List of my beliefs
Inspired by Pablo Stafforini's page www.stafforini.com/blog/my-beliefs-updated/. See the whys in Unpacking beliefs.
NOTE: I don't state all my beliefs here. Many can be found on more relevant pages for each topic.
Common beliefs
Many people share these beliefs with me, and it makes little difference to state them, but I thought it fun to identify them.
- ( 1000:1 for) Occam's razor will take very good care of my mind-reality mapping.
- ( 1000:1 for) All phenomena can be traced back to a small set of simple ontological bases.
- For example: all of math arises from a handful of axioms, all of this universe arises from fundamental physics.
- Elaboration: These fundamental physics involve only simple processes (where “simple” is meant in the technical sense of having a short Minimum Message Length; they may not be intuitive to a human, nor could we visualize the net result of a massive number of interacting variables, but simple the variables are and the rules they play by). Expressed differently, once we solve physics, we could encode a program that "simulates" another universe (I use quotation marks because simulation has a connotation of fakeness that's misleading)… and I expect it can be done with few lines of code, had we an astronomically beefy computer (perhaps needs a beefier computer than possible to build within this universe; a longer program could optimize away much of the needed computation, but the point is that in principle a stupidly short program could create everything). Everything we see, even what may look inherently complex, arises by itself from that low program complexity, as a natural consequence of how exactly the program is structured, the way rivers can cut artful paths through the landscape even though they are just composed of water atoms individually obeying gravity and bumping into other water atoms also obeying gravity and bumping into other water atoms…
- For example: all of math arises from a handful of axioms, all of this universe arises from fundamental physics.
- (<2022-Feb-14> 100:1 for) "Souls" (self-aware consciousnesses like me) are Turing-computable processes.
- In other words, nothing in the laws of physics necessarily stops AI from having feelings. On the other hand, nothing in them enables stones to have feelings since no neurons (or any other computing substrate, like transistors or memory cells or anything that act like these things) have been discovered in naturally occurring stone.
- My stone comment does not take into account Brian Tomasik's steelman of panpsychism, Is There Suffering in Fundamental Physics? (caution: very strange, but beware the absurdity heuristic: the knee-jerk reaction where because it sounds absurd it must be false. Also I recommend Tomasik's other writings first, they have more relevance to daily life). That hypothesis allows for stone consciousness in some sense, but in a different form than a layman would expect – for instance, stones in Tomasik's proposed reality would still have no awareness of being thrown around or broken into halves.
- In other words, nothing in the laws of physics necessarily stops AI from having feelings. On the other hand, nothing in them enables stones to have feelings since no neurons (or any other computing substrate, like transistors or memory cells or anything that act like these things) have been discovered in naturally occurring stone.
- ( 20:1 for) We live in at least one kind of infinite multiverse (Tegmark levels 1, 2, 3, or 4, or some or all of those).
- (INVALID: Not even a belief) If something exists, it's explainable. But that's a tautology due to how I define "explainable", and I wager that any discussion would boil down to that. See my short story Magic Science.
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(2 years ago)