"Every day, I ritually sacrifice part of my soul to appease Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory."
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Cryonics as Memoir
I wonder if cryonics would have a better reputation if it were sold as being more like leaving a memoir, than a bid for personal immortality. Historians are glad to have Samuel Pepys's diary for all that it tells us about life in 1660s London; would they not be more overjoyed to have Samuel Pepys's brain, if only we knew how to read brains as easily as we can read books?
Talking Too Much
"Sorry, have I been dominating our conversations too much?"
"Not at all; why do you ask?"
"I feel like my model of you is less detailed than my model of your model of me."
Lyrics to the Song About Truthseekers
Yesterday my sister won the Nobel prize
Her work will be a benefit to all of humankind
She went and proved some things which no one had surmised
Yesterday my sister won the Nobel physics prize
Yesterday I dreamed I won the Pulitzer prize
I uncovered the scandal, was a President's demise
I found the truth and brought it out to people's eyes
Yesterday I dreamed I won the Pulitzer journalism prize
And then I woke up
And rubbed my eyes
Yesterday my sister won the Nobel prize
Her work will be a benefit to all of humankind
She went and proved some things which no one had surmised
Yesterday my sister won the Nobel physics prize
The History of the Universe
"So, the universe starts out being made out of physics, then turns into game theory as life, then civilization, then artificial intelligence do increasingly a priori improbable things, then turns back into physics again as everyone runs out of negentropy. Poetically speaking."
"Right. Literally, it would just be physics throughout."
"But the poetry pays rent: the more agent-like a process is, the more predictively useful it is to take the intentional stance of talking about what it wants, rather than computing out the physics."
Personhood
"Did you hear that India has recognized dolphins as nonhuman persons with rights to life and liberty?"
"Hm, yes."
"I thought you'd approve."
"Oh, I do; any measure that reduces the suffering of sentient creatures is a very noble thing. I'm just uncertain about the correct way to generalize the concept of personhood in the wake of the knowledge that humanity isn't ontologically privileged. Some people seem to favor a broad interpretation, such that chimps and dolphins are persons. But sometimes I wonder if a narrow construal would be better, where not all humans are persons."
"You mean, excluding infants and brain-damage cases?"
"No, I mean excluding us. After you filter through all the memetic noise and tribal posturing, real-life humans don't exhibit nearly as much moral agency as we like to think. We have not yet dreamed of what our highest ideals of personhood would look like when implemented consistently."
Quotations I
"As far as anyone knows, there's never been an animal population that was stable in the absence of predation, famine, or disease."
"Don't get discouraged," Carla said, reaching over and putting a hand on his shoulder. "That's just the history of life for the past few eons. It's not as if it's a law of physics."
—The Eternal Flame by Greg Egan
Compensation
"Maybe there should be an effort to cryopreserve specimens of endangered species. 'Hey, sorry we killed your entire species, but when we get more computing power later, we'll be sure to give you lots of happy runtime as compensation.'"
Guns
"Do you know, I've decided I like guns. Of course it would be preferable to wave a magic wand and have all sentient life live in peace and harmony in paradise forever. But if Reality puts you in a situation where you have to kill, at least we have tools to do it quickly: a well-aimed bang and there isn't a creature there to suffer for very long. That's actually a huge improvement over the state of nature, where animals kill with nothing but teeth and claws."
Revisionist History I
"It is my considered opinion that Emily Dickinson was a time-traveling cryonicist."
"That is an opinion I have not previously heard advanced."
"C'mon! 'Because I could not stop for Death, / He kindly stopped for me; / The carriage held but just ourselves / And Immortality'? It's obvious!"
Remembering
"I remember feeling like a person, and feeling like people were ontologically distinct from animals, and I don't know how it's possible to pick up the pieces after that illusion has gone.
"I remember caring about parochial political concerns. I cared about gender equality, and educational freedom. And, and, I cared very badly about being respected for being intelligent. But now that I see that the latter was just a standard male primate status-seeking drive gone haywire—or not gone haywire, but functioning normally—and that my less-obviously-selfish concerns were driven by idiosyncratic features of my own psychology that few others have any reason to care about—none of it seems as compelling anymore.
