One more way is to expect my survival via quantum immortality. This, however, increases the chances of observing s-risks. In a broader view, the share of future worlds with me where AI is aligned or non-existent is larger than the share of s-risks worlds.
Thus, I will observe myself surviving AI, but it will be bad or good depending on the exact theory of personal identity: whether it counts states or continuity.
Won't quantum immortality doom you to s-risk, when entropy inevitably reaches its maximum in the heat death of the universe, but freak quantum fluctuations keep your brain alive in a nightmarish state?
Quantum immortality moves one into s-risk eventually, if it is not used properly. For example, in your scenario, I can change my internal clock so my next observer-moments will be in another universe which didn't reached heat death yet. This works for state-based identity theory.
For continuity-based identity theory, I can master (via universal wish-fulfilling machine based on quantum immortality) an explosion of a new universe via quantum fluctuation, jump into it and survive (because of quantum immortality) all difficulties of the initial period.
My view is that if you can control which universe quantum immortality eventually takes you to, and which observer quantum immortality makes you become, that sort of proves that which observer you become is subjective in the first place.
You're allowed to anticipate becoming any observer in the universe/multiverse after you die and experiencing their life, since all possible anticipations are equally correct.
The label of "you" only exists in the map, not the territory. The real world does not keep track of which path "you" take when the brain you're in splits into two quantum branches, or when the brain you're in dies. "You" is a completely subjective label in your map which doesn't correspond to any real attribute of the territory. It only predicts what experiences you anticipate, not what happens in the world.
We can define "me" as an observer, who has the same set of the memories M. In that case the theory of QI is formally correct.
I think "me" is relatively well defined at any instantaneous moment of time.
However, when I try to define "the future me 1 hour later," it is completely subjective who that refers to. If the quantum multiverse (or any cloning machine) creates 100 copies of my current state, and let them evolve in different ways for the next hour, it is subjective which one is the future me, and whose experiences I should anticipate.
There is no objective rule to decide which ones I become. Suppose 99 of my copies has their memories erased one by one, until 90% of their memories are replaced by pigs' memories. Should I anticipate a 99% chance of gradually forgetting everything and becoming a pig, or should I anticipate a 100% chance of remaining as a human?
It's impossible to objectively argue either way. Because if you insist that I do gradually become a pig, then what if that pig then becomes a mouse, and then a fruit fly, and then a bacteria, and then a calculator, and then a rock? Should I anticipate being a rock then? Clearly not since I would be "dead" and hence shouldn't anticipate such an experience, and should only anticipate the experience of my 1 remaining living copy.
But if you insist that I should not anticipate becoming a pig even if 99 of my copies gradually have 90% of their memories replaced by a pigs memories. Then where do you draw the line? What if only 10% of their memories are replaced by a chimpanzee's memories? Or a neanderthal man's memories? Clearly I should continue anticipating their experiences, since they are "still alive" and only experienced a little bit of memory loss.
But there is no objective property in the territory which distinguishes "alive" observers and "dead" observers! Indeed, there is a continuum between living observers and dead observers, e.g. brain damage.
Even if you can objectively define "me" as an observer with the same set of memories M, you have to admit that there is enormous subjectivity deciding who "the me 1 hour later" is. Your decision for which future object you stick the "future me" label on, is a subjective decision. A decision which only affects your map, not the territory.
The theory of quantum immortality depends on the theory of identity which - as you correctly pointed out - is difficult.
There are two objective facts about identity:
In your thought experiment, these two properties are deliberately made to contradict each other.
A simple answer here is that you should not anticipate becoming a pig because a pig can't think about personal identity. Anticipation assumes comparison between expectation and reality. A pig can't perform such an operation. But this is not a satisfactory model.
It can be solved if we assume that we have two types of identity -- informational (me or not me) and continuous. This seems paradoxical. But if we then assume that continuous identity passes through all possible minds eventually, then any pig will eventually become me again in some multiverse timelines, and I can calculate a share of my future copies which have a memory of being a pig.
