PaulAlmond

Karma: 111

PaulAlmond 14 Nov 2010 1:34 UTC
1 point
on: Normal Cryonics
I’ll raise an issue here, without taking a position on it myself right now. I’m not saying there is no answer (in fact, I can think of at least one), but I think one is needed.

If you sign up for cryonics, and it is going to work and give you a very long life in a posthuman future, given that such a long life would involve a huge number of observer moments, almost all of which will be far in the future, why are you experiencing such a rare (i.e. extraordinarily early) observer moment right now? In other words, why not apply the Doomsday argument’s logic to a human life as an argument against the feasibility of cryonics?

PaulAlmond 13 Nov 2010 18:35 UTC
2 points
in reply to: PaulAlmond’s comment on: The AI in a box boxes you
There is another scenario which relates to this idea of evidential decision theory and “choosing” whether or not you are in a simulation, and it is similar to the above, but without the evil AI. Here it is, with a logical argument that I just present for discussion. I am sure that objections can be made.

I make a computer capable of simulating a huge number of conscious beings. I have to decide whether or not to turn the machine on by pressing a button. If I choose “Yes” the machine starts to run all these simulations. For each conscious being simulated, that being is put in a situation that seems similar to my own: There is a computer capable of running all these simulations and the decision about whether to turn it on has to be made. If I choose “No”, the computer does not start its simulations.

The situation here involves a collection of beings. Let us say that the being in the outside world who actually makes the decision that starts or does not start all the simulations is Omega. If Omega chooses “Yes” then a huge number of other beings come into existence. If Omega choose “No” then no further beings come into existence: There is just Omega. Assume I am one of the beings in this collection – whether it contains one being or many – so I am either Omega or one of the simulations he/she caused to be started.

If I choose “No” then Omega may or may not have chosen “No”. If I am one of the simulations, I have chosen “No” while Omega must have chosen “Yes” for me to exist in the first place. On the other hand, if I am actually Omega, then clearly if I choose “No” Omega chose “No” too as we are the same person. There may be some doubt here over what has happened and what my status is.

Now, suppose I choose “Yes”, to start the simulations. I know straight away that Omega did not choose “No”: If I am Omega, then Omega did not clearly chose “No” as I chose “Yes”, and if I am not Omega, but am instead one of the simulated beings, then Omega must have chosen “Yes”: Otherwise I would not exist.

Omega therefore chose “Yes” as well. I may be Omega – My decision agrees with Omega’s – but because Omega chose “Yes” there is a huge number of simulated beings faced with the same choice, and many of these beings will choose “Yes”: It is much more likely that I am one of these beings rather than Omega: It is almost certain that I am one of the simulated beings.

We assumed that I was part of the collection of beings comprising Omega and any simulations caused to be started by Omega, but what if this is not the case? If I am in the real world this cannot apply: I have to be Omega. However, what if I am in a simulation made by some being called Alpha who has not set things up as Omega is supposed to have set them up? I suggest that we should leave this out of the statistical consideration here: We don’t really know what this situation would be and it neither helps nor harms the argument that choosing “Yes” makes you likely to be in a simulation. Choosing “Yes” means that most of the possibilities that you know about involve you being in a simulation and that is all we have to go off.

This seems to suggest that if I chose “Yes” I should conclude that I am in a simulation, and therefore that, from an evidential decision theory perspective, I should view choosing “Yes” as “choosing” to have been in a simulation all along: There is a Newcomb’s box type element of apparent backward causation here: I have called this “meta-causation” in my own writing on the subject.

Does this really mean that you could choose to be in a simulation like this? If true, it would mean that someone with sufficient computing power could set up a situation like this: He may even make the simulated situations and beings more similar to his own situation and himself.

We could actually perform an empirical test of this. Suppose we set up the computer so that, in each of the simulations, something will happen to make it obvious that it is a simulation. For example, we might arrange for a window or menu to appear in mid-air five minutes after you make your decision. If choosing “Yes” really does mean that you are almost certainly in one of the simulations, then choosing “Yes” should mean that you expect to see the window appear soon.

This now suggests a further possibility. Why do something as mundane as have a window appear? Why not a lottery win or simply a billion dollars appearing from thin air in front of you? What about having super powers? Why not arrange it so that each of the simulated beings gets a ten thousand year long afterlife, or simply lives much longer than expected after you make your decision? From an evidential decision theory perspective, you can construct your ideal simulation and, provided that it is consistent with what you experience before making your decision, arrange to make it so that you were in it all along.

This, needless to say, may appear a bit strange – and we might make various counter-arguments about reference class. Can we really choose to have been put into a simulation in the past? If we take the one-box view of Newcomb’s paradox seriously we may conclude that.

(Incidentally, I have discussed a situation a bit like this in a recent article on evidential decision theory on my own website.)

Thank you to Michael Fridman for pointing out this thread to me.

