purposes the evidence is perfectly balanced.
Generally agreeing with your point—it is nitpicking. Still it may be good practice to remember to say and think “that’s not usable evidence” instead of “that’s not evidence”.
Yes, mine is along the lines of “The stuff that would cause correctly implemented Bayesian agents to update”. Yours is one of the more socially defined kinds. You will note that the evidence is described as weak evidence, relative to the post that should resolve your confusion entirely. And weak evidence is what it is, no more and no less.
It’s ridiculously weak. Even mentioning it is an inefficient use of time and cognitive resources.
To elaborate a little bit more, humans believe all sorts of stuff that is dumb. I don’t have any particular reason to believe you’re invulnerable to this. I think that your arguments about the implied invisible don’t pay rent, and they complicate the way that I define things as real or unreal, so they’re not worth believing in. Your attempt to use emotionally laden thought experiments instead of real arguments about epistemology furthers my skepticism about your beliefs. The fact that you insist on using your own preferences as evidence for their justification makes your credibility go even lower, because that evidence is so obviously weak that the only reason you would mention it is if you’re extremely biased. Mentioning it is a waste of time; I get no predictive power out of the belief in my daughter who I will never see again.
You might as well argue for the weak existence of an afterlife by saying that you prefer the idea that your daughter still exists somewhere. I suppose that this should make me update my probability that there’s an afterlife by about one in a googol, but it’s also pretty clear that you’re privileging a hypothesis that doesn’t deserve it.
Eliezers, not mine. And they may not “Pay Rent” but they do, evidently, stand between you and the murdering of your siblings. They also constitute a strictly simpler model for reality than the one you advocate.
Again, not my attempt, it was multiple other people who were all patiently trying to explain the concepts in a way you might understand.
The arguments were real. They are what you rejected in the previous sentence. This may or may not mean you actually read them.
I wasn’t, and I included careful disclaimers to that effect in both comments. I was merely making an incidental technical correction regarding misuse of the word ‘evidence’. You made a point of separating your “intuitive judgement” from your abstract far-mode ideals. When people do this it isn’t always the case that the abstract idealized reasoning is the correct part. I often find that people’s intuitions have better judgement—and that is what I see occurring here. Your intuitions were correct and also happen to be the side of you that is safer to be around without risk of being murdered.
Fortunately, current engineering technology is such that your particular brand existence-denial does not pose an imminent threat. As has been mentioned, if we reached the stage where we were capable of significant interstellar travel this kind of thing does start to matter. If there were still people who believed that things magically disappeared once they were sufficiently far enough away from that person then such individuals would need to be restrained by force or otherwise prevented from taking actions that they sincerely believe would not be murder—in the same way that any other murder attempt is prevented if possible.
Stop begging the question / appealing to emotion. Also, if you’re bringing up Eliezers arguments, then defend them yourself. Don’t hide behind his authority and pretend that you’re not responsible for the words you speak.
This model requires me to waste cognitive space on things that are the same whether or not they’re true. I don’t understand why you believe that it is any simpler to assert that things beyond the Cosmological Horizon exist than it is to assert that they do not. I think the best answer is to say that the concept of existence itself is only worthwhile in some cases; my approach is more pragmatic than yours.
Why should I care whether or not my daughter is dead or alive if I can’t experience her either way? She is just as abstract either way. I don’t understand why you keep thinking that this sort of argument is a knock-down argument.
I understand the concepts, but I disagree with them. People should stop bringing them up unless they present sold epistemic arguments for their belief. Examples about the daughter just make things more confusing. And you’ve clearly been saying that my intuitions are wrong, don’t try to back out of that now.
Thought experiments are not arguments. They beg the question and muddle the issue with unjustified intuitions.
In other words, 1. you nitpicked instead of making a substantive point 2. you asserted that my intuitions were incorrect.
This matters in the same way that the possible existence of an invisible afterlife matters.
I find this style of argumentation disingenuous and decline to engage with you further on this subject.
