Short version: the issue with "reality is normal" is that the English statement looks bidirectional when the concept is actually unidirectional assignment. That is, a CS way of stating it would be:
normal := reality
This is, as you say, the solution to a lot of philosophical panic. The reverse statement
reality := normal (wrong!)
leads to a lot of confusion, and it's unfortunate that "reality is normal" doesn't exclude that interpretation, because this can lead to the double illusion of transparency. It looks to me like this post is valuable because it highlights that risk and tries to counteract it.
I'm not sure that your attempt to counteract it is very effective, though. When I first read the phrase "reality is weirdly normal," I thought you had totally missed the point. To quote from Think Like Reality:
...Whenever I hear someone describe quantum physics as "weird" - whenever I hear someone bewailing the mysterious effects of observation on the observed, or the bizarre existence of nonlocal correlations, or the incredible impossibility of knowing position and momentum at the same time - then I think to myself: This person will never underst
I'd like to point out the parallel to the existentialist concept of "absurdity". From Wikipedia:
It is illogical to seek purpose or meaning in an uncaring world without purpose or meaning, or to accumulate excessive wealth in the face of certain death. Absurdity is used in existentialist and related philosophy to describe absurdly pointless efforts to try to find such meaning or purpose in an objective and uncaring world, a philosophy known as absurdism.
To draw out the connection: rather than saying "reality is weirdly normal", I would say: Reality is absurd in human terms. Physics does not care about you. 'Every action has an equal and opposite reaction' is not a principle of justice; it has only to do with kinetic motion. Conservation of energy does not entail survival after death. The universe is allowed to kill you. Physics will happily twist everything you find meaningful beyond recognition (including you yourself).
This has a depressing aspect which is not present in the post. Perhaps that is the largest flaw of existentialism. However, I think this concept of absurdity is valuable. "Absurd" takes things one step further than "weird"...
Sartre is my prototype for 'existentialist' (and he was the first person to adopt the term), so I'm usually talking about his philosophy when I say 'existentialism'. Camus' philosophy is the thing I'd label 'absurdism'. The two thought they had different philosophies, though I think they mainly disagreed on emphasis and tone rather than substance. I've seen it put best:
Camus is also frequently mopey and mournful about the fact that we live in a godless, purposeless universe. Sartre is positively gleeful and exultant about it. (Though, admittedly, glee and exultation can look pretty scholastic and grim when you funnel it through Sartre's authorial demeanor.) So I think of absurdism as the brand of existentialism that emphasizes our tragic helplessness to escape our world's absurdity (the Droopy Dog Method for overcoming nihilism), while Sartrean existentialism emphasizes the mad power and freedom that comes with atheism (the Calvinball Method for overcoming nihilism). I believe Sartre avoids the flaw Eliezer's pointing at. (Though he suffers from plenty of other flaws.)
Enjoy billions of years contemplating your inevitable demise.
Or, enjoy several weeks of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy as you train yourself out of pointless rumination followed by billions of years enjoying utopia. The universe having a trait that is not preferred does not thereby obligate you to be overwhelmed by angst.
This isn't what I'm arguing against here. Of course 50 billion years is better, ceteris paribus.
What I am arguing against are these particular comments.
If the clever rhetorical questions you ask are rhetorically wrong then they remain wrong even if you have some good point that you want to ultimately support. I know this is a peculiar cultural norm to go by but it's a valuable one.
50 billion years still remain absurdly small compared to eternity.
Quite a lot smaller, yes.
The interesting question to ask here is what chance of eternal life we would be willing to exchange for a given 1% chance of 50 billion years of life in terms of hypothetical decision making. For instance someone who valued years of life linearly would, given the chance, dedicate the cosmic commons to computronium dedicated to optimistic matrix hacking even if almost completely certain there is no escape possible. I don't value life years linearly and I'm quite sure that there are finite numbers of life years that I would prefer over chances of eternal life but I don't know quite what the equivalence function looks like.
Dude, this post is amazing (though I could probably articulate (or resolve in the process) a few quibbles I have with it, if I had time for that)! You should seriously consider rewriting some of Eliezer's stuff.
