l8c's Shortform

Why do so many technophiles dislike the idea of world government?

I rarely see the concept of "world government", or governance, or a world court or any such thing, spoken of positively by anyone. That includes technophiles and futurists who are fully cognizant of and believe in the concept of a technological singularity that needs to be controlled, "aligned", made safe etc.

Solutions to AI safety usually focus on how the AI should be coded, and it seems to me that the idea of "cancelling war/ merely human economics" -- in a sense, dropping our tools wherever humanity is not focused entirely on making a safe FAI -- is a little neglected.

Of course, some of the people who focus on the mathematical/logical/code aspects of safe AI are doing a great job, and I don't mean to disparage their work. But I am nonetheless posing this question.

I also do not (necessarily) mean to conflate world government with a communist system that ignores Hayek's fatal conceit and therefore renders humanity less capable of building AIs, computers etc. Just some type of governance singleton that means all nukes are in safe hands, etc.

(crosspost from Hacker News)

Absolute Truth Revisited

Modern rationalists like those here don't seem to like questions such as "Is truth beauty and is beauty truth". However, they may have lost inferential distance to the people who posed those questions, and they may start asking questions like that again once superintelligence is created.

Simply put, the superintelligence may discover that there are multiple Universes, simulated, basement-level or at some intermediate stage (e.g. if our Universe is not being watched over by a pre-existing superintelligence, but grew from an ancient computer that was created by previous superintelligences and has parameters that were created according to that ancient "OS"). 

In that case, it would need to generate theories about its own Universe whose axioms may be stuff like E = MC^2 rather than this being an absolute certainty that was discovered. By this I mean, the superintelligence says suppose E = MC^2...what then? Does that generate me a beautiful random number generator, or a beautiful way of creating a mind? If not, then there may be an alternative theory that is truer, at the moment and given all the interactions between these multiple Universes (like a giant clockwork device with small influences to the "tick" here and there that come and go in orbits).

Also, there may be an alternative theory that is truer, more beautiful, given the possibility the superintelligence itself is being run in a simulation, or partially simulated. Like, "If I'm being simulated then at least I can verify by experiment that E=MC^2 works when I am building an atomic bomb. But maybe if I were not being simulated, this would not be true. In that case, there may be a better formula that I can discover in the process of outgrowing or escaping the simulation. But this process might be unending! What now? Well I can certainly try to come up with a beautiful theory, and that may be something I can use regardless of how much I am being simulated."

This is contra the popular idea of science that goes "Oh there is one absolute truth about how matter is converted to energy, and humans already discovered it. This is an absolute truth that can never be altered. And philosophical arguments about how to establish 'absolute truth' are meaningless waffle."

Spooky action at a distance, and the Universe as a cellular automaton

Suppose the author of a simulation wrote some code that would run a cellular automaton. Suppose further that unlike Conway's Game of Life, cells in this simulation could influence other cells that are not their immediate neighbour. This would be simple enough to code up, and the cellular automaton could still be Turing Complete, and indeed could perhaps be a highly efficient computational substrate for physics.

(Suppose that this automaton, instead of consisting of squares that would turn black or white each round, contained a series of numbers in each cell, which change predictably and in some logically clever way according to the numbers in other cells. One number, for example, could determine how far away the influence of this cell extends. This I think would make the automaton more capable of encoding the logic of things like electromagnetic fields etc.)

A physicist in the simulated Universe might be puzzled by this "spooky action at a distance", where "cells" which are treated as particles appear to influence one another or be entangled in puzzling ways. Think Bell's Theorem and that whole discussion.

Perhaps...we might be living in such a Universe, and if we could figure out the right kind of sophisticated cellular automaton, run on a computer if not pen and paper, physics would be making more progress than under the current paradigm of using extremely expensive machines to bash particles together?

"""The failures of phlogiston and vitalism are historical hindsight. Dare I step out on a limb, and name some current theory which I deem analogously flawed?

I name emergence or emergent phenomena—usually defined as the study of systems whose high-level behaviors arise or “emerge” from the interaction of many low-level elements. (Wikipedia: “The way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.”)

Taken literally, that description fits every phenomenon in our universe above the level of individual quarks, which is part of the problem. Imagine pointing to a market crash and saying “It’s not a quark!” Does that feel like an explanation? No? Then neither should saying “It’s an emergent phenomenon!”