I notice I am very confused. Are you some form of solipsist? Do you endorse selfishness? Or believe that “altruism” just means “I care about my own mental state of believing my decisions make others happy”?
Does that apply only to people you can’t interact with in principle, or to everyone you don’t interact with? E.g., if I tell you “Someone on the other side of the planet is being tortured, if you press this button a rescue team will be sent”, do you pay $1 to get access to the button, or do you stare at me blankly and say “I’ll never meet this ‘victim’ or ‘rescue team’, they don’t meaningfully exist.” and go donate to a charity that sends donors pictures of the kids they’ve helped?
I’m a solipsist in the sense that I don’t think it makes sense to believe in things that I can’t see or touch or hear or deduce the existence of from things that I can see or touch or hear. That seems like realism, to me. It involves solipsist elements only insofar as existence isn’t an absolute state but is amenable to probabilities, as a consequence of the fact that probabilities are fundamentally subjective, as is evidence.
I endorse a broad form of selfishness. It makes me happy to make others happy or to see others happy or to know that my actions made others happy. I don’t really care to define altruism right now. I don’t think that will be relevant?
I have a broad definition of interaction in mind here. If they connect to me through a chain of variables, then that is interaction. I think the more direct the chain the more interaction that is and the more valuable the person becomes, this is why I care more for family members than people in other universes who I will never meet. So, I will interact with the victim and rescue team, under my understanding of interaction. And $1 is cheap. So I help them.
I think this is more of a reason that my natural intuitions are broken than a good argument for your belief.
Values aren’t things which have predictive power. I don’t necessarily have to be able to verify it to prefer one state of the universe over another.
You can prefer that state, sure. But that doesn’t mean that it is an accurate reflection of reality. The abstract idea of my daughters existence beyond the light cone is comforting, and would make me happy. But the abstract idea of my daughters existence in heaven is also comforting and would make me happy. I wish it were true that she existed. But I don’t believe things just because they would be nice to believe.
This is what I meant when I said that thought experiments were a bad way to think about these things. You’ve confused values and epistemology as a result of the ludicrously abstract nature of this discussion and the emotionally charged thought experiment that I had thrust upon me.
I am not saying, “You value her continued existence, therefore you should believe in it.” I am rather saying that your values may extend to things you do not (and will not, ever) know about, and therefore it may be necessary to make estimations about likelihoods of things that you do not (and will not, ever) know about. In this case, the epistemological work is being done by an assumption of regularity and a non-privileging of your particular position in the physical laws of the universe, which make it seem more likely that there is not anything special about crossing your light cone as opposed to just moving somewhere else where she will happen to have no communication with you in the future.
It seems like a waste of time to think about things I can’t ever know about. It seems like make-believe to place objective value on the existence of things that I’ll never be able to experience or interact with. I don’t understand why I should care about things that I will never ever know or experience. My values are broken insofar as they lead me to value abstract concepts in and of themselves, as opposed to physical things that I can interact with.
I’d like to point out that my interpretation means I’ll fight like hell to keep my daughter inside my light-cone, because I don’t want to lose her. Your interpretation means you’ll be content with the idea of your daughters existence in the abstract, and to me that’s no different than belief in an afterlife. I point this out because I think the initial example emphasizes the “downsides” to my position while ignoring any corresponding “upsides” that it might entail.
I thought about this. It turns out I’ve been using a modified version of Hume’s problem of induction as the basis for my argument, in the back of my head. When it comes to real life and my future, I’m willing to temporarily discard the problem of induction because doing so brings me rewards. When it comes to things beyond my light cone and my experiences, I’m not, because there is no such reward and never could be.
In other words, I have a heuristic in my head that says paradoxes only go away when it is pragmatic to ignore them, because otherwise you sacrifice mental accuracy. This heuristic means that I’m not willing to discard the problem of induction when it comes to experiences and existences beyond my range of interaction.
