Actually, you’ve kind of made me want to get my own hemispherectomy and then a re-merging just so that I can experimentally see which side’s experiences I experience. I bet you would experience both (but not remember experiencing the other side while you were in the middle of it), and then after the re-merging, you would remember both experiences and they would seem a bit like two different dreams you had.
Matthew_Opitz
Karma: 382
So, what will that feel like? I have a hard time imagining what it will be like to experience two bodies at once. Can you describe how that will work?
I don’t really understand the point of view of people like torekp who would say, “No, they’re just different interpretations of “you”.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m not accustomed to being able to change my interpretation of who I am to such an extent that I can change what sensory stimuli I experience.
I can’t just say to myself, “I identify with Barack Obama’s identity” and expect to start experiencing the sensory stimuli that he is experiencing.
Likewise, I don’t expect to be able to say to myself, “I identify with my clone” and expect to start experiencing the sensory stimuli that the clone is experiencing.
I don’t seem to get a choice in the matter. If I enter the teleporter machine, I can WANT to identify with my clone that will be reconstructed on Mars all I want, but I don’t expect that I will experience stepping out of the teleporter on Mars.
I’m with Usul on this whole topic.
Allow me to pose a different thought experiment that might elucidate things a bit.
Imagine that you visit a research lab where they put you under deep anesthesia. This anesthesia will not produce any dreams, just blank time. (Ordinarily, this would seem like one of those “blink and you’re awake again” types of experiences).
In this case, while you are unconscious, the scientists make a perfect clone of you with a perfect clone of your brain. They put that clone in an identical-looking room somewhere else in the facility.
The scientists also alter your original brain just ever-so-slightly by deleting a few memories. Your original brain is altered no more than it originally is when, let’s say, it has a slight alcohol hangover. But it is altered more than the clone, which has a perfect copy of your brain from before the operation.
Which body do you expect to wake up in the next morning? My intuition: the original with the slightly impaired memories—despite the fact that the pattern theory of identity would expect that one would wake up as the clone, would it not?
Of course, both will believe they are the original, and by all appearances it will be hard for outsiders who were not aware of the room layout of the building to figure out which one was the original. I don’t care about any of those questions for the purpose of this thought-experiment.
It seems to me that there can be five possibilities as to what I experience the next morning:
The body of the (ever-so-slightly) impaired original.
The body of the perfect clone.
Neither body (non-experience).
Neither body (reincarnation in a different body, or in an entirely different organism with an entirely different sort of consciousness, with no memory or trace of the previous experiences).
Somehow, both bodies at once.
So if you explained this setup to me before this whole operation and offered to pay either the original or the clone a million dollars after the experience was finished, my pre-operation self would very much prefer that the original get paid that million dollars because that’s the body I expect to wake up in after the operation.
Why? Well, we will wake up in our original bodies after dreaming or having a hangover that changes our brains a bit, no?
Are you telling me that, next time I go to sleep, if there happens to be a configuration of matter, a Boltzmann brain somewhere, that happens to pattern-match my pre-sleep brain better than the brain that my original body ends up with after the night, that my awareness will wake up in the Boltzmann brain, and THAT is what I will experience? Ha!
I have a very strong feeling that this has not happened ever before. So that means one of three things:
Boltzmann brains or copies of me somewhere else don’t exist. The brain in my bedroom the next morning is always the closest pattern-match to the brain in my bed the previous night, so that’s what my awareness adheres to all the time.
My feelings are fundamentally misleading (how so?)
Just think: if the pattern theory of identity is true, then here is what I logically expect to happen when I die:
My awareness will jump to the next-as-good clone of my original mental pattern. Whoever had the most similar memories to what my original brain had before it died, that’s whose body and brain and memories I will experience after the death of my original brain.
In that case: no cryonics needed! (As long as you are prepared to endure the world’s worst hangover where you lose all memories of your previous life, gain new memories, and basically think that you have been someone else all along. But hey: assuming that this new person has had a pretty good life up until now, I would say that this still beats non-existence!)