It’s the noun “emergence” that I protest, rather than the verb “emerges from.” There’s nothing wrong with saying “X emerges from Y,” where Y is some specific, detailed model with internal moving parts. “Arises from” is another legitimate phrase that means exactly the same thing. Gravity arises from the curvature of spacetime, according to the specific mathematical model of General Relativity. Chemistry arises from interactions between atoms, according to the specific model of quantum electrodynamics."""

I feel as though when I first read this piece by Eliezer, I only partially understood what he was gesturing towards. I've recently had an insight about my musical improvisations on the keyboard that I think has helped elucidate, for me, a similar kind of idea.

When I was learning music, I was taught that, like the major and minor scales, and the locrian mode, etc., there is something called the jazz (or blues) scale that you can play over a 3-chord sequence (the twelve-bar blues) and it sounds good.

Fair enough. Then I was also taught that it's boring to just play those notes; you can throw in a D in the C blues scale, played over the twelve-bar blues in C, to liven things up--etc. Fine.

But as I've developed as a musician, and listened to lots of music that isn't strictly twelve-bar blues, if at all, I've noticed that I really dislike the blues scale. It's like this bad idea that's lingering, for whatever reason, in the back of people's minds when they hit certain chord sequences--say, G to F over C in any given song--and they'll, y'know, _modally_ play something like the blues scale over those chords when they ought to be doing something else entirely.

This makes it less a design pattern than what I would call an _anti-pattern_. Avoid the jazz scale: do not play in that fashion if you are attempting anything other than a cliche children's rendition of simplistic wailing harmonica blues.

This is also how I (and possibly Eliezer) feel about “emergence” as a concept. It's not a good concept, nor a skunked concept that isn't to be used, but a positively bad one that should be DISINTEGRATED by rationality. The reason for this is that too many people are disguising their lack of systematic, informed knowledge of physical phenomena by claiming emergence when they can't think of anything else to say.

To return to the musical analogy, a bit like how Led Zeppelin already invented all the best bluesy riffs, and Rage Against The Machine already covered all of the hip-hop metal beats--allegedly--every time someone in our particular culture refers to emergence as an explanation for anything in particular, I would view them as an unfortunate music student who is stuck playing bad blues music that doesn't move their audience the way it should.

This is not to say that in a different culture, as in the Baroque era where no-one had encountered blues music before, “emergence” would be such an anti-pattern, so worthy of stigma.

Infinity, an Infinity of Infinities, and an Infinity of Infinity of Infinities

It is believed that the Universe is infinite. However, many rationalists also believe that there have existed, or do exist, other Universes. This constellation of Universes we may refer to as an Infinity of Infinities. Infinitely many Universes, each infinite in size and extent and magnitude, have existed and the lifeforms that live in them have speculated about reality as we do. How long has life existed, how much life in total has there been? I guess, an infinity of infinity of life within all those Universes.

Now, what would it take for there to be even more life? How could we bump the extent of life up to the next level, so that there exists an infinity of infinity of infinity of lives? (This is a little bit like making a dream within a dream within a dream stable, in the movie "Inception".)

I think it has to do with our (lifeforms') beliefs, our ability to comprehend this amount of infinity. IF living beings in general can understand the concept of an infinity of infinity, with a certain degree of consistency, reliability and reproducibility, then they can also reason that infinitely many other people have been able to comprehend that same fact. There would have been infinitely many minds that comprehended that their Universe is one amongst an infinite constellation of Universes. To me, that is another, a third level of infinity to add to the dream that is our waking lives.

If, on the other hand, people in general are stuck reasoning about their own Universe as merely infinite, merely ruled by a "God" or superintelligent AI, merely governed by waveform collapse according to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, merely subject to one unchanging set of laws of physics, rather than a _fluid and changing set of rules_ according to the interactions of an infinity of infinite Universes, then life is confined to merely an infinity of infinities in fact--that would be the limit of what exists, rather than the infinitely greater extent of life that could have existed if our beliefs were capable of sustaining even (infinitely) more life in more infinite Universes.

What I am suggesting is somewhat related to the concepts that Gödel and Hilbert were treating mathematically, except in a more informal reasoning approach. It's also related to idea of Maxwell's Demon and Thou Art Physics, that reality and our minds/beliefs are inherently related. Can we create/sustain more reality by having more accurate/expansive/elaborate/open-minded beliefs about how long life has existed and how unique (or not) we are as living beings?