LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Quantum immortality moves one into s-risk eventually, if it is not used properly. For example, in your scenario, I can change my internal clock so my next observer-moments will be in another universe which didn't reached heat death yet. This works for state-based identity theory. 

For continuity-based identity theory, I can master (via universal wish-fulfilling machine based on quantum immortality) an explosion of a new universe via quantum fluctuation, jump into it and survive (because of quantum immortality) all difficulties of the initial period. 

I think object identification is important if we want to analyze beliefs instead of sentences. For beliefs we can't take a third person perspective and say "it's clear from context what is meant". Only the agent knows what he means when he has a belief (or she). So the agent has to have a subjective ability to identify things. For "I" this is unproblematic, because the agent is presumably internal and accessible to himself and therefore can be subjectively referred to directly. But for "this" (and arguably also for terms like "tomorrow") the referred object depends partly on facts external to the agent. Those external facts might be different even if the internal state of the agent is the same. For example, "this" might not exist, so it can't be a primitive term (constant) in standard predicate logic.

I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here, but in case the following helps:

Indicators like "here"/"tomorrow"/"the object I'm pointing to" don't get stored directly in beliefs. They are pointers used for efficiently identifying some location/time/object from context, but what get's saved in the world model is the statement where those pointers were substituted for the referent they were pointing to.

One approach would be to analyze the belief that this apple is green as "There is an x such that x is an apple and x is green and x causes e." Here "e" is a primitive term (similar to "I" in "I'm hungry") that refers to the current visual experience of a green apple.

So e is subjective experience and therefore internal to the agent. So it can be directly referred to, while this (the green apple he is seeing) is only indirectly referred to (as explained above), similar to "the biggest tree", "the prime minister of Japan", "the contents of this box".

Note the important role of the term "causes" here. The belief is representing a hypothetical physical object (the green apple) causing an internal object (the experience of a green apple). Though maybe it would be better to use "because" (which relates propositions) instead of "causes", which relates objects or at least noun phrases. But I'm not sure how this would be formalized.

I think I still don't understand what you're trying to say, but some notes:

• In my system, experiences aren't objects, they are facts. E.g. the fact "cubefox sees an apple".
• CAUSES relates facts, not objects.
  • You can say "{(the fact that) there's an apple on the table} causes {(the fact that) I see an apple}"
• Even though we don't have an explicit separate name in language for every apple we see, our minds still tracks every apple as a separate object which can be identified.

Btw, it's very likely not what you're talking about, but you actually need to be careful sometimes when substituting referent objects from indicators, in particular in cases where you talk about the world model of other people. E.g. if you have the beliefs:

1. Mia believes Superman can fly.
2. Superman is Clark Kent.

This doesn't imply that "Mia believes Clark Kent can fly", because Mia might not know (2). But essentially you just have a separate world model "Mia's beliefs" in which Superman and Clark Kent are separate objects, and you just need to be careful to choose the referent of names (or likewise with indicators) relative to who's belief scope you are in.

Physics is incredibly precise (only pure mathematics is more rigorous) and everything does indeed follows from a small number of basic principles. These principles are not sacrosent though, more like useful assumptions, and in quantum gravity we don't expect locality to strictly holds. The solution of the black hole information paradox mentioned above is precisely showing that the late Hawking radiation (which is very far from the black hole) is the same quantum system as the black hole interior. This is a manifestion of quantum entanglement which is realized in gravity through a connected geometry (wormhole). So the solution of the Hawking information paradox is that the information thrown into a black hole is not lost after evaporation, it has escaped into Hawking radiation through tiny quantum wormholes. These non-local effects only happen at the Planck scale or in comlplicated systems such as old black holes. 

About spin-statistics, the modern understanding is that is just follows from the representation theory of the Lorentz group. The existence of fermions is due to the fact that SO(3,1) is not simply connected so what gets represented is its universal cover (a double cover) so there exists fermionic representations with anti-commuting properties. Their properties are fixed from the requirement that they must form consistent unitary representations of the Lorentz group. As you mention, in lower dimensions, anyons exist, and this is due to the fact that the lower-dimensional Lorentz groups have different properties, their universal cover can be an infinite cover so there are anyonic representations too.

But since the number is subjective living your life like you know you are right is certainly wrong

I don't think this makes sense. Suppose you have a subjective belief that a vial of tasty fluid is lethal poison 90%, you're going to act in accordance with that belief. Now if other people think differently from you, and you think they might be right, maybe you adjust your final subjective probability to something else, but at the end of the day it's yours. That it's subjective doesn't rule it out being pretty extreme.

If what you mean is you can't be that confident given disagreement, I dunno, I wish I could have that much faith in people.

