I need a protocol for dangerous or disconcerting ideas.

There is a pattern here, and part of it looks like this. You contemplate an idea X and it bothers you. You circulate your concerns among a number of people who are good at thinking and interested in ideas like X. None of them is bothered by it; none of them seems to see it the same way as you do. And, in every case, you conclude that all those people have failed to understand your idea.

Now, I think there are two kinds of explanation for this. First, we have (to put it crudely) the ones in which you are right and everyone else is wrong.

• These ideas are so horrifying that almost everyone flinches away from them mentally before they can really engage with them. The other people you talk to about X might be able to understand it, but they won't.
• You are super-abnormally good at understanding these things, and the other people you talk to about X simply don't have the cognitive horsepower to understand it.
• X is really hard to express (in general, or for you in particular) and on these occasions you have not been successful. So, while the other people could have understood X, they haven't yet had it explained clearly enough.

And then we have (to put it crudely, again) the ones in which you are wrong and everyone else is right. They all begin "You have, for whatever reason, become unduly upset about X", and continue:

• ... Others don't feel the same, and so they don't pay as much attention to X as you think they should.
• ... Now if anyone offers their own analysis of X and it somehow conflicts with (or merely doesn't include) that feeling of upset-ness, it will seem wrong to you.
• ... Other people see that you're upset, and what they say about X is aimed at some version of X they've thought of that would justify the upset-ness. But your upset-ness actually has other causes, so they're inventing versions of X that don't match yours.

For obvious reasons you will be more inclined to endorse the first kind of explanation. But an "outside view" suggests that the second kind is more likely.

Possibly relevant: Existential Angst Factory. Your situation is clearly not exactly the same as the one described there, but you should consider the possibility that your unusually dramatic reaction to these ideas is at least partly the result of something other than being the only person who truly understands them.

Now, considering the only one of those discussions that I've been in recently: I think you are simply incorrect to say that no one who disagreed with you in the Dust Theory thread actually understands Dust Theory. What might be true, though, is that you have (so to speak) your own private version of Dust Theory, and no one understands it because you haven't explained it and have just kept saying "Dust Theory".

Another arm-chair diagnosis here. Clearly far-out ideas affect you more than other, equally (or more) intelligent people. This is almost certainly a flaw in how your brain functions, not an indication of the problem's severity. If it were, some of those smart people you contacted would consider it seriously. If you concede that this is a problem with your brain, then you should consult the experts on fixing the brain, not fixing the future.

I think what you're doing is something that in psychology is called "Catastrophizing". In essence you're taking a mere unproven conjecture or possibility, exaggerating the negative severity of the implications, and then reacting emotionally as if this worst case scenario were true or significantly more likely than it actually is.

The proper protocol then is to re-familiarize yourself with Bayes Theorem (especially the concepts of evidence and priors), compartmentalize things according to their uncertainty, and try to step back and look at your actual beliefs and how they make you feel.

Rationality is more than just recognizing that something could be true, but also assigning appropriate degrees of belief to ideas that have a wide range of certainties and probability. What I am seeing repeatedly from your posts about the "dangers" of certain ideas, is that your assigning far too much fear to things which other people aren't.

To use an overused quote: "Fear is the mindkiller."

Try to look at the consequences of these ideas as dispassionately as possible. You cannot control everything that happens to you, but you can, to an extent, control your response to these circumstances.

For instance, with Dust Theory, you say that you gave it at most a 10% chance of being true, and it was paralyzing to you. This shouldn't be. First, you need to consider your priors and the evidence. How often in the past have you had the actual experience that Dust Theory suggests is possible and which you fear? What actual experiential evidence do you have to suggest that Dust Theory is true?

For that matter, one of the common threads of your fears seems to be that "you" cease to exist and are replaced by a different "you" or that "you" die. But the truth is already the case that people are constantly changing. The "you" from 10 years ago will be made up of different atoms than the "you" 10 years from now by virtue of the fact that our cells are constantly dying and being replaced. The thoughts we have also change from moment to moment, and our brains adjust the strengths of the connections between neurons in order to learn, such that our past and future brains gradually diverge.

The only thing that really connects our past, present, and future selves is causality, in the sense that our past selves lead to our future selves when you follow the arrow of time. Therefore, what you -think- is a big deal, really isn't.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't care about your future selves. In fact, in the same way that you should care about the experiences of all sentient beings because those experiences are real, you should care about the experiences of your future selves.