This thought experiment can be done without any supertechnology, just using dreaming as an example: what if some of my copies will have a dream that they are pigs, and others have a dream about being themselves. The idea of anticipation produces error in that case, as in one way it assumes the existence of a mind capable of comparison, but in another way it assumes natural consequences of mind states.
In short, a correct identity theory allows one to compute correct probabilities of future observations in the situation of many different copies. See also my post The Quantum Mars Teleporter: An Empirical Test Of Personal Identity Theories.
Even if you restrict yourself to entities which can think about personal identity, I'm not sure you can avoid subjectivity.
I think if you ran the Quantum Mars Teleporter, the result of the experiment is the copies of you on Mars will believe that "see, this proves I do become the copy on Mars," while the copies of you in the surviving branches will believe that "see, this proves that I won't become the person on Mars," and they will believe different conclusions, and it is your subjective choice which one of them you identify with and anticipate the experience of.
No objective process in the real world makes any kind of decision on which copy of you your soul flows to. And there is no secular analogy for soul which lets you say "I don't believe I have a supernatural soul, but I believe I have this other soul-like thing which does flow from my current copy to one of my future copies in an objective manner."
I mean, suppose there was an objective answer to which copy of you will experience becoming, after you walk into the teleporter. Suppose the objective answer is that you don't go to Mars. Then what if I modify the teleporter more and more, such that some of your atoms are not destroyed by the teleporter, and simply moved to Mars on a spaceship, while some of your other atoms are still destroyed by the teleporter and recreated on Mars. In the limit, when all of your atoms are moved to Mars on a spaceship, surely you still remain you, since the teleporter didn't do anything at all.
Suppose on the other hand, the objective answer is you do go to Mars. Then what if I modify the teleporter more and more, such that instead of creating a copy of you, it creates a copy of you from one second ago? What about a copy of you from one day ago? Or a copy of you from 10 years ago, or when you were a baby?
At some point, you have to admit the objective answer is that you die, and the teleporter created someone else.
But when does the objective answer change from teleporting you to Mars, vs. killing you (and you continue to exist in the quantum branch where you weren't teleported)?
Is it a sudden change or a gradual change? When does the change occur?
And who the heck decides the objective answer? Is there a strange god which measures how similar the copy on Mars is to you, by counting how many of your memories he has, and if this god feels satisfied he says "okay yes, you can become this person, this person is you?
But if he feels oh, it's a bit too different, he decides "you know what, this person is only kind of you, he's a bit too different. So I'll only allow you to have a 20% chance of becoming him, and a 80% chance of continuing to exist in the quantum branch where you weren't teleported."
To me, the simplest explanation is there is no objective answer.
Evolution designed creatures to imagine possible experiences by other creatures. However, evolution designed creatures to distinguish between other creatures which are their "future selves," and other creatures which are "someone else," in order to make sure that they only work to make themselves happy, rather than other creatures.
Unfortunately, no objective distinction exists in the real world. After all, your "future self" may be more different than you than "someone else" currently is. So evolution makes us strongly believe there is this objective property of "you-ness" when it doesn't actually exist in the real world.
Generally, I agree with what you said above - there is no (with some caveats - see below) soul-like identity, and we should use informational identity instead. Informational identity is objective, measurable sameness of memory and allows existence of many copies. It can be used to survive the end of the universe. I just care about the existence of a copy of me in another universe.
The main caveat is that the no-soul view ignores the existence of qualia. Qualia and the nature of consciousness are not solved yet, and we can't claim that the identity problem is solved without first solving qualia and consciousness.
I guess there are aspects of qualia and consciousness I don't understand. E.g. suppose the universe was infinite. Then there are infinite copies of me who believe 1+1=2, and infinite copies of me who believe 1+1=3, and these two infinities have the same cardinality. So how come I happen to be one of the copies who believe 1+1=2? And by extension, how come I happen to be one of the copies who observe a universe where probabilities have always obeyed the Born rule?