This also implies that, if you are a, let’s say, Jewish concentration camp prisoner who dies, the closest pattern-match to your mind the next moment that you will experience will be...probably another Jewish concentration camp prisoner. And on and on and on! Yikes!
This is so true! And if you buy into Julian Jaynes’s “Bicameral Mind” theory, then ancient religious commandments from god (which were in actuality lessons from parents/chiefs/priests ingrained in one’s psyche since childhood but falsely attributed to unseen spiritual forces) literally WERE heard in people’s minds like a catchy music tune played over and over.
I’m guessing the author meant that the ancestral environment was one that many of us now would consider “worse than death” considering our higher standards of expectation for standard of living, whereas our ancestors were just perfectly happy to live in cold caves and die from unknown diseases and whatnot.
I guess the question is, how much higher are our expectations now, really? And how much better do we really have it now, really?
Some things, like material comfort and feelings of material security, have obviously gotten better, but others, such as positional social status anxiety and lack of warm social conviviality, have arguably gotten worse.
I took the survey.
The only part I wasn’t sure about how to answer was the P(God) and P(supernatural) part. I put a very low probability on P(supernatural) because it sounded like it was talking about supernatural things happening “since the beginning of the universe” which I took as meaning “after the big bang.” But for P(God) I put 50% because, hey, who knows, maybe there was a clockmaker God who set up the big bang?
If one were to interpret these survey responses in a certain way, though, they could seem illogical because one might think that P(supernatural) (which includes God in addition to many other possibilities) would strictly have to have a higher probability than the more-specific P(God). But like I said, I took P(supernatural) as referring to stuff after the big bang, whereas I took P(God) as including any time even before the big bang.
Vitamin D and omega-3 fish oil daily.
Melatonin when needed (a couple of times a month).
Evening primrose oil occasionally.
Same thing here from around 2003 to 2006. I did not see the oil shale boom coming. I found plausible all of the peak oil pundits who argued that oil shale would barely, if at all, have an energy return on energy invested (EROEI) greater than 1, and thus it wouldn’t matter how high the price went—the costs would keep pace with the revenue, and it would not be economical to develop it. Of course, those pundits turned out to be wrong.
I remember the day when I really started to doubt peak oil. It was when I saw a TOD article on Toe-to-Heel-Air-Injection for heavy oil and I thought, “By golly, maybe they’ll be able to use all of that heavy oil after all....” If I had had any money at the time, rather than being a high school student, I would have put money on heavy oil and oil shale from that point on, and I’d probably be doing pretty well by now...
If god were perfectly understandable, if his miracles were repeatable, and if you could devise a perfect algorithm to elicit miracles from god, then how would “god” be distinct from “the natural world”? Wouldn’t it be more parsimonious to say, “We have gravity that says if you do X then Y happens, we have electromagnetism that says that if you do X then Y happens....and then there’s this “god” rule to the universe which says if you do X then Y happens.”
Of course, if you approach the Christian god in this way, Christians will immediately object and say that “god does not like to be tested,” as if they have a priori decided that they don’t want to think of themselves as living in a predictable universe. Strange preference, that....
Wolf brains produce way more adrenaline than dog brains on a regular basis. That is one reason why wolves are likely to be far less predictably docile, even if you raise one from a pup onward. That is why you still have to be careful around a tame wolf.
Domestication is different than taming. Taming involves conditioning an animal’s behavior; domestication involves breeding actual genetic/physiological changes.
Do we have evidence that whites and non-whites have different average levels of certain neurotransmitters? Are there actual gross physiological differences in white and non-write brains? If so, then there is more than just social-construction at work. If not, then social-construction is all there is.
I don’t think all of this is just a semantic game.
And yet fertility is negatively correlated with income.
I imagine that, if I were making more money, I would be working more hours, which would mean I would have less time for parenting, which would make parenting even more unattractive. (This is under the assumption, which might be mistaken as you point out, that good parenting requires lots of money and time).
