By that logic, literally any ridiculous supposition must be taken seriously, because you can’t prove a negative.

This is the civilization-scale Quantum Immortality argument... no civilization can be around that witnessed the end of civilization.

(I refer to it that way rather than a "variant" because Quantum Immortality should always be parameterized by an acceptance function... for any given acceptance function, that function will be preserved in the quantum multiverse, and scoping the precision of the function affects the percentage of universes that retain it rather than whether it will be retained. There's actually nothing in that definition that requires that the acceptance function describe a "conscious system", you can stick something that accepts a "civilization" in there just as easily. Or "this rock over here". Or any other thing you like. Conscious systems are just a particularly interesting case to us conscious systems.)

It's not a vacuous argument, though it is a funky one with very odd characteristics. But if you accept the suppositions underneath it, it does follow and is not vacuous. The suppositions are certainly not completely obviously true on their own terms, though.

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loopies 3 hours ago | parent [-]

>Quantum Immortality argument

I never really understood what is the explanation for ... old people that we notice as dying. In today's times you might have an argument that some kind of life extension could pop up and some of the people alive today could have that as an excuse.

But like 100 years ago? How would people dying of old age "continue living"?

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jerf 3 hours ago | parent [-]

From the point of view of the old people, exponentially large injections of improbability.

This is also where it is important to understand the argument is parameterized. If your acceptance function is "a full human body living a full human life in the way I'm used to", then you're asking for a huge whackload of improbability to keep that body alive. If, on the other hand, you merely ask for "the minimum system that stays conscious", while that is still a huge whackload it is exponentially smaller, by a very substantial factor.

Anyone who takes any sort of comfort in the argument doesn't understand it. It preserves minimal consciousness, for any and all definitions of "minimal consciousness". It does also preserve bodies, but at an exponentially smaller probability. You can even use as your acceptance function "civilization exactly as we know it today, with everyone currently living still alive in 1000 years" and that comes at a yet smaller exponential probability. All of these "exponential probabilities" as separated by numbers of zeros that themselves require exponential notation to write. But the universe itself is making so many splits and branches all the time that it has the "budget" for these probabilities to be true, somewhere in the quantum multiverse.

Or, put another way, any event that you can draw a non-zero probability pathway for occurs. It is not impossible for me to spontaneously have my particular genetic defect reversed in every cell in my body, so there are branches where that happens... they're just exponentially unlikely compared to what we actually experience. It can literally be in %10^(-10^1,000,000,000) of the universes... but if it's not zero, it will happen, if the quantum multiverse is the correct view.

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knome 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Quantum immortality is just an absurd quasi-religious pretense of physics that caters to those that fear death but feel embarrassed to participate in the traditional socially approved coping mechanisms.

	▲	loopies 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I do not think death exists as a thing. We're shoving a lot of stuff into the concept. Pain, loss of information, of the one who dies. Fear of the unknown, what happens next. Death is a very volatile concept if you really try to pin it down. When you take all the layers off...you are left with nothing really. But yes, the apparent loss of information seems to be true, for us at this technological level.

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loopies 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean sure, in the end you can have some heaven, some benevolent alien species reaching back into some field and copying all of your material structure data right at time of death and rebuilding you in some kind of resurection center. The space of what is possible is wildly vast, we know or can think of very little by comparison. If you give up some day to day coherence then you can almost always find something that would work and make sense once there.

It could even be us, future us, being able to somehow recover past data and literally reassemble all of the humans that ever lived. They aren't as many as you'd think, in the grand scheme of things.

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jerf an hour ago | parent [-]

As I said, anyone who takes comfort in the hypothesis doesn't understand it. The dominant probability has nothing to do with benevolent aliens reaching down and inevitably resurrecting you to youth and health. It is you, minimally conscious, with no body, no ability to move or sense the outside world, nothing more than the absolute bare minimum to be "conscious", just barely conscious and never able to stop being minimally conscious, with literally every last extraneous and unnecessary subatomic particle stripped away (so anything like "sensors" or "effectors" being long gone), for whatever your definition of "minimally conscious" is. This outcome dominates the probabilities that even remotely resembles your current existence by those 10^(10^1,000,000,000) sorts of probabilities.

