Could you elaborate on the point in footnote 11 about why you think it doesn't work? In any concrete problem (Newcomb's paradox, prisoner's dilemma, XOR blackmail etc) it seems like all that's needed is to imagine you made the precommitment at any time before you first had an experience that made you know you'd be facing this problem and need to make a choice (eg before you got the letter in XOR blackmail, but not necessarily before your house was or wasn't infested with termites since that fact is unknown to you until after getting the letter and making t...
For believers in scientific reductionism, moral realism based on a priori knowledge or fixed "human nature" or mental access to a realm of platonic moral truths is not plausible. But I would argue that people inclined to think in terms of very long (possibly infinite) transhuman futures should be more open to a form of moral realism based on the pragmatist philosopher C.S. Peirce's limit concept of truth, where objective truth is understood as that which a very long-lived "community of inquiry" would tend to converge on with probability 1 in the limit of i...
You responded to Ben's comment about when you parted ways, but I'd be curious to know how you'd respond to the other point he brought up about various extreme-sounding statements Ziz has made that don't seem to have been jokes, like "Don’t trust anyone over 30 with a kill count of 0" (about the anarchist transhumanist William Gillis, whose writing she had previously cited in a positive way) or various other examples of violent rhetoric in "A community warning about Ziz" (in the subsection titled 'Statements by Ziz').
It seems to me that your belief in her n...
Old thread, but I just wanted to note that one alternative is to view a "cucumber" as a particular algorithmic compression of an underlying fundamental physical state (one in which many different possible fundamental physical states could qualify, like a "macrostate" in statistical mechanics). This was the approach Daniel Dennett took in his paper "Real Patterns", see in particular the analogy starting on p. 37 with higher-level patterns in Conway's "Game of Life" cellular automaton, like the pattern we call a "glider". If one is a mathematical platonist o...
I can't access the paper by Andersen that you discuss, do you know if schizotypy as Andersen understands it would include the "schizoid" personality type or if he'd consider that distinct? Nancy McWilliams, who wrote an interesting piece about her impressions of schizoid personalities as a psychotherapist, commented on p. 199 of her textbook Psychoanalytic Diagnosis that "Our taxonomic categories remain arbitrary and overlapping, and acting as if there are discrete present-versus-absent differences between labels is not usually wise clinically ... Perhaps ...
I don't think it's quite right to say the idea of the universe being in some sense mathematical is purely a carry-over of Judeo-Christian heritage--what about the Greek atomists like Leucippus and Democritus for example? Most of their writings have been lost but we do know that Democritus made a distinction similar to the later notion of primary (quantitative) vs. secondary (qualitative) properties discussed at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualities-prim-sec/ with his comment about qualitative sensations being matters of human convention: "By convent...
I think it might be helpful to have a variant of 3a that likewise says the orthogonality thesis is false, but is not quite so optimistic as to say the alternative is that AI will be "benevolent by default". One way the orthogonality thesis could be false would be that an AI capable of human-like behavior (and which could be built using near-future computing power, say less than or equal to the computing power needed for mind uploading) would have to be significantly more similar to biological brains than current AI approaches, and in particular would have ...
Perhaps one can think of a sort of continuum where on one end you have a full understanding that it's a characteristic of language that "everything has a name" as in the Anne Sullivan quote, and on the other end, an individual knows certain gestures are associated with getting another person to exhibit certain behaviors like bringing desired objects to them, but no intuition that there's a whole system of gestures that they mostly haven't learned yet (as an example, a cat might know that rattling its food bowl will cause its owner to come over and refill i...
If I’m understanding correctly, if we are thinking about the ECL problem with a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma, the main new wrinkles relative to other problems are that 1) each agent is unsure that the other will actually make the choice recommended by FDT/the great commitment, 2) observing one’s own choice may provide some new evidence about the probability the other agent will make a given choice (probably modeled as a Bayesian update, which some might think of as an ‘acausal influence’), and finally 3) the original FDT/great commitment recommendation has ... (read more)