Righting reviews and mentions

• What if AGI is not coming?
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Mar 2024

  The first thing to come to mind is the traveling salesman problem, and the host of other unsolved math problems which we suspect may be unsolvable-by-us.

  There's also problems of self reference. A Turing machine may be able to solve the halting problem for pushdown automata, but it can't solve the halting problem for Turing machines. Whether or not we're as capable as Turing machines, there's a halting problem for us and we can't solve it.

  I'm restricted to mathy spaces here because how else would you construct a well defined problem that you cannot solve. But I see no reason why there wouldn't be other perspectives that we're incapable of accessing, it's just that in these cases the ability to construct the question is just as out of reach as the ability to answer it.

  You may have heard talk about known unknowns and unknown unknowns, but there are also known unknowables and unknowable unknowables ( I go into this in greater detail here: https://github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/Righting/blob/master... )

• Psychedelics Alter Metaphysical Beliefs
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Dec 2021

  Sure.

  I once wrote a paper for epistemology class (https://github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/Righting/blob/master...). In it I argue that there is a category of propositions that are knowably unknowable. These are things that we know that we will never be able to know. One example of such a proposition is:

  > We're living in a simulation that's too complete for us to escape

  You can believe it, or you can disbelieve it, and neither stance is more rational than the other. Beliefs in such a space can't be motivated by evidence, so they have to be motivated by something else--like whether they cause you to live the kind of life that you want to be living, or maybe you just think it's fun. My beliefs re: panpsychism are like this. I don't anticipate ever being able to prove them, nor do I expect to run into evidence that disproves them. They go something like this:

  I like to imagine that there is more than one temporal dimension. When we humans have cause to believe that a certain part of the universe has a mind, it's because that part of the universe has an arrow of time that is parallel to our own. Its future is also our future. This lets us communicate with it (maybe).

  By contrast, when we encounter a rock or a lightning bolt or something that you'd generally call dead. Well, whatever thoughts that that part of the universe is having--their arrow of time is orthogonal to ours, so we can't communicate with them. It's not so much that each rock is alive, or each lightning bolt, but that the whole universe is alive. The part of the universe that I get go call myself has come up with names for the other parts, but those names are just part of the story that I tell myself.

  I like to mess with people who are having arguments about abortion: I believe that life begins not at conception, not at birth, but at the big bang. There are very few ways that this belief affects my life, but it does occasionally motivate me to meditate. If I can get my own thoughts to settle down for a while I feel like I can tap into a bigger awareness. It's not having any thoughts that I can decipher, but it feels nice anyhow.