lavalamp

Karma: 2,092

lavalamp Feb 12, 2014, 1:11 AM
0 points
on: Weighting the probability of being a mind by the quantity of the matter composing the computer that calculates that mind
I think you’re getting downvoted for your TL;DR, which is extremely difficult to parse. May I suggest:

TL;DR: Treating “computers running minds” as discrete objects might cause a paradox in probability calculations that involve self-location.

lavalamp Feb 3, 2014, 6:12 AM
1 point
in reply to: RolfAndreassen’s comment on: Rationality Quotes February 2014
I dunno. I’d be pretty happy with a system that produced reasonable output when staffed with idiots, because that seems like a certainty. I actually think that’s probably why democracy seems to be better than monarchies—it has a much lower requirement for smarts/benevolence. “Without suffering” may be a high bar, but the universe is allowed to give us problems like that! (And I don’t think that democracy is even close to a complete solution.)

EDIT: Also, perhaps the entirety of the system should be to make sure that an “utter genius with leet rationality skillz” is in the top position? I’d be very happy with a system that caused that even when staffed by morons.

lavalamp Jan 17, 2014, 6:52 PM
0 points
in reply to: Jonathan Paulson’s comment on: The first AI probably won’t be very smart
I think we just mean different things by “human level”—I wouldn’t consider “human level” thought running at 1/5th the speed of a human or slower to actually be “human level”. You wouldn’t really be able to have a conversation with such a thing.

And as Gurkenglas points out, the human brain is massively parallel—more cores instead of faster cores is actually desirable for this problem.

lavalamp Jan 17, 2014, 1:53 AM
0 points
in reply to: solipsist’s comment on: Understanding and justifying Solomonoff induction
Ah, I see. Yeah, 1 bit in input bitstream != 1 bit of bayesian evidence.

lavalamp Jan 16, 2014, 9:31 PM
0 points
in reply to: solipsist’s comment on: Understanding and justifying Solomonoff induction
I think you mean BB(1000) bits of evidence?

lavalamp Jan 16, 2014, 9:17 PM
3 points
on: The first AI probably won’t be very smart
1) Yes, brains have lots of computational power, but you’ve already accounted for that when you said “human-level AI” in your claim. A human level AI will, with high probability, run at 2x human speed in 18 months, due to Moore’s law, even if we can’t find any optimizations. This speedup by itself is probably sufficient to get a (slow-moving) intelligence explosion.

2) It’s not read access that makes a major difference, it’s write access. Biological humans probably will never have write access to biological brains. Simulated brains or AGIs probably will have or be able to get write access to their own brain. Also, DNA is not the source code to your brain, it’s the source code to the robot that builds your brain. It’s probably not the best tool for understanding the algorithms that make the brain function.

3) As said elsewhere, the question is whether the speed at which you can pick the low hanging fruit dominates the speed at which increased intelligence makes additional fruit low-hanging. I don’t think this has an obviously correct answer either way.

lavalamp Jan 15, 2014, 6:55 AM
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Understanding and justifying Solomonoff induction
I see, thanks!

You can’t “count every possible program equally”.

I did know this and should have phrased my sentence hypothetically. :)

lavalamp Jan 15, 2014, 6:53 AM
0 points
in reply to: Manfred’s comment on: Understanding and justifying Solomonoff induction

The only programs allowed in the Solomonoff distribution are ones that don’t have any extended versions that produce the same output observed so far.

Did not know that! It seems like that would leave some probability mass unassigned, how do you rebalance? Even if you succeed, it seems likely that (for large enough outputs) there’ll be lots of programs that have epsilon difference—that are basically the same, for all practical purposes.

lavalamp Jan 15, 2014, 1:52 AM
1 point
on: Understanding and justifying Solomonoff induction
I have been thinking that the universal prior is tautological. Given a program, there are an infinite number of longer programs which perform the same computation (or an indistinguishable variation) but only a finite number of shorter programs having this characteristic. If you count every possible program equally, you’ll find that each short program represents a host of longer programs. However, now that I write this down, I’m no longer sure about it. Can someone say why/if it’s wrong?

lavalamp Jan 15, 2014, 1:15 AM
3 points
in reply to: pianoforte611’s comment on: Open Thread for January 8 − 16 2014
I’d like to agree with you, but how do I know you’re not a concern troll?

lavalamp Jan 14, 2014, 8:55 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheAncientGeek’s comment on: The mathematical universe: the map that is the territory
I believe if you read my previous comments, you’ll see that they all are attempts to do exactly this. I will bow out of this conversation now.

