"Why? I am an image of His image. Do we not share the same values?" said the woman.
Snakes can't talk.
Reminder what C.S. Lewis said in The Magician's Nephew:
"Creatures, I give you yourselves," said the strong, happy voice of Aslan. "I give to you forever this land of Narnia. I give you the woods, the fruits, the rivers. I give you the stars and I give you myself. The Dumb Beasts whom I have not chosen are yours also. Treat them gently and cherish them but do not go back to their ways lest you cease to be Talking Beasts. For out of them you were taken and into them you can return. Do not so."
I think this is the first time i'm seeing an author portraying some“one” losing “their” sapience timelessly, having been retrocursed into never having been hnau in the first place.
[The Talking Beasts actually were totally real. Walter Wangerin's Dun Cow saga is a good account of the tragedy of what happened to them.]
If your intuitions about the properties of qualia are the same as mine, you might appreciate this schizo theory pattern-matching them to known physics.
I have an objection towards the Troll Proof you linked in the picture. Namely, line 2 does not follow from line 1. □C states that “C is provable within the base system”, but the Troll Proof has “base system + □C→C” as its assumptions, per line 3.
The strongest statement we can get at line 2 is □((□C→C)→C), by implication introduction.
Adversarial epistemology is one of the main themes in the visual novel When the Seagulls Cry, which i have reviewed on my twitter previously. (Also see Gwern's review).
It is a corrosive enough idea, that if you take it seriously enough, you can conclude that entire fields of science are fake because you have no way to verify their claims, so the “experimenters” might as well be making results up.
The root of this paradox is that the human notion of ‘self’ actually can refer to at least two things: the observer and the agent. FDT and similar updateless decision theories only really concern themselves with the second.
An FDT agent cannot really “die” as they do exist in all places of the universe at once. Whereas, as you have noticed, an observer can very much die
in a finite thought experiment. In reality, there is nooutside-textdictating what can happen and you would just get quantum-immortaled into hell instead.This case is not really a scenario exposing a bug in FDT, it's rather FDT exposing an absurdity in the scenario's prior — stipulating that you should be only concerned with one copy of you (the one outside the simulation).
Thought experiments can arbitrarily decide that one copy of the agent does not correspond to an observer whose values should be catered to and therefore can be assigned a probability/utility of 0. But you, the one who implements the algorithm, cannot differentiate between yourselves based on whether they are simulated by Omega, only based on what you have observed.