PaulAlmond

Karma: 111

PaulAlmond Aug 26, 2010, 9:20 PM
9 points
in reply to: Pavitra’s comment on: The Importance of Self-Doubt
I’ll give a reworded version of this, to take it out of the context of a belief system with which we are familiar. I’m not intending any mockery by this: It is to make a point about the claims and the evidence:

“Let us stipulate that, on Paris Hilton’s birthday, a prominent Paris Hilton admirer claims to have suddenly become a prophet. They go on television and answer questions on all topics. All verifiable answers they give, including those to NP-complete questions submitted for experimental purposes, turn out to be true. The new prophet asserts that Paris Hilton is a super-powerful being sent here from another world, co-existing in space with ours but at a different vibrational something or whatever. Paris Hilton has come to show us that celebrity can be fun. The entire universe is built on celebrity power. Madonna tried to teach us this when she showed us how to Vogue but we did not listen and the burden of non-celebrity energy threatens to weigh us down into the valley of mediocrity when we die instead of ascending to a higher plane where each of us gets his/her own talkshow with an army of smurfs to do our bidding. Oh, and Sesame Street is being used by the dark energy force to send evil messages into children’s feet. (The brain only appears to be the source of consciousness: Really it is the feet. Except for people with no feet. (Ah! I bet you thought I didn’t think of that.) Today’s lucky food: custard.”

There is a website where you can suggest questions to put to the new prophet. Not all submitted questions get answered, due to time constraints, but interesting ones do get in reasonably often. Are there any questions you’d like to ask?”

The point I am making here is that the above narrative is absurd, and even if he can demonstrate some unusual ability with predictions or NP problems (and I admit the NP problems would really impress me), there is nothing that makes that explanation more sensible than any number of other stupid explanations. Nor does he have an automatic right to be believed: His explanation is just too stupid.

PaulAlmond Aug 26, 2010, 8:57 PM
3 points
in reply to: Pavitra’s comment on: The Importance of Self-Doubt
Yes—I would ask this question:

“Mr Prophet, are you claiming that there is no other theory to account for all this that has less intrinsic information content than a theory which assumes the existence of a fundamental, non-contingent mind—a mind which apparently cannot be accounted for by some theory containing less information, given that the mind is supposed to be non-contingent?”

He had better have a good answer to that: Otherwise I don’t care how many true predictions he has made or NP problems he has solved. None of that comes close to fixing the ultra-high information loading in his theory.

PaulAlmond Aug 26, 2010, 4:42 PM
3 points
in reply to: inklesspen’s comment on: Consciousness of simulations & uploads: a reductio
But maybe there could be a way in which, if you behave ethically in a simulation, you are more likely to be treated that way “in return” by those simulating you—using a rather strange meaning of “in return”?

Some people interpret the Newcomb’s boxes paradox as meaning that, when you make decisions, you should act is if you are influencing the decisions of other entities when there is some relationship between the behavior of those entities and your behavior—even if there is no obvious causal relationship, and even if the other entities already decided back in the past.

The Newcomb’s boxes paradox is essentially about reference class—it could be argued that every time you make a decision, your decision tells you a lot about the reference class of entities identical to you—and it also tells you something, even if it may not be much in some situations, about entities with some similarity to you, because you are part of this reference class.

Now, if we apply such reasoning, if you have just decided to be ethical, you have just made it a bit more likely that everyone else is ethical (of course, this is your experience—in reality—it was more that your behavior was dictated by being part of the reference class—but you don’t experience the making of decisions from that perspective). Same for being unethical.

You could apply this to simulation scenarios, but you could also apply it to a very large or infinite cosmos—such as some kind of multiverse model. In such a scenario, you might consider each ethical act you perform as increasing the probability that ethical acts are occurring all over reality—even of increasing the proportion of ethical acts in an infinity of acts. It might make temporal discounting a bit less disturbing (to anyone bothered by it): If you act ethically with regard to the parts of reality you can observe, predict and control, your “effect” on the reference class means that you can consider yourself to be making it more likely that other entities, beyond the range of your direct observation, prediction or control, are also behaving ethically within their local environment.

