I'd like to better understand how compatibilists conceive of free will.[1] LW is a known hotbed of compatibilism, so here's my question: Suppose that determinism is true. When I face a binary choice,[2] there are two relevantly-different states of the world I could be in:[3] State A: Past events HA...
I may be wrong, but I think the following is a mainstream position in rationalist circles: even people who care about animal welfare don't have particularly strong moral reasons to personally switch to a vegan diet. I haven't seen a fully fleshed-out defence of this position. I can think of...
First, I sympathise! And I don't think your sadness is a mistake; I grew up with quite fuzzy religious beliefs and moved away from them gradually, but if I had been a true believer I think I would have felt a great sense of loss. And I've certainly felt (and sometimes continue to feel) a range of negative existential emotions that could have been comforted or completely obviated by religious belief. But I don't think your new worldview has the ramifications you're implying it does.
Why should anything matter if we're just arbitrary self-reinforcing arrangements of chemicals?
We're not "just" that, unless you're taking for granted that "arbitrary self-reinforcing arrangements of chemicals" have the... (read more)
I'm afraid I don't get this at all; I still have no idea why the second paragraph is relevant or why you think I'm building into my priors the assumption that I have access to information that I don't know and couldn't predict. I think it's completely normal to consider predictions about the future to have truth values regardless of whether the eventual outcome could be calculated with certainty now. I think you're saying that a prediction about the future only has a truth value if the person making it (or someone else who lives at the same time as them?) could, at least in theory, determine that truth value now. If... (read more)
We don't need to deny that there's a meaningful first-person perspective, only that any particular first-person perspective is special (in this case, special in that it's the 'true' continuation of the original). When a perfect copy is made, two meaningful first-person perspectives exist, they both see themselves as continuations of the original, and neither is more right or wrong than the other in any deep sense.
From my perspective, unless there is something akin to a soul or disembodied consciousness, there's simply no fact of the matter here beyond the more granular facts. I don't think "the same consciousness" means anything more than the prosaic ways in which we might define it, e.g. with reference to overlapping chains of experience and memory. We instinctively care about it, but I think that's fairly easy to explain as a byproduct of our self/other distinction and self-preservation instinct and so on.
When you ask "would this be the same conscious experience", do you have a clear idea of what "the same conscious experience" means, and you're wondering whether the world works in such a way that the concept would hold in these hypotheticals? Or is it a concept that feels important, but which you can't pin down, and your goal here is to analyse it?
I think that's a reasonable interpretation of the actual serious content of the post, and my understanding of Eliezer's position basically matches yours. But the post starts like this:
tl;dr: It's obvious at this point that humanity isn't going to solve the alignment problem, or even try very hard, or even go out with much of a fight. Since survival is unattainable, we should shift the focus of our efforts to helping humanity die with with slightly more dignity.
And it sticks with the 'death with dignity' framing, talking about doubling our chances of survival from 0% to 0%, striving to earn 'dignity points' to take to our graves, and so on. It's also... (read more)
... (read more)Harlan 0:17:13
A really repeated theme is the inevitability thing. It’s pretty frustrating to hear, as someone who’s spending effort trying to help with this stuff in some kind of way that we can, and for someone to characterize your camp as thinking doom is inevitable. If I thought it was inevitable, I would just be relaxing. I wouldn’t bother doing anything about it. There’s some sense in which if it was inevitable, that would be worse, but it would also mean that we didn’t really have to do anything about it.Liron 0:17:42
Just to repeat your point in case viewers don’t get the connection: Dario is saying that doomerism is so unproductive because
But you are implicitly assuming that you already know this process is in fact going to continue. So it's rather as if you asked Fred, and he told you yeah, there's always a big rush at the end of the day, few people get here as early as you.
I didn't mean to imply certainty, just uncertain expectation based on observation. Maybe I asked Fred, or the other customers, but I didn't receive any information about 'the end of the day' -- only confirmation of the trend so far.
(I'm not trying to be difficult for the sake of it, by the way! I just want to think these things through carefully and genuinely... (read more)
But that's not how I'm thinking of it in the first place -- I'm not positing any random selection process. I just don't see an immediately obvious flaw here:
And I still don't quite understand your response to this formulation of the argument. I think you're saying 'people who have ever lived and will ever live' is obviously the wrong reference class, but your arguments mostly target beliefs that I don't hold (and that I don't think I am implicitly assuming).
I'd like to better understand how compatibilists conceive of free will.[1] LW is a known hotbed of compatibilism, so here's my question:
Suppose that determinism is true. When I face a binary choice,[2] there are two relevantly-different states of the world I could be in:[3]
State A: Past events HA have happened, current state of the world is A, I will choose CA, future FA will happen.
State B: Past events HB have happened, current state of the world is B, I will choose CB, future FB will happen.
When I make my choice (CA or CB), I'm choosing/revealing which of those two states of the world are (my) reality. They're package deals: CA follows from HA just... (read more)
I may be wrong, but I think the following is a mainstream position in rationalist circles: even people who care about animal welfare don't have particularly strong moral reasons to personally switch to a vegan diet.
I haven't seen a fully fleshed-out defence of this position. I can think of a few possible arguments, but none seem convincing:
I still feel like you're focusing mainly on refuting things I haven't said and don't think, but, in any case, this is just obviously untrue:
I'd prefer to stick to the actual range of possible futures, rather than artificially limiting it to two extreme cases, but regardless -- are you really saying nothing we know, and nothing we might conceivably discover, could update us in one direction or the other? That if, tomorrow, you learn that a rogue ASI has already begun construction of a carbon-fibre paperclip factory and has declared its intention to convert every human into paperclips by 2031, this is irrelevant because information can't flow backwards in time?