"Then what is compelling? Well, I'm terrified of the pain of being physically hurt, so if I don't know what's real and I don't know what's right, I can always fall back on 'pain and suffering are bad.'
"But there has to be more to morality than that. I complained about how people in institutional contexts optimize for not-being-personally-blamed and no one is actually trying to do anything. But of course passive helplessness is the result when you don't have any goals except not-being-hurt.
"I want to be Innocent and Safe with Probability One, but Probability One is an absurdity that can't exist. In a sufficiently large universe, random fluctuations in maximum entropy heat death form a Boltzmann brain Judeo-Christian God who will punish you for masturbating. But somehow I'm not worried about that.
"But I shouldn't be thinking about any of this. I have my own life to tend to, and it looks great; the rest of space and time will have to take care of itself. I seem to have memories of being in the save/destroy/take over the world business, but now it seems more convenient to be agnostic about whether any of that actually happened."
Rankings
"Hey, you know what's fun? Ranking people according to some criterion, and then making an ordered list!"
"Like what?"
"'Thinkers from my native subculture, ranked on a continuum from negative to positive utilitarianism': it goes from Brian Tomasik to Robin Hanson."
Good Works
"And you, you louse! How do you justify your existence?"
"I tutor orphans."
"Oh, yeah? What subject?"
"Galois theory."
Lyrics to the Song About Matt Reeves
Dead kid gets a bench
Dead kid gets a memorial bench
So now we all know his name
Though we don't know who he is
Class of nineteen ninety two
Though he died in 'ninety one
Was he a better friend than you?
And what'd he do for fun?
What were his opinions on the issues of the day?
And what exactly took his breath away?
Now he's still and in the grave
And since the dead seem all the same
No one really cares to wonder what he was
Forgotten as we're staring at his name
Dead kid gets a bench
Dead kid gets a memorial bench
So now we all know his name
Though we don't care who he is
Dead kid gets a bench
And the inscription just screams "Rust this"
No inscription can do justice
Though we don't know who he is
And we don't care who he is
Retirement
"Rational agents should never be made worse off by more information—well, almost never. So if I can no longer contemplate the big picture without life seeming like a bad thing—the fewer needs you have, the fewer ways in which you can be hurt; if you don't exist, you can't be hurt—then maybe I could just—not contemplate it? If my will to live is something that can be destroyed by the truth, then maybe P. C. Hodgell was wrong? This needn't entail self-delusion: distraction is quite sufficient. There are plenty of things to do that won't remind me of the vastness of suffering in the multiverse.
"Daily life, exercise, practical programming skills, finding a job—pure math and compsci if I need something intellectual. But no philosophy, history, current events, futurism, social science, biology, or game theory. Not much fiction, because stories are about people's pain. I just don't want to know anymore."
Relevance
"Utilitarianism is slowly driving me mad."
"Really?"
"Okay, the part of me that talks wants to self-report that utilitarianism is slowly driving me mad, but what's actually happening is probably better described at a lower level of organization.
"I don't know how to simultaneously love life and actually believe in evolution. People mostly like being alive, and there are all sorts of wonderful things like friendship and love and pleasure and beauty—but those things only exist at the expense of enough pain and suffering and death to carve love into the genome from scratch. I don't—I'm not sure it was worth it.
"But my thoughts are better constrained by decision-theoretic relevance: since I can't make decisions about the past, asking whether it was worth it is a type error, a confusion. My life is going fine right now: I'm young and healthy and smart and rich. The local future looks great. And the deep future—doesn't need us. I am content."
Dimensionality
"So, an engineer and a mathematician are leaving a lecture. The engineer says, 'I just don't understand how you can visualize objects in seven-dimensional space.' The mathematician says, 'Oh, that's easy. You just visualize the n-dimensional case, and then set n equal to seven.'"
