JacobW38
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I'm a metaphysical and afterlife researcher who, needless to say, requires an excess of rationality to perform effectively in such an epistemically unstable field.
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I'm a hardcore consciousness and metaphysics nerd, so some of your questions fall within my epistemic wheelhouse. Others, I am simply interested in as you are, and can only respond with opinion or conjecture. I will take a stab at a selection of them below:
4: "Easy" is up in the air, but one of my favorite instrumental practices is to identify lines of preprogrammed "code" in my cognition that do me absolutely no good (grief, for instance), and simply hack into them to make them execute different emotional and behavioral outputs. I think the best way to st...
If you go back even further we’re the descendants of single celled organisms that absolutely don’t have experience.
My disagreement is here. Anyone with a microscope can still look at them today. The ones that can move clearly demonstrate acting on intention in a recognizable way. They have survival instincts just like an insect or a mouse or a bird. It'd be completely illogical not to generalize downward that the ones that don't move also exercise intention in other ways to survive. I see zero reason to dispute the assumption that experience co-originat...
Explain to me how a sufficiently powerful AI would fail to qualify as a p-zombie. The definition I understand for that term is "something that is externally indistinguishable from an entity that has experience, but internally has no experience". While it is impossible to tell the difference empirically, we can know by following evolutionary lines: all future AIs are conceptually descended from computer systems that we know don't have experience, whereas even the earliest things we ultimately evolved from almost certainly did have experience (I have no clue...
I spoke briefly on acceptance in my comment to the other essay, and I think I agree more with how that one conceptualized it. Mostly, I disagree that acceptance entails grief, or that it has to be hard or complicated. At the very least, that's not a particularly radical form of acceptance. My view on grief is largely that it is an avoidable problem we put ourselves through for lack of radical acceptance. Acceptance is one move: you say all's well and you move on. With intensive pre-invested effort, this can be done for anything, up to and including whateve...
A very necessary post in a place like here, in times like these; thank you very much for these words. A couple disclaimers to my reply: I'm cockily unafraid of death in personal terms, and I'm not fully bought into the probable AI disaster narrative, although far be it from me to claim to have enough knowledge to form an educated opinion; it's really a field I follow with an interested layman's eye. But I'm not exactly one of those struggling at the moment, and I'd even say that the recent developments with ChatGPT, Bing, and whatever follows them excite m...
I fully agree with the gist of this post. Empowerment, as you define it, is both a very important factor in my own utility function, and seems to be an integral component to any formulation of fun theory. In your words, "to transcend mortality and biology, to become a substrate independent mind, to wear new bodies like clothes" describes my terminal goals for a thousand years into the future so smack-dab perfectly that I don't think I could've possibly put it any better. Empowerment is, yes, an instrumental goal for all the options it creates, but also an ...
I highly recommend following Rational Animations on Youtube for this sort of general purpose. I'd describe their format as "LW meets Kurzgesagt", the latter which I already found highly engaging. They don't post new videos that often, but their stuff is excellent, even more so recently, and definitely triggers my dopamine circuits in a way that rationality content generally struggles to satisfy. Imo, it's perfect introductory material to anyone new on LW to get familiar with its ideology in a way that makes learning easy and fun.
(Not affiliated with RA in any way, just a casual enjoyer of chonky shibes)
You've described habituation, and yes, it does cut both ways. You also speak of "pulling the unusual into ordinary experience", as though that is undesirable, but contrarily, I find exactly that a central motivation to me. When I come upon things that on first blush inspire awe, my drive is to fully understand them, perhaps even to command them. I don't think I know how to see anything as "bigger than myself" in a way that doesn't ring simply as a challenge to rise above whatever it is.
Manipulating one's own utility functions is supposed to be hard? That would be news to me. I've never found it problematic, once I've either learned new information that led me to update it, or become aware of a pre-existing inconsistency. For example, loss aversion is something I probably had until it was pointed out to me, but not after that. The only exception to this would be things one easily attaches to emotionally, such as pets, to which I've learned to simply not allow myself to become so attached. Otherwise, could you please explain why you make the claim that such traits are not readily editable in a more general capacity?
