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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34536 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Two Tweets from OpenAI's Sam Altman: "eliezer has IMO done more to accelerate AGI than anyone else. certainly he got many of us interested in AGI, helped deepmind get funded at a time when AGI was extremely outside the overton window, was critical in the decision to start openai, etc." "it is possible at some point he will deserve the nobel peace prize for this--I continue to think short timelines and slow takeoff is likely the safest quadrant of the short/long timelines and slow/fast takeoff matrix."

Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks that the rapid development of AGI will likely kill us and he has devoted his life to trying to stop this from happening, and Sam Altman almost certainly knows this. My personal guess is that quantum immortality means regardless of who is right, some branches of the multiverse will survive AGI, and the survivors will have enough computational power to know what percentage of the branches survived, and consequently whether Altman or Yudkowsky were right.

Edit: Eliezer's response Tweet, which I don't understand.

Doesn't quantum immortality mean that we're likely to spend eternity in pain on our death beds, seemingly close to death but miraculously surviving? If AGI tries to wipe us out, aren't we likely to suffer in pain forever from a miraculously survived murder attempt, maybe lying as a blind and deaf quadriplegic with third degree burns buried in a garbage dump?

No. To quote a post I made in response to someone expressing the same concern:

Is the thing you're afraid of the idea that quantum immortality would involve something like a near-eternity of horrible lives where you're almost but not quite dead? Because if so, I think you're badly misjudging the probability distribution. Those situations are associated with quantum immortality only because they're so incredibly unlikely that if they happen it'll be obvious that quantum immortality is true - but by definition that means they are absurdly unlikely to happen! Something like "you get shot and almost die, but random quantum fluctuations cause a lump of graphite to spontaneously appear inside your chest and barely stop the bleeding" are unlikely on a truly cosmic scale, even under the logic of quantum immortality it only matters if it's the only future where you don't die. And that sort of quantum immortality would require it happen again and again, multiplying the improbability each time.

Even if quantum immortality is true, anything the slightest bit plausible will completely dominate the probability distribution. There is no reason that technology granting near-immortality is impossible, so in virtually every Everett branch where you survive the reason is just that the technology is invented and you use it. Which is generally going to correspond to a technologically advanced and prosperous society. Quantum immortality wouldn't feel like a series of staggering coincidences barely preserving your life, it would feel like living in a universe where everything went surprisingly well. Billions of years from now your society is harvesting energy from black holes and maybe occasionally during get-togethers with your friends you debate whether this outcome was unlikely enough that quantum immortality is probably true.

Quantum immortality wouldn't feel like a series of staggering coincidences barely preserving your life, it would feel like living in a universe where everything went surprisingly well.

This doesn't make any sense. I already have information about the world I'm in. It's a world where comfortable immortality is far away and out of reach for me. Your argument is backwards, most of the probability mass with conscious humans will be in those world's where immortality is nice and easy, but I know which world I live in now. I am embodied in time right now. Most humans would live nice quantumly immortal lives in general, but I already know I won't be one of those people, because of the knowledge I have right now about the branch I am in.

(Also, more importantly I don't see why if by the Born rule I end up in a world where I am dead, I won't just be dead. There is nothing in physics that says that option is off limits; though, of course, other copies would still exist in agony.)

I already have information about the world I'm in. It's a world where comfortable immortality is far away and out of reach for me. Your argument is backwards, most of the probability mass with conscious humans will be in those world's where immortality is nice and easy, but I know which world I live in now. I am embodied in time right now.

Consider that you aren't 100% sure of being a reliable narrator, and that the uncertainty, however minuscule, is greater than odds of spontaneous physical miracles – as per @sodiummuffin's logic. Conditional on you invariably ending up alive, you will... not have had experienced lethal harms that cannot be survived without magic; and if it very convincingly looks to you as if you had experienced them, well, maybe that was just some error? A nightmare, a psychedelic trip, a post-singularity VR session with memory editing...

I woke up today from a realistic dream where I got crippled and blinded by a battery pack explosion. In its (and, in a sense, my own) final moments, I consciously chose the alternate reality relative to which that world was a dream, focused my awareness, and realized that this has happened many times before – in other worlds I had escaped by simply waking up into this one. (This reminded me: I've never read Carlos Castaneda but he probably wrote about this stuff? Sent me on a binge. Yeah, that's one of his topics, mages jumping between apparent universes that should be ontologically unequal).