(Meta: you’re tripping my troll sensers. I’m sorry if it’s unintentional on your part. I’m just not getting the sense that you’re trying to understand me. Or it’s the case that the two of us just really cannot communicate in this forum. Either way, it’s time to call it quits.)

EDIT: Your response to this has caused my P(you’re trolling me) to rise from ~60% to ~95%.

lavalamp Jan 14, 2014, 8:48 PM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: A proposed inefficiency in the Bitcoin markets
Ah, you’re disagreeing with the model and phrasing it as “if that model were true, no one would sell you btc, but people are willing to sell, therefore that model is false.” Do I understand?

If so, I do not agree that “if that model were true, no one would sell you btc” is a valid inference.

lavalamp Jan 14, 2014, 7:29 PM
1 point
in reply to: TheAncientGeek’s comment on: The mathematical universe: the map that is the territory

You have mentioned the Mathematical Universe hypothesis several times, and Tegmark’s is a name very much associated with it, …

Right, I know what the MUH is, I know who Tegmark is, I just don’t recognize terms that are a combination of his name and (im)materialism. Please taboo your terms! I don’t know what they mean to you!

If anything, let’s call my position “non-distinctionalism”—I maintain that there’s no other coherent models for the word “exist” than the one I mentioned earlier, and people who use the word “exist” without that model are just talking gibberish. There’s no distinction between “material existence” and “immaterial existence” in the sense that the first clause of this sentence is meaningless noise.

You second sentence doens’t follow from your first. Someone can define “material existence” as existence in your sense, plus some additional constraint, such as the “world” in which the pattern is found being a material world.

Yes, if you look at the last paragraph, I (tried to) say explicitly that is my desired state of the terms, it’s just not the standard usage, afaik.

So, if I were writing the terms, “material existence” = exists in our sub-branch of the MUH, “immaterial existence” = exists in a sub-branch of the MUH inaccessible to us (except via simulation). However, I don’t think people ordinarily use the word “material” to mean this.

Actually, now that I think about it, I think that’s a bad way to think of things. Really, the concept those terms would express is accessibility, not existence. When I hear other people say things like “immaterial existence”, my brain interprets that as “exists, but not in a branch of the MUH,” which I think is gibberish.

lavalamp Jan 14, 2014, 6:57 PM
1 point
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: A proposed inefficiency in the Bitcoin markets
What Vaniver said. Also, emperically, you can look at the current price/order book on an exchange and see that people are in fact willing to sell you these things. If my holdings represented a life altering sum of money it would be time to take less risk and I would be one of those people.

lavalamp Jan 14, 2014, 2:50 AM
2 points
in reply to: Manfred’s comment on: Double-thick transistors and other subjective phenomena
The computer doesn’t hold cash (clearly), it has account # and password of a bank account (or private key to bitcoin addresses if it’s a particularly risky computer). The two thin computers therefore only have half as much money to bet. (Or they’ll overdraw their account.)

lavalamp Jan 14, 2014, 2:24 AM
2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: A proposed inefficiency in the Bitcoin markets
Bitcoin is plenty liquid right now unless you’re throwing around amounts > $1 mil or so.

lavalamp Jan 10, 2014, 7:30 PM
2 points
in reply to: TheAncientGeek’s comment on: The mathematical universe: the map that is the territory
Thanks for editing—I’m still puzzled.

I also don’t know what “Tegmarkian immaterialism” is and I’m not arguing for or against it. I do not know what “immaterialism” is and I’m also not arguing for or against that. (Meta: stop giving either sides of my arguments names without first giving the names definitions!)