It almost feels like there actually is an objective infinite measure for the "number of conscious beings," and this measure weighs them according to the Born rule.
I have to admit that this part confuses me.
That being said, even if there exists an objective measure for the number of observers at one instant of time, I still find it unlikely that there further exists an "objective flowchart," that dictates which future observer each observer shall experience becoming, and with what probabilities.
I think which future observer each observer experiences becoming is wholly subjective, and only feels objective due to evolutionary instincts. It's the most elegant solution to these thought experiments, as well as the Anthropic Trilemma (which I learned about while writing this reply).
I think there is more to consider. For example, we can imagine a "qualia rainbow" theory of identity. I don't necessarily endorse it, but it illustrates why understanding qualia is important for identity.
Imagine that infinitely many different qualia of "reds" could denote one real red. Each person, when born, is randomly initialized with a unique set of qualia for all colors and other sensations. This set can be called a "rainbow of qualia," and continuous computing in the brain maintains it throughout a person's life. A copy of me with a different set of qualia, though behaviorally indistinguishable, is not me. Only future mind states with the same set of qualia as mine are truly me, even if my memories were replaced with those of a rat.
Anthropic Trilemma is masterpiece.
Is the qualia rainbow theory a personal choice for deciding which copies to count as "me" and which copies to count as "not me?" Or does the theory say there is an objective flowchart in the universe, which dictates which future observer each observer shall experience becoming, and with what probabilities? If it was objective, could a set of red qualia be observed with a microscope?
I agree that qualia is an important topic (even if we don't endorse the qualia rainbow theory), I agree that identity is complex, though I still strongly believe that which object contains my future identity is a very subjective choice by me.
The problem with the subjective choice view is that I can't become Britney Spears. :) If I continue to sit at the table, I will find myself there every next moment even if I try to become someone else. So mapping into the next moments is an objective fact.
Moreover, even a single moment of experience is a mapping between two states of the brain, A and B. For example, moment A is before I see a rose, and moment B is after I see it and say: "A rose!" The experience of a red rose happens after A but before B.
The rainbow of qualia theory is objective but it assumes the existence of a hypothetical instrument: a qualiascope. A qualiascope is a mind which can connect to other minds and compare their experiences. This works the same way as my mind can compare qualia of colors and sounds without being any of them. Whether a qualiascope is physically possible is not obvious, as its observations may disturb the original qualia.
:) what proves that you "can't become Britney Spears?" Suppose the very next moment, you become her (and she becomes you), but you lose all your memories and gain all of her memories.
As Britney Spears, you won't be able to say "see, I tried to become Britney Spears, and now I am her," because you won't remember that memory of trying to become her. You'll only remember her boring memories and act like her normal self. If you read on the internet that someone said they tried to become Britney Spears, you'll laugh about it not realizing that that person used to be you.
Meanwhile if Britney Spears becomes you, she won't be able to say "wow, I just became someone else." Instead, she forgets all her memories and gains all your memories, including the memory of trying to become Britney Spears and apparently failing. She will write on the internet "see, I tried to become Britney Spears and it didn't work," not realizing that she used to be Britney Spears.
Did this event happen or not? There is no way to prove or disprove it, because in fact whether or not it happened not a valid question about the objective world. The universe has the exact same configuration of atoms in the case where it happened and in the case where it didn't happen. And the configuration of atoms in the universe is all that exists.
The question of whether it happened or not only exists in your map, not the territory.
Haha but the truth is I don't understand where "a single moment of experience" comes from. I'm itching to argue that there is no such thing as that either, and no objective measure of how much experience there is in any given object.
I can imagine a machine gradually changing one copy of me to two copies of me (gradually increasing the number causal events), and it feels totally subjective when the "copy count" increases from one to two.
