Tensor White

To phrase it better: You find yourself in room N, how many total rooms are there?

I know UDASSA accounts for the description length of the room address, but remember that given a number of rooms, each room will have the same description length. If there are 64 rooms, then room 1 will have address "000000" and not simply "0" or "1".

This way if you find yourself in a room, without knowing how many total rooms there are, and only knowing your room number, then you write it out in binary and take 2 to the bit-length of your room's address. For ex, you find yourself in room number "100111", 6 bits. So... (read more)

I am a Christian. If you don't have a soul, then I can simply dismiss any persuasion you attempt on me. I don't owe "highly-specified arrangements of matter" anything. Also, it's weird why you would be motivated to promalgate your ideas. Do you owe arrangements of matter anything? No. When I used to think like you, I knew I didn't owe material-onlyism anything. My secular beliefs didn't make me more correct (or less wrong) than those with non-secular beliefs, even if my secular beliefs were true! Every belief is equal in the eyes of atoms.

Moreover, there are some bullets you, a material-onlyist, have to bite. For ex, that a star trek teletransporter... (read more)

Parity-flip robustness.

Suppose an exact copy of you appeared in front of you. Would you successfully cooperate with him? (Imagine a portal 2 like situation, or a prisoners' dilemma.) It's a pretty trivial accomplishment; all you'd have to do is pick a leader and pre-commit to following your other's orders if you lost the leadership. Since anything you'd do in your other's situation is exactly what your copy will end up doing.

Now let's bump up the difficulty to rather than an exact copy presented to you, he was an exact copy of you but with one parameter flipped to its opposite value. For example, the tendency to maintain eye contact. If you maintain... (read more)

Debunking AI x-risk.

Suppose you gave an NN access to its own NN. It would have read and write access over every neuron and every connection. Such a trivial "self-learning" system would quickly change something that pushed it out of being able to change itself. It would eventually enter a static state and no longer a threat.

But wouldn't sufficiently advanced self-seeing NN avoid risky changes and even have a ctrl-z function? The later still has the issue shown above; it will change something and lose access to ctrl-z. The former is a bit more complicated: as "intelligence" increases, the conformal space also increases. In order to search that conformal space for a possible... (read more)

Pascal's Wager tends to be dismissed because he originally only looked at Christianity vs Atheism. But the logic holds even if you generalize Pascal's Wager by expanding the considered options to include every existing religion, every past religion, and even possible religions; Christianity still dominates the cost-benefit-chance analysis. Funnily enough, in this Generalized Pascal's Wager (GPW), the only threat to Christianity is another Abrahamic religion: Islam. Mainly due to the doctrine in Islam that if you attrubute partners to God (ie, the Holy Trinity) untill the moment up to your death, then you won't ever be forgiven, and so you'll go to Hell. Christianity still wins though due to the "costs/benefits-while-wrong" side... (read more)

Fun physics fact: humans are at the center of the universe (qua scale). This anthro-centrism holds for length, duration, and mass at least.

Mass is the easiest: the Planck mass is 0.021764 milligrams, the mass of an eyebrow hair. Small, but very human. The Planck mass is the boundary to QM (a system more massive than the PM won't exhibit quantum behavior since its Compton wavelength is smaller than the Planck Length).

Length: the smallest length in physics is the Planck Length (1.6163×10^-35 meters), the largest length in physics is the universe diameter (8.8×10^26 meters). The center of these two extremes is sqrt(1.6163×10^-35 meters * 8.8×10^26 meters) = 0.1193 millimeters. That's the width of... (read more)