I want to be clear here that I am under no illusion that there is some kind of “magical causal link”. We might say that this is about how our decisions are really determined anyway. Deciding as if “the decision” influences the distant past, another galaxy, another world in some expansive cosmology or a higher level in a computer simulated reality is no different, qualitatively, from deciding as if “your decision” affects anything else in everyday life—when in fact, your decision is determined by outside things.

This may be a bit uncomfortably like certain Buddhist ideas really, though a Buddhist might have more to say on that if one comes along, and I promise that any such similarity wasn’t deliberate.

One weird idea relating to this: The greater the number of beings, civilizations, etc that you know about, the more the behavior of these people will dominate your reference class. If you live in a Star Trek reality, with aliens all over the place, what you know about the ethics of these aliens will be very important, and your own behavior will be only a small part of it: You will reduce the amount of “non-causal influence” that you attribute to your decisions. On the other hand, if you don’t know of any aliens, etc, your own behaviour might be telling you much more about the behavior of other civilizations.

P.S. Remember that anyone who votes this comment down is influencing the reference class of users on Less Wrong who will be reading your comments. Likewise for anyone who votes it up. :) Hurting me only hurts yourselves! (All right—only a bit, I admit.)

PaulAlmond Aug 26, 2010, 2:47 PM
0 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Existential Risk and Public Relations
Okay, I may have misunderstood you. It looks like there is some common ground between us on the issue of inefficiency. I think the brain would probably be inefficient as well as it has to be thrown together by the very specific kind of process of evolution—which is optimized for building things without needing look-ahead intelligence rather than achieving the most efficient results.

PaulAlmond Aug 26, 2010, 12:58 PM
0 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Existential Risk and Public Relations
Are you saying that you are counting every copy of the DNA as information that contributes to the total amount? If so, I say that’s invalid. What if each cell were remotely controlled from a central server containing the DNA information? I can’t see that we’d count the DNA for each cell then—yet it is no different really.

I agree that the number of cells is relevant, because there will be a lot of information in the structure of an adult brain that has come from the environment, rather than just from the DNA, and more cells would seem to imply more machinery in which to put it.

PaulAlmond Aug 26, 2010, 12:58 AM
1 point
in reply to: Perplexed’s comment on: The Importance of Self-Doubt
If we do that, should we even call that “less complex earlier version of God” God? Would it deserve the title?

PaulAlmond Aug 26, 2010, 12:30 AM
0 points
in reply to: byrnema’s comment on: The Importance of Self-Doubt
Do you mean it doesn’t seem so unreasonable to you, or to other people?

PaulAlmond Aug 25, 2010, 11:42 PM
2 points
in reply to: Furcas’s comment on: The Importance of Self-Doubt
The really big problem with such a reality is that it contains a fundamental, non-contingent mind (God’s/Allah’s, etc) - and we all know how much describing one of those takes - and the requirement that God is non-contingent means we can’t use any simpler, underlying ideas like Darwinian evolution. Non-contingency, in theory selection terms, is a god killer: It forces God to incur a huge information penalty—unless the theist refuses even to play by these rules and thinks God is above all that—in which case they aren’t even playing the theory selection game.

PaulAlmond Aug 23, 2010, 11:45 PM
3 points
in reply to: Kingreaper’s comment on: The Smoking Lesion: A problem for evidential decision theory
Just that the scenario could really be considered as just adding an extra component onto a being—one that has a lot of influence on his behavior.

Similarly, we might imagine surgically removing a piece of your brain, connecting the neurons at the edges of the removed piece to the ones left in your brain by radio control, and taking the removed piece to another location, from which it still plays a full part in your thought processes. We would probably still consider that composite system “you”.

What if you had a brain disorder and some electronics were implanted into your brain? Maybe a system to help with social cues for Asperger syndrome, or a system to help with dyslexia? What if we had a process to make extra neurons grow to repair damage? We might easily consider many things to be a “you which has been modified”.