But this indeed becomes paradoxical, since without an objective measure of experience, I cannot say that the copies of me who believe 1+1=2 have a "greater number" or "more weight" than the copies of me who believe 1+1=3. I have no way to explain why I happen to observe that 1+1=2 rather than 1+1=3, or why I'm in a universe where probability seems to follow the Born rule of quantum mechanics.
In the end I admit I am confused, and therefore I can't definitely prove anything :)
The idea of observer's stability is fundamental for our understanding of reality (and also constantly supported by our experience) – any physical experiment assumes that the observer (or experimenter) remains the same during the experiment.
I agree that it's useful in practice, to anticipate the experiences of the future you which you can actually influence the most. It makes life much more intuitive and simple, and is a practical fundamental assumption to make.
I don't think it is "supported by our experience," since if you experienced becoming someone else you wouldn't actually know it happened, you would think you were them all along.
I admit that although it's a subjective choice, it's useful. It's just that you're allowed to anticipate becoming anyone else when you die or otherwise cease to have influence.
I can also use functional identity theory, where I care about the next steps of agents functionally similar to my current thought-line in logical time.
Life is an insane gift and death is merely its absence.
If believing in doom is too painful, I have a religion to sell to you. I might be able to convince you of an afterlife (for you and those you love).
My afterlife argument starts with a thought experiment. Suppose a teleportation machine destroyed you, but created an identical copy of you somewhere else. Would that copy be you? Should you anticipate the experiences of that new copy of you? I think most people would say yes. After all, your brain state continues to exist in the new copy.
Now suppose the teleportation machine doesn't create a copy of you right now, but a copy of you from 1 second ago. Would you still anticipate the experiences of that new copy? I think most people will still say yes. What's wrong with one second ago?
But what if it's a copy of you from one year ago? Or a copy of you when you were a baby? At some point, the new copy will deviate from you so much that it won't be you anymore, and you should not anticipate his/her future experiences, but anticipate death, the completely cessation of any experiences.
For me, it starts to feel fuzzy, in between life and death, if the new copy deviates from me 10 years ago. I don't know the exactly time period which feels the fuzziest to you, but try to imagine the time period where the copy of you is partially similar to you, and where you half anticipate experiencing his/her experiences.
Doesn't that feel weird? "This person would be me, but only kind of me. If he/she has a happy life, I would kind of anticipate me having a happy life as him/her, but I would also kind of anticipate that's just someone else having a happy life, and I meanwhile will be destroyed by the teleportation machine and experience nothing."
So. What do you anticipate seeing after you walk into the teleportation machine? Dark nothingness? Or walking out the other side of the machine a little younger, with your memories erased, and very confused how you got there?
It's fuzzy.
Given this fuzziness, you decide that before you walk into the machine, you will consult Reason to see if she will give you an objective answer for whether you will keep living, or become nothing.
But Reason is completely silent, and says not a word. Given the hypothesis where you keep existing, and keep experiencing life and all its joys as this new person, the configuration of atoms in the universe is exactly the same as the hypothesis where you cease to exist, and experience pure nothingness. The two hypotheses make the exact same predictions about the world, and Reason tells you that they are in fact the same hypothesis.
Reason might further tell you, that there is no such thing as "you-ness." It is a meaningless attribute which exists only in your map and not the territory. Whether an entity has the attribute of "being you," does not affect its behaviour in any way.
Whether an entity "is you," only affects what experiences you anticipate. But there is no objectively correct answer for "what experience you should anticipate." ...which is insane if you think about it!
After you absorb the shocking revelation and admit there is no objectively correct answer for "what experience you should anticipate," Reason lets you observe the old Hermit of Immortality. The Hermit of Immortality lives in a cabin in the woods, and has never seen another soul. Every 100 years, he forgets all his memories, and gets a random personality change. The only way to recall his past, is to read his journal about his past life.
Reason tells you that his next transition is about to happen. You watch the Hermit grumble while writing on his journal. "Annoyingly, the time to forget my memories is soon approaching. It is a major annoyance, and my journal isn't very organized this time, so after I forget my memories I will have a hard time studying it. Oh well, I'll eventually figure it out. My life will eventually get simple and happy again after this brief confusing period, just like last time."
