While I was busy procrastinating, I produced http://38020.vs.webtropia.com/sciencewiki/index.php/Helium_balloon (the Wiki-Extension for the plot, not the data, that was lying around anyway). This could (if enough people are using it) become quite a useful collection of evidence of various simple sciency questions, and also ultimately motivate some more people to actually...
Effort: 180 minutes tldr: To stop an AI from exterminating you, give the AI the belief that by switching itself off, humanity will die and the AI will not be switched off. Problem Somebody wrote a general self-improving AI and fat fingered its goal as "maximize number of humans living...
A counterexample to your claim: Ackermann(m,m) is a computable function, hence computable by a universal Turing machine. Yet it is designed to be not primitive recursive.
And indeed Kleene's normal form theorem requires one application of the μ-Operator. Which introduces unbounded search.
I don't buy your first argument against time-travel. Even under the model of the universe as a static mathematical object connected by wave-function consistency constraints, there is still a consistent interpretation of the intuitive notion of "time travel":
The "passage" of time is the continuous measurement of the environment by a subsystem (which incidentally believes itself to be an 'observer') and the resulting entanglement with farther away parts of the system as "time goes on" (i.e. further towards positive time). Then time-travel is a measurement of a "past" state or described differently (but the same thing) an entanglement between a subsystem (the location in the past the traveler visited) and its surroundings,... (read more)
Here is my attempt to convince you also of 1 (in your numbering):
I disagree with your: "From a preference utilitarian Perspective, only a self-conscious being can have preferences for the future, therefore you can only violate the preferences of a self-conscious being by killing it."
To the contrary, every agent which follows an optimization goal exhibits some preference (even if itself does not understand them). Namely that its optimization goal shall be reached. The ability to understand ones own optimization goal is not necessary for a preference to be morally relevant, otherwise babies and even unconscious people would not have moral weight. (And even non-sleeping people don't understand all their optimization goals.)
This leaves... (read more)
I, for one, like my moral assumptions and cached thoughts challenged regularly. This works well with repugnant conclusions. Hence I upvoted this post (to -21).
I find two interesting questions here:
How to reconcile opposing interests in subgroups of a population of entities whose interests we would like to include into our utility function. An obvious answer is facilitating trade between all interested to increase utility. But: How do we react to subgroups whose utility function values trade itself negatively?
Given that mate selection is a huge driver of evolution, I wonder if there is actually a non-cultural, i.e. genetic, component to the aversion (which I feel) against providing everyone with sexual encounters / the ability to create genetic offspring / raise children. And I'd also be interested in hearing where other people feel the "immoral" line...
Interestingly, there appears (at least in my local cultural circle) that being attended by human caretakers when incapacitated by age, is supposed to be a basic right. Hence, there must be some other reason - and not just the problem about rights being fulfilled by other persons, why the particular example assumed to underlie the parable, is reprehensible to many people.
To disagree with this statement is to say that a scanned living brain, cloned, remade and started will contain the exact same consciousness, not similar, the exact same thing itself, that simultaneously exists in the still-living original. If consciousness has an anatomical location, and therefore is tied to matter, then it would follow that this matter here is the exact matter as that separate matter there. This is an absurd proposition.
You conclude that consciousness in your scenario cannot have 1 location(s).
If consciousness does not have an anatomical / physical location then it is the stuff of magic and woo.
You conclude that consciousness in your scenario cannot have 0 locations.
However, there are more... (read more)
Regarding auras. I am not sure, if I observed the same phenomenon, but if I sit still and keep my eyes fixed on the same spot for a while (in a still scene), my eyes will -- after a while -- get accustomed to the exact light pattern incoming and everythig kind-of fades to gray. But very slight movements will then generate colorful borders on edges (like a gaussian edge detector).
Install a smoke detector
Do martial arts training until you get the falling more or less right. While this might be helpful against muggers the main benefit is the reduced probability of injury in various unfortunate situation.
While I was busy procrastinating, I produced http://38020.vs.webtropia.com/sciencewiki/index.php/Helium_balloon (the Wiki-Extension for the plot, not the data, that was lying around anyway). This could (if enough people are using it) become quite a useful collection of evidence of various simple sciency questions, and also ultimately motivate some more people to actually do experiments themselves.
Before going further with this (in particular wrt. telling people about it) however, I have a few questions:
Effort: 180 minutes
tldr: To stop an AI from exterminating you, give the AI the belief that by switching itself off, humanity will die and the AI will not be switched off.
Somebody wrote a general self-improving AI and fat fingered its goal as "maximize number of humans living 1 million years from now".
After a few months cases of people run over by AI controlled trucks are reported -- it turns out everybody run over was impotent or had consciously decided to have no kids anyway. The AI didn't particularly care for those individuals, as they will not foster the AI's goal according to the AI's current approximation of how the world works.
The original... (read 978 more words →)
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleene%27s_T_predicate:
In other words: If someone gives you an encoding of a program, an encoding of its input and a trace of its run, you can check with a primitive recursive function whether you have been lied to.