Hopefully that makes my position clearer to you. It’s not that I’m privileging my own position; it’s that my position is the only one I have to work from and that I have no idea how things would work outside my light cone.
A convenient implication of the “things past the Cosmological Horizon don’t exist anymore” belief occurs to me. All it takes to utterly annihilate any enemy you have is a fast ship. Fly as fast as you can away from them and poof, you’ve caused them to cease to exist! The “Ignore Them And They Will Go Away For Real” doomsday device.
You’re trying to come up with examples of my belief that seem silly, instead of focusing on rational arguments. You’re so focused on this goal that you ignore that flying beyond the Cosmological Horizon solves your problem even under your interpretation. If your enemies can never get you ever again, then isn’t it safe to say you’ve ended the war? Why would you be upset that your enemies exist somewhere in some other impossibly far away region of the galaxy, how would this be any different than having destroyed them or banished them to a different dimension?
Depends, are you trying to escape your enemies or to punish them?
The desire for vengeance has always seemed like another broken intuition to me. It increases the probability that someone will act on sunk costs. If you meant to talk about punishment as deterrence aimed at stopping bad actions from occurring, then flying away arguably achieves this end by making their bad actions cease to exist from your reference point. According to other views, it doesn’t. That would bring us back to the initial conflict.
My larger point is that we shouldn’t try using thought experiments or examples on things like this because they sneak moral and metaphysical assumptions into the argument without justifying those assumptions, and they also increase the prevalence of emotional biases. Although his specific example fails to help his point, and although it fails to help mine, I think that using any examples at all on problems like this should be avoided as much as possible.
Works for you. They really can’t come after you.
Lightcone only makes sense as a concept if FTL is impossible. If impossible, you can never get far enough away to get the enemy outside your lightcone (without cooperation from your enemy). If possible, the limit of what you could ever see / interact with is unconnected from speed of light.
Yes, which universe do you live in? FTL is impossible in this one!
If FTL is impossible, then so is your travel-to-get-enemy-out-of-lightcone scenario.
No. This is actually a curious feature of living on an expanding universe. If you travel far enough away from something the expansion will be sufficient for light to be unable to reach it. My future light cone as of {now} actually contains things that my future light cone as of {now} does not. The status of the matter that has been taken out of our reach like that is the focus of the discussion.
Ok, I’ve thought about it, and I’m still confused about the terminology.
Suppose Alice and Bob agree to try to escape each other’s lightcone—so they start traveling away from each other at .5c (relative to the resting frame they started in). I’m a lawyer and can’t do the transformations, but I know that the speed Alice perceives Bob traveling at is less than c—let’s call that speed X.
If Alice breaks the agreement, turns around, and starts traveling towards Bob at a speed greater than X (relative to the mutual starting frame), she’ll eventually catch up with Bob.
Given that, either (a) I’ve made a mistake about how relativity works, or (b) it seems impossible for Bob to get outside of Alice’s lightcone. Please help.
You forgot that space itself is expanding. In theory, it’s possible for Alice and Bob to travel far enough apart that the space between them expands faster than light, meaning the distance between them continues to increase even if they travel toward each other at the speed of light.
Isn’t that violating the lightspeed limit? As you describe it, there’s a frame of reference in which Alice and Bob are moving away from each other faster than the photons they are traveling near.
The lightspeed limit is a local notion. Something whizzing by you cannot be clocked to travel at or faster than light, but there is no clear definition of the relative velocity of two spatially separated objects in a curved spacetime.
I don’t suppose you have a link to a reasonably accessible explanation of this point?
Maybe this will help… It’s not overly accurate, but seems to be accessible enough.
Putting this here to help passers-by. My basic confusion appears to have been caused by not realizing that the universe is stretching. Thus, we aren’t in an inertial frame with respect to other galaxies.
Inertial frame is a local notion, as well, so “inertial frame with respect to other galaxies” is not a meaningful statement. In GR inertial frame is generalized to a geodesic. There is also the concept of comoving frame, that in which the expansion rate looks the same in all directions.