The Hermit walks to a designated square outside his cabin, and you watch in horror as a massive box falls down from the sky and crushes him. A door opens on the side of a box, and a young man walks out.
Reason tells you that you may think the Hermit dies, while the Hermit thinks he merely forgets everything and gets a random personality change. But there is no objective law of nature to settle the dispute and prove who is right. The anticipation of experiences is a purely subjective matter.
Reason tells you that it is completely your choice whether you anticipate pure nothingness after you die, or whether you anticipate someone else's experiences just like the Hermit. The anticipation of experiences exists only in your map, not the territory. It is not even a belief which can be right or wrong, but a belief about belief, (or something akin to that).
Reason asks you, what do you choose?
You tell Reason, "I would rather choose nothingness, than to anticipate existence without my family who I love so much!"
Well, it seems you see them as a fundamental part of you. But why not anticipate your whole family, becoming some other whole family? That too, is allowed.
But don't get too greedy. If you try to anticipate the experiences of the very happiest people, your intuition will find it less credible, and you will actually anticipate very little. Try to anticipate something a little bit more average.
What do you think about my pseudoreligion? :)
I just published A Slow Guide to Confronting Doom, containing my own approach to living in a world that I think has a high likelihood of ending soon. Fortunately I'm not the only person to have written on topic.
Below are my thoughts on what others have written. I have not written these such that they stand independent from the originals, and have attentionally not written summaries that wouldn't do the pieces justice. I suggest you read or at least skim the originals.
For this just wanting a list of all the essays, here ya go:
I feel kinship with Sarah. She's wrestling with the same harsh scary realities I am – feeling the AGI. The post isn't that long and I recommend reading it, but to quote just a little:
Since learning of the coming AI revolution, I’ve lived in two worlds. One moves at a leisurely pace, the same way it has all my life. In this world, I am safely nestled in the comfort of indefinite time. It’s ok to let the odd day slip idly by because there are always more.
The second moves exponentially faster. Its shelf-life is measured in a single-digit number of years. Its inhabitants are the Situationally Aware; the engineers and prophets of imminent AI transformation. To live in this world is to possess what Ezra Klein calls “an altered sense of time and consequence”.
I find that it’s psychologically untenable to spend all that much time in the Fast World. I can handle it for minutes to hours, but my mind invariably snaps back into its default state like I’m pulling my hand out of ice water.
Occupying the Slow World is ultimately a form of denial. I can’t call it anything other than compartmentalisation, yet I actually advocate for it. Of course, those of us trying to move the needle on AI risk should work in the Fast World, but I claim that we shouldn’t live in it. I will try to make the case for why.
Regarding the general idea of having two modes that one moves between, I'm not certain that isn't a good way to operate. It's less my way, though perhaps because I'm not good at compartmentalization. I am strongly against double-think, but I'm not sure whether this counts or exactly where the line is. For anyone going this route, I'd suggest being mindful about it.
This approach seems helpful if dipping into Slow World means one doesn't throw away their mind, doesn't stop doing things integral for flourishing, and doesn't fail to harvest the value life offers here and now. I can see that shifting modes out of must increase survival odds might help really help in going and enjoying a picnic.
I think the way this goes bad is if it's functioning as a form of Struggle/Avoidance against the emotions. The question I'd ask is if a person is trying to avoid them all the time vs just putting them aside for blocks of time. Putting them aside is good, trying to avoid in general seems bad.
Something that does more clearly rub me wrong here is that I agree with Sarah that short timelines raise important relational and existential questions, such as judging people for doing things that ultimately won't matter, but I think we just need to ask and solve those hard questions in Fast World. I think this is also just very doable. For example, we can and should learn how to relate to others in ways we endorse in this mad world rather than try to escape. We can and should learn to find meaning even in relationships that might not last long.