I noticed that "reality is normal" and "reality is weirdly normal" both commit the mind projection fallacy. However, this is OK (though probably not optimal) if the reader has a technical understanding of what you mean (which is more likely to be true for someone who is reading this than for someone who is not).
That being said,...
Thanks, notsonewuser! Do tell me some of your quibbles if you have time.
Perhaps I'll add a cautionary link to the Mind Projection Fallacy where I explicitly allude to this -- "the cosmos as it sees itself".
I like your challenge a lot! I'll rewrite this for a more general audience and post it to my blog. Possibly as two separate posts, the first introducing 'Reality is normal' and the unusualness koan, the second discussing Egan's Law. I'll try to remove 'dependencies' in the sense of prerequisites for comprehension, but I don't think I'll try to remove the large number of intellectual connections to what Eliezer's written. What Eliezer's written is too useful, and part of my reason to make this more accessible is so new people will check out the Sequence posts I link.
Since the beginning, not one unusual thing has ever happened. ... Relative to the universe's laws, everything is par for the course. But relative to human standards of normality — what I'll call the familiar — barely anything that actually exists is par for the course. ... That's much of why absurdity is a poor guide to probability.
That sounds to me like, "Some events appear improbable to us, but nothing that actually occurs was improbable." That might be correct in some multiverse universes, but is trivially and dramatically false in non-mult...
What's "the phenomenon"?
I'm going to be willfully cagey about that. What I really mean by "the phenomenon" is "whatever's going on". Or whatever's going on that we're cognitively accessing or representing. It needn't all add up to a world that makes my map true; but it will add up to a world that explains why my map looks the way it does.
As far as I can tell, you are talking about Qualia, the subjective experience. Don't be shy - we are allowed to talk about it.
Related to: When Anthropomorphism Became Stupid, Reductionism, How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3
"Reality is normal." That is: Surprise, confusion, and mystery are features of maps, not of territories. If you would think like reality, cultivate outrage at yourself for failing to intuit the data, not resentment at the data for being counter-intuitive.
"Not one unusual thing has ever happened." That is: Ours is a tight-knit and monochrome country. The cosmos is simple, tidy, lawful. "[T]here is no surprise from a causal viewpoint — no disruption of the physical order of the universe."
"It all adds up to normality." That is: Whatever is true of fundamental reality does not exist in a separate universe from our everyday activities. It composes those activities. The perfected description of our universe must in principle allow us to reproduce the appearances we started with.
These maxims are remedies to magical mereology, anthropocentrism, and all manner of philosophical panic. But reading too much (or too little) into them can lead seekers from the Path. For instance, they may be wrongly taken to mean that the world is obliged to validate our initial impressions or our untrained intuitions. As a further corrective, I suggest: Reality is weirdly normal. It's "normal" in odd ways, by strange means, in surprising senses.
At the risk of vivisecting poetry, and maybe of stating the obvious, I'll point out that the maxims mean different things by "normal". In the first two, what's "normal" or "usual" is the universe taken on its own terms — the cosmos as it sees itself, or as an ideally calibrated demon would see it. In the third maxim, what's "normal" is the universe humanity perceives — though this still doesn't identify normality with what's believed or expected. Actually, it will take some philosophical work to articulate just what Egan's "normality" should amount to. I'll start with Copernicanism and reductionism, and then I'll revisit that question.
Everything is usual. Very nearly nothing is familiar.
Relative to the universe's laws, everything is par for the course. But relative to human standards of normality — what I'll call the familiar — barely anything that actually exists is par for the course. Nearly all events are senseless, bizarre, inhuman. But that's because our mapping hardware is adapted to a very specific environment; if anything's objectively weird, it's we, not the other denizens of Everythingland. That's much of why absurdity is a poor guide to probability.
Egan's Law reminds us that beneath our human surface weirdness lies a deeper regularity, a deeper unity with the rest of Nature. But to call this alien order 'regular' already assumes a shift in perspective from what a person off the street would initially think of as 'regular', to the hidden patterns of the very large and very small. We should prize the ability to shift between these points of view, while carefully avoiding conflating them.
Thinking like reality requires understanding reality. You can't just will yourself into becoming a high-fidelity map. If nothing else, you'll be too vulnerable to knowledge gaps. Pretending you think like quantum physics is even worse than rebelling against the physics for being too confusing. At least in the latter case you've noticed the disparity between your map and the territory.
