A counterexample to your claim: Ackermann(m,m) is a computable function, hence computable by a universal Turing machine. Yet it is designed to be not primitive recursive.
And indeed Kleene’s normal form theorem requires one application of the μ-Operator. Which introduces unbounded search.
I don’t buy your first argument against time-travel. Even under the model of the universe as a static mathematical object connected by wave-function consistency constraints, there is still a consistent interpretation of the intuitive notion of “time travel”:
The “passage” of time is the continuous measurement of the environment by a subsystem (which incidentally believes itself to be an ‘observer’) and the resulting entanglement with farther away parts of the system as “time goes on” (i.e. further towards positive time). Then time-travel is a measurement of a “past” state or described differently (but the same thing) an entanglement between a subsystem (the location in the past the traveler visited) and its surroundings, which does not respect the common constraint that entanglement propagates at speed of light (because the traveler came from some future location (and its past light-cone) which is—“surprisingly”—entangled with the past). While violating common understanding of space-time, it is not logically impossible in this understanding of the universe.
This time-travel allows interaction with the past (which are not different from observations anyway).
Do I overlook something here?
Here is my attempt to convince you also of 1 (in your numbering):
I disagree with your: “From a preference utilitarian Perspective, only a self-conscious being can have preferences for the future, therefore you can only violate the preferences of a self-conscious being by killing it.”
To the contrary, every agent which follows an optimization goal exhibits some preference (even if itself does not understand them). Namely that its optimization goal shall be reached. The ability to understand ones own optimization goal is not necessary for a preference to be morally relevant, otherwise babies and even unconscious people would not have moral weight. (And even non-sleeping people don’t understand all their optimization goals.)
This leaves the problem of how to weight various agents. A solution which gives equal weight “per agent” has ugly consequences (because we should all immediately take immunosuppressants to save the bacteria) and is ill-defined, because many systems allow multiple ways to count “agents” (each cell has equal weight? each organ? each human? each family? each company? each species? each gene allele?).
A decent solution seems to be to take computing power (alternatively: the ability to reach the optimization goals) of the system exhibiting optimizing behavior as a “weight” (If only for game-theoretic reasions; it certainly makes sense to value preferences of extremly powerful optimizers strongly). Unfortunately, there is no clear scale of “computing power” one can calculate with. Extrapolating from intuition gives us a trivial weight for bacterias’ goals and a weight near our own for the goals of other humans. In the concrete context of killing animals to obtain meat, it should be observed that animals are generally rather capable of reaching their goals in the wild (e.g. getting food, spawning offspring) - better than human children, I’d say.
I, for one, like my moral assumptions and cached thoughts challenged regularly. This works well with repugnant conclusions. Hence I upvoted this post (to −21).
I find two interesting questions here:
How to reconcile opposing interests in subgroups of a population of entities whose interests we would like to include into our utility function. An obvious answer is facilitating trade between all interested to increase utility. But: How do we react to subgroups whose utility function values trade itself negatively?
Given that mate selection is a huge driver of evolution, I wonder if there is actually a non-cultural, i.e. genetic, component to the aversion (which I feel) against providing everyone with sexual encounters / the ability to create genetic offspring / raise children. And I’d also be interested in hearing where other people feel the “immoral” line...
Interestingly, there appears (at least in my local cultural circle) that being attended by human caretakers when incapacitated by age, is supposed to be a basic right. Hence, there must be some other reason—and not just the problem about rights being fulfilled by other persons, why the particular example assumed to underlie the parable, is reprehensible to many people.
To disagree with this statement is to say that a scanned living brain, cloned, remade and started will contain the exact same consciousness, not similar, the exact same thing itself, that simultaneously exists in the still-living original. If consciousness has an anatomical location, and therefore is tied to matter, then it would follow that this matter here is the exact matter as that separate matter there. This is an absurd proposition.
You conclude that consciousness in your scenario cannot have 1 location(s).
If consciousness does not have an anatomical / physical location then it is the stuff of magic and woo.
You conclude that consciousness in your scenario cannot have 0 locations.
However, there are more numbers than those two.
The closest parallel I see to your scenario is a program run on two computers for redundancy (like it is sometimes done in safety-critical systems). It is indeed the same program in the same state but in 2 locations.
The two consciousnesses will diverge if given different input data streams, but they are (at least initially) similar. Given that the state of your brain tomorrow will be different from the state of if today, why do you care about the wellbeing of that human, who is not identical to now-you? Assuming that you care about your tomorrow, why does it make a difference if that human is separated from you by time and not by space (as in your scenario)?
Regarding auras. I am not sure, if I observed the same phenomenon, but if I sit still and keep my eyes fixed on the same spot for a while (in a still scene), my eyes will—after a while—get accustomed to the exact light pattern incoming and everythig kind-of fades to gray. But very slight movements will then generate colorful borders on edges (like a gaussian edge detector).
