You can make it with Parfit’s hitchiker, but in that case there’s an action before hand and so a time when you have the ability to try to be rational.
There is a path from the decision theory to the predictor, because the predictor looks at your brain—with the decision theory it will make—and bases the decision on the outputs of that cognitive algorithm.
The Demon is omniscient.
FDTists can’t self-modify to be CDTists, by stipulation. This actually is, I think, pretty plausible—I couldn’t choose to start believing FDT.
Well here’s one indication—I don’t know if there’s a single published academic philosophy paper defending FDT. Maybe there’s one—certainly not many. Virtually no decision theorists defend it. I don’t know much about Soares, but I know he’s not an academic philosopher, and I think there are pretty unique skills involved in being an academic philosopher.
Yeah, I agree I have lots of views that LessWrongers find dumb. My claim is just that it’s bad when those views are hard to communicate on account of the way LW is set up.
The description is exactly as you describe in your article. I think my original was clear enough, but you describe your interpretation, and your interpretation is right. You proceed to bite the bullet.
How’d you feel about a verbal debate?
Philosophy is pretty much the only subject that I’m very informed about. So as a consequence, I can confidently say Eliezer is eggregiously wrong about most of the controversial views I can fact check him on. That’s . . . worrying.
I felt like I was following the entire comment, until you asserted that it rules out zombies.
If you only got rid of consciousness behavior would change.
You might be able to explain Chalmers’ behavior, but that doesn’t capture the subjective experience.
It’s not epiphenomenalism because the law invokes consciousness. On the interactionalist account, consciousness causes things rather than just the physical stuff causing things. If you just got rid of consciousness, you’d get a physically different world.
I don’t think that induction on the basis of “science has explained a lot of things therefore it will explain consciousness” is convincing. For one, up until this point, science has only explained physical behavior, not subjective experience. This was the whole point (see Goff’s book Galileo’s error). For another, this seems to prove too much—it would seem to suggest that we could discover the corect modal beliefs in a test tube.
Did you read the next sentence? The next sentence is ” (note, this is not exactly how I feel about Yudkowsky, I don’t think he’s knowingly dishonest, but I just thought it was a good quote and partially represents my attitude towards Yudkowsky).” The reason I included the quote was that it expressed how I feel about Yud minus the lying part—every time I examine one of his claims in detail, it almost always turns out false, often egregiously so.
I don’t think that arguments about whether animals are conscious are value questions. They are factual questions—do animals have experience. Is there something it’s like to be them?
On Cannell, as I said, I’m too ignorant to evaluate his claims in detail. My claim is just there are smart sounding people who claim Eliezer is naive about AI.
On the zombie argument, the physical facts are not why it happens in the relevant sense. If god causes a couch to disappear in one world, that is physically identical to another world in which Allah caused the couch to disappear, which is physically identical to a third world in which there is a fundamental law that causes it to disappear. Physical identity has to do with the way that the physical stuff composing a world behaves.
I don’t find Eliezer that impressive, for reasons laid out in the article. I argued for animal sentient extensively in the article. Though the main point of the article wasn’t to establish nonphysicalism or animal consciousness but that Eliezer is very irrational on those subjects.
Notably, about three quarters of decision theorists two box. I wasn’t arguing for non-physicalism so much as arguing that Eliezer’s specific argument against physicalism shows that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Pain is a subset of suffering—it’s the physical version of suffering, but the same argument can be made for suffering. I didn’t comment on Everetianism because I don’t know enough (just that I think it’s suspicious that Eliezer is so confident) nor on probability theory. I didn’t claim there was a contradiction between Bayesian and frequentist methods.
Yep