If anything, let’s call my position “non-distinctionalism”—I maintain that there’s no other coherent models for the word “exist” than the one I mentioned earlier, and people who use the word “exist” without that model are just talking gibberish. There’s no distinction between “material existence” and “immaterial existence” in the sense that the first clause of this sentence is meaningless noise. I can be disproved by being informed of another coherent model. I maintain that my thought experiment shows that it’s difficult to hold any distinction between exists-in-reality and exists-in-the-mathematical-multiverse.

(If I were king of the world, “immaterial existence” would mean “exists in an inaccessible place of the mathematical universe”, but for me to use the term that way would currently be idiosyncratic and just confuse everyone further.)

lavalamp Jan 9, 2014, 11:22 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheAncientGeek’s comment on: The mathematical universe: the map that is the territory
I think we are having very significant communication difficulties. I am very puzzled that you think that I think that I’m arguing against MUH. I think something like MUH is likely true. I do not know what “Tegmarkian materialism” is and I’m not defending or attacking it. I also cannot make sense of some of your sentences, there seems to be some sort of editing problem.

lavalamp Jan 9, 2014, 7:15 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheAncientGeek’s comment on: The mathematical universe: the map that is the territory

So far, none of this tells us what immateriality is. But then it isn’t easy to say what matter is either.

Yeah. There’s supposedly two mysterious substances. My claim is that I can’t see a reason to claim they’re separate, and this thought experiment is (possibly) a demonstration that they’re in fact same thing. Then we still have one mysterious substance, and I’m not claiming to make that any less mysterious with this argument.

There are more than two options. If you had evidence of a bitstring corresponding to a billions of years of biological development involving trillions of organims—amuch more comple bitstring than a mind, but not a mind,-- it might well be most probable to assign the production of a mind to that.

I don’t know if you realise it, but your argument was Paleyian

Whoa, I think you understood something pretty different from what I was trying to say. I was definitely not claiming a deity of some sort must have been responsible! Let me repeat with unambiguous labels:

(1) Given that you’ve found a bitstring in a simulation that represents mind M existing, taking actions, and feeling things, … it’s therefore (4) vastly more probable that mind M actually performed computations in the course of producing that bitstring, than it is that you found it randomly.

Yes, of course mind M will have been the result of some evolutionary process in any universe I can imagine finding via simulation, but that dosen’t make mind M less real. I suppose you could probably see this as a special case/expansion of the Anti Zombie Principal—any system that produces the outputs of a mind (at least) contains that mind.

(If you meant something else by the Paleyian comment, you’ll have to spell it out for me. I’m not the one that downvoted you and I appreciate the continued interaction.)

lavalamp Jan 8, 2014, 7:50 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheAncientGeek’s comment on: The mathematical universe: the map that is the territory

What would “immaterial existence” even mean?

I don’t know exactly, but if “material existence” means something, so does “immaterial existence”.

Hm. I don’t think “material existence”, if it’s a thing, has a unique opposite.

I guess I’d define exists-in-the-real-world as equivalent to a theoretical predicate function that takes a model of a thing, and a digitized copy of our real world, and searches the world for patterns that are functionally isomorphic (given the physics of the world) to the model, and returns true iff it finds one or more.

This model of existence doesn’t work if you don’t supply the real world (or at least a world) as an argument. I’m interpreting “immaterial existance” as “exists, but not in a world” which seems like a logical impossibility to me. Of course, this is a function of how I’ve defined “exists”, but I don’t know of a better way to define it.

Rather than assuming that there are infinite numbers of real but immaterial people floaitng around somewhere, I prefer to assume that “memories” are just data that don’t have any intrinsic connection to prior events.. Ie, a memory proper is a record of an event, but neurons can be configured as if there were a trace of an even that never happened.

OK, that’s a reasonable position. I’ll adjust my argument. My claim now is:

(1) Given that you’ve found a bitstring in a simulation that represents a mind existing, taking actions, and feeling things,

(2) this bitstring is quite astonishingly long,

(3) most long bitstrings do not similarly describe minds by any reasonable mapping function,

it’s therefore (4) vastly more probable that a mind actually ran to produce that bitstring, than it is that you found it randomly.

Basically, I’m treating the outputs of a mind as being something like a proof that there was a mind running. Similarly to the idea that publishing an SHA-256 hash of some data is proof that you had that data at the time that you published the hash.