So basically, Westerners have gotten more picky about having children to the point of insisting on having a lot of free time AND a high income, AND for child-rearing to be a more intrinsically interesting activity than other things they could be doing with that time and money (say, being an unemployed millionaire who trades stocks and plays poker for fun). Time, money, and interest have all become necessary, but not sufficient conditions.
I think this has to do with the vast increase in the number of fun distractions in modern society. As a farmer in Sub-Saharan Africa, what does one do with one’s time? Herd cattle? Why not have kids? They are like little super-intelligent robots that you can help program and develop. How neat! That sort of technology pretty much blows every other entertainment they would have right out of the water. But Westerners? They think, “Oh, whoop-de-do, a super-intelligent robot that you can help program and develop...but which you will also be responsible for and which may occasionally be stressful...no thanks, I’m more interested in football/LessWrong/youtube/something that is equally interesting but not as stressful.”
Bingo. Except its perfectly possible to raise “nice middle-class” kids without micromanagement, your parents’ generation did just that.
Nah, my parents helicoptered and micromanaged. But if you want to talk about my parents’ parents’ generation, then yes. The thing is, they didn’t really raise good middle-class kids, in that my father ended up being a roofer and my mother a housewife. Neither graduated college until my mother went back to school after my siblings had gotten out of high school. Not that it hurt them too much in their generation. My father made good money at roofing. Would the money still be as good? I don’t know.
Really, I get the feeling that these days people don’t pay much attention to their neighbors, also why do you care what they think?
By “neighbors,” I mean social circle, whether or not they geographically border one’s property.
Probably not if you live in a neighborhood without thugs, granted this is becoming harder now that progressives are transporting thugs out of ghettos to other neighborhoods in the name of diversity.
And living in a neighborhood with a good peer group requires money.
Also in the “old days” the neighbors would look down on someone who divorces or has sex outside of marriage rather than someone who’s a non-helicopter parent. Why did this change?
My naive progressive feeling about this is because “ending an unhappy marriage through divorce” or “sex outside of marriage” produce net good things. Progressives have this idea that divorce is the psychologically “healthier” option in that it is more honest and builds less resentment. Likewise, progressives tend to have this idea that having sex outside of marriage is a good way to make sure that sexual chemistry is compatible before marrying, plus it is just fun, and if protection is used and people are careful with each other’s feelings, then there are no downsides (and progressives do not see lack of babies as a downside).
On the other hand, progressives have this idea that being a non-helicopter parent produces net bad things, such as children getting stuck in dysfunctional life situations. Buuuut...I will admit that there are those intriguing studies that suggest that parenting style does not have much of an effect on child outcome, which would be a bombshell to the progressive mindset.
The statistics about fertility rates in Nepal corresponding closely to level of education are telling. Education past the age of 12 has to be having some effect. But what is the mechanism?
Jim hypothesizes that there is a subtle indoctrination that begins in school around that age that dissuades women from having children. Perhaps a little bit...but is that all there really is to it?
Let’s think about this for a second: let’s imagine that it were legal for girls in the U.S. to drop out of school at 13. (I think the current legal age is 16).
What does a 13 year old girl do in American society if she isn’t going to school? What can she usefully do?
She could theoretically get a job. There are probably some jobs that a 13-year old could be reasonably good at...like coffee house barista. Or maybe just the coffee house barista’s helper who buses the tables. How hard are those jobs, really?
But, how’s a 13 year old going to get that sort of job when the job market is swarming with over-qualified college graduates who can’t get work in their fields of study, will be at least marginally more effective at those jobs (perhaps in terms of social interactions with the patrons or ancillary skills they might have picked up in college), and who will also be willing to work for minimum wage?
So a 13-year old drop-out can’t reasonably expect to get a job. So, what about marriage and kids? Can a 13-year old reasonably expect to find a man who is at least vaguely within her age range (<18 years old) who is willing and ABLE to support her and her kids?
I noticed that this Jim guy pins a lot of the blame on Western women not wanting to have kids. Now, do we actually have evidence for this? Do we in fact know that it is not the Western MEN who are hesitant about having to provide for kids?
