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.
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.