Thanks for asking. I'll likely be publishing my first paper early next year, but the subject matter is quite advanced, definitely not entry-level stuff. It takes more of a practical orientation to the issue than merely establishing evidence (the former my specialty as a researcher; as is probably clear from other replies, I'm satisfied with the raw evidence).
As for best published papers for introductory purposes, here you can find one of my personal all-time favorites. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Development-of-Certainty-About-the-Correct-Decease...
Apologies for the absence; combination of busy/annoyance with downvotes, but I could also do a better job of being clear and concise. Unfortunately, after having given it thought, I just don't think your request is something I can do for you, nor should it be. Honestly, if you were to simply take my word for it, I'd wonder what you were thinking. But good information, including primary sources, is openly accessible, and it's something that I encourage those with the interest to take a deep dive into, for sure. Once you go far enough in, in my experience, t...
Based on evidence I've been presented with to this point - I'd say high enough to confidently bet every dollar I'll ever earn on it. Easily >99% that it'll be put beyond reasonable doubt in the next 100-150 years, and I only specify that long because of the spectacularly lofty standards academia forces such evidence to measure up to. I'm basically alone in my field in actually being in favor of the latter, however, so I have no interest in declining to play the long game with it.
Been staying hard away from crypto all year, with the general trend of about one seismic project failure every 3 months, and this might be the true Lehman moment on top of the shitcoin sundae. Passing no assumptions on intent or possible criminal actions until more info is revealed, but it certainly looks like SBF mismanaged a lot of other people's money and was overconfident in his own, being largely pegged to illiquid altcoins and FTT. The most shocking thing to me is how CZ took a look at their balance sheets for all of like 3 hours after announcing int...
That being said, I could see how this feeling would come about if the value/importance in question is being imposed on you by others, rather than being the value you truly assign to the project. In that case, such a burden can weigh heavily and manifest aversively. But avoiding something you actually assign said value to just seems like a basic error in utility math?
I have a taboo on the word "believe", but I am an academic researcher of afterlife evidence. I personally specialize in verifiable instances of early-childhood past-life recall.
Honestly, even from a purely selfish standpoint, I'd be much more concerned about a plausible extinction scenario than just dying. Figuring out what to do when I'm dead is pretty much my life's work, and if I'm being completely honest and brazenly flouting convention, the stuff I've learned from that research holds a genuine, not-at-all-morbid appeal to me. Like, even if death wasn't inevitable, I'd still want to see it for myself at some point. I definitely wouldn't choose to artificially prolong my lifespan, given the opportunity. So personally, death an...
I like the thought behind this. You've hit on something I think is important for being productive: if thinking about the alternative makes you want to punch through a wall, that's great, and you should try to make yourself feel that way. I do a similar thing, but more toward general goal-accomplishment; if I have an objective in sight that I'm heavily attracted to, I identify every possible obstacle to the end (essentially murphyjitsu'ing), and then I cultivate a driving, vengeful rage toward each specific obstacle, on top of what motivation I already had ...
It appears what you have is free won’t!
For the own-behavior predictions, could you put together a chart with calibration accuracy on the Y axis, and time elapsed between the prediction and the final decision (in buckets) on the X axis? I wonder whether the predictions became less-calibrated the farther into the future you tried to predict, since a broader time gap would result in more opportunity for your intentions to change.
This is way too interesting not to have comments!
First, I think this bears on the makeup of one's utility function. If your UF contains absolutes, infinite value judgments, then in my opinion, it is impossible not to be truly motivated toward them. No pushing is ever required; at least, it never feels like pushing. Obstacles just manifest to the mind in the form of fun challenges that only amplify the engagement, because you already know you have the will to win. If your UF does not include absolutes, or you step down to the levels that are finite (for the...
Yes, I am a developing empirical researcher of metaphysical phenomena. My primary item of study is past-life memory cases of young children, because I think this line of research is both the strongest evidentially (hard verifications of such claims, to the satisfaction of any impartial arbiter, are quite routine), as well as the most practical for longtermist world-optimizing purposes (it quickly becomes obvious we're literally studying people who've successfully overcome death). I don't want to undercut the fact that scientific metaphysics is a much large... (read more)