Archive for August, 2021

The nature of reality and how it informs decisions

Tuesday, August 17th, 2021

So, one of the things I occasionally feel resentment about is my desire to spend large numbers of hours exploring music combined with the recognition that the world almost certainly does not *need* these things (and the odds of me being better than anyone else at creating music are vanishingly small). One thing I have thought about is how my actions would be different if I *knew* the nature of the universe.

In particular, if I knew that I was in a single-person video game style simulation, I wouldn’t be concerned about the needs of the world and just what I could get away with.. I work more than I need to to support myself, partially to help out other people and partially to hone my skills in the hopes that I can participate in either the singularity or the mass automation in such a way as to help increase the general freedom of humanity.

But, I have to go with the assumption the reality that is presented to me is “real” and that the suffering of people is likewise real. On the other paw I am not willing to be completely selfless and give all my energy into things that advantage other people. So I try to balance out time to do the things I want to do (like exploring music and artificial neural networks) with things that the world will pay me to do because presumably it needs them done (system administration and a lot of not very exciting coding, mostly)

Some of the possibilities as to “what’s going on” that have occured to me

*) This whole thing could be a accidental side effect of some other system – our type of life inserts itself into entropy flow – we might even be moving from system to system, tapping different entropy flows, without us being aware of it.

*) This could be the work of a creator or creators. That might *also* be us, or it might be a seperate, distinct entity.

*) This might be a massive multiplayer simulation. In that case, it might be that the plot is driven by our decisions or it might be that the plot is on rails.

Unlike other people I have met I tend to think the people I talk to are not me, so I tend to think whatever we’re in has some sort of networking or multiple participants. I do wish sometimes that I knew what the most efficient choices to make were in order to optimize for reducing the suffering of others, and then could do cost-benefit analysis of the various actions I am taking in order to find some sort of optimized path forward that contains adequate time of me doing the things I want to do for my own reasons vs helping others.

The dangers of certainty

Thursday, August 12th, 2021

So, in reading “Thinking fast and slow”, I’ve come to think of the human brain as having two modes. One of these modes involves some voodoo that we might call ‘free will’ – it doesn’t execute quickly, but it is easily changeable. The other involves hardcoded, compiled neural interconnects – it’s the reflexes that make you hit the brakes when the car in front of you stops – and, I am coming to suspect, the hard-wiring that makes you insist “Of course Jesus hates gays and would support hurting them in any way possible!” and other equally absurd interpretations of the bible – not to mention “COVID is a hoax and I am free to not wear a mask” even as you read of others who took that stance dying.

I talked in a previous article the idea that because multiple signals pass through the same set of subnets our minds may protect even wrong ideas because they are necessary confluences of signal. I’ve also come to think more and more about the actual physical restrictions of changing the physical wiring – neurotransmitters, proteins, all sorts of actual, limited resources come into play when unlearning something. Therefore, there is a biological reason we might defend wrong ideas.

Now, there’s a couple of directions I’d like to go with this. At some future date I will discuss the tendency of certain Christians to think hate is love – I think I’ve talked about that before but the above does point out why there’s probably not a lot of point in trying to bring to their attention that they are just plain wrong – they’re not going to be capable of learning, their firm belief has translated into neural wiring and they *can’t* unlearn – even if Jesus himself came and told them they were wrong, they wouldn’t be able to accept and integrate that.

This same problem exists in political ideology that is carefully grounded in fiction. We’ve talked about how conservative media (especially Fox) has been lying for a long time – but the adherents to it think that the lies are facts, and have formed hard structures encoding them. Again, they can see over and over the data proving that trickle down economics do not work, and continue to push for it. They can see over and over that automation is taking their jobs, and continue to blame the immigrants.

Part of what I’m trying to wrap my head around is there’s no point in being angry with them. Both groups of people mentioned above are contributing to making the world a worse place, but there’s no way they can stop. They can’t even be aware of the fact that they’ve got deep structures that are counter-factual stored.

Now, there’s a lot of things that I talk about as being ‘unknowable’ – things like our purpose here, what happens after we die, what deities there might be (clearly if there is someone in charge they don’t want us to know that as the amount of work they’ve gone to to maintain plausible deniability is absurd). And I try to avoid having certain beliefs about those unknowables, because I’d rather not know than have absolute faith in something that’s wrong, especially if that absolute faith led me to encourage abuse of others because I thought, in my limited view of the universe, that their choices were “sin”.

I have noticed that over and over people create God in their image – limited and full of hate. One of the things that I’ve mentioned to various Christians trying to convince me that I’m going to hell is that I tend to think I’d be better at imagining God than they would because of my life experience – I’ve built worlds (in games), I’ve coded somewhere near a million lines in a wide variety of languages, I’ve used evolutionary algorithms, I’ve read thousands of books and studied many subjects. Now, I’m not claiming I’m God – far from it – but I think I’d be better able to wrap my head around what a deity might think like than most of the people who claim to know the mind of God because of a bunch of words written by people wandering around in a desert 2000 years ago.

Now, if God would like to change my mind about this, I’m certain *e knows how to reach me. I’m open to other ideas – but you are not going to convince me that the Bible is the word of God (except in the very general sense that if God is infinity, all books are the words of God). You will convince me that the words of Jesus contain wisdom – and the primary message is “Be excellent to each other”. Them who would like to hate on those who sleep with different folk are failing to be excellent to each other, therefore I am clear on the fact they have failed to grok the message of Jesus. Often it’s because they are creating God in their own, hate filled, confused, lost image. But you’ll never convince them of that. Why? See above.