From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Mar 31 2003 - 22:23:18 MST
Damien Sullivan wrote:
>
> Yes. I tend to dismiss paranormal claims the same way. Some people seem to
> have an array of belief toggles they can switch independently: soul,
> afterlife, psi, science stuff, etc. I've got a consilient skeletal view of
> the universe, and while it could take a god on the outside, there ain't no
> room for souls and magick and psi, they just won't *fit* without a lot of
> damage. So fuzzy little things on the edge of statistical significance get
> ignored. Now if Talia Winters comes up and reads 10-digit numbers out of my
> head I'll start paying attention...
What happened to good-old-fashioned "This universe is a computer
simulation"? I have a consilient view of everything, but it's very hard
to conceive of a humanly simple set of perceptions that would break the
consilience; the Kolmogorov complexity of anything I come up with is never
going to be any higher than "Eliezer tries to think of a set of sensory
perceptions that would boggle Eliezer", which isn't very complex at all.
I don't expect to see magick in operation. I assign it a tiny prior
probability; not quite the not-worth-tracking infinitesimal, because
specific people have made the claim and I've put specific cognitive effort
into evaluating and rejecting it; but still the prior probability is about
as tiny as a specifically claimed proposition can get. Nonetheless I can
conceive of the possibility of seeing magick in operation. I project that
my reaction to observing magick would be to start tracking the several
Kolmogorov simplest explanations:
(a) a non-humanly-Friendly SI with evolved inhabitants and Lee Corbin
ethics: top-level citizens can run arbitrary simulations containing
helpless sentients; someone's playing the god of this world.
(b) personal hallucinations: I am currently under hypnosis or experiencing
organic dysfunction; various externally controlled possibilities
(c) ordinary VR game simulation in a pre-Singularity world, with elided
memories
Note that in all cases the *pattern* of magick ultimately comes from the
memes of an evolved pre-Singularity civilization - the idea of magick is a
specific complex pattern that I would not expect to have a simpler
explanation than its origins as a fiction, even if that fiction were
experientially realized.
To see magick *as magick*, it would have to have a consilient explanation
that fit in with everything else, an explanation that did *not* invoke an
enclosing simulation translating a human fiction into reality. Presumably
if magick did exist, as magick, then there would exist a valid
deconstruction of my information-theoretical objections to it, and after
hearing the explanation I'd slap myself on the forehead and go: "Duh!
What a simple pattern! It's clear that you can't have a universe like
this one without ritual spellcasting that uses spoken Latin phrases and
virgin's tears; it'd be like having a periodic table that was missing the
element of mercury but was otherwise exactly the same. I'm especially
embarassed about mistaking the human rationalizations and distortions of
this phenomenon for anthropomorphic inventions."
Now *that* is hard to imagine.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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