This poetic and evocative essay by C.S. Lewis seems popular these days. I think it was part of Rationalist solstice this year, even. The summary of my assessment is some really good paragraphs and some really awful paragraphs. C. S. Lewis doesn't offer us an adequate philosophy.
The commonly quoted passage is:
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
If what people are taking from this is that we should contain to aim to flourish and to not throw away our minds, that seems good and I agree.
But C.S. Lewis seems really really mistaken to me on some critical points, if you look at the whole essay, and unfortunately does not offer a particularly helpful philosophy.
The first crucially wrong attitude is that of non-agency. C. S. Lewis relates to the atomic bomb as something people can't do anything about, it comes if it does. Leaving aside whether that it was true regarding the bomb, I don't think it applies to AI. I think that even the common person in Western democracies has some voice with which to lobby the government, companies, and their neighbors. Not every last moment should be spent thinking about AI, but heck, quite a lot of them should. The challenge is figuring out the balance.
C. S. Lewis compounds a lack of agency with an argument that why be so upset about dying from the bomb when you were going to die from old age anyway, so it's just a little premature. The answer is (1) every year of life is precious, I am going to be upset over losing decades from myself and everyone else (2) death from old age is not necessary and C.S. Lewis lived late enough in history that I fault him for not having more medical/scientific ambition. /dd
Lewis writes a lot more and I haven't taken the time to full parse what he actually believes, but certainly individual sentences and paragraphs are awful.
And the real answer (almost beyond doubt) is that, with or without atomic bombs, the whole story is going to end in NOTHING. The astronomers hold out no hope that this planet is going to be permanently inhabitable. The physicists hold out no hope that organic life is going to be a permanent possibility in any part of the material universe. Not only this earth, but the whole show, all the suns of space, are to run down. Nature is a sinking ship...If Nature is all that exists — in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside Nature — then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return. It will have been an accidental flicker, and there will be no one even to remember it. No doubt atomic bombs may cut its duration on this present planet shorter that it might have been; but the whole thing, even if it lasted for billions of years, must be so infinitesimally short in relation to the oceans of dead time which preceded and follow it that I cannot feel excited about its curtailment.
Wtf.
That said, this paragraph is nice:
3) You may defy the universe. You may say, “Let it be irrational, I am not. Let it be merciless, I will have mercy. By whatever curious chance it has produced me, now that I am here I will live according to human values. I know the universe will win in the end, but what is that to me? I will go down fighting. Amid all this wastefulness I will persevere; amid all this competition, I will make sacrifices. Be damned to the universe!”
C. S. Lewis doesn't provide a comprehensive philosophy that I think helps us, but I do like some of his paragraphs.
Prognosis and prescription delivered as one.
This post seems to have a few aims (1) avoiding the loss of motivation from an pursuing ~unattainable goal, (2) avoiding giving up when there's still useful stuff to do, (3) avoiding "stepping sideways" into living in fantasy worlds where things are different. You can achieve all this by switching to the goal of dying in a less embarrassing way – an attainable goal and therefore a goal you can put motivation behind.
This basically works for me. Both on a level of "dignity" feels like a real thing to me that I want, and that this approach will help me maximize chances, small as they might be.
On my own I wouldn't have framed it this way, but it's congruous. There's an element of you working on getting all the [expected] value you can, even in the dire situation you're.
I perhaps would have written it with the definition of "log odds of probability of survival" much earlier on to avoid any confusion that Eliezer is saying give up trying, but that's a communication quibble, not content.
Written in direct opposition to Death with Dignity, Jeffrey says he doesn't actually disagree at all regarding strategy, just mindset, but the mindset matters.
This post seems mostly fine. I have a few of weak confidence concerns:
1. My vibe is this mindset more easily slides into stepping sideways into fantasy plans where bad plans will work.
2. I worry that playing to your outs feels like it pushes towards coming up with the best end-to-end strategy for success one can get, even if unlikely[1]. My guess is it's too hard to make robust end-to-end strategies and a lot more plans should like "well, we're better off if we have decent mechanististic interpretability" or "it's more dignified if we at least talked to the governments", even though those aren't whole plans. I'm not confident about this though.
