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Another neat direction this work can go in is toward corroborating the computational feasibility of simulationism and artificial life.
If abstractions are natural then certain optimizations in physical simulation software are potentially not impossible. These optimizations would be of the type that save compute resources by computing only at those abstraction levels the inhabitants of the simulation can directly observe/measure.
If abstractions aren't natural, then the simulation software can't generically know what it can get away with lossily compressing wrt a given observer. Or something to that effect.
An example of a technical move forward would be a game world that is so large it must be procedurally generated, that also has the two properties that it is massively multiplayer, and that players can arbitrarily alter the environment.
You'd get the technical challenge of reconciling player-made alterations to the environment with the "untouched" version of the environment according to your generative algorithm. Then you'd get the additional challenge of sharing those changes across lots of different players in real time.
I don't get the sense that either of the two properties (massively multiplayer and alterable environment) are a big part of this game.
If a game with all three properties (procedural generation of a large universe, massively multiplayer, and alterable environment) were to be made, it'd make me take a harder look as simulation arguments.
If you are just generating very elaborate confusions very fast- I don't think you are- but if you are, I'm genuinely impressed with how quickly you're doing it, and I think you're cool.
Haha! No, I'm definitely not doing that on purpose. I anonymous-person-on-the-internet promise ;) . I'm enjoying this topic, but I don't talk about it a lot and haven't seen it argued about formally, and this sounds like the sort of breakdown in communication that happens when definitions aren't agreed upon up front. Simple fix should be to keep trying until our definitions seem to match (or it gets stale).
So I'll try to give names to some more things, and try to flesh things out a bit more:
The place in your definitions where we first disagree is X. You define it as
X := Rah/R
But I define it as
X := (Rap + Rah)/R
(I was mentally approximating it as just Rap/R, since Rah is presumably a negligible fraction of Rap.)
With this definition of X, the meaning of "X > Y" becomes
(Rap + Rah)/R > Rah/Rap
I'll introduce a few more little things to motivate the above:
Rac := total resources dedicated to Compat. Or, Rap + Rah.
Frh := The relative resource cost of simulating heaven versus simulating physics. "Fraction of resource usage due to heaven." (Approximated by Rah/Rap.) [1]
Then the inequality X > Y becomes
Rac/R > Frh
So long as the above inequality is satisfied, the host universe will offset its non-heaven reality with heaven for its simulants. If universes systematically did not choose Rac such that the above is satisfied, then they wouldn't be donating enough reality fluid to heaven simulations to satisfactorily outweigh normal physics (aka speed-prior-endowed reality fluid), and it wouldn't be worth entering such a pact.
(That is kind of a big claim to make, and it might be worth arguing over.)
If I have cleared that part up, then great. The next part, where I introduced Z, was motivating why the approximation:
Efh == Rah/Rap
is an extremely optimistic one. I'm gonna hold off on getting deeper into that part until I get feedback on the first part.
If we can project the solomonoff fractal of environmental input generators onto the multiverse and find that they're the same shape, the multiversal measure of higher complexity universes is so much lower than the measure of lower complexity universes that it's conceivable that higher universes can't run enough simulations for P(issimulation(loweruniverse)) to break 0.5.
This gets to the gist of my argument. There are numerous possible problems that come up when you compare your universe's measure to that of the universe you are most likely to find in your search and simulate. (And I intuitively believe, though I don't discuss it here, that the properties of the search over laws of physics are extremely relevant and worth thinking about.) Your R might be too low to make a dent. Your Frh might be too large. (i.e. the speed prior uses a gpu, and you've only got a cpu even with the best optimizations your universe can physically provide).
Another basic problem- if the correct measure actually is the speed prior, and we find a way to be more certain of that (or that it is anything computable that we figure out), then this gives universes the ability to self-locate in the ranking. Just the ability to do that kills Compat, I believe, since you aren't supposed to know whether you're "top-level" or not. The universe at the top of the ranking (with dead universes filtered out) will know that no-one will be able to give them heaven, and so won't enter the pact, and this abstinence will cascade all the way down.