I’m afraid the links I’ve seen are all actually less accessible than shminux’s explanation.
It’s not so much ‘violating’ the lightspeed limit as laughing in its face because it isn’t constrained by it. Stuff within space travels at or less than the speed of light, space itself can do as it pleases (as determined by weirder stuff than just special relativity).
I’m not sure on the appropriate terminology here. Do they call it “moving away from” when neither thing has moved but have simply become further away from due to space changing?
I guess the second {now} was supposed to be {later} or something?
No, if spoken the temporally separated ’now’s would be spoken such that it was obvious to the speaker that it was referring to the time between the first mark and the second mark—about a second and a half I’d guess. Similar to the usage when syncronyzing watches with “12:30 as of… now”. I had expected the formatting to convey to most readers a similar message but for reading—so a bit under a second. But not all readers have the same intuitions regarding ad hoc markup.
Is one of those {now}s supposed to be a {then}?
Was going for instantiation while typing or reading.
Ah! Yeah, that works. It might be clearer to make that instantiation explicit by replacing the ‘now’ with ‘time of writing’ and ‘time of reading.’
You have observed that objects tend conserve energy. You have also observed that the cosmological horizon isn’t absolute, but is in fact centered on you. You have also observed that time is symmetric (charge and parity flipped). You have observed that a model of the universe without any absolute coordinates is more likely. Thus we induce that were you put on a spaceship, you would never cross the cosmological horizon, from your own point of view. Similarly it is very likely that some other person would have the same experiences.
Q. E. D(?)
Objects inside the cosmological horizon are the ones I observe tend to conserve energy.
I think you said this backwards, or else I don’t know what you mean by saying the horizon is centered on me.
I don’t know what you mean by this.
Your terminology is unfamiliar to me.
I’m uncertain how we induce this from the previous statements.
I can’t agree to this statement until I understand the ones previous to it.
My overall impression of your arguments is that you made the same argument over again, just using more complicated terminology and breaking it down into smaller parts. I think my initial line of argument stands against this sort of attack. Everything that I know is derived from my experiences. By definition I cannot have had experiences or been effected by things outside the cosmological horizon. Therefore I cannot know anything about what happens outside the cosmological horizon.
Things don’t exist in any meaningful sense except a relational one. Yudkowsky’s arguments here seem reminiscent of certain Kantian concepts or of Plato’s idea of eternal forms, and those sort of arguments have always annoyed me. It’s useless to make predictions or judgements about things that you will never encounter in any way. I don’t understand why it’s so important to Yudkowsky to insist that we can know things about the universe external to ourselves. Even if we could, so what? Why would I even care?
Yes, exactly.
The cosmological horizon is defined in terms of a distance from a given observer. It is the distance beyond which you cannot observe anything, due to the expansion of the universe.
If you run the universe backwards, flipping all charges (positive to negative and vice versa) and parity (like a mirror image of the universe, I think) then the laws of physics, as we know them, remain unchanged at the atomic level. (Don’t ask about all those eggs suddenly unscrambling in this reversed universe).
This is one of the foundational assumptions of relativity—that there is no absolute rest frame. That a set of coordinates using any one non-accelerating object as the origin is just as useful as the set of coordinates using any other non-accelerating object as the origin; you can use the same equations to describe the universe, regardless of the velocity of the origin. (Note that the acceleration of the origin still has an effect). For argument in support of this point, I recommend “On The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” by A. Einstein (it’s more readable than most people think).
Accelerate the spaceship to near-lightspeed, then shut off the engines and coast along
Define a reference frame using the (now non-accelerating) spaceship as the origin. The spaceship thus remains at the origin—it does not move. (Note that in this reference frame, the Earth is moving backwards at pretty close to the speed of light).
Recall that the cosmological horizon is defined in terms of a distance from yourself. In this newly defined reference frame, it is not moving. Nor is your spaceship.
