Recent content by Ayatollah So

How comforting, in the age of Trump, we can serve as an object lesson to the rest of the world. On the subject of CPAP/BiPAP machines: https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-overused-for-covid-19/ argues that BiPAP machines can be used to treat many patients...

Whoa, Cutlass, Warpus, Valka, Metatron and Birdjag are still here, after all this time! And that's just on this page. Me, I'm just dropping by. I think.

Ah, sorry about that, then. Hard to tell the players, without a scorecard. (Apropos of nothing, here's where that phrase comes from.)

I'm going with Akka and Kyriakos and Perfection, here: "Because I said so" isn't a moral argument. No matter how big and powerful the One saying it is. Now I know a lot of Christians will say this is a misrepresentation. It's not about how powerful God is, it's about how good he is...

Decline in OT activity? Where??

That's true and, in the normal world, important. But in the sci-fi world, the death of "you" is not important - it's a mere technicality. In the sci-fi world, people will use broader concepts than your current concept of personal identity. And they'll get more of what they want as a result...

Me too, but look how different that is from the usual and straightforward path to AI and robotics. When we design AI, we don't try to copy every feature of the human brain - only those which pay off in intelligent behavior. I suspect that the easier technological path to designing a human-like...

I think that most people underestimate how much knowledge/understanding is useful. So I always try to keep some activity devoted to gaining more. But that doesn't mean you can't "get r done" at the same time with lots of practical activities. Practical activities lead to lots of knowledge too...

GiveWell is awesome. When I give money, it's usually in order to help people. That means I want to make the largest positive difference to the most lives that I can. I don't care if the charity saves lives from cancer, or saves lives from malaria. I do care if they have a 1% chance to save...

Not necessarily. Doing an experiment often leads to far more confirmation (or disconfirmation) if it turns out one way, versus another. Bayes's Theorem. An event which, on the null hypothesis, is wildly improbable, and which on the hypothesis of interest, has (say) 1/5 chance, will strongly...

I don't understand this "metaphysical noise" term. But "one-sided" sounds pretty clear ... are you trying to say that awareness is separate from physical events in the brain (dualism), and is caused by them but does not cause anything else (epiphenomenalism)? In that case, where's the...

OK: What makes you you, is as much your preferences as it is your decisions: fair enough! But why is this a problem? Are you going to tell me that I don't really make decisions because the decisions are based on preferences?? To quote an infamous philosopher, "They say that because you have...

Free will is a kind of target that we can attain to varying degrees. That's not a bug in my attempt to understand free will, it's a feature! Yes, sometimes our decision making gets short-circuited before we finish reflecting on the situation. That is a problem for human life, and can reduce...

"Anticipation" implies consciousness, so the expert-system-AI is out. But I do think some intelligent animals - birds and mammals - have rudimentary free will. Not enough to support moral responsibility, really - although we still talk about reward and punishment for dogs - but they have...

I don't think it's necessary in the thread to thoroughly define free will. That term and its close cognates have many ordinary, everyday uses in decision-making, legal proceedings, and moral praise and blame. The uses all hang together pretty well. And for none of them does determinism make a...