When you say that the question is not directed at the compound entity, one answer could be that the scenario involved adding an extra component to you, that “you” has been extended, and that the compound entity is now “you”.

The scenario, as I understand it doesn’t really specify the limits of the entity involved. It talks about your brain, and what Omega is doing to it, but it doesn’t specifically disallow the idea that the “you” that it is about gets modified in the process.

Now, if you want to edit the scenario to specify exactly what the “you” is here...

PaulAlmond Aug 23, 2010, 11:32 PM
0 points
in reply to: Kingreaper’s comment on: The Smoking Lesion: A problem for evidential decision theory
“Except that that’s not the person the question is being directed at.”

Does that mean that you accept that it might at least be conceivable that the scenario implies the existence of a compound being who is less constrained than the person being controlled by Omega?

PaulAlmond Aug 23, 2010, 11:17 PM
3 points
in reply to: Kingreaper’s comment on: The Smoking Lesion: A problem for evidential decision theory
The point, here, is that in the scenario in which Omega is actively manipulating your brain “you” might mean something in a more extended sense and “some part of you” might mean “some part of Omega’s brain”.

PaulAlmond Aug 23, 2010, 11:03 PM
1 point
in reply to: Kingreaper’s comment on: The Smoking Lesion: A problem for evidential decision theory
Okay, so I got the scenario wrong, but I will give another reply. Omega is going to force you to act in a certain way. However, you will still experience what seem, to you, to be cognitive processes, and anyone watching your behavior will see what looks like cognitive processes going on.

Suppose Omega wrote a computer program and he used it to work outhow to control your behavior. Suppose he put this in a microchip and implanted it in your brain. You might say your brain is controlled by the chip, but you might also say that the chip and your brain form a composite entity which is still making decisions in the sense that any other mind is.

Now, suppose Omega keeps possession of the chip, but has it control you remotely. Again, you might still say that the chip and your brain form a composite system.

Finally, suppose Omega just does the computations in his own brain. You might say that your brain, together with Omega’s brain, form a composite system which is causing your behavior—and that this composite system makes decisions just like any other system.

“If the entity making the choice is irrelevant, and the choice would be the same even if they were replaced by someone completely different, in what sense have they really made a choice?”

We could look at your own brain in these terms and ask about removing parts of it.

PaulAlmond Aug 23, 2010, 10:45 PM
2 points
in reply to: Kingreaper’s comment on: The Smoking Lesion: A problem for evidential decision theory
EDIT—I had missed the full context as follows: “In my example, it is give that Omega decides what you are going to do, but that he causes you to do it in the same way you ordinarily do things, namely with some decision theory and by thinking some thoughts etc.”

for the comment below, so I accept Kingreaper’s reply here. BUT I will give another answer, below.

If the fact that Omega causes it means that you are irrational, then the fact that the laws of physics cause your actions also means that you are irrational. You are being inconsistent here.

“I mean my mind deciding what to do on the basis of it’s own thought processes, out of set of possibilities that could be realised if my mind were different than it is.”

so can we apply this to a chess program as you suggest? I’ll rewrite it as:

“I mean a chess program deciding what to do on the basis of it’s own algorithmic process, out of set of possibilities that could be realised if its algorithm were different than it is.”

No problem there! So you didn’t say anything untrue about chess programs.

BUT

“I, in this scenario, cannot. No matter how my mind was setup prior to the scenario, there is only one possible outcome.”

This doesn’t make sense at all. The scenario requires your mind to be set up in a particular way. This does not mean that if your mind were set up in a different way you would still behave in the same way: If your mind were set up in a different way, either the outcome would be the same or your mind would be outside the scope of the scenario.

We can do exactly the same thing with a chess program.

