trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
"Personal Identity and Uploading", by Mark Walker
by gwern — 2012-01-07T19:55:00.726Z

“Personal Identity and Uploading”, Mark Walker is the next JET paper. Abstract:

Objections to uploading may be parsed into substrate issues, dealing with the computer platform of upload and personal identity. This paper argues that the personal identity issues of uploading are no more or less challenging than those of bodily transfer often discussed in the philosophical literature. It is argued that what is important in personal identity involves both token and type identity. While uploading does not preserve token identity, it does save type identity; and even qua token, one may have good reason to think that the preservation of the type is worth the cost.

1 Uploading: prospects and perils

If, like me, you think that uploading is possible (at least in principle), and so you hold that the first interpretation of these events is correct, then you must hold true the following three theses:

1. Computers are capable of supporting the important properties constitutive of personal identity, e.g., thought and consciousness.

It is clear that uploading will not preserve all properties we associate with Homo sapiens, e.g., basic facts about the human digestive system are not likely to be preserved in uploading to a robotic body. But these facts are not typically thought to be important for personal identity. Candidates for important properties include thought, consciousness, emotions, creativity, aesthetic experience, sensory experience, empathy and so on. For the most part, the question of which properties are important is not as serious as it may first seem, since uploading promises to preserve the essential aspects of the brain and nervous system, which overlap with the usual lists of important properties for identity.

…suffice it to say that if Searle is correct, then #1 may be false. For Searle thinks that a computer can never consciously think merely in virtue of instantiating a computer program, and the uploading process seems to be one of merely instantiating a computer program (Agar 2010, 2011).

2. It is possible to capture the information necessary to emulate the important properties of individual humans.

…If we slice off layers of your neurons, and record the information of each layer, the lower layers will change (due to trauma or death).1 If we flash freeze your brain, we may destroy some essential information. Philosophic

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An argument that animals don't really suffer
by Solvent — 2012-01-07T09:07:53.775Z

I ended up reading this article about animal suffering by this Christian apologist called William Craig. Forgive the source, please.

In his book Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Michael Murray explains on the basis of neurological studies that there is an ascending three-fold hierarchy of pain awareness in nature:i

Level 3: Awareness that one is oneself in pain
Level 2: Mental states of pain
Level 1: Aversive reaction to noxious stimuli

Organisms which are not sentient, that is, have no mental life, display at most Level 1 reactions. Insects, worms, and other invertebrates react to noxious stimuli but lack the neurological capacity to feel pain. Their avoidance behavior obviously has a selective advantage in the struggle for survival and so is built into them by natural selection. The experience of pain is thus not necessary for an organism to exhibit aversive behavior to contact that may be injurious. Thus when your friend asks, “If you beat an animal, wouldn't it try to avoid the source of pain so that way 'it' wouldn't suffer? Isn't that a form of 'self-awareness?'," you can see that such aversive behavior doesn’t even imply second order pain awareness, much less third order awareness. Avoidance behavior doesn’t require pain awareness, and the neurological capacities of primitive organisms aren’t sufficient to support Level 2 mental states.

Level 2 awareness arrives on the scene with the vertebrates. Their nervous systems are sufficiently developed to have associated with certain brain states mental states of pain. So when we see an animal like a dog, cat, or horse thrashing about or screaming when injured, it is irresistible to ascribe to them second order mental states of pain. It is this experience of animal pain that forms the basis of the objection to God’s goodness from animal suffering. But notice that an experience of Level 2 pain awareness does not imply a Level 3 awareness. Indeed, the biological evidence indicates that very few animals have an awareness that they are themselves in pain.

Level 3 is a higher-order awareness that one is oneself experiencing a Level 2 state. Your friend asks, “How could an animal not be aware of their suffering if they're yelping/screaming out of pain?" Brain studies supply the remarkable answer. Neurological research indicates that there are two independent neural

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[SEQ RERUN] Words as Hidden Inferences
by MinibearRex — 2012-01-07T05:30:41.437Z

Today's post, Words as Hidden Inferences was originally published on 03 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The mere presence of words can influence thinking, sometimes misleading it.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Parable of Hemlock, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
The Third Annual Young Cryonicists Gathering (2012)
by hankx7787 — 2012-01-07T03:30:33.879Z

I received notification of this today from Alcor, my cryonics provider. I also received notification of this event last year but was unable to attend at that time. Does anyone plan on attending this year? Has anyone attended this type of event in the past, and if so was it worth going / what was your experience?