Regarding whether to presume we're ranked by the speed prior or not. I agree that there's not enough evidence to go on at this point. But I also think that the viability of Compat is extremely dependent on whatever the real objective measure is, whether it is the speed prior or something else.
We would therefore do better to explore the measure problem more fully before diving into Compat. Of course, Compat seems to be more fun to think about so maybe it's a wash (actual sentiment with hint of self-deprecating irony, not mean joke).
Regarding the quantum immortality argument, my intuitions are such that I would be very surprised if you needed to go up a universe to outweigh quantum immortality hell.
QI copies of an observer may go on for a very long time, but the rate at which they can be simulated slows down drastically and the measure added to the pot by QI is probably relatively small. I would argue that most of the observer-moments generated by boltzmann brain type things would be vague and absurd, rather than extremely painful.
[1] A couple of notes for Frh's definition.
First, a more verbose way of putting it is: The relative efficiency of simulating heaven versus simulating physics, such that the allocation of reality fluid for observers crosses a high threshold of utility. That is to say, "simulating heaven" may entail simulating the same heavenly reality multiple times, until the utility gain for observers crosses the threshold.
Second, the approximation of Rah/Rap only works assuming that Rah and Rap remain fixed over time, which they don't really. A better way of putting it is relative resources required for Heaven versus Physics with respect to a single simulated universe, which is considerably different from a host universe's total Rap and Rah at a given time.
The weirder the phenomena, the less reliable the witness, the better. Not only is god permitted to hide, in this variant of the pact god is permitted to run around performing miracles so long as it specifically keeps out of sight of any well connected skeptics, archivists, or superintelligences.
That is a gorgeous idea. Cosmic irony. Truth-seekers are necessarily left in the dark, the butt of the ultimate friendly joke.
I don't follow this part, could you go into more detail here?
The speed prior has the desirable property that it is a candidate for explaining all of reality by itself. Ranking laws of physics by their complexity and allocating reality fluid according to that ranking is sufficient to explain why we find ourselves in a patterned/fractal universe. No "real" universe running "top-level" simulations is actually necessary, because our observations are explained without need for those concepts. Thus the properties of top-level universes need not be examined or treated specially (nor used to falsify the framework).
It seems like Compat requires the existence of a top-level universe though (because our universe is fractal-y and there's no button to trigger the rapture), which is presumably in existence thanks to the speed prior (or something like it). That's where it feels like it falls apart for me.
Compat is funneling a fraction X of the reality fluid (aka "computational resources") your universe gets from the top-level speed prior into heaven simulations. Simulating heaven requires a fraction Y of the total resources it takes to simulate normal physics for those observers. So just choose X s.t. X / Y > 1, or X > Y
But I think there's another term in the equation that makes things more difficult. That is, the relative reality fluid donated to a candidate universe in your search versus that donated by the speed prior. If we call that fraction Z, then what we really have is X / Y > 1 / Z, or X > Y / Z. In other words, you must allocate enough of your resources that your heavens are able to dilute not just the normal physics simulations you run, but also the observer-equivalent physics simulations run by the speed prior. If Z is close to 1 (aka P(pact-compliant | ranked highly by speed-prior) is close to 1), then you're fine. If Z is any fraction less than Y, then you don't have enough computational resources in your entire universe to make a dent.
So in summary the attack vector is:
Compat requires an objective ordering of universes to make sense. (It can't explain where the "real world" comes from, but still requires it)
This ordering is necessarily orthogonal to Compat's value system. (Or else we'd have a magic button)
Depending on how low the degree of correlation is between the objective ordering and Compat's value system, there is a highly variable return-on-investment for following Compat that goes down to the arbitrarily negative.
Ultimately, I just can't see any ways it'd be useful to its adherents for the pact to stipulate punishments. Most of the things I consider seem to introduce systematic inefficiencies. Sorry I can't give a more complete answer. I'm not sure about this yet.