To take pride in one's confusion at the quantum, rather than striving mightily to understand, is an epistemic sin. But to deny one's confusion at the quantum, to push it from one's mind and play-act at wisdom, is a graver sin. The goal isn't to do away with one's confusion; it's to do away with one's best reasons to be confused.
What adds up to the familiar needn't be familiar.
x + y + z + ... = Normality. But x ≠ Normality. Nor does y. In fact, even the complete quantum-mechanical description of the human world would not look normal, from a human perspective. But it would be a description of exactly the world we live in.
This is another reminder that surprise is a feature of maps, not of territories. Very different maps — a wave function scribbled in silicon, a belief, a gesture, a child's drawing — can represent the same territory. The drawing is normal (familiar), and the wave function isn't. But the referent of the two maps may well be the same. In asserting "quantum mechanics adds up to normality", we're really asserting that our maps of familiar objects, to the extent they're accurate, would co-refer with portions of the maps of an ideal Finished Science. They're two different languages, but faithful translation is possible.
The relationship between the quantum and the familiar can be thoroughly unfamiliar. The way in which the unintuitive fundamental truths yield an intuitive Middle World is not itself intuitive.
We could call this "emergence", if we wished to craft a territory predicate out of mapstuff. Otherwise, I suggest calling this predicate"wow-sometimes-I'm-not-very-good-at-keeping-track-of-lots-of-small-things-ence". Understanding the logical or mathematical implications of simple patterns is not humanity's specialty. Causal and part-whole relations are no exception to this rule.
It all adds up to the phenomenon.
Normality isn't common sense. Normality isn't our beliefs, expectations, assumptions, or strongest convictions. Normality, in the sense relevant to a true and binding "It all adds up to normality", is the phenomenon, the human world as it appears. (Not the human world as it is believed to appear. The human world as we actually encounter it.)
What's "the phenomenon"?
I'm going to be willfully cagey about that. What I really mean by "the phenomenon" is "whatever's going on". Or whatever's going on that we're cognitively accessing or representing. It needn't all add up to a world that makes my map true; but it will add up to a world that explains why my map looks the way it does.
Even saying that much risks overly restricting the shape explanations are allowed to take. Egan's Law can be used as a general constraint on successful explanations — they must account for the explanandum — but only if we treat the explanandum loosely enough to permit dissolutions and eliminations alongside run-of-the-mill reductions. It all adds up to an explanation of how our beliefs arose, though not necessarily a validation of them.
It's obvious that appearances can deceive us about underlying reality. But a variety of perceptual illusions demonstrate that experiences can also consistently mislead us about themselves. It all adds up to normality, but normality lies.
In some cases, we can't accurately describe our surface impressions until we've understood their underlying mechanism. Since so much of science is revisionary, we mustn't interpret Egan's Law in a way that unduly privileges first-pass descriptions. When data and theory conflict, it's sometimes more likely that the data has been misrepresented than that the theory is false.
How far does this openness to map revision extend? As far as the dynamics of one's brain allows. From the sidelines, it may appear to me that in principle a thinker should be able to have certainty about some propositions — for instance, 'an experience is occurring'. But when I actually find myself living through such a thought, I don't in fact experience infinite confidence. It remains physically possible for me to be persuaded otherwise.
This point ought to be a bit controversial, and more defense of it is needed. But I do insist on treating 'phenomenal experience' and 'phenomenon' as prima facie independent concepts. Egan's Law really is the law, whereas claims about some inerrant mode of reasoning or perception will at best qualify as well-supported hypotheses.
Egan's Law is not about saving conscious experience, or our theories, or our axioms, or our interpretations or descriptions of the phenomenon. It's about saving the phenomenon itself — the piece of the world in which we are, in fact, submerged. Egan's Law can be restated: The part of reality that (under its familiar description) puzzled or surprised us is identical to (or otherwise lawfully derivable from) the part of reality that (under its more fundamental description) explains it.
The human piece of the universe is of a piece with everything else. And the Everything Else gets explanatory priority. Of all our science's findings to date, that may well be the most startling.