I myself have a beautiful wife who would make for a great mother, both genetically and in terms of raising kids, but the thought of having kids seems just insane to me right now. Why? I make about $10,000 a year with a MASTER’S DEGREE as a part-time college adjunct instructor and as a K-12 substitute teacher. My wife makes about the same with a BACHELOR’S DEGREE as a part-time nurse’s aid in a hospital. Together, we might scrape together $20,000. Our expenses are about $16,000 a year if we are frugal (we have a very small apartment and only one old car). Not much buffer room. Not much money to save up towards a house or a new car for when the old one breaks down. Don’t even talk to me about children.
Now, our luck could change. One of us could land a full-time job with benefits. Realistically, a job where one of us made $25,000 a year would have us jumping for joy. But in the current economy, there are no guarantees. And even if I did get a nice full-time job, I would still not have the confidence in the economy to expect that I would keep it, or something like it, for the next 20 years while my wife and I raised our kids.
It seems to me that the problems are that:
There are way too few well-paying jobs in the economy for the number of over-qualified college graduates that there are to fill them. This is why I think that the politically-correct catchphrase, “Education is the KEY!” is way off track. Our problem is not lack of education. If everyone tomorrow suddenly starting doing better in school and went on to higher degrees, the only difference that would make is, we would suddenly have Ph.D.s working at McDonalds or Starbucks. More education does not magically create more jobs or better jobs.
There are also higher cultural expectations on how good of a parent you have to be (at least, if we are talking about the “nice middle-class white” demographic whose low fertility rates the neoreactionaries are so worried about). “Close-parenting” is now the expected norm among this demographic. I get the sense from the stories my parents and grandparents tell that people used to assume that kids kinda “raised themselves.” You just told them to go out in the neighborhood and play with other kids, and be home for supper, and you put food on the table, and you occasionally reprimanded them when they misbehaved or did poorly in school. You didn’t micromanage their extra-curricular activities, go to all of their extra-curricular activities, research college-preparatory programs, etc. You didn’t “helicopter parent.” Now, if you don’t “helicopter parent,” then A. other parents will look down on you, and B. your kid probably will go off track and end up as a street thug in some gang or as a couch potato because the surrounding culture is not as much of a supportive ally. (Now why is that?)
All of this adds up to the fact that it is probably not just women who are wary of having kids, but men too.
If a girl starts having kids at 14 like some neoreactionaries advise, it is NOT going to be in a stable marriage with a nice male provider. And that is not necessarily going to be solely due to any bad choices on the girl’s part. Even if the girl only tried to woo nice, decent men, what nice, decent 18-year olds are going to be willing and ABLE to raise a family in our economy and culture?
A big problem I see is that, in traditional societies, children are a net economic assets, whereas in modern society, children seem like a net economic drain. That, combined with the inability for a person to get a single-breadwinner job at 18, pretty much makes Jim’s neoreactionary strategy not viable, even if a young woman tried to take his advice and execute it conscientiously.
How is wireheading trading freedom away if you are quite sure that it will do exactly what you want, and if you have some “abort button”? That sounds like the ultimate power.
Perhaps we are confusing what something looks like from the outside (it looks like the person is obviously immobilized and helpless) vs. what it feels like on the inside (the person gets exactly what they want).
Note that I would be wary about ever wireheading if there were other humans still around whose actions were not sufficiently predictable or constrained. That is because they could potentially try to mess with me while I am in my wireheaded state. I would only go into the wireheaded state if either I was the only human left and I had perfectly automated everything to take care of me while I was being wireheaded, or if there were other humans, but they were all safely under the control of an AI singleton who would keep them from screwing with me while I was being wireheaded.