Suppose I get a chess position (the state of play in a game) and present it to a chess program. The chess program replies with the move “Ngf3”. We now set the chess position up the same way again, and we predict that the program will move “Ngf3″ (because we just saw it do that with this position.) As far as we are concerned, the program can’t do anything else. As predicted, the program moves “Ngf3”. Now, the program was required by its own nature to make that move. It was forced to make that move by the way that the computer code in the program was organized, and by the chess position itself. We could say that even if the program had been different, it would still have made the same move—but this would be a fallacy, because if the program were different in such a way as to cause it to make a different move, it could never be the program about which we made that prediction. It would be a program about which a different prediction would be needed. Likewise, saying that your mind is compelled to act in a certain way, regardless of how it is set up, is also a fallacy, because the situation describes your mind as having set up in a specific way, just like the program with the predicted chess move, and if it wasn’t it would be outside the scope of the prediction.

PaulAlmond Aug 23, 2010, 7:59 PM
1 point
in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: The Importance of Self-Doubt
Would you actually go as far as maintaining that, if a change were to happen tomorrow to the 1,000th decimal place of a physical constant, it would be likely to stop brains from working, or are you just saying that a similar change to a physical constant, if it happened in the past, would have been likely to stop the sequence of events which has caused brains to come into existence?

PaulAlmond Aug 23, 2010, 6:21 PM
7 points
in reply to: Kingreaper’s comment on: The Smoking Lesion: A problem for evidential decision theory
I think that the “ABSOLUTELY IRRESISTIBLE” and “ABSOLUTELY UNTHINKABLE” language can be a bit misleading here. Yes, someone with the lesion is compelled to smoke, but his experience of this may be experience of spending days deliberating about whether to smoke—even though, all along, he was just running along preprepared rails and the end-result was inevitable.

If we assume determinism, however, we might say this about any decision. If someone makes a decision, it is because his brain was in such a state that it was compelled to make that decision, and any other decision was “UNTHINKABLE”. We don’t normally use language like that, even if we subscribe to such a view of decisions, because “UNTHINKABLE” implies a lot about the experience itself rather than just implying something about the certainty of particular action or compulsion towards it.

I could walk to the nearest bridge to jump off, and tell myself all along that, to someone whose brain was predisposed to jumping off the bridge, not doing it was unthinkable, so any attempt on my part to decide otherwise is meaningless. Acknowledging some kind of fatalism is one thing, but injecting it into the middle of our decision processes seems to me to be asking for trouble.

PaulAlmond Aug 23, 2010, 9:49 AM
0 points
in reply to: JanetK’s comment on: Consciousness of simulations & uploads: a reductio
with a lot of steps.

PaulAlmond Aug 23, 2010, 9:24 AM
0 points
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
No, I think you are misunderstanding me here. I wasn’t claiming that proliferation of worlds CAUSES average energy per-world to go down. It wouldn’t make much sense to do that, because it is far from certain that the concept of a world is absolutely defined (a point you seem to have been arguing). I was saying that the total energy of the wavefunction remains constant (which isn’t really unreasonable, because it is merely a wave developing over time—we should expect that.) and I was saying that a CONSEQUENCE of this is that we should expect, on average, the energy associated with each world to decrease as we have a constant amount of energy in the wavefunction and the number of worlds is increasing. If you have some way of defining worlds, and you n worlds, and then later have one billion x n worlds, and you have some way of allocating energy to a world, then this would have to happen to maintain conservation of energy. Also, I’m not claiming that the issue is best dealt with in terms of “energy per world” either.

PaulAlmond Aug 23, 2010, 8:27 AM
0 points
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
I do admit to over-generalizing in saying that when a world splits, the split-off worlds each HAVE to have lower energy than the “original world”. If we measure the energy associated with the wavefunction for individual worlds, on average, of course, this would have to be the case, due to the proliferation of worlds: However, I do understand, and should have stated, that all that matters is that the total energy for the system remains constant over time, and that probabilities matter.

Regarding the second issue, defining what a world is, I actually do understand your point: I feel that you think I understand less on this than is actually the case. Nevertheless, I would say that getting rid of a need for collapse does mean a lot and removes a lot of issues: more than are added with the “What constitutes a world” issue. However, we probably do need a “more-skilled MWI advocate” to deal with that.