Won't quantum immortality doom you to s-risk, when entropy inevitably reaches its maximum in the heat death of the universe, but freak quantum fluctuations keep your brain alive in a nightmarish state?

The colon seems optional to me, but quotation marks absolutely aren't, as evidenced by how comparatively unreadable this guy's dialogue looks. From his book "The Road":

He screwed down the plastic cap and wiped the bottle off with a rag and hefted it in his hand. Oil for their little slutlamp to light the long gray dusks, the long gray dawns. You can read me a story, the boy said. Cant you, Papa? Yes, he said. I can.

That already looks unnecessarily hard to read even though the dialogue is so short. I guess the guy made it work somehow, but this seems like artificially challenging oneself to write a novel without the letter 'E': intriguing, but not beneficial to either reader or prose.

I think object identification is important if we want to analyze beliefs instead of sentences. For beliefs we can't take a third person perspective and say "it's clear from context what is meant". Only the agent knows what he means when he has a belief (or she). So the agent has to have a subjective ability to identify things. For "I" this is unproblematic, because the agent is presumably internal and accessible to himself and therefore can be subjectively referred to directly. But for "this" (and arguably also for terms like "tomorrow") the referred object depends partly on facts external to the agent. Those external facts might be different even if the internal state of the agent is the same. For example, "this" might not exist, so it can't be a primitive term (constant) in standard predicate logic.

One approach would be to analyze the belief that this apple is green as "There is an x such that x is an apple and x is green and x causes e." Here "e" is a primitive term (similar to "I" in "I'm hungry") that refers to the current visual experience of a green apple.

So e is subjective experience and therefore internal to the agent. So it can be directly referred to, while this (the green apple he is seeing) is only indirectly referred to (as explained above), similar to "the biggest tree", "the prime minister of Japan", "the contents of this box".

Note the important role of the term "causes" here. The belief is representing a hypothetical physical object (the green apple) causing an internal object (the experience of a green apple). Though maybe it would be better to use "because" (which relates propositions) instead of "causes", which relates objects or at least noun phrases. But I'm not sure how this would be formalized.

Reading this post, my immediate hunch is that the decline in sentence lengths has a lot to do with the historical role of Latin grammar and how deeply it influenced educated English writers. Latin inherently facilitates longer, complex sentences due to its use of grammatical inflections, declensions, and verb conjugations, significantly reducing reliance on prepositions and conjunctions. This syntactic flexibility allowed authors to naturally craft extensive yet smooth-flowing sentences. Latin's liberating lack of fixed word order and its fun little rhetorical devices combine to support nuanced, flexible thinking. From my own experience studying Latin 7th-12th grade, I find this sort of stuff contributes significantly to freer, more expansive expression when writing or speaking in English, and I often can immediately tell when speaking with or reading something written by someone else who studied Latin. An easy "tell" is when they say "having done x."

Educated English writers historically learned Latin as a foundational part of their education, internalizing this syntactic complexity. As a result, English prose from authors like Chaucer, Samuel Johnson, and Henry James shows a clear preference for hypotaxis, complex sentences with nested subordinate clauses, rather than simpler paratactic structures consisting of shorter, sequential clauses.

The practical advantage of these complex sentence structures is the precise communication of nuanced and sophisticated ideas. Longer sentences enabled authors to maintain coherent, detailed arguments and descriptions within a single cohesive thought. I see this as reflecting "transcription fluency," where authors aim for fidelity in translating their complex internal thought processes directly into prose, trusting readers’ intelligence and attention span to engage deeply.

Here's a fun example from Thoreau’s "Walden," which makes it clear that such elaborate writing was intended to be understood even by poorer and less formally educated readers. Consider the following (just) two sentences:

“I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins æs alienum, another’s brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other’s brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.

I think having a huge p(doom) vs a much smaller one would change this article substantially. If you have 20-30 or 50% doom you can still be positive. In all other cases it sounds like a terminal illness. But since the number is subjective living your life like you know you are right is certainly wrong. So I take most of your article and apply it in my daily life and the closest to this is being a stoic but by any means I don't believe that it would take a miracle for our civilization to survive. It's more than that and it's important.

Great work, it's wonderful to know that Google DeepMind isn't dismissing AI risk, and is willing to allocate at least some resources towards it.

When you have lists of problems and lists of solutions, can you quantify them by their relative importances? A very rough guess might be better than nothing.

Without knowing the relative importances, it's hard to know if we agree or disagree, since we might both say "I believe in X, Y and Z, they are very important," without realizing that one of us thinks the importance is 80% X, 10% Y, 10% Z, while the other one thinks it's 5% X, 10% Y, 85% Z.