"I've never liked that joke. The punchline is intended to be absurd, but it's not: that's actually how you do it."
"Really?"
"Okay, fine. You visualize the three-dimensional case, and then set three equal to seven."
Skeptical Hypotheses
"I think Popper said something about the power of scientific reasoning: that our hypotheses can die instead of us."
"Neat trick, isn't it?"
"Except according to the third horn of the simulation argument, we are someone's hypothesis!"
Prodrome
"I'm okay—I've been through this—it's just the sort of prodrome that could develop into paranoid schizophrenia, but won't, because I've been trained not to believe my own thoughts!
"But the relationship between psychology and philosophy is funny. I've been having pretty drastic mood swings on the timescale of hours or minutes, and I've also been paying a lot of attention to modal realism, mathematical universe, "existence as an ensemble of disconnected observer-moments"-type ideas. I think the causality actually goes in that direction: from psychoticism to Tegmark IV. But the nature of reality can't actually depend on the minutia of my particular form of mental illness ...
"I don't want to do philosophy or social science or futurism anymore; I've lost the ability to do it sanely, if I ever had it. My brain just keeps generating cosmic horror stories to be terrified of, when really it's not my business and can't be my business. Most of what happens in the future is outside of my current conceptspace. Most of what happens in the present is outside of my current conceptspace. It all adds up to normality locally: that is, that which we consider normal is an artifact of how the world has unfolded up to now.
"Better to take up an engineering mindset. Focus on solving practical problems in the only world that I can actually touch, rather than continuing to execute self-injury behaviors dwelling on the horror that must exist in the vastness of space and time.
"I'll be fine—for the near future. Only I miss how consciousness used to feel. I used to feel like I knew things, but now all I can do is make predictions."
Strategy Overhaul
"I have drastically, drastically underestimated the social costs of nonconformity—costs I was paying, and quite possibly correctly so under reflection, but which I didn't notice I was paying."
"Say more."
"Well, as discussed previously, I had been modeling other people as defective versions of my model of myself, without realizing that this was a mistake on at least two counts: one, other people are not like my model of me, and two, I'm not as much like my model of me as I had wanted to believe, both of which observations are manifestations of that horrifying fact which I'm only now starting to appreciate: that people are animals, that Darwinism isn't just a proposition to endorse, but it actually happened that way in real life."
"And how does that relate to the costs of nonconformity?"
"I had expected people, including myself, to be fairly agent-like, when actually we're far more animal-like than I would have ever guessed: we're mostly just kludges of habits and heuristics; the skill of, of ... recomputing how to behave in the service of some goal is rare, and it's justifiably rare, because it usually doesn't work; most new ideas are wrong. We're told that school is about learning, and when I noticed that the things I do outside of school are genuinely more intellectually meritorious than my official homework, I felt outraged and betrayed: why didn't anyone just tell me that knowledge is good, and skill is good, and anything you do in the service of the acquisition of knowledge and skill is good?! But it was a rhetorical question; I didn't actually try to answer it. But it's not hard to figure out: the stories we tell about ourselves aren't very good models of our behavior, that's all. Insofar as we attribute purpose to the evolved social institution of schooling, it's probably some weighted blend of learning, babysitting, signaling intelligence and conscientiousness, subordination training, and path-dependent noise. Insofar as we construe people as agents who want to learn stuff, paying for college is idiotic: that's what books are for. But as coordination technology for a civilization of crazy monkeys?—if everyone expects a Bachelor's degree, who am I to tell them that it's just a signaling game, just a bubble?"
"So, you're planning to finish your degree despite your recent, uh, setback?"
"Well ... maybe. I certainly need to learn to fit in better with the other crazy monkeys by being more empathetic and agreeable—I've had a lot of unacknowledged outgroup hostility going on that I should stop. But it should be clear now that the degree is strictly of instrumental value. That's how most people think of it, isn't it?—just a job ticket. It shouldn't be heartbreaking to do something instrumentally, just for what it buys you. And yet ..."