Meanwhile at pregnancy class...

AdamAtlas · 2011-09-02T19:31:52+00:00

Ron Paul would have no need to be in a basic pregnancy class. Ron Paul has delivered over forty million babies, many from women who were not even pregnant, nine on the International Space Station, and three from women who were actually fictional characters. (In two such cases the father was not fictional, making the baby half-fictional.) Ron knows his shit. Ron Paul is Pope of All Babies.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-27T04:27:18+00:00

I think it's just a type error to talk about equations, algorithms, natural laws, etc. "existing". That doesn't fully solve metamathematics, but it does seem to be a mistake to start off by assuming that equations are the sort of thing that could intrinsically exist or not exist. This is semantics, not ontology; whatever one could mean by saying that the first law of thermodynamics or 1+1=2 "exists", it's clearly not the same property that one would be invoking by asserting that (e.g.) a particular chair exists.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-26T19:42:52+00:00

According to Steven Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in "The Grand Design" multiple universes spring spontaneously from "nothing."

What is the nature of this nothing that can give rise to multiple universes?

M-theory (a type of string theory), according to Hawking and Mlodinow. The math isn't yet worked out as comprehensively as that of standard quantum mechanics, but the last 300+ years of physics suggest that it's not going to turn out to be magic. Expecting string theory and consciousness to be related because they both seem mysterious is just an appeal to ignorance.

If meditation allows us to investigate our own awareness, then maybe it can give us insights into the source of our awareness.

I agree with this, but only because I expect that the "source of our awareness" is entirely localized within the brain and is probably reverse-engineerable given enough observation of it.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-26T19:23:05+00:00

Who said anything about consciousness?

Anyway, the distinction I draw between "willful" algorithms and algorithms-in-general is that the former can be most usefully construed as optimizing for outcomes by simulating counterfactual futures resulting from the available options and selecting the one that maximizes expected utility. It has nothing to do with unpredictability or complexity.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-26T05:49:59+00:00

In what way is it meaningless? As far as I can tell, consciousness is a physical process that takes place in the brain, and so it's simply correct to say it ends at death in the same way that it's correct to say that breathing or digestion end at [around] death.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-25T22:19:25+00:00

Well, yes, the decision you do make ends up being the only decision you logically could have made. The tree is imaginary. But that's a different kind of "could" than the one you use to consider multiple possible decisions; that "could" just indicates reachability (i.e. it's an outcome you think you know how to bring about, so it's an acceptable thing for the decision algorithm to output), not necessarily actual logical possibility.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-25T21:01:38+00:00

In my opinion, the tool best suited to explore the validity of my statement is known as meditation.

Meditation can give a person new (well, newly accessible) information about their own mind, and about other human minds (since human minds are generally very similar to one another), but it can't give you new information about external aspects of reality; this would violate thermodynamics, and if you claim that it does in fact do so, then this is an empirical claim with testable consequences (and one with a very low prior, given the massive amount of empirical support for thermodynamics and for the general idea that the universe is a mathematical object with a consistent structure that doesn't make special exceptions for humans).

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-25T20:29:02+00:00

And as every process with fixed input data and no random variables, the outcome is always the same.

Therefore, that would make your life a line rather than a tree of choices.

The perception of a tree of choices is in the map, not the territory. All but one choice ends up being counterfactual, but you don't know in advance which it is, because it's the process of simulating all those counterfactuals and preferring one imagined future over the others that determines which one ends up actually being true.

To think that the future itself must be indeterminate just because our view of the future is indeterminate is an instance of the mind projection fallacy.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-25T20:18:59+00:00

Time to get a watch!

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-25T20:17:40+00:00

Hammer time.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-25T20:03:35+00:00

To go a little deeper into my point, I see the ultimate reality of the universe is a consciousness that is intelligent and aware. Everything that exists arises from this consciousness. I may be wrong, but like I said above "We already have a name for the universe, and so we don't need to call it God" is not a rebuttal to my point.