But don't worry so much about things that you cannot control, like whether or not you'll wake up tomorrow because of Dust Theory. I cannot see how worrying about this possibility will make it any more or less likely to occur. For all we know the sun could explode tomorrow. There is a non-zero possibility of that happening because we don't know everything. But the probability of that happening, given our past experience with the sun, is very very very low, and as such behaving as if it will happen is completely irrational. Act according to what is MOST likely to happen, and what is MOST likely true, given the information you have right now. Maximize the Expected Utility. Expected is the key word here. Don't make plans based on mere hopes or fears unless they are also expected. In statistics, expectation is commonly associated with the mean or average. Realistically, what will happen tomorrow will probably be a very average day.

That is being rational.

Hope that helps!

The next mistake was opening the door to solipsism and Brain-in-a-Vat arguments. This was so traumatic to me that I spent years in a manic depression.

Consider the possibility that the manic-depression was coincidental. When people have mental things happen for fundamentally biochemical reasons, they often misattribute them to the most plausible seeming non-biochemical cause they can think of. Exposure to ideas can exacerbate an existing problem, but it is unlikely that the lowest-hanging here has anything at all to do with the ideas themselves. Instead of looking at how you engage with stressful ideas, consider looking into other aspects of your life which might reduce your resilience.

With that said...

You started with a set of values and preferences and an ontology. When you encountered dust theory, you discovered that one of the definitions used to define your values - the notion of personal identity - wasn't fully coherent. You then tried to substitute a different definition in its place - an alternative notion of personal identity, which might not carry across a sleep/wake cycle. This alternate notion of identity is not the thing you care about. A small philosophically-minded portion of your brain has decided that it is what you care about, and is now in conflict with the other parts of your brain which don't accept the altered values. Listen to them; while those brain-parts aren't good at explaining things, they have knowledge and in this case they are right.

I am going to perpetrate a little bit of the sin of amateur psychological diagnosis over the Internet. Sorry about that.

I'm not sure that the substance of the philosophical and cosmological concepts here is what is afflicting you. After all, many people engage with cosmological horror recreationally — see, for instance, the continued popularity of writers such as Lovecraft, Stross, Banks, or the "SCP Foundation" folks.

Exposure to weird cosmological horror does not cause most humans to freak out, at least not for very long. Most people more-or-less instinctively take Egan's Law into account ("it all adds up to normality") — to the extent that this Law is only needed as a reminder for people who don't automatically do so.

It sounds like you are having trouble disengaging from these ideas. So you might want to go seek treatment specifically for anxiety. This doesn't mean "stop thinking about these issues and thereby give up any possibility of coming up with good solutions to them"; it means "become able to stop thinking about these issues when it's getting loopy and unproductive, and get back to ape mode — and remember, ape mode is acceptable; we've been living with it for a long, long time."

If Egan's Law helps, good. OTOH, if prescribed beta blockers help, good too.

On the other hand, many people have struggled with the existence of sickness and death, and not every one of them became a Buddha. Some of what you write seems to be heavily concerned with the notions of personal identity and continuity, and whether this is an illusion. This is an area in which the Buddhists seem to be way ahead of the clinical psychologists in giving people tools to deal with it.

I think what you need to realize is that it is not a question of proving that all of those things are false, but rather that it makes no difference whether they are or not. For example when you go to sleep and wake up it feels just the same whether it is still you or a different person, so it doesn't matter at all.

I think there should be a discussion about the more general idea of "needing a protocol for discussing dangerous or disconcerting ideas" in addition to the discussion of this specific circumstance.

I think that I understand your feelings. I had the same periods of existential fear about most of the things that you had. Two of them I discussed in the post about AI failures levels which didn't got any comments to my surprise.

But it is also possible to have existential euphoria. First one I got than proved for my self the idea of quantum immortality. Second is that than I understood that I will become a god in my own branch of the universe. The last needs more complex explanation, which I would omit for now.

But as I became older I got less and less feeling from theoretical ideas.

Of course the most dangerous of all ideas is idea of death itself. Everybody knows it and nobody react on it. Most people got bulletproof for such ideas from 6 years old when they was told that they will die, and after it nothing will happened, and nothing can be done about it.

Today's blog post by Yvain starts:

Anxiety disorders are the most common class of psychiatric disorders. Their US prevalence is about 20%. They’re also among the least recognized and least treated...

the idea that during sleep my mind declines enough to merge into other experiences and I awake into a world I would consider alien, with perfectly consistent memories.

An entity with self-consistent memories is astronomically more likely to be found in a world which matches those memories, than in some mismatched world. The latter has a complexity penalty equal to all the extra mismatched complexity.