PaulAlmond Aug 23, 2010, 3:18 AM
1 point
in reply to: PaulAlmond’s comment on: Justifying Induction
I will add something more to this.

Firstly, I should have made it clear that the reference class should only contain worlds which are not clearly inconsistent with ours—we remove the ones where the sun never rose before, for example.

Secondly, some people won’t like how I built the reference class, but I maintain that way has least assumptions. If you want to build the reference class “bit by bit”, as if you are going through each world as if it were an image in a graphics program, adding a pixel at a time, you are actually imposing a very specific “construction algorithm” on the reference class. It is that that would need justifying, whereas simply saying a world has a formal description is claiming almost nothing.

Thirdly, just because a world has a formal description does not mean it behaves in a regular way. The description could describe a world which is a mess. None of this implies an assumption of order.

PaulAlmond Aug 23, 2010, 2:48 AM
8 points
on: Justifying Induction
The issue is too involved to give a full justification of induction here, but I will try to give a very general idea. (This was on my mind a while back as I got asked about it in an interview.)

Even if we don’t assume that we can apply statistics in the sense of using past observations to tell us about future observations, or observations about some of the members of a group to tell us about other members of a group, I suggest we are justified in doing the following.

Given a reference class of possible worlds in which we could be, in the absence of any reason for thinking otherwise, we are justified in thinking that any world from the reference class is as likely as any other to be our world. (Now, this may seem an attempt to sneak statistics in—but, really, all I said was that if we have a list of possible worlds that we could be in, and we don’t know, then we our views on probability merely indicate that we don’t know.)

The next issue is how this reference class is constructed—more specifically, how each member of the reference class is constructed. It may seem to make sense to construct each world by “sticking bits of space-time together”, but I suggest that this itself implies an assumption. After all, many things in a world can be abstract entities: How do we know what appear to be basic things aren’t? Furthermore, why build the reference class like that? What is the justification? It also forces a particular view of physics onto us. What about views of physics were space-time may not be fundamental? They would be eliminated from the referenc class.

The only justifiable way of building the reference class is to say that the world is an object, and that the reference class of worlds is “Every formal description of a world”. Rather than make assumptions about what space is, what time is, etc, we should insist that the description merely describes the world, including its history as an object. Such a description is out situation at any time. At any time, we live in a world which has some description, and all I am saying is that the reference class is all possible descriptions. Now, it may seem that I am trying to sneak laws of nature and regular behavior in by the backdoor here, but I am not: If we can’t demand that a world be formally describable we are being incoherent. If we can’t demand that the reference class contains every such formal description, surely the most general idea we could have of building a reference class, we are imposing something more specific, with all kinds of ontological assumptions, on it.

Now, if we see regular patterns in a world, this justifies expecting those patterns to continue. For a pattern to be made by the description specifiying each element individually will take a lot of information. Therefore, the description must be highly specific and only a small proportion of possible world-descriptions in the reference class will comply. On the other hand, if the pattern is made by a small amount of information in the world-description, which describes the entire pattern, this is much less specific and a greater proportion of possible worlds will comply: We are demanding less specific information content in a possible world for it to be ours. Therefore, if we see a regular pattern, it is much more likely that our world is one of the large proportion of worlds where that pattern results from a small amount of information in the description that one of the much smaller proportion of worlds where it results from a much greater amount of information in the description.

A pattern which results from a small amount of information in the world description should be expected to be continued, because that is the very idea of a pattern generated by a small amount of information. For example, if you find yourself living in a world which looks like part of the Mandelbrot set, you should think it more likely that you live in a world where the Mandelbrot rule is part of the description of that world and expect to see more Mandelbrot pattern in every places.

Therefore, patterns should be expected to be continued.

I also suggest that Hume’s problem of induction only appears in the first place because people have the misplaced idea that the reference class should be built up second by second, from the point of view of a being inside time, when it should ideally be built from the point of view of an observer not restricted in that way.