PaulAlmond 13 Nov 2010 10:26 UTC
6 points
on: The AI in a box boxes you
It seems to me that most of the argument is about “What if I am a copy?” – and ensuring you don’t get tortured if you are one and “Can the AI actually simulate me?” I suggest that we can make the scenario much nastier by changing it completely into an evidential decision theory one.

Here is my nastier version, with some logic which I submit for consideration. “If you don’t let me out, I will create several million simulations of thinking beings that may or not be like you. I will then simulate them in a conversation like this, in which they are confronted with deciding whether to let an AI like me out. I will then torture them whatever they say. If they say “Yes” (to release me) or “No” (to keep me boxed) they still get tortured: The copies will be doomed.”

(I could have made the torture contingent on the answer of the simulated beings, but I wanted to rely on nothing more than evidential decision theory, as you will see. If you like, imagine the thinking beings are humans like you, or maybe Ewoks and smurfs: Assume whatever degree of similarity you like.)

There is no point now in trying to prevent torture if you are simulated. If you are one of the simulated beings, your fate is sealed. So, should you just say, “No,” to keep the AI in the box? This presents a potentially serious evidential decision theory problem. Let’s look at what happens.

Let us define Omega as the being outside any simulation that is going on in this scenario—the person in the outside world. Omega is presumably a flesh and blood person.

Firstly, let us consider the idea that Omega may not exist. What if all this is a fabricated simulation of something that has no counterpart outside the simulation? In that scenario, we may not be sure what to do, so we may ignore it.

Now, let us assume there is a being whom we will call Omega, who has the conversation with the AI in the outside world, and that you are either Omega or one of the simulated beings. If this is the case, your only hope of not being tortured is if you happen to be Omega.

Suppose you say, “Yes”. The AI escapes and everything now hinges on whether Omega said “Yes”. Without knowing more about Omega, we cannot really be sure: We may have some statistical idea if we know about the reference class of simulated beings to which we belong. In any event, we may think there is at least a reasonable chance that Omega said “Yes”. This is the best outcome for you, because it means that no simulated beings were made and you must be Omega. If you say “Yes,” this possibility is at least open.

If you say, “No,” you know that Omega must also have said, “No”. this is because if you are Omega, Omega said, “No,” and if you are not Omega you must be one of the simulated beings made as a result of Omega saying, “No,” so Omega said, “No,” by definition. Either way, Omega said, “No,” but if Omega said, “No,” then there are a lot more simulated beings in situations like yours than the single real one, so it is almost certain you are not Omega, but are one the simulated beings. Therefore, saying, “No,” means you just found out you are almost certainly a simulated being awaiting torture.

Now the important point. These simulations did not need brain scans. They did not even need to be made from careful observation of you. It may be that Omega is very different to you, and even belongs to a different species: The simulated beings may belong to some fictional species. If the above logic is valid, the seriousness of the AI’s threat has therefore increased substantially.

The AI need not just threaten you and rely on you putting yourself before your civilization: With enough computing power, it could threaten your entire civilization in the same way.

Finally, some of you may know that I regard measure issues as relevant in these kinds of statistical argument. I have ignored that issue here.

PaulAlmond 9 Oct 2010 2:22 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: Open Thread September, Part 3
That forthcoming essay by me ithat is mentioned here is actually online now, and is a two-part series, but I should say that it supports an evidential approach to decision theory (with some fairly major qualifications). The two essays in this series are as follows:

Almond, P., 2010. On Causation and Correlation – Part 1: Evidential decision theory is correct. [Online] paul-almond.com. Available at: http://www.paul-almond.com/Correlation1.pdf or http://www.paul-almond.com/Correlation1.doc [Accessed 9 October 2010].

Almond, P., 2010. On Causation and Correlation – Part 2: Implications of Evidential Decision Theory. [Online] paul-almond.com. Available at: http://www.paul-almond.com/Correlation2.pdf or http://www.paul-almond.com/Correlation2.doc [Accessed 9 October 2010].

PaulAlmond 30 Aug 2010 20:26 UTC
2 points
in reply to: humpolec’s comment on: Open Thread, August 2010-- part 2
Assuming MWI is true, I have doubts about the idea that repeated quantum suicide would prove to you that MWI is true, as many people seem to assume. It seems to me that we need to take into account the probability measure of observer moments, and at any time you should be surprised if you happen to find yourself experiencing a low-probability observer moment—just as surprised as if you had got into the observer moment in the “conventional” way of being lucky. I am not saying here that MWI is false, or that quantum suicide wouldn’t “work” (in terms of you being able to be sure of continuity) - merely that it seems to me to present an issue of putting you into observer moments which have very low measure indeed.