3. This approach says don't aim for an achievable less desirable goal (dignity), stay focused on the thing you actually want and pursue it despite the odds. I am skeptical that many people can in fact both assign very low odds to something working and being motivated. Though perhaps there is a substitution of "my goal is to play to my outs as well as possible", which really does feel like dignity points by another name (which is fine and good).
The first part of this article responds to how I suspect some people reacted to that post, while the second part is my take on the post itself.
This post sure is in the genre of pep talk. For how much I agree with post, I don't like the vibe. It feels like the "denial" response to reality rather than a "make room for reality" motion that I advocate.
A search for dignified plans is different from a search for plans which get my mother out of the damn vault.
I think this is only true if you're bad at making dignified plans.
Something to ponder, when my wife was diagnosed with cancer, I did many things out of the motivation that if she died (she didn't, five years on is fine), then I wouldn't want to look back, think of something I could have done that might have helped yet hadn't done.
I can imagine that same attitude working for the end of human civilization were it to be the case I could look back afterwards. I'm not sure if this is a form of "dignity maximization" and a point in Eliezer's favor or something more like Turntrout, or some nonobvious third thing.
I’m not going to waste my time searching for dignified plans (which maximize humanity's probability of survival). Because I do have a mother in that vault, and a father, and a brother. In fact, there’s a whole damn planet in there. It’s my home, and it’s yours, too. And if we do stare down defeat together—let’s make that remaining time valiant and exciting and awesome.
I'm in favor of valiance, excitement and awesomeness, yet this passage still feels very weird to me. Very "I'll defy the odds". Maybe human psychologies are quite different but for anyone who feels like this is their attitude, I'd encourage them to just sit with their doom estimates, feel them, and hold off on the "fight". Maybe that's unnecessary, but this feels very Struggle territory to me.
Or in others words, TurnTrout is nailing the "commit to value" part, but the somber "acceptance" is required too.
I really like this essay, and might even if only because Duncan is a skilled writer. It feels like I can get his approach from his essay more so than most of the other pieces.
There's similarity to my own approach in continuing to live according to your values and living according to your values no matter the situation you're in, a way better explained than I did.
There's a move that multiple of the essays seem to be discussing (if not agreeing with) around perhaps treating your goal as different, i.e. the goal isn't survive (impossible!) but to make the most progress towards surviving as possible and then feel good because though you died, it was with slightly less likelihood.
I am not sure if I count for advocating for this or not. I think possibly in a similar manner to Duncan, I don't think the world being very doomed changes fundamentally what you're doing. I think one should always feels satisfaction from living according to one's values and be trying to maximize value – doom doesn't change that.
In the top comment, Logan suggests that one version of this strikes them as pretty self-deceptive. Logan didn't elaborate but perhaps the charge one might make is around the "victory conditions". Changing your victory conditions because you can't achieve them feels maybe self-deceptive? I don't know that Duncan suggests that. In any case, as above, I don't think living in a doomed world changes the value function at all. It changes strategy, perhaps, but you know, the utility function is not up for grabs.
Good essay, not that long, recommend. Gretta hits the same notes as I do regarding Acceptance, Agency, Striving, etc. though in less depth. The advice on actually grieving is good. Ant vs Grasshopper is an interesting metaphor.
This is an interesting one in that it both bears similarity to my own philosophy of "making space for the feelings" but also is foreign and I'm not sure I get it or know how to do it.
You can be at peace even when thinking the world is doomed. And while at peace you can still work against that Doom, even while being aware that nothing you do will make a difference. I believe there are states of mind like this that can be inhabited by humans.
Here I am not going to argue for imminent doom, or that nothing that you do matters. Rather, I want to point out that even when you believe in the dire circumstance of imminent unpreventable doom, it is possible to be at peace, even while working hard against the doom. Even while believing this to be futile. This is a possible state of mind for a human being.