Hence, the spaceship will never cross your cosmological horizon (though it will eventually cross Earth’s cosmological horizon)
Quite. I hope this helps.
My confusion was a result of me not recognizing that the Cosmological Horizon would be different if two people existed in different locations. It was also a result of taking a post-warp perspective instead of one which would apply equally well both post and pre warp, which caused me to misunderstand the way that some of those arguments were meant to function.
I don’t think the point about absolute coordinates was relevant, or else I still might be misunderstanding it. The position I’m trying to defend doesn’t say that “nothing exists outside of me”, it takes a more agnostic approach and says that I shouldn’t bother trying to decide whether things exist outside of me or whether or not I’m justified in assuming that everything there is the same as here. I don’t say that the universe actually has a giant sphere built into it, centered on me; I just contend that I don’t know anything about things that I’ll never interact with and that I’m not much interested in them.
Thank you very much, you definitely helped.
The Cosmological Horizon was named well. It’s a horizon. Walk a couple of hundred miles and look again and the horizon is still going to be just as far away as you started. (This is without even considering living on a planet that is expanding at an accelerating rate.)
You don’t have to care about most of physics. Get an intuitive grasp on Newtonian physics, take it on faith that the guys who made your GPS know something about something called “Relativity” and you are set. Oh, and if folks invent space travel sufficiently powerful that horizon issues come into it don’t start acting as folks who are going to be far away are going to die just because at some time in the future it will be theoretically impossible to contact them. That could get awkward and make straightjackets necessary.
This argument begs the question by assuming that it is morally wrong to not value the lives of people who are functionally abstractions, which is the assumption that I am questioning. Because of vagueness, I’m unsure whether or not this would be accurate, but I also get the feeling that you might be conflating convenient societal conventions with actual individual moralities.
No it doesn’t. It expresses a position. One that is a necessary exception to the “well I suppose you don’t need to understand or care about physics if you really don’t want to” concession I had made in the preceding statements. It does convey the message that you disagree with—that physics doesn’t care about your disbelief, your sister in a long long time and a galaxy far away is an artifact of the same physics that your are made of and thereby it rejects “Why should I even care?” as an anomaly rather than a default.
For the purpose of the discussion your actual morality is barely relevant and a “prefer my sister to be alive assuming she actual was real according to the physics we operate on” morality is assumed merely for the sake of convenience. If you really want you can outright hate your counterfactual sister, in which case not murdering her could be the mistake you make. Or, you could conceivably construct a utility function that values configurations of the universe only when they happen to be spatially located sufficiently near to the future-object you call “you”. That allows you to “just not care” about such things.
I infer, by the way, that you don’t value anything in the universe after the time of your death. Some people (claim that they) have such a value system. For you it is implied because “outside your future light cone” isn’t defined if you don’t exist. As an illustration consider your brother flying at near light speed in the opposite direction to your sister. You can choose, if you follow your brother in your relativistic rocket you can keep him within your future light cone but lose your sister. If you follow your sister then you lose your brother. If you are dead then your utility function doesn’t specify which sibling you followed and sophistmagically allowed to remain ‘real’.
I suppose you could propose a hack to your utility function such that when you die the “stuff that matters and is considered real” part of reality could become fixed to “stuff that is within the light cone of you at the time of your death”. But then that would imply that your sister and brother are both ‘real’ but that they aren’t ‘real’ to each other.
Not remotely. Merely assuming one of the must uncontroversial of societal conventions (and human instinct) out of (perceived) convenience. Again, your morality, ethics and values can be as arbitrary as you like for the purpose of this conversation.
I understand that morality and physics are different, but I think you might underestimate the connection. My personal epistemology says that in order to avoid an infinite regress we need to place some sort of foundation on our concept of what is true or not. I use my internal values as this foundation, and only consider a concept to be true or meaningful if that concept achieves my values, whether directly or indirectly. I don’t think this is as unreasonable as you like to portray it.
