qmotus

Actually, I'm just interested. I've been wondering if big world immortality is a subject that would make people a) think that the speaker is nuts, b) freak out and possibly go nuts or c) go nuts because they think the speaker is crazy; and whether or not it's a bad idea to bring it up.

Are people close to you aware that this is a reason that you advocate cryonics?

What cosmological assumptions? Assumptions related to identity, perhaps, as discussed here. But it seems to me that MWI essentially guarantees that for every observer-moment, there will always exist a "subsequent" one, and the same seems to apply to all levels of a Tegmark multiverse.

(I'm not convinced that the universe is large enough for patternism to actually imply subjective immortality.)

Why wouldn't it be? That conclusion follows logically from many physical theories that are currently taken quite seriously.

I'm not willing to decipher your second question because this theme bothers me enough as it is, but I'll just say that I'm amazed figuring this stuff out is not considered a higher priority by rationalists. If at some point someone can definitely tell me what to think about this, I'd be glad about it.

I guess we've had this discussion before, but: the difference between patternism and your version of subjective mortality is that in your version we nevertheless should not expect to exist indefinitely.

I feel like it's rather obvious that this is approximately what is meant. The people who talk of democratizing AI are, mostly, not speaking about superintelligence or do not see it as a threat (with the exception of Elon Musk, maybe).

You also can't know if you're in a simulation, a Big quantum world, a big cosmological world, or if you're a reincarnation

But you can make estimates of the probabilities (EY's estimate of the big quantum world part, for example, is very close to 1).

So really I just go with my gut and try to generally make decisions that I probably won't think are stupid later given my current state of knowledge.

That just sounds pretty difficult, as my estimate of whether a decision is stupid or not may depend hugely on the assumptions I make about the world. In some... (read more)

If you're looking for what these probabilities tell us about the underlying "reality"

I am. It seems to me that if quantum mechanics is about probabilities, then those probabilities have to be about something: essentially, this seems to suggest that either the underlying reality is unknown, indicating that quantum mechanics needs to be modified somehow, or that Qbism is more like an "interpretation of MWI", where one chooses to only care about the one world she finds herself in.

Fortunately, Native American populations didn't plummet because they were intentionally killed, they mostly did so because of diseases brought by Europeans.

Thanks for the tip. I suppose I actually used to be pretty good at not giving too many fucks. I've always cared about stuff like human rights or climate change or, more lately, AI risk, but I've never really lost much sleep over them. Basically, I think it would be nice if we solved those problems and, but the idea that humanity might go extinct in the future doesn't cause me too much headache in itself. The trouble is, I think, that I've lately begun to think that I may have a personal stake in this stuff, the point illustrated by the EY post that I linked to. See also my reply to moridinamael.

The part about not being excited about anything sounds very accurate and is certainly a part of the problem. I've also tried just taking up projects and focusing on them, but I should probably try harder as well.

However, a big part of the problem is that it's not just that those things feel insignificant; it's also that I have a vague feeling that I'm sort of putting my own well-being in jeopardy by doing that. As I said, I'm very confused about things like life, death and existence, on a personal level. How do I focus on mundane things when I'm confused a... (read more)

I'm having trouble figuring out what to prioritize in my life. In principle, I have a pretty good idea of what I'd like to do: for a while I have considered doing a Ph.D in a field that is not really high impact, but not entirely useful either, combining work that is interesting (to me personally) and hopefully a modest salary that I could donate to worthwhile causes.

But it often feels like this is not enough. Similar to what another user posted here a while ago, reading LessWrong and about effective altruism has made me feel like nothing except AI and may... (read more)

I'm certainly not an instrumentalist. But the argument that MWI supporters (and some critics, like Penrose) generally make, and which I've found persuasive, is that MWI is simply what you get if you take quantum mechanics at face value. Theories like GRW have modifications to the well-established formalism that we, as far as I know, have no empirical confirmation of.

Fair enough. I feel like I have a fairly good intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics, but it's still almost entirely intuitive, and so is probably entirely inadequate beyond this point. But I've read speculations like this, and it sounds like things can get interesting: it's just that it's unclear to me how seriously we should take them at this stage, and also some of them take MWI as a starting point, too.

Regarding QBism, my idea of it is mostly based on a very short presentation of it by Rüdiger Schack at a panel, and the thing that confuses me is ... (read more)

I'm not sure what you mean by OR, but if it refers to Penrose's interpretation (my guess, because it sounds like Orch-OR), then I believe that it indeed changes QM as a theory.

Guess I'll have to read that paper and see how much of it I can understand. Just at a glance, it seems that in the end they propose one of the modified theories like GRW interpretation might be the right way forward. I guess that's possible, but how seriously should we take those when we have no empirical reasons to prefer them?

If it doesn't fundamentally change quantum mechanics as a theory, is the picture likely to turn out fundamentally different from MWI? Roger Penrose, a vocal MWI critic, seems to wholeheartedly agree that QM implies MWI; it's just that he thinks that this means the theory is wrong. David Deutsch, I believe, has said that he's not certain that quantum mechanics is correct; but any modification of the theory, according to him, is unlikely to do away with the parallel universes.

QBism, too, seems to me to essentially accept the MWI picture as the underlying ont... (read more)

Do you think that we're likely to find something in those directions that would give a reason to prefer some other interpretation than MWI?

It could be that reality has nasty things in mind for us that we can't yet see and that we cannot affect in any way, and therefore I would be happier if I didn't know of them in advance. Encountering a new idea like this that somebody has discovered is one my constant worries when browsing this site.