Best way to fix climate change: “Renewables / Nuclear”
Secret Services are necessary to fight terrorism / Secret Services must be abolished
GPL / BSD-Licences
Install a smoke detector
Do martial arts training until you get the falling more or less right. While this might be helpful against muggers the main benefit is the reduced probability of injury in various unfortunate situation.
The Metamath project was started by a person who also wanted to understand math by coding it: http://metamath.org/
Generally speaking, machine-checked proofs are ridiculously detailed. But it being able to create such detailed proofs did boost my mathematical understanding a lot. I found it worthwhile.
Install a smoke detector (and reduce mortality by 0.3% if I’m reading the statistics right—not to talk of the property damages prevented).
I use multiple passwords of consisting of 12 elements of a..z, A..Z, 0..9, and ~20 symbol characters, generated randomly. Total entropy of these is around 76 bits.
10 decimal digits is actually more like 33 bits of entropy.
small enough to be masked by confounders There are an extremely large number of companies. Unrelated effects should average out.
Regarding statistics: http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/07/08/3457859/women-ceos-beat-stock-market/ links to quite some.
Given identical money payoffs between two options (even when adjusting for non-linear utility of money), choosing the non-ambiguous has the added advantage of giving a limited rationality agent less possible futures to spend computing resources on while the process of generating utility runs.
Consider two options: a) You wait one year and get 1 million dollars. b) You wait one year and get 3 million dollars with 0.5 probability (decided after this year).
If you take option b), depending on the size of your “utils”, all planning for after the year must essentially be done twice, once for the case with 3 million dollars available and once for the case without.
I usually take the minutes of the German Pirate Party assemblies. It is non-trivial to transcribe two days of speach alone (and I don’t know steno). A better solution is a collaborative editor and multiple people typing while listening to the audio with increasing delay, i.e. one person gets life audio, the next one 20 seconds delay, etc… There is EtherPad, but the web client cannot really handle the 250kB files a full day transcript needs, also two of the persons interested in taking minutes (me included) strongly prefer VIm over a glorified textfield.
Hence: On the 23rd of June I downloaded the VIm source and started implementing collaborative editing. On the 28th and 29th three people used it for hours without major problems (except I initially started the server in a gdb to get a backtrace in case of a crash and the gdb unhelpfully stopped it on the first SIGPIPE—but that was not the fault of my software).
To give you an idea of the complexity of collaborative editing, let me quote Joseph Gentle from http://sharejs.org: “I am an ex Google Wave engineer. Wave took 2 years to write and if we rewrote it today, it would take almost as long to write a second time.” It took me 5 days (and I had a full-day meeting on one of them) to deliver >80% of the goodness. Alone.
while corporations have a variety of mechanisms for trying to provide their employees with the proper incentives, anyone who’s worked for a big company knows that they employees tend to follow their own interests, even when they conflict with those of the company. It’s certainly nothing like the situation with a cell, where the survival of each cell organ depends on the survival of the whole cell. If the cell dies, the cell organs die; if the company fails, the employees can just get a new job.
These observations might not hold for uploads running on hardware paid for by the company. Which would give a combination of company+upload-tech superior cooperation options compared to current forms of collaboration. Also, company-owned uploads will have most of their social network inside the company as well, in particular not with uploads owned by competitors. Hence the natural group boundary would not be “uploads” versus “normals”, but company boundaries.
There should be a step 9, where every potential author is sent the final article and has the option of refusing formal authorship (if she doesn’t agree with the final article). Convention in academic literature is that each author individually endorses all claims made in an article, hence this final check.
So… how would I design an exercise to teach Checking Consequentialism?
Divide the group into pairs. One is the decider, the other is the environment. Let them play some game repeatedly, prisoners dilemma might be appropriate, but maybe it should be a little bit more complex. The algorithm of the environment is predetermined by the teacher and known to both of the players.
The decider tries to maximize utilitiy over the repeated rounds, the environment tries to minimise the winnigs of the decider, by using social interaction between the evaluated game rounds, e.g. by trying to invoke all the fancy fallacies you outlined in the post or convincing the decider that the environment algorithm actually results in a different decision. By incorporating randomness into the environment algorithm, this might even be used to train consequentialism under uncertainty.
The described effect seems strongly related to the concept of opportunity cost.
I.e. while a bet of yours is still open, the resources spent paying for entering the bet cannot be used again to enter a (better) bet.
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleene%27s_T_predicate:
In other words: If someone gives you an encoding of a program, an encoding of its input and a trace of its run, you can check with a primitive recursive function whether you have been lied to.