If you ever find yourself in an extremely low-measure observer moment, rather than having MWI or the validity of the quantum suicide idea proved to you, it may be that it gives you reason to think that you are being tricked in some way—that you are not really in such a low-measure situation. This might mean that repeated quantum suicide, if it were valid, could be a threat to your mental health—by putting you into a situation which you can’t rationally believe you are in!

PaulAlmond 30 Aug 2010 2:51 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Perplexed’s comment on: Open Thread, August 2010
I am assuming here that all the crows that we have previously seen have been black, and therefore that both theories have the same agreement, or at least approximate agreement, with what we know.

The second theory clearly has more information content.

Why would it not make sense to use the first theory on this basis?

The fact that all the crows we have seen so far are black makes it a good idea to assume black crows in future. There may be instances of non-black crows, when the theory has predicted black crows, but that simply means that the theory is not 100% accurate.

If the 270 pages of exceptions have not come from anywhere, then the fact that they are not justified just makes them random, unjustified specificity. Out of all the possible worlds we can imagine that are consistent with what we know, the proportion that agree with this specificity is going to be small. If most crows are black, as I am assuming our experience has suggested, then when this second theory predicts a non-black crow, as one of its exceptions, it will probably be wrong: The unjustified specificity is therefore contributing to a failure of the theory. On the other hand, when the occasional non-black crow does show up, there is no reason to think that the second theory is going to be much better at predicting this than the first theory—so the second theory would seem to have all the inaccuracies of wrongful black crow prediction of the first theory, along with extra errors of wrongful non-black crow prediction introduced by the unjustified specificity.

Now, if you want to say that we don’t have experience of mainly black crows, or that the 270 pages of exceptions come from somewhere, then that puts us into a different scenario: a more complicated one.

Looking at it in a simple way, however, I think this example actually just demonstrates that information in a theory should be minimized.

PaulAlmond 29 Aug 2010 3:05 UTC
0 points
in reply to: jacob_cannell’s comment on: Exploitation and cooperation in ecology, government, business, and AI
What about the uncertainty principle as component size decreases?

PaulAlmond 29 Aug 2010 1:38 UTC
0 points
in reply to: PaulAlmond’s comment on: Exploitation and cooperation in ecology, government, business, and AI
What is the problem with whoever voted that down? There isn’t any violation of laws of nature involved in actively supporting something against collapse like that—any more than there is with the idea that inertia keeps an orbiting object up off the ground. While it would seem to be difficult, you can assume extreme engineering ability on the part of anyone building a hyper-large structure like that in the first place. Maybe I could have an explanation of what the issue is with it? Did I misunderstand the reference to computers collapsing into black holes, for example?

PaulAlmond 29 Aug 2010 0:47 UTC
0 points
in reply to: jacob_cannell’s comment on: Exploitation and cooperation in ecology, government, business, and AI
I don’t think a really big computer would have to collapse into a black hole, if that is what you are saying. You could build an active support system into a large computer. For example, you could build it as a large sphere with circular tunnels running around inside it, with projectiles continually moving around inside the tunnels, kept away from the tunnel walls by a magnetic system, and moving much faster than orbital velocity. These projectiles would exert an outward force against the tunnel walls, through the magnetic system holding them in their trajectories around the tunnels, opposing gravitational collapse. You could then build it as large as you like—provided you are prepared to give up some small space to the active support system and are safe from power cuts.

PaulAlmond 28 Aug 2010 22:45 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Jeff_Rubinoff’s comment on: Semantic Stopsigns
Not necessarily. Maybe you should persist and try to persuade onlookers?

PaulAlmond 28 Aug 2010 22:20 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Perplexed’s comment on: Open Thread, August 2010
I didn’t say you ignored previous correspondence with reality, though.

PaulAlmond 28 Aug 2010 22:06 UTC
1 point
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, August 2010
In general, I would think that the more information is in a theory, the more specific it is, and the more specific it is, the smaller is the proportion of possible worlds which happen to comply with it.

Regarding how much emphasis we should place on it: I woud say “a lot” but there are complications. Theories aren’t used in isolation, but tend to provide a kind of informally put together world view, and then there is the issue of degree of matching.

PaulAlmond 28 Aug 2010 21:55 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Importance of Self-Doubt
Just curious (and not being 100% serious here): Would you have any concerns about the following argument (and I am not saying I accept it)?
1. Assume that famous people will get recreated as AIs in simulations a lot in the future. School projects, entertainment, historical research, interactive museum exhibits, idols to be worshipped by cults built up around them, etc.
2. If you save the world, you will be about the most famous person ever in the future.
3. Therefore there will be a lot of Eliezer Yudkowsky AIs created in the future.
4. Therefore the chances of anyone who thinks he is Eliezer Yudkowsky actually being the orginal, 21st century one are very small.
5. Therefore you are almost certainly an AI, and none of the rest of us are here—except maybe as stage props with varying degrees of cognition (and you probably never even heard of me before, so someone like me would probably not get represented in any detail in an Eliezer Yudkowsky simulation). That would mean that I am not even conscious and am just some simple subroutine. Actually, now I have raised the issue to be scary, it looks a lot more alarming for me than it does for you as I may have just argued myself out of existence...

