Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[silverspawn]

If you don't need numbers to do math, as I recall you saying, then the standard model of arithemtic isn't particularly fundamental, which means the incompleteness theorem isn't that big of a deal -- right?

[silverspawn]

well or any system that includes the minimal arithmetic hm

[silverspawn]

This actually begs another question. Suppose you could prove beyond any doubt that the pleasurableness (=valence)  of a moment of experience is a precisely and objectively measurable quantity. Does this matter for ethics? faust?

I'm not sure I understand the premise. What exactly are we measuring?

You plug a human into an fMRI, put the data into your computer program, get out a mathematical object (probably a hilbert space), measure a quantity of this space, and that tells you exactly how pleasurable that particular moment of experience was for the human. And by assumption, this is absolutely fundamental and subsumes any complexities of the case.

(This could also allow much more targeted interventions which would be the practical side, but I'm more talking about the philosophical aspect of knowing that such a quantity even exists.)

[silverspawn]

woah ETH is going up :-)

[silverspawn]

Someone who co-wrote a paper about AI Safety with the legendary Nick Bostrom is running for congress in Oregon. Cool.

[silverspawn]

The website however is structured in the same annoying way that every candidate website is structured nowadays. At least it's unusually well made, if you're going to have dumb moving objects with a smiling picture of your guy at the top, it can at least be a nice landscape shot like this one.

[silverspawn]

So probably reality universally consists of a unified field, and apparent particles are "pinches" in this field (quantum field theory). This is relevant because I suspect nothing less is capable of solving the Binding Problem. It may be that if you had Von Neumann level philosophical intelligence, you could have figured out basically in the absence of specific data that we eventually have to end up at an ontology where small objects are emergent phenomena of a fundamentally unified universe, rather than unified objects being emergent phenomena of a fundamentally disconnected universe.

However (if I understand this correctly), most objects like e.g. a rock are not in fact carving out a rock-sized area out of this unified field; rather they carve up many tiny tiny miniscule, particle-like areas out of the unified field, which is exactly why they are not phenomenally bound. For the most part, reality does consist of 'tiny points' to some reasonable approximation. but evolution figured out how to pinch the field in such a way as to carve out areas that are legitimately connected, and this is why we have all these unique computational abilities.

[silverspawn]

not that I have even the slightest clue how 'pinching the field' works.

[faust]

Even the example you gave with the polyhedron was an information loss.

*Regular* Polyhedrons do *not* have information loss in this transformation, do they? Only general polyhedrons do. (Or rather, regular ones do not if the spaces only contain regular ones, obviously a regular one in the general space does as well.)

This is true; you did not mention regularity. Of course there aren't all that many regular polyhedra, so this is not super impressive.

Why assume physics is closed? Because it seems a hell of a lot more elegant to have a bijection than a function that's 99.999% injective or whatever lower bound we can determine based on the current model of physics. And elegance -- or rather, simplicity, measured by length of the shortest program that implements the model -- is everything.

It happens all the time though. In ancient Greece you'd probably think that all numbers are rational because well basically every number that we're dealing with is, so there's not much room anyways for non-rational numbers. Of course we start out observing simpler cases where deductions are easy, but the assumption that observations about these simpler cases generalize was made very often and only very rarely holds. I think it's hubris to assume that everything we can observe today is like 99.999% of what is there.

[faust]

This actually begs another question. Suppose you could prove beyond any doubt that the pleasurableness (=valence)  of a moment of experience is a precisely and objectively measurable quantity. Does this matter for ethics? faust?

I'm not sure I understand the premise. What exactly are we measuring?

You plug a human into an fMRI, put the data into your computer program, get out a mathematical object (probably a hilbert space), measure a quantity of this space, and that tells you exactly how pleasurable that particular moment of experience was for the human. And by assumption, this is absolutely fundamental and subsumes any complexities of the case.

(This could also allow much more targeted interventions which would be the practical side, but I'm more talking about the philosophical aspect of knowing that such a quantity even exists.)

Well okay, I don't think that matters particularly. Of course having more data is generally a good thing if you want to make an ethical decision but I don't see this quantity as uniquely relevant.

[silverspawn]

This is true; you did not mention regularity. Of course there aren't all that many regular polyhedra, so this is not super impressive.

Right right, I wasn't mentioning it because of that, rather I use this example to explain what "matter is inherently tied to C." actually means in my post, and I'd rather not make a mistake in the example.

[silverspawn]

It happens all the time though. In ancient Greece you'd probably think that all numbers are rational because well basically every number that we're dealing with is, so there's not much room anyways for non-rational numbers. Of course we start out observing simpler cases where deductions are easy, but the assumption that observations about these simpler cases generalize was made very often and only very rarely holds. I think it's hubris to assume that everything we can observe today is like 99.999% of what is there.

I meant 99.999% accuracy in describing how matter works. Like if you see an apple falling, you can compute when it hits the ground with Newtonian mechanics, and you will get an answer that is of course wrong because it ignores objects moving through space at different rates, but the error will be tiny. If you use special relativity, I mean I actually have no idea in what way the shortcomings of the standard model even manifest, but I imagine the error will be even smaller.

But that wasn't my main point, my main point is that it seems like the laws of the universe are consistently very *short*, and if you agree with there being some kind of function between material stuff and phenomenal stuff, I expect this function to be very short (both measured by how many lines in e.g. python you'd need to write them down). A bijection seems like a great candidate here.

