One particular sentence in this story brought this short science-fiction story to mind: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm Prominently featuring a 'recursive image' that causes fatal damage to the human brain when viewed.
What’s expected of us (2005)
31–40 of 57 posts
Re: What’s expected of us (2005)
#32Specifically, visual information travel faster to my brain than the nerves inside my body. So I would click or flip the light switch only to see the light before the touch sensation.
Re: What’s expected of us (2005)
#33One second is plenty of time to react by stopping your hand. So what happens if I train myself to slowly move my hand towards the button and only stop when seeing the light?
The mechanism doesn't work by predicting whether you will press the button in 1 second. It works after you have actually pressed the button!
Re: What’s expected of us (2005)
#34It would be equally convincing, also without bringing anything to back it:
> Most people agree these arguments are irrefutable, but no one ever really accepts the conclusion. The experience of reassurance that offers determinism¹ is too powerful for an argument to overrule.
¹ Don’t blame me, the universe determined that things should be in a way which make me unresponsible of all that is wrong in this world. Also that’s the universe determined nature that anything positive should be credited to me.
My current opinion/impression/illusion (you name it), is that free will is an undecidable topic. As you can not "go out" of your actual experiment, you can only pick between models of the outside world. But for this very reason, you can’t "objectively" decide what causes or not your decision of believing in free will or determinism. Deterministic people will say that free-will believers are determined in such a way which forces them to do so, and free-will believers will say that the deterministic mindset people freely chose to believe in a deterministic model.
The concerned issue is not what the external world provides as data, but how we interpret it. That is, how we decide to opt for this or that interpretation. How we decide to opt for a model which includes free-decisions or only completely-bounded-decisions is not evaluable before a model is selected.
Re: What’s expected of us (2005)
#35One particular sentence in this story brought this short science-fiction story to mind: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm Prominently featuring a 'recursive image' that causes fatal damage to the human brain when viewed.
Given the existence of trypophobia on the one hand, and ASMR on the other, the plausibility of a basilisk cannot be dismissed.
Re: What’s expected of us (2005)
#36One second is plenty of time to react by stopping your hand. So what happens if I train myself to slowly move my hand towards the button and only stop when seeing the light?
Mu[1]. There is no such a device, so there is no way to train against its intended purpose.
Re: What’s expected of us (2005)
#37I suspect that in that case, the device wouldn't work reliably. There's no way for it to influence the person's decision to press the button or not simply by choosing to illuminate the light or not even with full information. That's simply not a powerful enough input into the person's decision making process, even if that decision making process is perfectly deterministic and we ignore things like quantum indeterminacy. However I don't know how to prove or test that logically.
Re: What’s expected of us (2005)
#38> Most people agree these arguments are irrefutable, but no one ever really accepts the conclusion. The experience of having free will is too powerful for an argument to overrule. It would be equally convincing, also without bringing anything to back it: > Most people agree these arguments are irrefutable, but no one ever really accepts the conclusion. The experience of reassurance that offers determinism¹ is too pow…
We are complicated pieces of biochemical machines. Atoms, molecules, cells interacting with each other. No magic, nothing special. Just nice, repeating patterns in infinity.
Re: What’s expected of us (2005)
#39Interesting. However, I disagree that if such a machine existed, people would lose motivation. They'd realize that the rational part of the brain is used just for rationalization and is not always actively engaged in real-time decision-making... but that's about it. They'd then beat the machine with little practice, regardless of how it is implemented.
The machine in the story doesn't read minds. >The heart of each Predictor is a circuit with a negative time delay — it sends a signal back in time. If a Predictor was hooked up to a geiger counter instead of a button, the light would flash exactly one second before the counter would click. It would flash even before the decay occurred. I don't see any way to beat that.
Re: What’s expected of us (2005)
#40Will someone external force me to life my life again? Should it make more sense to optimize my current life and try to stay alive as long as possible?
If i'm reincarnated, should i start to make the current world a better place to life for the risk of me being reincarnated somewhere else?
Should i spend my time and effort of trying to find a mechanism to keep my knowledge and try to reconnect with my previous me?
Of course all funny interesting thoughts, at the end of the day, i saw enough people around me living a normal life, dying and thats it.
But i'm curious when we create an AI what logic it will come up to kill or not kill itself.