“There exists a invisible dragon in my garage, which can’t be seen, felt, or sensed by any methods known to man today, or in the future”.
This is meaningful and true according to MWI.
steven
Karma: 526
A mind with access to its source code, if it doesn’t want to be corrupted, won’t be.
“alternative” → “alternatives”
I found this post a lot more enlightening than the posts that it’s a followup to.
TGGP, as far as I understand, Arrow’s theorem is an artifact of forcing people to send only ordinal information in voting (and enforcing IIA which throws away that information on the strength of preferences between two alternative which is available from rankings relative to third alternatives). People voting strategically isn’t an issue either when you’re extrapolating them and reading off their opinions.
I’m not sure I want to see Caledonian banned, but I would love to see explicitly very elitist fora created, perhaps like the erstwhile Polymath mailing list.
I’ve been wondering. The conventional wisdom says that it’s a problem for mathematical realism to explain how we can come to understand mathematical facts without causally interacting with them. But surely you could build causal diagrams with logical uncertainty in them and they would show that mathematical facts do indeed causally influence your brain?
Also, I would say the problem (if any) is the location of 2, 3, and 5, not the location of 2+3=5, unless the location of “Napoleon is dead” is also a problem.
Can we taboo the words “math”, “maths”, and “mathematics”? I think there are mathematical facts and then there is the study of mathematical facts, and these two things are as different in the same sense that the universe isn’t cosmology, crops aren’t agronomy, minds aren’t psychology, and so on.
It seems to me that when I say “every Hilbert space is convex”, I’m not saying something in math; I’m saying something about math, in English. Yes, I might talk about the world by saying “the world has the structure of a Hilbert space”. But then I might talk about blog commenters (not the ones here at OB) by saying they are like a horde of poo-throwing chimpanzees, and yet that doesn’t make primatology a language.
Math isn’t a language, mathematical notation is a language. Math is a subject matter that you can talk about in mathematical notation, or in English, etc.
200-year old buildings don’t feel philosophically different from 2000-year old buildings to me. I have however sometimes found it thought-provoking to be in places where ~nothing was more than 50 years old; it’s odd living in a completely different world than your ancestors.
Maybe this is naive of me but why would you not just do the standard act-utilitarian thing? Having all of future scientific knowledge before intelligence augmentation is worth let’s say a 10% chance of destroying the world right now, future physics knowledge is 10% of total future knowledge, knowledge from the LHC is 1% of future physics knowledge, so to justify running it the probability of it destroying the world has to be less than 10^-4. The probability of an LHC black hole eating the world is the probability that LHC will create micro black holes, times the probability that they won’t Hawking-radiate away or decay in some other way, times the probability that if they survive they eat the Earth fast enough to be a serious problem, which product does indeed work out to much less than 10^-4 for reasonable probability assignments given available information including the new Mangano/Giddings argument. Repeat analysis for other failure scenarios and put some probability on unknown unknowns (easier said than done but unavoidable). Feel free to argue about the numbers.
Has anyone done an analysis to rule out existential risks from the possibility of time travel at LHC? Also, what about universe creation (in a way not already occurring in nature), which raises its own ethical issues?
Both of these do seem very improbable; I would bet that they can be ruled out completely through some argument that has not yet been spelled out in a thorough way. They also seem like issues that nonphysicists are liable to spin a lot of nonsense around, but that’s not an excuse.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
This is false, of course; with sufficiently advanced technology you could build a machine that read out your mind state and caused Earth to disappear once it determined you no longer believed in Earth. Doesn’t mean Earth was never real.
WASONB: We All Sail On Neurath’s Boat.
A more general argument than 2LT against humans as fuel goes something like, “it’s a priori unlikely regardless of physics that the best way to generate power also happens to involve creating structures so complicated as conscious minds”.
Just to clarify, Hallq uses “mutual knowledge” as if it’s synonymous to “common knowledge”, but game theorists use the two terms as a contrast: mutual knowledge of A is when everyone knows A, common knowledge of A is when everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows (...) A. So this is about raising to common knowledge things that were merely mutual knowledge.
I doubt my ability to usefully spend more than $10 million/year on the Singularity. What do you do with the rest of the money?
Pay all the competition to retire?
Does anyone know of a solid proof that either 1) LHC won’t create lab universes or 2) if so, it already happens all the time anyway? I expect that both 1) and 2) could be shown to be practically certain but I haven’t seen it addressed anywhere.
Also, is time travel via traversable wormholes a possible risk? You’d expect it to already have happened, but maybe in a particle accelerator unlike in the wild time travelers would know the necessary coordinates or something. Again it seems quite improbable but it could have been addressed.
Eliezer, the cosmic ray argument doesn’t work against black holes or strangelets; cosmic ray collision products have a large momentum relative to Earth whereas some of the particle accelerator collision products would end up going slowly enough to cause damage. There are, however, other strong arguments against both the black hole and strangelet scenarios, for which see http://lhc2008.web.cern.ch/LHC2008/documents/LSAG.pdf (note that the author confirms the part about the cosmic ray argument not working). In the black hole case, for there to be a disaster, it would have to be true that 1) LHC unexpectedly creates micro black holes, 2) Hawking radiation unexpectedly doesn’t work, 3) it eats the Earth with unexpected speed, 4) especially given that micro black holes don’t seem to have eaten neutron stars.
Since they’re alive and remember being you, nothing stops them from counting as true successors. This is different from dead people.
Unless they’re freshly dead, so they could theoretically be cryonicized. So should we expect to stay freshly dead forever?
The dragon is in another world superimposed on ours, one where something improbable happened (some form of genetic engineering?); we will never be able to interact with the dragon in any way, but it’s perfectly real, as the people (also invisible to us) in its world can verify.