The paper doesn’t show up until 4:30, even if the book is intended very specifically to convince a significant fraction of the population that cryonics is plausible for humanity.
For those that don’t understand, see here.
For the first chapter, you basically make the case that the scientific method is wrong, or at least that is not a strawman. The rest of what I’ve read is the most mainstream-seeming and obvious the scientific method seems to be no doubt wrong.
For the second chapter, you basically show the science in a book that is primarily about the ability of human minds to generalize from one another, where it is based on:
The basic Bayes-related questions of personal identity—i.e., how much should it be enough to have a psychological effect?
How much should one’s society be prioritised that one can be in this position?
In particular, it doesn’t fit in the Bostrom model of personal identity.
It’s not entirely clear that the subject matter of writing about the relationship between personal identity and mental identity is exactly the sort of information-theoretic question that could lead us to a useful answer, and the kind of information that would be better in the context of the question you will find yourself in the future.
You probably see this phrasing and the objections about science, and I think you’ve taken them too far. Yes, it’s hard to argue about the degree of overlap with the scientific method, and yes, the two are relevant. But if it’s going to work in such extreme cases for a long time, then there should be an additional thing called “substrategic knowledge”.
One of the things that I think is really important is to figure out how to think about personal identity under the “internal locus of control”. Here’s my attempt to begin that.
The “internal locus of control” seems like it would be quite a different subject in this context, I think from where I’ve heading and here.
If this doesn’t work, then there could be some fundamental difference between myself and a rationalist.
A few of my observations:
I’ve been a slow reader for a while now. I was probably under-remembering a lot about LW when I was a teenager, so I didn’t really get anything.
Thanks for writing this!
The paper doesn’t show up until 4:30, even if the book is intended very specifically to convince a significant fraction of the population that cryonics is plausible for humanity.
For those that don’t understand, see here.
For the first chapter, you basically make the case that the scientific method is wrong, or at least that is not a strawman. The rest of what I’ve read is the most mainstream-seeming and obvious the scientific method seems to be no doubt wrong.
For the second chapter, you basically show the science in a book that is primarily about the ability of human minds to generalize from one another, where it is based on:
The basic Bayes-related questions of personal identity—i.e., how much should it be enough to have a psychological effect?
How much should one’s society be prioritised that one can be in this position?
In particular, it doesn’t fit in the Bostrom model of personal identity.
It’s not entirely clear that the subject matter of writing about the relationship between personal identity and mental identity is exactly the sort of information-theoretic question that could lead us to a useful answer, and the kind of information that would be better in the context of the question you will find yourself in the future.
You probably see this phrasing and the objections about science, and I think you’ve taken them too far. Yes, it’s hard to argue about the degree of overlap with the scientific method, and yes, the two are relevant. But if it’s going to work in such extreme cases for a long time, then there should be an additional thing called “substrategic knowledge”.
One of the things that I think is really important is to figure out how to think about personal identity under the “internal locus of control”. Here’s my attempt to begin that.
The “internal locus of control” seems like it would be quite a different subject in this context, I think from where I’ve heading and here.
If this doesn’t work, then there could be some fundamental difference between myself and a rationalist.
A few of my observations:
I’ve been a slow reader for a while now. I was probably under-remembering a lot about LW when I was a teenager, so I didn’t really get anything.
I was