If you experienced psychic powers as being real in a way consistent and sustained enough that, for example, over thirty years people became well able to study and control them, and your local neighborhood Psi Corps was as familiar a figure as your local neighborhood police, I doubt that thirty years from now you would be huddled up in a ball with your fingers in your ears saying “this isn’t real, this isn’t real”.
Perhaps in this case you should taboo “reality” and “hallucination” and talk about whether an experience is consistent and sustained. An experience of psychic powers may be inconsistent—for example, when you say “Look at me move this weight with my mind”, your friend says “You’re just sitting there with an intent look on your face and nothing’s happening”—or more subtle, in that you hallucinate your friends approving but not other obvious consequences, like you winning the Randi Prize, scientists taking you off to study, or a gradual shift in society’s view of the physical versus the spiritual. A sufficiently consistent hallucination would be strong evidence that it’s not a hallucination at all, unless you believe your brain could predict the way society would develop post-psychic powers and could feed you all the appropriate stimuli forever—in which case you have minimal reason to believe your normal pre-psychic life isn’t a hallucination too.
Or it may not be sustained. For example, you may have a relatively vivid hallucination of being in a world with psychic powers, but it only lasts a few minutes before you end up back in the real world and people tell you you’ve been in a coma the whole time.
If you find yourself in a world with psychic powers, or Omega, or whatever, then the longer it stays consistent and sustained, the greater the probability with which you can predict that acting as if the powers or Omega are real is the way to go, either because they are real or because your hallucination is so vivid and complex that you know acting as if they’re real will have the same results as if they are real.
You could also try giving a small amount of probability to the “real” hypothesis and a large amount to the “hallucination” hypothesis. Then, as it becomes gradually clearer and clearer that nothing you do can break you out of the hallucination and satisfy your aims in reality, all the actions in the “hallucination” hypothesis have equal utility and it’s the utilities in the “real” branch that should guide your actions.
...this kind of makes me want to write rationalist Thomas Covenant fanfiction, which would probably be a bad idea.
Cause the book is basically psychological, and if Tom had the brainpower to realize that when you’re up against an enemy whose power derives from self-loathing, loathing yourself all the time might not be such a good idea, then there goes the conflict and depth, and it devolves to smacking cavewights around. With the revelation in the latest book that (spoiler) nothing done out of love can ever aid the Despiser, even indirectly, he literally couldn’t go wrong by turning his frown upside-down.
And that’s not even getting to the stuff with the Earthblood. Seriously, Elena, you’ve gained complete omnipotence for the space of one wish, and the best you can think of is “resurrect the vengeful ghost of the morally conflicted apocalyptic ex-ruler because maybe he’s mellowed out”? How about “I wish for a Friendly AI under the control of Revelstone”?
Presumably you’d have to change some details like Eliezer did in order to make Harry not have an auto-win button. But it would likely require a lot more setting modification (I’m not sure. I haven’t thought about this that much.)
If you experienced psychic powers as being real in a way consistent and sustained enough that, for example, over thirty years people became well able to study and control them, and your local neighborhood Psi Corps was as familiar a figure as your local neighborhood police, I doubt that thirty years from now you would be huddled up in a ball with your fingers in your ears saying “this isn’t real, this isn’t real”.
Perhaps in this case you should taboo “reality” and “hallucination” and talk about whether an experience is consistent and sustained. An experience of psychic powers may be inconsistent—for example, when you say “Look at me move this weight with my mind”, your friend says “You’re just sitting there with an intent look on your face and nothing’s happening”—or more subtle, in that you hallucinate your friends approving but not other obvious consequences, like you winning the Randi Prize, scientists taking you off to study, or a gradual shift in society’s view of the physical versus the spiritual. A sufficiently consistent hallucination would be strong evidence that it’s not a hallucination at all, unless you believe your brain could predict the way society would develop post-psychic powers and could feed you all the appropriate stimuli forever—in which case you have minimal reason to believe your normal pre-psychic life isn’t a hallucination too.
Or it may not be sustained. For example, you may have a relatively vivid hallucination of being in a world with psychic powers, but it only lasts a few minutes before you end up back in the real world and people tell you you’ve been in a coma the whole time.
If you find yourself in a world with psychic powers, or Omega, or whatever, then the longer it stays consistent and sustained, the greater the probability with which you can predict that acting as if the powers or Omega are real is the way to go, either because they are real or because your hallucination is so vivid and complex that you know acting as if they’re real will have the same results as if they are real.
You could also try giving a small amount of probability to the “real” hypothesis and a large amount to the “hallucination” hypothesis. Then, as it becomes gradually clearer and clearer that nothing you do can break you out of the hallucination and satisfy your aims in reality, all the actions in the “hallucination” hypothesis have equal utility and it’s the utilities in the “real” branch that should guide your actions.
...this kind of makes me want to write rationalist Thomas Covenant fanfiction, which would probably be a bad idea.
Why would it be a bad idea?
Cause the book is basically psychological, and if Tom had the brainpower to realize that when you’re up against an enemy whose power derives from self-loathing, loathing yourself all the time might not be such a good idea, then there goes the conflict and depth, and it devolves to smacking cavewights around. With the revelation in the latest book that (spoiler) nothing done out of love can ever aid the Despiser, even indirectly, he literally couldn’t go wrong by turning his frown upside-down.
And that’s not even getting to the stuff with the Earthblood. Seriously, Elena, you’ve gained complete omnipotence for the space of one wish, and the best you can think of is “resurrect the vengeful ghost of the morally conflicted apocalyptic ex-ruler because maybe he’s mellowed out”? How about “I wish for a Friendly AI under the control of Revelstone”?
::taps 3B, casts Zombify on thread::
Hmmm… since Thomas Covenant fanfiction is problematic, how about Life on Mars fanfiction instead?
Presumably you’d have to change some details like Eliezer did in order to make Harry not have an auto-win button. But it would likely require a lot more setting modification (I’m not sure. I haven’t thought about this that much.)
“Against All Things Ending” is finally out? I’ll have to go read it...