Concepts which do not pay rent do not exist for me; I don’t bother wasting my time or cognitive space pondering their existence or nonexistence. Believing in the existence of physics outside the Cosmological Horizon doesn’t do anything useful for me, because it doesn’t lead me to make any new predictions about what my experiences will be. The only reason it would possibly matter to me is if I valued peoples’ existence as an abstract thought rather than as a tangible interaction. Even then, I don’t think it would deserve the status of a truth, it would be more of a convenient fiction that it makes me feel happy to believe in.
When you talked about future societies that have to deal with problems related to the horizon, and said that those societies would need to have a rule saying they should believe in the existence of people beyond their horizon, that is what I felt was conflating convenient societal convention and individual morality.
You keep saying that. I still reject the premise. This is not a correct usage of the local jargon “pay rent”. Use a different phrase.
What predictions are you lead to by these concepts?
If the terminology is unfamiliar I suggest reading some physics textbooks about relativity.
What I inretrospect seem to be trying to communicate is that of the solomonoffian anti-solipsist: It is a much simpler hypothesis that you are in fact not the center of the universe in any meaningful sense. The so-called cosmological horison is a strictly observer centric phenomenon in general relativity.
My hypothesis is a mathematical construction that doesn’t mention the cosmological horison directly, but has it as a deduced property of the universe; to my best abilities it seems your’s have it as a basic truth.
I feel as though this is a slight, or something? Telling me to go read some physics textbooks is just a way for you to shut the conversation down without actually addressing my arguments. Your phrasing was often unclear, with odd parentheticals and verbose rhetoric, so I asked you to reexplain what you were saying. If you can’t explain the ideas that you’re defending then you probably shouldn’t defend them.
I am the center of my own universe, which is the only one that I have access to. The idea of existence doesn’t apply to things that I can’t interact with because things are only meaningful insofar as they can be touched or seen or smelled.
I’m don’t believe the laws of physics are different when I’m not around; I just don’t believe anything about them because there’s no way for me to know what happens when I’m not around. Solomonoff and Occam’s Razor aren’t answers to the problem of induction, which is really what this comes down to. There’s no justification for your extrapolation because they’re illogical insofar as the problem of induction applies, and there’s no benefit to your belief, so I allow the problem of induction to discard your belief.
I’m willing to ignore sophistry when I get some benefit out of it. But the belief that my daughter exists beyond the cosmological horizon doesn’t pay rent, so I’m perfectly justified in treating myself as the center of my experiences and values and beliefs.
Edit: typo.
It can be appropriate to point people towards physics resources when ignorance of physics and ability to not understand terminology or explanation is being pushed aggressively as a debate tactic. “Verbose!”, “Odd!”, “Unclear!” and “You can’t explain!” are sometimes accurate but can be used as fully general counter-arguments if necessary. Similar in nature to “La la la. I’m not listening.”
How should one distinguish between cases where his response is legitimate and cases where it is not? Obviously it’s fine in some cases, but to me this doesn’t seem like a legitimate usage. I have no idea why the symmetry of time would be relevant to his overall point, but I think that’s mostly the fault of his comment and not the fault of a lack of knowledge on my part.
I’ve read technical explanations of things that still make sense to me despite unfamiliarity with the underlying reading material. However, his comment specifically is impenetrable because it’s basically a bullet list of big words without reference to the underlying concepts, or attempts to justify those concepts, or explanations of their interactions, or an explanation of the ultimate underlying conclusion. Hypothetically, these big words might be a great argument that I would understand if only I had more physics knowledge, but why should I believe that? How is his post responsive to my point?
His comment, despite its verbosity, was something I could roughly follow, and from what I understand of it he was overcomplicating the issue. He broke down the initial argument into smaller and more technical responses, without actually addressing the points I was making. Going into the specific mechanisms of the way the universe works doesn’t refute the basic argument I’ve made about how existence without interaction is a wholly abstract concept that can never pay rent, nor does it refute the argument I’ve made about how the problem of induction applies here. It also fails to refute the more general assumption connecting the two arguments which is that difficult and possibly unsolvable logical problems shouldn’t be discarded or ignored unless there’s some kind of pragmatic reward for doing so.