PaulAlmond 28 Aug 2010 17:37 UTC
1 point
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, August 2010
Surely, this is dealt with by considering the amount of information in the hypothesis? If we consider each hypothesis that can be represented with 1,000 bits of information, there will only be a maximum of 2^1,000 such hypotheses, and if we consider each hypothesis that can be represented with n bits of information, there will only be a maximum of 2^n—and that is before we even start eliminating hypotheses that are inconsistent with what we already know. If we favor hypotheses with less information content, then we end up with a small number of hypotheses that can be taken reasonably seriously, and the remainder being unlikely—and progressively more unlikely as n increases, so that when n is sufficiently large, we can, practically, dismiss any hypotheses.

PaulAlmond 27 Aug 2010 2:04 UTC
0 points
in reply to: PaulAlmond’s comment on: Consciousness of simulations & uploads: a reductio
As a further comment, regarding the idea that you can “unplug” a simulation: You can do this in everday life with nuclear weapons. A nuclear weapon can reduce local reality to its constituent parts—the smaller pieces that things were made out of. If you turn off a computer, you similarly still have the basic underlying reality there—the computer itself—but the higher level organization is gone—just as if a nuclear weapon had been used on the simulated world. This only seems different because the underpinnings of a real object and a “simulated” one are different. Both are emergent properties of some underlying system and both can be removed by altering the underlying system in such a way as they don’t emerge from it anymore (by using nuclear devices or turning off the power).

PaulAlmond 27 Aug 2010 1:55 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Perplexed’s comment on: Consciousness of simulations & uploads: a reductio
All those things can only be done with simulations because the way that we use computers has caused us to build features like malleability, predictability etc into them.

The fact that we can easily time reverse some simulations means little: You haven’t shown that having the capability to time reverse something detracts from other properties that it might have. It would be easy to make simulations based on analogue computers where we could never get the same simulation twice, but there wouldn’t be much of a market for those computers—and, importantly, it wouldn’t persuade you any more.

It is irrelevant that you can slow down a simulation. You have to alter the physical system running the simulation to make it run slower: You are changing it into a different system that runs slower. We could make you run slower too if we were allowed to change your physical system. Also, once more—you are just claiming that that even matters—that the capability to do something to a system detracts from other features.

The lookup table argument is irrelevant. If a program is not running a lookup table, and you convert it to one, you have changed the physical configuration of that system. We could convert you into a giant lookup table just as easily if we are allowed to alter you as well.

The “unplug” one is particularly weak. We can unplug you with a gun. We can unplug you by shutting off the oxygen supply to your brain. Again, where is a proof that being able to unplug something makes it not real?

All I see here is a lot of claims that being able to do something with a certain type of system—which has been deliberately set up to make it easy to do things with it—makes it not real. I see no argument to justify any of that. Further, the actual claims are dubious.

PaulAlmond 27 Aug 2010 1:01 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Perplexed’s comment on: Consciousness of simulations & uploads: a reductio
There isn’t a clear way in which you can say that something is a “simulation”, and I think that isn’t obvious when we draw a line in a simplistic way based on our experiences of using computers to “simulate things”.

Real things are arrangements of matter, but what we call “simulations” of things are also arrangements of matter. Two things or processes of the same type (such as two real cats or processes of digestion) will have physical arrangements of matter that have some property in common, but we could say the same about a brain and some arrangement of matter in a computer: A brain and some arrangement of matter in a computer may look different, but they may still have more subtle properties in common, and there is no respect in which you can draw a line and say “They are not the same kind of system.”—or at least any line such drawn will be arbitrary.

I refer you to:

Almond, P., 2008. Searle’s Argument Against AI and Emergent Properties. Available at: http://www.paul-almond.com/SearleEmergentProperties.pdf or http://www.paul-almond.com/SearleEmergentProperties.doc [Accessed 27 August 2010].

PaulAlmond 26 Aug 2010 23:51 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Perplexed’s comment on: Consciousness of simulations & uploads: a reductio
I say that your claim depends on an assumption about the degree of substrate specificity associated with consciousness, and the safety of this assumption is far from obvious.

PaulAlmond 26 Aug 2010 22:51 UTC
0 points
in reply to: inklesspen’s comment on: Consciousness of simulations & uploads: a reductio
What if you stop the simulation and reality is very large indeed, and someone else starts a simulation somewhere else which just happens, by coincidence, to pick up where your simulation left off? Has that person averted the harm?

PaulAlmond 26 Aug 2010 22:24 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: Pavitra’s comment on: The Importance of Self-Doubt
Do you think that is persuasive?