The Third Annual Young Cryonicists Gathering
Teens & Twenties 2012: Getting to Know You - You Getting to Know Each Other
Friday-Sunday; April 27-29, 2012 Deerfield Beach FL Host: Bill Faloo

I'm sorry I don't have more information at this time. Here is a link to a discussion post regarding the one last year: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5ob/young_cryonicists_conference_2011/
Active AGI and/or FAI researchers
by hankx7787 — 2012-01-07T03:08:46.687Z

I am curious in general about who here, if anyone, is actively researching the AGI and/or FAI problems directly in a full-time capacity (or soon will be). So if that's you, please say hello! Or if you know another website/mailing-list/etc this question would be more appropriate to ask, please let me know.

If you are interested in saying more about who you are and what you're doing, I've included some additional questions below. Feel free to provide as much or as little information as you'd like - but the more the better!

Are you working for a particular organization or a known AGI project? If so, which? Link? If not, are you working on these issues independently, or can you otherwise explain your situation?

What is your overall theory/philosophy on FAI/AGI? How are you similar to and how are you different from Eliezer Yudkowsky in this respect?

What has been your overall approach to study for this line of research / what specific curriculum and what specific books/papers/etc would you recommend? I would be interested in as much detail as you can provide here.

Do you have any published material (even informal/in-progress information, documentation, discussion, blogs, etc)? Links?

What are you working on now and what's coming next in your work? Are you solving some interesting problem, creating some interesting new idea, bringing together a grand theory, actually building a working FAI/AGI or similar, or approaching some big milestone along any of these paths or others? What do your plans and timeline for the future look like?
What Curiosity Looks Like
by lukeprog — 2012-01-06T21:28:00.179Z

See also: Twelve Virtues of Rationality, The Meditation on Curiosity, Use Curiosity

What would it look like if someone was truly curious — if they actually wanted true beliefs? Not someone who wanted to feel like they sought the truth, or to feel their beliefs were justified. Not someone who wanted to signal a desire for true beliefs. No: someone who really wanted true beliefs. What would that look like?

A truly curious person would seek to understand the world as broadly and deeply as possible. They would study the humanities but especially math and the sciences. They would study logic, probability theory, argument, scientific method, and other core tools of truth-seeking. They would inquire into epistemology, the study of knowing. They would study artificial intelligence to learn the algorithms, the math, the laws of how an ideal agent would acquire true beliefs. They would study modern psychology and neuroscience to learn how their brain acquires beliefs, and how those processes depart from ideal truth-seeking processes. And they would study how to minimize their thinking errors.

They would practice truth-seeking skills as a musician practices playing her instrument. They would practice "debiasing" techniques for reducing common thinking errors. They would seek out contexts known to make truth-seeking more successful. They would ask others to help them on their journey. They would ask to be held accountable.

They would cultivate that burning itch to know. They would admit their ignorance but seek to destroy it.

They would be precise, not vague. They would be clear, not obscurantist.

They would not flinch away from experiences that might destroy their beliefs. They would train their emotions to fit the facts.

They would update their beliefs quickly. They would resist the human impulse to rationalize.

But even all this could merely be a signaling game to increase their status in a group that rewards the appearance of curiosity. Thus, the final test for genuine curiosity is behavioral change. You would find a genuinely curious person studying and learning. You would find them practicing the skills of truth-seeking. You wouldn't merely find them saying, "Okay, I'm updating my belief about that" — you would also find them making decisions consistent with their new belief and inconsistent with...
Less wrong has a fitocracy group (invites)
by RomeoStevens — 2012-01-06T18:40:06.238Z

Fitocracy is a fitness gamification social site for logging and tracking workouts. It has an RPG like system with quests and leveling up. It makes it very easy to make public commitments to a workout plan and provide each other with motivation and advice.