Given that, his comment still seems worthless and pedantic to me; it seems like he’s trying to rehearse the evidence, except that the evidence he’s rehearsing isn’t really even relevant to what I’m saying; it also might be that he was intentionally trying to be confusing and hoping I believed that Scientific Terminology is Magically True, or that I was too intimidated to continue. It’s not that I find anything he did suspicious in itself, but given each specific questionable action in the context of all of the others, a general pattern emerges that I don’t like.
The reason I asked for him to explain his terminology wasn’t an attempt to ignore his argument, and I’m a bit annoyed that you claim that. It was because I didn’t think he really had made a new argument, but I was trying to be charitable and give him a chance to explain whatever new ideas he might have failed to get across, and a large reason for this charity is because I’m usually reluctant to challenge claims that I don’t understand. Having asked for an explanation, and received none, I feel more confident that I’m right and that his comment didn’t add anything to this discussion.
He believes that we should extrapolate from our current experiences towards belief in things which we will never experience, and I think my arguments are responsive to that general point because they contest the underlying assumptions of his argument, on both a pragmatic level (why does it matter?) and on a logical level (how do you justify extrapolating these concepts?). I’ve already explained this elsewhere; no one has yet addressed those points, but I continue to receive lots of bad karma and people continue to repeat the same refrain instead of engaging in some actual clash. This is annoying.
Perhaps what I’m really objecting to here is the idea of the Cosmological Horizon itself. Or perhaps I’m misunderstanding what the Cosmological Horizon is. My understanding of it is that the Cosmological Horizon is the distance from me that something would have to be so that I could never be effected by it again. If the Cosmological Horizon means something different than that, then maybe I don’t disagree at all.
The cosmological horizon is merely “Past this distance you have to go faster than light in order to send signals to eachother”
I thought it might have been serving as placeholder for “past this distance it’s impossible to communicate or interact”. Technically, I don’t have a problem with the faster than light version, because then with enough time I would be able to interact with my daughter. But insofar as it’s a placeholder for “impossibly far away”, I have a problem with it.
… assuming a constant or accelerating inflation of the universe.
If the inflation of the universe slows down or stops, it won’t be the case anymore. And while it seems currently that the inflation is accelerating, we don’t know much about why it is doing so, nor if it’ll continue to accelerate or if it’ll slows down later on.
Even if the inflation stops or slows down, that’s still what “cosmological horizon” means.
This merely implies that if the inflation does stop or slow down, the cosmological horizon will also happen to coincide with “how far a signal could possibly travel until the complete death of the universe / the end of time”, for c-bound velocities. If there’s an upper bound on the spatial size of the universe, then the cosmological horizon might not exist in reality at this point. If there isn’t but it turns out we will never reach maximum entropy, then the cosmological horizon also doesn’t exist here.
Fun stuff to think about, IMO.
Thanks. Then, if faster than light travel was possible, I wouldn’t be opposed to believing in things outside the Cosmological Horizon. Since that speed is impossible, I’m opposed to believing in things that leave here to go outside, or in things that were outside the entire time.
There is no way of knowing what things are like outside because we can never go outside and we have never been outside to observe, and we have no reason to believe that our current observations apply to the outside because there’s as much justification for the assumption that the outside is the same as the inside as there is for the assumption that the outside is fundamentally different.
Not quite true.
Occam’s Razor says things are probably the same everywhere, whether inside or outside, which points towards our observations applying to the outside.
Since our observations apply to pretty much all of the inside, we should infer that they are also more likely to apply to pretty much any part of the outside because inference usually works with large samples (and the entire observable universe is something I’d consider a fairly large sample, if nothing within the observable universe goes against our current observations).
So we have two principles we could use to believe that our current observations apply to the outside. This requires that our priors for inference and Occam’s Razor working be set pretty high, obviously.