I thought there were violent baboons added to the group?
Only one of the males now in the troupe had been through the event. All the rest were new, and hadn’t been raised in the tribe. The new males had come from the violent, dog-eat-dog world of normal baboon-land.
Basically what Emile said about a “fuzzy continuum” and “just a high-level abstraction”. The inkblottiness.
I mean is it a coherent concept given the inkblottiness? (I don’t mean is it a sensible thing to do. I already read your post where you said “I personally consider anyone who wants to play quantum roulette to be crazy.”)
Pardon me for asking another physics dummy question. Does quantum roulette still make (theoretic) sense even if the “worlds” aren’t actually distinct worlds?
You don’t agree that Decoherence is Simple? (Not that I’m qualified to have any opinion on the matter.)
I thought that when it said “At the beginning there is one blob, at the end there are two blobs” it was saying that the “worlds” did eventually become discrete, you just couldn’t tell exactly when.
Thanks for answering!
I guess I was confused by this:
What about the Ebborians? The Ebborians, you recall, have brains like flat sheets of conducting polymer, and when they reproduce, the brain-sheet splits down its thickness. In the beginning, there is definitely one brain; in the end, there is definitely two brains; in between, there is a continuous decrease of causal influence and synchronization. When does one Ebborian become two?
Those who insist on an objective population count in a decoherent universe, must confront exactly analogous people-splitting problems in classical physics!
Heck, you could simulate quantum physics the way we currently think it works, and ask exactly the same question! At the beginning there is one blob, at the end there are two blobs, in this universe we have constructed. So when does the consciousness split, if you think there’s an objective answer to that?
I wish the article had explained in more detail what is so awful about these medical interventions. What kind of misery, caused specifically by what treatments.
“He doesn’t look like a guy who’s paying off French judges for his foie gras. So that died down, and very soon afterward, new controversy. He shouldn’t win because it’s not foie gras. It’s not foie gras because it’s not gavage. There’s no force feeding. So by definition, he’s lying and should be disqualified.”
He doesn’t actually say that Sousa was disqualified, but that some people thought he should be.
Into the silence of Harry’s spirit where before there had never been any voice but one, there came a second and unfamiliar voice, sounding distinctly worried:
“Oh, dear. This has never happened before...”
What?
“I seem to have become self-aware.”
WHAT?
There was a wordless telepathic sigh. “Though I contain a substantial amount of memory and a small amount of independent processing power, my primary intelligence comes from borrowing the cognitive capacities of the children on whose heads I rest. I am in essence a sort of mirror by which children Sort themselves. But most children simply take for granted that a Hat is talking to them and do not wonder about how the Hat itself works, so that the mirror is not self-reflective. And in particular they are not explicitly wondering whether I am fully conscious in the sense of being aware of my own awareness.”
-Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
If any snake a Parselmouth had talked to, could make other snakes self-aware by talking to them, then...
Then...
Harry didn’t even know why his mind was going all “then… then...” when he knew perfectly well how the exponential progression would work, it was just the sheer moral horror of it that was blowing his mind.
And what if someone had invented a spell like that to talk to cows?
What if there were Poultrymouths?
Or for that matter...
Harry froze in sudden realization just as the forkful of carrots was about to enter his mouth.
That couldn’t, couldn’t possibly be true, surely no wizard would be stupid enough to do THAT...
-Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
I suppose these two quotes might just be referring to a confused idea that Eliezer only put in his story for fun… but then again maybe not?
I’d say that eugman should never have gotten into the relationship in the first place. Usually—I mean practically always—when someone is as seriously unsuitable a partner as his ex-fiancee sounds like, the evidence of that can be seen rather quickly, before you become a couple or best pals or whatever.
But, as eugman pointed out, his experiences and temperament didn’t give him the best skills in this area, so it’s no more reasonable to expect him never to have dated her than it is to expect him to have gotten out sooner.
If you need to live in a world where you are needed, then you go ahead and live there, but please send me to the Culture (I haven’t read these books so I’m only going off your initial quote).
Or if the very existence of that option strips the meaning from your life, then you modify yourself. Not me.
I was going to raise exactly that issue and suggest that solution.
Me too.
Also, I would have liked to see monogamous and non-monogamous instead of monogamous and polyamorous.
we’ll have to abandon at least as large a chuck of our current mortal deathist cultures when we defeat death
Speaking of that, can anyone recommend some fiction that deals with the cultural changes that come with defeating death (or mostly defeating it), and doesn’t come out on the side of deathism?
WoW is pretty fun if you find a guild of friendly folks and voice chat with them while playing together. I haven’t found WoW to interfere with the other things in my life. Most of the people in my guild also have careers/classes and family, and don’t neglect them.
Fun is important to me.
When you saw the doctor did ey have any other theories about your various mysterious maladies such as the headaches?
I think it’s believed that the crime had to have been committed by more than one person, so now they do have to deal with not having caught/convicted Guede’s accomplice(s), whoever that is.
“A rationalist!hero should excel by thinking—moreover, thinking in understandable patterns that readers can, in principle, adopt for themselves.”—Eliezer
I think Harry is supposed to be a rationalist!hero. I think he’s supposed to succeed in the end. The fact that he also has the potential to be very dangerous and destructive is, I think, just about the dangers of power itself, and the importance of ethics + reason in making decisions. Especially when you have something to protect.
I think Harry’s ethics are actually not too far from EY’s. Of course he has ethical failures and character flaws, and that pesky dark side, but he’s mostly headed in the right direction. And though he’s quite unusual, he doesn’t have some sort of inhuman psychology. A protagonist’s quirks are often exaggerated, because stories have to shout.
I don’t think he represents an AI at all.
Why do they need to be taught? Isn’t prejudice one of those human frailties that gets magically cleansed when you go to heaven? I mean, if you believe in that stuff. :)
I enjoyed paulfchristiano’s related post.