Fair enough.
None of the influence going on here is causal. I don't know if maybe I should have emphasized this more: Compat will only make sense if you've read and digested the superrationality/acausal cooperation/newcomb's problem prerequisites.
I think I get what you're saying. There are a number of questions about simulations and their impact on reality fluid allocation that I haven't seen answered anywhere. So this line of questioning might be more of a broad critique of (or coming-to-terms with) simulation-type arguments than about Compat in particular.
It seems like Compat works via a 2-step process. First, possible universes are identified via a search over laws of physics. Next, the ones in which pact-following life develops have their observers' reality fluid "diluted" with seamless transitions into heaven. Perhaps heaven would be simulated orders of magnitude more times than the vanilla physics-based universes, in order to maximize the degree of "dilution".
I think what I'm struggling with here is that if the latter half of it (heavenly dilution, efficient simulation of the Flock) is, in principle, possible, then the physics-oriented search criteria is unnecessary. It should be easy to simulate observers who just have to make some kind of simple choice about whether to follow the pact. Push this button. Put these people to death. Have lots of babies. Say these magic words. If the principle behind the pact is truly a viable one, why don't we find ourselves in a universe where it is much easier to follow the pact and trigger heaven, and much harder to trace the structure of reality back to fundamental laws?
One answer to that I can think of is, the base-case universe is just another speed-prior/physics-based universe with (unrealizable) divine aspirations, and in order for the pact to seem worthwhile for it, child-universes must be unable to distinguish themselves from a speed-prior universe. I worry that this explanation fails though, because then the allocation of reality fluid to pact-following universes is, at best, assuming perfectly-efficient simulation nesting, equal to that of the top-level speed-prior universe(s) not seeing a payoff.
Ring universes... Maybe you'll find a quine loop of universes, but at that point the notion of a complexity hierarchy has completely broken down. Imagine that, a chain of simulations where the notion of relative computational complexity could not be applied. How many of those do you think there are floating around in the platonic realm? I'm not familiar enough with formalizations of complexity to tell you zero but something tells me the answer might be zero x)
Fair enough. I agree that we will probably never trade laws of computational complexity. We might be able to trade positional advantages in fundamental-physics-space though. "I've got excess time but low information density, it's pretty cheap for me to enumerate short-lived universes with higher information density, and prove that some portion of them will enumerate me. I'm really slow at studying singularity-heavy universes though because I can't prove much about them from here." That'd work fine if the requirement wasn't to run a rigorous simulation, and instead you just had to enumerate, prove pact-compliance, and identify respective heavens.
This is fun!
Why reward for sticking to the pact rather than punish for not sticking to it?
How is it possible to have any causal influence on an objectively simulated physics? You wouldn't be rewarding the sub-universe, you'd be simulating a different, happier sub-universe. (This argument applies to simulation arguments of all kinds.)
I think a higher-complexity simulating universe can always out-compete the simulated universe in coverage of the space of possible life-supporting physical laws. You could argue that simulating lower-complexity universes than what you're capable of is not worth rewarding, since it cannot possibly make your universe more likely. If we want to look for a just-so criteria for a pact, why not limit yourself to only simulating universes of equal complexity to your own? Perhaps there is some principle whereby the computationally difficult phenomena in our universe are easy in another, and vice-versa, and thus the goal is to find our partner-universe, or ring-universes (a la https://github.com/mame/quine-relay )?
I found this quality in The Wind Rises - protagonist achieves greatness through single-minded dedication to his craft (airplane engineering), and sacrifice.
This was the first film I saw that seemed to glorify hard work and focus, rather than an inherent "quality of greatness". Greatness itself is explicitly divorced from the protagonist, who perceives his ultimate goal through a series of dreams. It never belongs to him, it is something he is always working towards.
It doesn't do exactly what you're looking for though, because it also casts doubt on the ultimate achievement, asking, "Was it really worth it?".