Dreams aside, I feel like the idea of quantum immortality is unfortunately all tangled up with the idea of observer effect. As per QI, you aren't immortal across the board – you die, and soon, in the vast majority of timelines observed by any other consciousness, just like all humans who have died before our time. You are, right now, in a timeline you observe (though as noted above, only probably) – and presumably you aren't yet dying any more than any other person who's exposed to normal risks and aging. The idea is that you do indeed die in those scenarios where you eat an explosion, develop malignant tumors, are lying in a dump bleeding out all alone with no chance of survival, or are 80 years old in 1839; but those are counterfactuals, not real timelines, and the you who doesn't die, the person typing those comments, doesn't get into them. If it looks to you as if you did, and QI is right – you being wrong is more likely than a miracle.

In its (and, in a sense, my own) final moments, I consciously chose the alternate reality relative to which that world was a dream, focused my awareness, and realized that this has happened many times before – in other worlds I had escaped by simply waking up into this one.

Okay, now try that in the waking world. Shoot yourself or stab yourself or poison yourself and see if you can "consciously choose the alternate reality" where blowing your brains out was only a dream. It won't work, and if it does, come back and tell us and I'll then believe in quantum immortality.

(Really, the lengths to which people go in thought experiments are baffling, when those same people scoff at religious believers who believe in souls and afterlifes. "Heaven is just a fairy tale, but the idea that there are uncounted worlds where you live forever because immortality is easy is reasonable thinking!")

Shoot yourself or stab yourself or poison yourself and see if you can "consciously choose the alternate reality" where blowing your brains out was only a dream. It won't work, and if it does, come back and tell us and I'll then believe in quantum immortality.

You know, this snarky and borderline rules-breaking response makes me think that, back when Scott uncritically reposted the 4chan story about 90 IQ people not understanding conditional hypotheticals and was told that actually there's no way such failures happen at 90 IQ, that was dead wrong. Actually he should've been told that fairly smart people can't into conditional hypotheticals either. If their worldview depends on it, that is; cue Upton Sinclair. You miss the point in so many dimensions at once, and so smugly at that, it's pretty frustrating.

Hello! My story is precisely about such a scenario. I have accidentally or deliberately fucked myself up in dreams countless times – and probably an OOM more in forgotten ones. "Coming back" and telling is what I am doing. That it is not persuasive because the ontological status of the event is inherently low is the fucking point – if it happened «for real», I'd have been in no condition to reply.

What I'm describing is not a «quantum immortality theory» but a much less speculative, let's call it, «probabilistic-phenomenological immortality theory» that does not depend at all on there existing, in some sense other than metaphorical, bona fide alternative worlds, universes, timelines, any weird physics: it's explicitly about alternative mundane explanations for subjective experiences founded on the premise of human fallibility, especially with regard to ontological status of events. If I commit to killing myself and succeed, the most robust way for me to have subjective awareness after that (assuming materialism), and report on it, is if it turns out I have not even tried and have simply dreamed of doing it, or got otherwise confused about what's going on. This is, in fact, what happens, because while awake, I'm not really suicidal, prone to get baited into killing myself by an online troll, or interested in risky metaphysically motivated experiments.

This is relevant to @Hyperion's and @Glassnoser's arguments because it suggests the solution in the strongest case. Namely: given an observer's a) subjective observation that he's heading to certain death only a miracle could prevent and b) the assumption that he will not in fact die and cease observing, it is more plausible that he's wrong about his situation than that physics-breaking miracles (even evil ones, like a biologically implausible neverending agony) will happen and undo the death. Given that old people die, that he strongly believes «comfortable immortality is far away and out of reach for me», and conditional on him staying alive – between «eternal Tithonus torture because quantum timelines something something» and «nah man, it turns out technological immortality wasn't that hard» the latter is overwhelmingly more probable. People fail at reasoning infinitely more often than laws of physics fail to apply.

Really, the lengths to which people go in thought experiments are baffling, when those same people scoff at religious believers who believe in souls and afterlifes

Right. The cool part is, this logic works the same way for afterlife and any religious miracle as for the sci-fi version of quantum immortality. You're shooting yourself in the foot here and I'm not sure it's possible for me to make that clear. I'm equally unsure if you are reflexively condescending without fully understanding the implications of this logic, or if you see them – and defend your views in such an indirect way.

"I consciously chose the alternate reality relative to which that world was a dream, focused my awareness, and realized that this has happened many times before – in other worlds I had escaped by simply waking up into this one."

You are the one recounting a dream where you willed yourself into another reality. If it's all only a dream, then poison yourself in this dream and will yourself into another reality - it's easy, you've already done it by report!

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