Yes...I think American progressives (what Europe would call our “social democrats”) share most of the assumptions that I’ve highlighted in this thread, as do communists. But American progressives aren’t as willing to be frank with themselves or others about following the assumptions towards their icily-logical endpoints. American progressives are more likely to have some conflicting sentimental attachments to religious ideas of objective value, or ideas of “human rights” being a pseudo-objective value (I say “pseudo-objective” because, unless they are arguing from religion, the only basis they really have for asserting that such-and-such is an objective “human right” is their own moral intuition (in other words, what makes them feel good or icky, which is back to subjectivism even if they don’t realize it. Like I said, they don’t always follow their thoughts to the logical conclusion)).
So, American social democrats are not as “full-blooded progressives” as communists are, but their ideas lead in the same direction.
Okay, wow, I don’t know if I quite understand any of this, but this part caught my attention:
The Omohundrian/Yudkowskian argument is not that we can take an arbitrary stupid young AI and it will be smart enough to self-modify in a way that preserves its values, but rather that most AIs that don’t self-destruct will eventually end up at a stable fixed-point of coherent consequentialist values. This could easily involve a step where, e.g., an AI that started out with a neural-style delta-rule policy-reinforcement learning algorithm, or an AI that started out as a big soup of self-modifying heuristics, is “taken over” by whatever part of the AI first learns to do consequentialist reasoning about code.
I have sometimes wondered whether the best way to teach an AI a human’s utility function would not be to program it into the AI directly (because that will require that we figure out what we really want in a really precisely-defined way, which seems like a gargantuan task), but rather, perhaps the best way would be to “raise” the AI like a kid at a stage where the AI would have minimal and restricted ways of interacting with human society (to minimize harm...much like a toddler thankfully does not have the muscles of Arnold Schwarzenegger to use during its temper tantrums), and where we would then “reward” or “punish” the AI for seeming to demonstrate better or worse understanding of our utility function.
It always seemed to me that this strategy had the fatal flaw that we would not be able to tell if the AI was really already superintelligent and was just playing dumb and telling us what we wanted to hear so that we would let it loose, or if the AI really was just learning.
In addition to that fatal flaw, it seems to me that the above quote suggests another fatal flaw to the “raising an AI” strategy—that there would be a limited time window in which the AI’s utility function would still be malleable. It would appear that, as soon as part of the AI figures out how to do consequentialist reasoning about code, then its “critical period” in which we could still mould its utility function would be over. Is this the right way of thinking about this, or is this line of thought waaaay too amateurish?
I would say that the most full-blooded “progressives” around today would be communists. No, not the Confucian Mandarins in China that try to pass themselves off as “communists” nowadays. I’m talking about communists who were / are at least as vaguely connected to the actual writings of Marx and Engels as the Soviet communists were. They are the ones who wanted / want to make “heaven on Earth.” They are the ones who had / have the most supreme confidence in humankind’s ability to eventually “master nature” in principle. They are the ones who had / have the most confidence in their designs to re-engineer human society and “lift the world.” They are the ones neoreactionaries truly loathe.
As much as neoreactionaries wail about the decline of Western Civilization now, imagine what they would be like if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War...if they had subverted all Western governments and the U.S. was now run by a communist Poliburo. I think neoreactionaries’ heads would explode.
That said, the numbers of real fire-breathing communists in the West nowadays is minuscule, so that is probably why neoreactionaries do not frame them as their ultimate enemy. Instead, neoreactionaries focus on ideologically combating the social justice types, who usually hail from a slightly less extreme part of the left associated with “democratic” socialism, social democracy, and maybe the left wing of the Democratic Party. They are less-extreme “progressives” in that they do not push the whole philosophy of “progressivism” to its most extreme conclusions, but because they are more numerous and more of a threat, they are who gets tarred with the label “progressivist,” and that is why neoreactionaries talk about “progressivism” rather than “Enlightenment-ism” or “communism,” and hence why I have chosen to use the label “progressivism” in this thread.