[silverspawn]

Well okay, I don't think that matters particularly. Of course having more data is generally a good thing if you want to make an ethical decision but I don't see this quantity as uniquely relevant.

Out of curiosity, is it at all relevant? Like, is there some massive amount of valence that you would trade over the things you value?

[silverspawn]

House of Leaves is an extremely interesting book

[silverspawn]

[silverspawn]

May 10, 2017
Palo Alto

The apocalypse began in a cubicle.

Its walls were gray, its desk was gray, its floor was that kind of grayish tile that is designed to look dirty so nobody notices that it is actually dirty. Upon the floor was a chair and upon the chair was me. My name is Aaron Smith-Teller and I am twenty-two years old. I was fiddling with a rubber band and counting the minutes until my next break and seeking the hidden transcendent Names of God.

“AR-ASH-KON-CHEL-NA-VAN-TSIR,” I chanted.

Every inch of wall space is covered by a bookcase. Each bookcase has six shelves, going almost to the ceiling. Some bookshelves are stacked to the brim with hardback books: science, maths, history, and everything else. Other shelves have two layers of paperback science fiction, with the back layer of books propped up on old tissue boxes or lengths of wood, so that you can see the back layer of books above the books in front. And it still isn't enough. Books are overflowing onto the tables and the sofas and making little heaps under the windows.

Here is how I decided to live with my father in Washington.

My favorite three questions are, What do I want?, What do I have?, and How can I best use the latter to get the former?

Actually, I'm also fond of What kind of person am I?, but that one isn't often directly relevant to decision making on a day-to-day basis.

What did I want? I wanted my mother, Renée, to be happy. She was the most important person to me, bar none. I also wanted her around, but when I honestly evaluated my priorities, it was more important that she be happy. If, implausibly, I had to choose between Renée being happy on Mars, and Renée being miserable living with me as she always had - I wouldn't be thrilled about it. At all. But I'd send her to Mars.

[silverspawn]

these are examples of good openings. You can debate the third one, it's a bit nerdy, but so is the story (and afaik the author), so this is fitting.

The opening I have right now is awful. It's completely awful. It's my third attempt and it's probably better than the two before which were even more awful, but it's still awful. I can't figure out how to make it not-awful. I'm pretty happy with chapters 2-4 upon reread but the opening is the most important thing

[silverspawn]

The first opening is good because it's weird and endearing, the other two are good because they say something about the main character. This shouldn't be so hard; why can't I do it?

[silverspawn]

Let's look at some others

Dear Journal,

When did music begin? Did it begin with a question? Or an exclamation? Was somepony laughing? Or sobbing? Was that pony alone? Or was there an audience?

When I first attended Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns, I thought that I would find out all of the answers of how and where music began. What I discovered was that the best pieces of us—the artistic, soulful, and melodious pieces—have been lost forever. Equestrian Civilization is over ten thousand years old, and of those ten millennia only the last fifteen hundred years' worth of music has been recorded, preserved, or recited to this day.

This is not for you.

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly
normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything
strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.

Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to
remember to shut the pop-holes. With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to
side, he lurched across the yard, kicked off his boots at the back door, drew himself a last
glass of beer from the barrel in the scullery, and made his way up to bed, where Mrs. Jones
was already snoring.

Dear Reader,

I'm sorry to say that the book you are holding in your hands is extremely unpleasant. It tells an unhappy tale about three very unlucky children. Even though they are charming and clever, the Baudelaire siblings lead lives filled with misery and woe. From the very first pages of this book when the children are at the beach and receive terrible news, continuing on through the entire story, disaster lurks at their heels. One might say they are magnets of misfortune.

PROLOGUE
We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them. “The
wildlings are dead.”
“Do the dead frighten you?” Ser Waymar Royce asked with just the hint of a smile.
Gared did not rise to the bait. He was an old man, past fifty, and he had seen the
lordlings come and go. “Dead is dead,” he said. “We have no business with the dead.”
“Are they dead?” Royce asked softly. “What proof have we?”

[silverspawn]

I'd say the harry potter one is the best, but they're all decent. Animal farm probably the least impressive

[silverspawn]

"ALIENS!"

Every head swung toward the Sensory console.  But after that one cryptic outburst, the Lady Sensory didn't even look up from her console: her fingers were frantically twitching commands.

There was a strange moment of silence in the Command Conference while every listener thought the same two thoughts in rapid succession:

Is she nuts?  You can't just say "Aliens!", leave it at that, and expect everyone to believe you.  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My
fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding
only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She
must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our
mother. Of course, she did. This is the day of the
reaping.

[silverspawn]

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he
would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with
a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and
excitement in Hobbiton

[silverspawn]

oh man eliezer is such a good writer it's painfully unfair

[silverspawn]

Interesting, dudley learns a new word "Won't" and German translates it with "Pfui" which is something like "ugh" or "gross"

[faust]

Well okay, I don't think that matters particularly. Of course having more data is generally a good thing if you want to make an ethical decision but I don't see this quantity as uniquely relevant.

Out of curiosity, is it at all relevant? Like, is there some massive amount of valence that you would trade over the things you value?

I don't know what you mean by "trade over the things I value". Obviously it's good for people to feel good. I think your ethics are utilitarian, and you think what one should do is optimize for this valence. Your question seems to imply that I am simply optimizing for something else, and might be convinced to switch to valence if there's more to gain there. But I'm not in the business of optimizing at all.