I shouldn't really have to go over why you need to be working out if you plan on living until the singularity :)

http://ftcy.co/vMOYfA
More intuitive explanations!
by XiXiDu — 2012-01-06T18:10:39.264Z

The post on two easy to grasp explanations on Gödel's theorem and the Banach-Tarski paradox made me think of other explanations that I found easy or insightful and that I could share them as well.

1) Here is a nice proof of the Pythagorean theorem:

2) An easy and concise explanation of expected utility calculations by Luke Muehlhauser:

Decision theory is about choosing among possible actions based on how much you desire the possible outcomes of those actions.

How does this work? We can describe what you want with something called a utility function, which assigns a number that expresses how much you desire each possible outcome (or “description of an entire possible future”). Perhaps a single scoop of ice cream has 40 “utils” for you, the death of your daughter has -⁠274,000 utils for you, and so on. This numerical representation of everything you care about is your utility function.

We can combine your probabilistic beliefs and your utility function to calculate the expected utility for any action under consideration. The expected utility of an action is the average utility of the action’s possible outcomes, weighted by the probability that each outcome occurs.

Suppose you’re walking along a freeway with your young daughter. You see an ice cream stand across the freeway, but you recently injured your leg and wouldn’t be able to move quickly across the freeway. Given what you know, if you send your daughter across the freeway to get you some ice cream, there’s a 60% chance you’ll get some ice cream, a 5% your child will be killed by speeding cars, and other probabilities for other outcomes.

To calculate the expected utility of sending your daughter across the freeway for ice cream, we multiply the utility of the first outcome by its probability: 0.6 × 40 = 24. Then, we add to this the product of the next outcome’s utility and its probability: 24 + (0.05 × -⁠274,000) = -⁠13,676. And suppose the sum of the products of the utilities and probabilities for other possible outcomes was 0. The expected utility of sending your daughter across the freeway for ice cream is thus very low (as we would expect from common sense). You should probably take one of the other actions available to you, for example the action of not sending your daughter across the freeway for ice cre

...
Explained: Gödel's theorem and the Banach-Tarski Paradox
by XiXiDu — 2012-01-06T17:23:02.978Z

I want to share the following explanations that I came across recently and which I enjoyed very much. I can't tell and don't suspect that they come close to an understanding of the original concepts but that they are so easy to grasp that it is worth the time if you don't already studied the extended formal versions of those concepts. In other words, by reading the following explanations your grasp of the matter will be less wrong than before but not necessarily correct.

World's shortest explanation of Gödel's theorem

by Raymond Smullyan, '5000 BC and Other Philosophical Fantasies' via Mark Dominus (ask me for the PDF of the book)

We have some sort of machine that prints out statements in some sort of language. It needn't be a statement-printing machine exactly; it could be some sort of technique for taking statements and deciding if they are true. But let's think of it as a machine that prints out statements.

In particular, some of the statements that the machine might (or might not) print look like these:

P*x
(which means that
the machine will print x)

NP*x
(which means that
the machine will never print x)

PR*x
(which means that
the machine will print xx)

NPR*x
(which means that
the machine will never print xx)

For example, NPR*FOO means that the machine will never print FOOFOO. NP*FOOFOO means the same thing. So far, so good.

Now, let's consider the statement NPR*NPR*. This statement asserts that the machine will never print NPR*NPR*.

Either the machine prints NPR*NPR*, or it never prints NPR*NPR*.

If the machine prints NPR*NPR*, it has printed a false statement. But if the machine never prints NPR*NPR*, then NPR*NPR* is a true statement that the machine never prints.

So either the machine sometimes prints false statements, or there are true statements that it never prints.

So any machine that prints only true statements must fail to print some true statements.

Or conversely, any machine that prints every possible true statement must print some false statements too.