Edit: Also, one might object that communists talk a great deal about “serving the people” and not being selfish and all that. Surely they would not fit the mold of normative subjectivism (“Whatever I like, I define as “good.”) But here again, you are getting confused by our modern-day Confucian Mandarin knock-offs. To a certain extent, even Soviet communism was polluted with all sorts of quasi-Eastern Orthodox sentiments. If you go back to “Real Communism”(tm) in the writings of Marx and Engels, you find that communism is about finding a collective solution to what is a shared, but essentially individual problem of an individual worker’s alienation from his labors and his feeling of unfreedom. Marx cannot be easily separated from his contemporaries Pierre Joseph Proudhon (anarchist) and Max Stirner (egoist). Although Marx disagreed with them at length, his idea of communism was definitely influenced by them and other Enlightenment thinkers.
At some point along the way, communists mixed up the ultimate goal (individual liberation from unfreedom and alienation) with proximate means like “serve the people” or “das Partei hat immer Recht!” (The Party is always right!) (And these were poor proximate means at that, to judge by the fact that they did not bring society one inch closer to communism).
Yes, I’ve realized that neoreactionaries use the term “progressive” to basically mean “post-Enlightenment thought” in general. And that is the way I am using the term in this thread.
Edit: Except there is that tricky problem that neoreactionaries trace the origins of “progressivism” and “the Cathedral” back even farther to “ultra-Calvinism” and the Protestant Reformation. So I guess “progressivism” is post-Reformation thought, which would include Enlightenment thought and New Deal liberalism as further signposts along that road?
Interesting dichotomy. Yes, I think you may be on to something here.
The argument goes roughly that peasants, slaves, battered wives, and so on who accepted their lot in life would mentally adapt and be able to be perfectly happy. Progressivism/liberalism/the Cthedral has either destroyed our capacity to thrive in these arrangements or caused us to dishonestly claim we would hate them.
One way to test this hypothesis would be to locate a place in the world today, or a place and time in history, where the ideas of the “Cathedral” has not / had not penetrated, and give the “oppressed” a chance to state their true opinions in a way where they know that they don’t need to censor themselves in front of the master.
For example, if we went back to 1650 in Virginia (surely before any abolitionist sentiment or Cathedralization of that society’s discourse...) and found a secret diary of a slave that said, “Oh lawd, I sho’ love slavin’ fo’ da massah evryday,” then that would support the neoreactionary hypothesis. On the other hand, many discoveries of secret slave diaries in that context saying, “Bein’ slaves is awful bad” would suggest the opposite.
Although I can’t seem to find any citations for this at the moment, I do believe that I have run across at least one such example of a slave praising slavery in my time spent looking at primary sources from American antebellum slavery...but, if I recall, it might have been from a slave writing just after the Civil War, writing about “Dem was da good times befo’ da war,” and the statement might have been given for ulterior reasons with a mind to who the audience would be (possibly ex-slavemasters whom the ex-slave now served as a sharecropper...I can’t remember the context).
To be sure, the vast, vast majority of slave sources that I have read all seem to indicate that slaves hated slavery and tried to escape at any opportunity...but maybe that was just the Cathedral fooling them...
Unfortunately, writing was an elite skill throughout much of history, and the honest opinions of the oppressed were not often recorded....
An analogous question that I encountered recently when buying a powerball lottery ticket just for the heck of it (also because its jackpot was $1.5 billion and the expected value of buying a ticket was actually approaching a positive net reward) :
I was in a rush to get somewhere when I was buying the ticket, so I thought, “instead of trying to pick meaningful numbers, why not just pick something like 1-1-1-1-1-1? Why would that drawing be strictly more improbable than any other random permutations of 6 numbers from 1 to 60, such as 5-23-23-16-37-2? But then the store clerk told me that I could just let the computer pick the numbers on my ticket, so I said “OK.”
Picking 1-1-1-1-1-1 SEEMS like you are screwing yourself over and requiring an even more improbable outcome to take place in order to win...but are you REALLY? I don’t see how....
I’m sure if 1-1-1-1-1-1 were actually drawn, there would be investigations about whether that drawing was rigged. And if I won with ANY ticket (such as 5-23-23-16-37-2), I would start to wonder whether I was living in a simulation centered around my life experience. But aren’t these intuitions going astray? Aren’t the probabilities all the same?