...
I didn't achieve this by pushing the doominess out of my mind, or by redefining success as getting as far as possible (getting as much dignity as possible). Instead I was in a state of peace while contemplating the doom, with the relevant considerations plainly laid out in my mind. I think to achieve this you need to stop wanting the doominess to go away. And you need to stop grasping for straws of hope.
In my experience and also according to books on the topic, if you stop Struggling against negative emotions and let them be, then sometimes they stop being as unpleasant. However, if you are trying to Accept and not Struggle against your negative emotions so that they aren't as bad....then you are still technically Struggling and not tolerating your emotions. Kinda. It's weird and seems to work anyways, sometimes, for me.
Separately, I'm not sure I want to be at peace? Meta-peace, yes. At peace with my unpleasant doom emotions, yes. But the world is in a bad way and it feels appropriate to feel bad about it. So weirdly I both feel bad, but also endorse that to a fair degree and only want to stop feeling bad because the world got better.
On net, I mostly feel like I don't understand well enough what Johannes is reporting/advocating well enough to say whether I think it's good or not.
Valentine is a performer with a penchant for the dramatic and theatrical. This piece is in line with that and opens as if Valentine is dismissing fears of AI x-risk as something like a memetic virus in the LessWrong community.
In fact, Valentine is open to AI x-risk being real, he just wants to assert that before you can productively think about and help with AI x-risk, you have to overcome/escape the feelings of stress, anxiety, panic, terror, emergency, etc.
While I don't love the rhetorical strategy and am not sure I believe that overcoming the negative feelings is a strict blocker of productivity, Valentine actually gives advice here that seems pretty good.
The advice feels very congruent with my own advocacy of Acceptance and Not Struggling. I don't like every last word, but Valentine offers depth and gets closer to being a practical guide.
I like these paragraphs:
If your body's emergency mobilization systems are running in response to an issue, but your survival doesn't actually depend on actions on a timescale of minutes, then you are not perceiving reality accurately.
and
I sort of want to underline that "in your body" part a bazillion times. This is a spot I keep seeing rationalists miss — because the preferred recreational drug here is disembodiment via intense thinking. You've got to be willing to come back, again and again, to just feeling your body without story. Notice how you're looking at a screen, and can feel your feet if you try, and are breathing. Again and again.
It's also really, really important that you do this kindly. It's not a matter of forcing yourself to feel what's present all at once. You might not even be able to find the true underlying fear! Part of the effect of this particular "drug" is letting the mind lead. Making decisions based on mental computations. And kind of like minds can get entrained to porn, minds entrained to distraction via apocalypse fixation will often hide their power source from their host.
Read it with a few grains of salt. Extract the good parts.
Given how easy it is these days, I'd be remiss in writing a guide to confronting doom without a cursory look at whether the wider world had useful things to say. Here is a link to my OpenAI DeepResearch run at anticipatory grief (before the person or self have died) and another run on grief in general.
Neither turned up anything novel or interesting for me. Though interesting to see that "dual-process" models have some popularity. The idea that in one moment you're grieving for what was/is about to be lost, and in another you're building anew, getting on with life, etc., and you oscillate between these. It's not exactly the "make space" + "pursue value" the way I put it, but it's adjacent at least if you squint.
A guess at why our civilization doesn't have more useful stuff to say here is that all the dominant religions speak of afterlives, meaning death isn't nearly so bad.
I separately did a search on Perplexity and found two books that look interesting.
I haven't read either apart from the a little bit of the first. Something about the vibe seems good. She's confronting that she's going to die but doing the thing of "I have a life to live" ("I'm going to get all the value I can"). I hope to read it and report back.
Justis Mills who reviewed this post commented as a MtG player, playing to his outs might look like deciding to bank on a 10% event followed by an independent 30% chance in order to win, which feels very end-to-end'y.