Finally, we come to an absolutely terrifying idea I had a few days ago, which I naively assumed would catch the attention of any rational person. An extrapolation of Dust Theory [3] implied that you might die upon going to sleep, not immediately, but through degeneration, and that the person who wakes up in the morning is simply a different observer, who has an estimated lifespan of however long he remains awake. Rationally anyone should therefore sign up for cryonics and then kill themselves, forcing their measure to continue into post-Singularity worlds that no longer require him to sleep (not that I would have ever found the courage to do this). [4]

You say this is tremendously important, but you haven't put in the rather minimal amount of effort necessary to show how it follows from accepted promises.

My logic was sound, but he substituted abstractly intuitive concepts in place of them.

Sound logic doesn't help when you start of with bad assumptions.

One of them of them insisted that I needed to explain how 'causality' could be violated; isn't that the whole point of acausal systems?

No, it isn't. The fact that the word acausal exists on LW, doesn't mean that those people who use it don't believe in causality. It's used when speaking about agents that use a specific decision theory.

You furthermore simply pointed at arguments without being explicit about your chain of reasoning. Without you being explicit it's impossible to show you where you are wrong.

I'm not very good yet at conveying these kind of ideas

Because you are not thinking clearly about the ideas. If you deeply desire to be helped help you are lazy. There no reason to write posts about Dust theory without explaining what you believe Dust theory to be. This is not the kind of discussion where it's useful to point to concepts and take those for granted.

There seem to be multiple people who got into mental health issues by thinking too much about ideas in that realm. In general if people warn you about not developing into ideas because of possible mental health risks, follow their advice.

If you want specific help you are more likely find it through in person discussion at LW meetups then through emailing random persons.

Let X be something bad. If X is true it is something you and nearly every other person should rightly fear. If, however, no one but you fears X than either (1) you are mistaken, or (2) you have some special information or insight that everyone else lacks. Logically, it's almost certainly (1). So if you fear X but Eliezer, Bostrom, and Hanson don't appear to, take comfort from their lack of fear even if you don't understand it.

Thank you for all the responses. I'm trying to contact Yudkowsky, does anyone know if how often he responds to his email? Or does the email address given here still work?

Like many people I felt compelled to distinguish myself by solving your problem while playing by your rules (rules which aren't completely clear). But after all ... and I guess I should offer an apology if this doesn't help, but, why should any of that change anything? Picture someone who for his whole life thought he had free will, then discovered that the universe is deterministic, with all that entails about ideas like "free will" as normal people envision it. This sounds pretty similar to your situation. You discovered that you may at any point "become" or "jump" to another conscious being whose memories are consistent with your own, but whose life and environment/universe is vastly different from your current/own universe.

Then what? What are your goals anyway? How does that change of perspective affect them? How can you best act, adjust yourself to still pursue those goals? What else should matter to you? The waters may be a little muddier than you believed them to be before, but not so muddied that it should be impossible to move forward. Seriously, aside from the vague existential angst, elaborate how this change of perspective affects your beliefs, and what actions you think you should act to reach your goals in life (if you have a good grasp of your goals. If you don't, then you should solve that first).

I have a talent for reasoning my way into terrifying and harmful conclusions.

I often worked through them myself, always by refuting the horrible consequences of them to my own satisfaction

This is a good start. Assemble your data.

Catalogue the terrifying conclusions which have troubled you, and record the life cycle of each.

Currently still terrified? If not, how was the terror resolved? How long after the thought first terrified you until the terror was resolved?

Stop reasoning and take data. Often patterns becomes obvious once data is tidily assembled in place. And if you clearly and concisely assemble the data here, other people may be able to spot the patterns which you don't see - "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".

Come to think of your thought process as an accumulation of information layers on top of each other, it should not be surprising to see the introduction of a possibly devastating new thought threatening the foundations of your thinking process being counter-productive, or depressive. I am speaking of my personal experience with solipsism, which did not come from exposure but personal self-destructive thought process; I've looked it up to find out about solipsism later on. The introduction of these ideas at your pace, as you've experienced yourself, is very uncomfortable and should be moderated.

In your case, you need a solid, unshakeable foundation which you should defend no matter what. This may sound a bit religious, but consider religion for the example's sake: an exposure to potentially threatening concept is overwritten with the religious concepts that are accepted duly by the observer. This is an overwriting mechanism and you need it in the most critical cases.