Mark Dominus further writes,

The proof of Gödel's theorem shows that there are statements of pure arithmetic that essentially express NPR*NPR*; the trick is to find some way to express NPR*NPR* as a statement about arithmetic, and most of the technical details (and cleverness!) of Gödel's theorem are concerned with this trick. But once the trick is done, the argument can

...
Weekly LW Meetups: Fort Collins and Melbourne
by FrankAdamek — 2012-01-06T14:54:51.900Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup: 04 January 2012 07:00PM
First Philadelphia Meetup of 2012: 08 January 2012 02:00PM
[TENTATIVE] Portland Meetup?: 14 January 2012 12:00PM
San Diego experimental meetup: 15 January 2012 01:00PM
Salt Lake City, Late January 2012
Columbus or Cincinnati Meetup: 22 January 2012 05:00PM
First Brussels meetup: 11 February 2012 11:00AM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Melbourne practical rationality meetup: 06 January 2012 07:00AM

Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Irvine, London, Madison, WI, Marin, CA (uses the Bay Area List), Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ottawa, Oxford, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver.
[SEQ RERUN] The Parable of Hemlock
by MinibearRex — 2012-01-06T05:55:35.061Z

Today's post, The Parable of Hemlock was originally published on 03 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Socrates is a human, and humans, by definition, are mortal. So if you defined humans to not be mortal, would Socrates live forever?

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Parable of the Dagger, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Roger Williams (Author of Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect) on Singularity
by Dr_Manhattan — 2012-01-06T05:09:36.511Z

This is Roger's article on Singularity issues, connecting his MOPI novel to how things might/should happen.

http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopising.html

(Roger is clearly aware of SIAI ideas and has referenced Eliezer in some of his posts)
Singularity Institute Executive Director Q&A #2
by lukeprog — 2012-01-06T03:40:12.909Z

Previously: Interview as a researcher, Q&A #1

This is my second Q&A as Executive Director of the Singularity Institute. I'll skip the video this time.

Singularity Institute Activities

Bugmaster asks:

...what does the SIAI actually do? You don't submit your work to rigorous scrutiny by your peers in the field... you either aren't doing any AGI research, or are keeping it so secret that no one knows about it... and you aren't developing any practical applications of AI, either... So, what is it that you are actually working on, other than growing the SIAI itself ?

It's a good question, and my own biggest concern right now. Donors would like to know: Where is the visible return on investment? How can I see that I'm buying existential risk reduction when I donate to the Singularity Institute?

SI has a problem, here, because it has done so much invisible work lately. Our researchers have done a ton of work that hasn't been written up and published yet; Eliezer has been writing his rationality books that aren't yet published; Anna and Eliezer have been developing a new rationality curriculum for the future "Rationality Org" that will be spun off from the Singularity Institute; Carl has been doing a lot of mostly invisible work in the optimal philanthropy community; and so on. I believe this is all valuable x-risk-reducing work, but of course not all of our supporters are willing to just take our word for it that we're doing valuable work. Our supporters want to see tangible results, and all they see is the Singularity Summit, a few papers a year, some web pages and Less Wrong posts, and a couple rationality training camps. That's good, but not good enough!

I agree with this concern, which is why I'm focused on doing things that happen to be both x-risk-reducing and visible.

First, we've been working on visible "meta" work that makes the Singularity Institute more transparent and effective in general: a strategic plan, a donor database ("visible" to donors in the form of thank-yous), a new website (forthcoming), and an annual report (forthcoming).

Second, we're pushing to publish more research results this year. We have three chapters forthcoming in The Singularity Hypothesis, one chapter forthcoming in The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, one forthcoming article on the difficulty of AI, and several other articles and working papers w...
[POLL] Wisdom of the Crowd experiment
by tgb — 2012-01-05T22:13:31.511Z

Many of you will be familiar with the "Wisdom of the Crowd" - a phenomenon where the average result of a large poll of people's estimates tends to be very accurate, even when most people make poor estimates. I've written a short poll to test a small variant of this setup which I would like to test.

Please fill out this short poll.

Specifically, I want to see how the weighted average of the results performs when the question is posed as "is the value in question closer to A or B?" This change is inspired by your usual two-party election where people choose between two extreme values, when many voters have opinions in the middle of the two.

Thank you for helping!

I'm a little worried about anchoring in this survey. Suggestions for how to improve it would be appreciated.