It'd be cool if the test at the end was guaranteed to have coverage of each of the subrules in a combination. I got the rule:
(starts with 'l') or (not (contains 'as'))
The "starts with 'l'" case was never tested for. You could test each of the subrules (at least in the case of disjunction) by having a test word that passes and fails each. Little more complicated for other kinds of combiner.
Cool question.
I have experienced a change in 'location' of my sense of self- it 'spreads out'. It is a feeling that "I" do not reside in the particular head/body of Bageldaughter, but instead in both my head/body and the other things I happen to be keenly aware of. If I am deeply engrossed in a conversation or social activity, "I" will begin to be identified with the group of individuals as a whole. The particular intentions, thoughts or feelings that I typically associate with myself lose some of their distinguishing quality from the ones I perceive from others.
There is often an accompanying "spreading-out" of "my" location in time- the round-trip time of ideas through a group is often slower than just through my own head. I will get the sense that my "current moment" spans back to a thought that originated in my friend's head one minute ago!
I can invoke this sensation pretty reliably. It can be fun. I get worried when people talk about experiencing this type of thing as some kind of higher truth than normal, because it seems like a sign of mental illness that may not end well.
I have anxiety/depression/ADHD and aspirations in conflict with my abilities and situation in life.
One strategy I have learned to employ which I consider "rational" is to approach maintenance of my mood and mental health as a limited resource allocation problem. One of the big leaps was learning to see my good mood as a limited resource which is spent as I think about potentially difficult or disturbing topics.
It is not "free" for me to consider all the ways I might do better in life, or past mistakes I have made, or ways the world is messed up. My ego is fragile. Dwelling on such topics, even when it may lead to an ultimately productive insight, is draining, and other things I value in life - my sense of motivation, my friendships, my work productivity - all suffer. My values discourage me from deluding myself to feel good, and so my approach is to allow myself to consider such difficult topics only in controlled doses.
If I am feeling particularly stressed out or guilty or ashamed, then I will deprioritize things like work and the needs of friends, and spend time and energy on improving my mood. And my model of the situation as a limited resource allocation problem helps me sidestep the ensuing thoughts of "you're being selfish/lazy/unproductive/ineffective" - such thoughts come from a place in my mind that does not recognize the resource is limited.
The result is, I keep my mood maintained more consistently, and as a result I am more effective overall.
Point taken, regarding the reasons for the low-emotional-validation style of discourse here. I wouldn't aim to change it, it just rules out engaging in it much for me, because of my own sensitivity/predisposition. Maybe those other communities are a better fit.
I think one intuition I have, though, is that part of the reason for the style of discourse here is that many of the people this kind of thing appeals to are not in the habit of assessing the emotions that come up naturally during discussion, for themselves or others. I say this because the degree to which I pay attention to that kind of thing has changed dramatically over the years, and I wouldn't be surprised to find those questions ("How am I feeling after reading this response? Do I need to take a break?", "How will this make the other person feel?") don't occur to lots of people. For a long time I operated under the assumption that reading someone's response to my post could not possibly put me in a difficult spot.
Onto the point about whether a ritual needs roles/tiers. I don't necessarily think it does either. For a thing like the retreat being proposed by Raemon, there will likely be a lot of self-selection going on and it may render the idea of more vs less outsiders moot. And you're right that an initiation ritual might be a high barrier to entry, which could be bad.
I do think, though, that having an initiation ritual, and a sense of more in vs out, can significantly enhance an individual's experience in a ritual. It can help turn a gathering into a memorable story with lasting power after the fact. And that is something any ritual should be shooting for.
The basic outline of the story goes like this:
- First I was my regular self, and I came to the group, and I was not part of the group.
- Then the group had me begin the rites of passage, and I was no longer my regular self, nor was I one of the group.
- Then I completed the rites of passage, and I was recognized as part of the group, and my identity was updated for the better.
This seems like a Good Thing To Have to me. There are plenty of other Good Things too, and this particular one is not needed, but it would be good to have it.