However overwriting everything simply eliminates all the useful information that are out there, or even the potentially threatening information from which you can extract useful bits of further information. My personal method of coping with these thoughts is simply to accept the possibility of anything presented to you of being real. It is similar to the old days of Stonehedge druids gazing at the wide sky showing the ultimate expression of infinity to humans: stars. The sight of infinite stars lining up on a clear sky is a humbling experience, and being humble comes with the admission that you simply cannot grasp everything. When you start leaving an open door to problems presented to you, instead of trying to tackle it down every time, you accept that it is beyond you and you let it go. That's how it can't affect you in depth. You can see similar thought processes in Middle Eastern https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kismet) and Far Eastern fatalism. The fatalism is actually a very useful tool to reduce anxiety such as yours, because it allows the person to move on instead of being crushed under the infinite possibilities of encounters.

For example, a person brought up in a culture where the usage of Kismet is common, would answer whether his newest business would be successful with a simple word: Kismet. It's the blind faith, a psychological support that frees your mind from anxiety, in the same fashion as our ancestors did. In the current age, we forgot to be humble and grew arrogant. Whenever we can't deal with answers we come up with, we either grow anxious or get depressed. Instead, let the questions find their own answers.

Obviously I'm not suggesting a direct cloning of these ideas, but rather your extrapolation of them. As you get more and more comfortable with casting thoughts aside and strengthening your foundation, you'll see the infinite possibilities expand before your eyes.

I have the exact same problem. It's nice to know I'm not alone. I've been scared to mention my fears on lesswrong because I didn't think anyone would understand.

I'm mainly concerned about many worlds interpretation being true. I don't take dust theory seriously. Unless I understand it wrongly, it removes causation and just assumes the information itself is what is important. I really recommend you read Causal Universes. It's one of my favorite Lesswrong posts.

I also think dust theory leads to absurd and obviously wrong conclusions. Like how do interpret some random collection of bits? Under different interpretations they can represent anything.

If it's true that causation doesn't matter, then it's really weird that I just happen to find myself here with memories of living in a causal universe with simple, universal laws, for the last 2 decades. I should expect to be a boltzman brain observing extremely high entropy.

Anyway, my main tactic of dealing with Scary Idea is just keeping my mind off it as much as possible. Thinking about it hurts me, so I don't think about it. I also think I've resolved it somewhat, but again I prefer not to think about the issue at all.

I'm really scared of the transhumanist future. If we massively increase our intelligence, or create AIs which can explain complex ideas to us, then we will be forced to deal with all of these existential issues all at once. Including ones we haven't even thought of yet or can't understand. Our simple minds allow us some cognitive dissonance to just ignore this stuff.

EDIT: Also lighting helps a lot. I feel much worse in a dark room than a bright one. During the day time in the sunlight my mood improves even more. So I can understand why these problems occur during bedtime. Reading until I fall asleep helps. During the day I just find things to keep my mind off of it. If I started getting really terrified, I just opened a reddit page and looked at cat pictures for awhile.

An extrapolation of Dust Theory [3] implied that you might die upon going to sleep, not immediately, but through degeneration, and that the person who wakes up in the morning is simply a different observer, who has an estimated lifespan of however long he remains awake.

If that were true, wouldn't a lot of people be dying in their sleep so that we'd be seeing their corpses?

You are talking about rationality and about fear. Your protocol could have several independent layers. You seems to think that your ideas produce your fear, but it could be also opposite. Your fear could produce your ideas (and it is definitely very probable that fear has impact on your ideas (at least on contents)). So you could analyze rational questions on lesswrong and independently solve your irrational part (=fear etc) with terapeuts. There could be physical or chemical reasons why you are concerning more than other people. Your protocol for dangerous ideas needs not only discussing it but also solve your emotional responses. If you like to sleep well then it could depend more on your emotional stability than on rational knowledge.

The next big failure was my resolution to the Doomsday argument.

Are you aware of the self-indication assumption.

Nvm...

Why think about these sorts of things?

Personally, death really messes with my mind, and I try not to think about it (and related bad things) in the short-mid term. I don't see that I'm in a position to do much to avoid death/related bad things right now, and so I don't see that there's much benefit to thinking about it right now. The cost to me is that it makes me mildly unhappy and risks moments of extreme unhappiness.

Do you have a link to Max Tegmark's rebuttal? What I've read so far seemed like a confused dodge.

I'm pretty much immune to infinity angst. PM the "dust theory" problem to me. I'm curious how it could be worse psychologically than modal realism, as AFAICT dust theory implies that all subjective experiences exist, so I'm unsure how it could differ in terms of psychological impact.