Microplastics have been in the news and the local rationalist discord with increasing frequency over the past few months. Of note are Nat Friedman's PlasticList, and this 2024 preprint demonstrating that some human brains are now 0.5% plastic by weight. There was also an article on black plastic cookware that was quickly retracted[1]. The volume of discussion made it clear that few people seem to have a clear understanding of what we actually know about microplastics, so we had a meetup about it.
Here are the notes from Kitchener-Waterloo Rationality's in-person meetup[2] researching the current understanding of microplastics in a time-boxed format. Sort of like partitioned book club, the goal of the meetup was... (read 3658 more words →)
What are the other objections?
It's not just that it implies faster-than-light communication, it's that it implies communication at all.
Experiencing both bodies at the same time, you will be able to take actions in one body that you wouldn't have done without the other one. It seems odd that with no biological changes to your brain, the mere existence of another similar brain changes how this one functions. Why would they be linked? This implies the observer is some external soul-like thing that can manipulate matter. If you can't take actions based on your conscious experience, it implies the observer is dissociated from the brain and not created from it or able to interact with it.
I can definitely imagine a world where this is true, but it seems extremely unlikely based on what we currently know.
I can confirm seeing this one. I had a guitar teacher who had short nails on one hand, and long nails on the other.
What's the empirical or physical content of this belief?
I'll take a stab at explaining this with a simple thought experiment.
Say there are two people, Alice and Bob, each with their own unique brain states.
If Alice's brain state changes slightly, from getting older, learning something new, losing some neurons to a head injury, etc, she will still be Alice. Changing, adding, or removing a neuron does not change this fact.
Now what if instead part of her brain state was changing slowly to match Bob's? You could think of this as incrementally removing Alice's neurons and replacing them with a copy of Bob's, I find it hard to believe that any discrete small change... (read more)
I agree with you that the LLM's job is harder, but I think that has a lot to do with the task being given to the human vs. LLM being different in kind. The internal states of a human (thoughts, memories, emotions, etc) can be treated as inputs in the same way vision and sound are. A lot of the difficulty will come from the LLM being given less information, similar to how a human who is blindfolded will have a harder time performing a task where vision would inform what state they are in. I would expect if an LLM was given direct access to the same memories, physical senations, emotions,... (read more)
I played the game a few times when it first came out, I didn't finish it and hadn't played in years. This made me pretty familiar with the game in general, but not with some of the specific mechanics/interactions.
I started with the Tiny Pond level and afterwards did The River. For both the first plan that I executed worked, but for both this final plan was chosen only after scrapping many other plans that seemed promising at first, but in the end either my assigned success probability was too low to try them or important parts were missing/uncertain.
Usually for these kind of puzzles my first instinct is to explore around to figure... (read more)