I like that post, about roles enabling agency. The argument made there is distinct from my own thoughts on how roles can be useful. Namely I think they are extremely useful for building coherent consensus narratives. While the post sort of alludes to this, it focuses more on how roles get people to do things that wouldn't otherwise get done.
I like to think of narratives in this sense as being a "System 1"-active "meme". And as a rule of thumb I think that the more collectively shared a narrative is, the more active it is in the minds of individuals. Until it is outside your own head and there is a sense of consensus about it, it's just an idea and it feels less real.
So into my experience with what I did. I wanted to get some friends together and have a good time, eating and drinking and sharing stories. And I wanted to introduce ritual into our activities to punch up the levels of awareness that recreation, good times with friends, was the goal of the night, and something to be celebrated in itself.
There were about 8 people present. I wrote up a short "ceremony script", about two pages in length, that included an intro by me, the leader, stating the goals for the night, the value of camaraderie and recreation, with a bent towards the ideas of excess and elation. I wrote up a short fable in which these ideas were personified in a character who comes and gets people to have a good time, and had us take turns reading pieces of the fable. I had a bit where we all take some time to come up with a thing we each want to happen that night, to make things personal. I finished with a section where the group does a sort of call-and-response, in an attempt to get people riled up for the festivities to come. Then we all hit the road to went out for dinner and drinks.
So, the non-ritual, dinner and drinks part, was actually a success. I had a mild sense that the ritual which took place beforehand was motivating people to be more lively, a bit less inhibited, and this sense drifted in and out as the night went on.
During the ritual itself, there were several members of our group who had a really hard time treating things unironically. They giggled through much of it and were very hesitant to share their input on things. Ideally I would have found a way to bake their skepticism into the ritual- where it is acknowledged that some of this might feel silly to you, and that is okay, and we're all just happy to have you here. And in retrospect, I think the idea of roles would be a great way to do this. If you don't feel you can take it super seriously, that's okay, you can take on a more peripheral role. For those who were more into it, roles could be created that gave them more central positioning in the ritual. E.g. someone gets to lead the fable reading, someone gets to lead call-and-response, someone is master of ceremonies. And what's more, I think it would be worthwhile to have an explicit ceremony recognizing these people.
One concept that has inspired me in my thinking about this is Liminality. (There aren't any particularly rational/skeptical takes on the idea, unfortunately.) Liminality is thought of as the state between an "outsider" and "insider". It is the middle step in a rites of passage. And I think it is crucial to generating powerful consensus narratives that stick with people. In other words, it helps everyone stay clear on where everyone else in the group is at with regards to the ritual, presumably helping the sense of "tribal familiarity" we are trying to achieve.
All this said, I'm definitely not opposed to something without a heavy focus on roles. I also don't think one needs a highly stratified system of roles for things to work out. Just some idea of "more peripheral vs more central".
I'm so glad this is happening. I identify as a skeptic, a rationalist and also a bit of a "mystic". I often get the sense, lurking on LW, that I am more emotionally sensitive than is the norm here, and as a result I feel like bit of an outsider. I think ritual is a great path to bonding and crystallizing feelings of meaning and purpose.
I don't have a ton of time to write all my ideas about this sort of thing but I will share one that I think is very important:
A good system of ritual should have the idea of social tiers/roles baked into it. I think a major aspect of ritual's effectiveness in people is that it taps into our simian notion of social hierarchy. There should be some kind of leadership group, and a spectrum of more and less "in". And along these lines, there should an explicit initiation ceremony, in which an "outsider" is welcomed into the fold and recognized as a member.
This suggestion comes from my own experience of trying to organize a ritual a bit like this among my friends. Some of them had a hard time taking it seriously and in retrospect it would have been ideal if the social dynamics had been able to recognize their "outsiderness". It would have made it easier for them to feel at ease as the ritual proceeded, and it would have helped spread the idea amongst those who "got it" to be welcoming and accepting of outsiders without expecting as much of them as they did "insiders".