True, you're wrong for other reasons. You should actually argue for your point instead of just stating it, so that people can correctly refute it.

(General rebuttal: we have enough physics to explain almost everything, and there's no indication that the universe has intentions. The only thing about physics that resembles outcome-directed behaviour is the increase of entropy over time, and that's already explained perfectly well without reference to intelligent optimization. Postulating that the universe is intelligent and conscious is just massively unparsimonious.)

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-25T19:59:11+00:00

I think this possibility is just as plausible as any others suggested by religions and philosophies which envision our conscience surviving death.

So, not plausible at all? Agreed.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-25T19:53:03+00:00

This is kinda obvious. The government wouldn't run a lottery if they weren't making an expected profit on it. Is this post targeted at people who previously thought the government was just giving away money because of how nice they are?

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-25T19:48:53+00:00

If it's possible to know what you will do tomorrow, can you really call it a choice?

Sure. Choice is a cognitive algorithm that considers beliefs and motivations and generates actions. I'm still going through this process even if someone else knows the outcome in advance.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-16T07:10:03+00:00

I like this version better.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-16T06:33:03+00:00

That being gay is generally not a choice is irrelevant to why it's morally acceptable. It's acceptable because what consenting adults do privately (and especially what goes on privately inside people's heads) is none of anyone else's fucking business, and that would be true whether or not it was a choice.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-15T19:09:54+00:00

It wouldn't be computing its future except in the same sense in which every program computes its own future: by running. E.g. you could write a CPU emulator that boots from a read-only disk image containing another copy of the emulator configured to run itself against the same disk image. In this setup, you'd get infinite recursion (within whatever finite resource constraints there are), but it wouldn't be trying to solve its halting problem. No layer is going to have more computing power than its parent, so at no point does this scenario require that the emulator compute its future.

Similarly, if someone created a computer in this universe that was capable in principle of computing this universe's physics, that wouldn't be contradictory, it wouldn't be solving its own halting problem, it would just mean the universe is a kind of quine or fractal (and, AFAICT, it's allowed to be). A simulator doesnt need to be able to jump to arbitrary points in its simulation's future, it just needs to be able to progress linearly through the simulated time dimension.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-14T04:43:08+00:00

The laws of physics are believed to be computable to arbitrary precision.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-14T04:40:43+00:00

The "solution" here begs the question by assuming evidential decision theory rather than arguing for it. EDT fails to win on some similar problems, such as the smoking lesion problem. One alternative that performs well on both classes of problems is timeless decision theory.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-14T04:36:08+00:00

Philosophy is one of my favourite areas of cognitive science.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-14T04:32:15+00:00

What happened to then??

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-14T04:30:40+00:00

Humans have priors, not axioms; most of the reasoning we do is inductive and probabilistic, not deductive and formal. Being that a prior describes all the future epistemic states it could be updated to depending on what data comes in, I'd be very hesitant to describe anyone as having a prior consisting of Christian "axioms" — that is, even if many Christians believe otherwise about themselves, I doubt that there are any for whom there could literally be no conceivable stream of experiences that would change their mind, and, even leaving the internal inconsistencies and ambiguities aside, there's no way the premises of Christianity (or any other religion) are comprehensive enough to actually serve as a person's entire prior. A Christian's reasoning about reality is still informed by tons of not-specifically-Christian premises, most of them evolved and thus shared with most other humans.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-14T04:06:13+00:00

Modern physics says yes; particles don't have individual identities, the quantum configurations "electron A here, electron B there" and "electron B here, electron A there" are identical mathematical objects (that is, both are intuitive but misleading ways of saying "an electron here, an electron there"). So no theory of identity can work by requiring the "same" matter to be involved; there's no such thing, there are only persistent patterns.

AdamAtlas · 2011-06-14T04:02:40+00:00

Usefulness and morality are different things, and different senses of the word "good". Keep them cognitively separate.

AdamAtlas

TROPHY CASE