Everyone should very much hope that quantum immortality is false. It is the very opposite of comforting.

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loopies an hour ago | parent [-]

I don't understand. Why does my current life win every instant atm? Why is it so much greater than your proposition? Why don't we all instantly collapse to what you described?

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jerf an hour ago | parent [-]

That would require a very improbable sequence of events for it to happen right this second.

Moreover, if the theory is true, it is happening all around us, all the time. Every consciousness that has ever existed, human or otherwise, is still in existence in some branch of the multiverse.

It's a pretty horrifying theory.

	▲	loopies 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think whenever we reach such ludicrous conclusions it's more likely we have made at least one wrong assumption, if not more. And people seem to be captivated by these memes, because the fear is great. It similar to eternal damnation in hell meme. Just look for how long it worked, and it's still working. The logic is simple, it's too dangerous to ignore such a threat, even with seemingly very small probabilities. But that still doesn't make it possible. Logical traps founded on wrong assumptions.

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myrmidon 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, that does not follow.

Any other argument against <ridiculous apocalyptic supposition> is perfectly fine, just not the "it hasn't happened before" one.

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timr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You're arguing in favor of a teapot circling Mars. We can't prove it's not there, but telling me that "nobody has ever found it" is an invalid argument is obviously absurd.

In that quote, the author is telling you that all of your past predictions of teapots have been wrong (which is 100% true -- the ridiculous doom has been going on since at least GPT-2. remember how that was "too dangerous to release"?) Show me why I should believe in this one.

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applfanboysbgon 3 hours ago | parent [-]

This is a grevious misuse of Russell's Teapot. You realise your assertion, if followed to its logical conclusion, is that because civilization has existed for this long, it can never collapse no matter what.

> In that quote, the author is telling you that all of your past predictions of teapots have been wrong

Past predictions have zero influence on future ones. If you flip a coin 10 times and get heads every time, the probability of your next coin flip coming up heads is 50%, not 100%, because it is independent of any prior trials.

Moreover, if Alice and Bob each make 100 predictions and are 100% wrong, but Charles makes 10 predictions and is 100% correct, Alice and Bob's predictions have zero bearing on whether you should trust Charles' predictions. They are not even a factor to be considered.

I don't think I even disagree with you in the broad picture. I am not concerned about language models. But you have committed three blatant logical fallacies in a row. You literally could not make a worse case for your position if you tried, I suspect.

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timr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You're making a ridiculously improbable prediction that can never be falsified -- akin to beliefs in a vengeful God. Russell's Teapot is exactly the correct metaphor.

The philosophical burden of proof lies on the person making empirically unfalsifiable claims. That is the point of Russell's Teapot.

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applfanboysbgon 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> The philosophical burden of proof lies on the person making empirically unfalsifiable claims.

You appear not to understand what a prediction is. "I believe X will likely happen because Y" is different from an assertion of fact that "X will happen". A prediction cannot even be empirically proved! You are simply suggesting that nobody is allowed to make a prediction, ever. Russell's Teapot, too, is not an argument that you cannot believe in God. It is an argument that the unfalsifiability of a claim is not a basis to assert that God exists.

	▲	timr 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can make whatever predictions you like. Don't expect other people to believe them and act on them unless you provide evidence.

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fwlr 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m not sure what logic you have imputed to my comment, but I’m having trouble connecting what you wrote to anything I was saying. I am criticising the argument “every past apocalyptic prediction was wrong, therefore this future apocalyptic prediction is wrong” (specifically, that it carries exactly 0 weight, because the counterfactual world where at least one past apocalyptic prediction was true, is also a world that does not contain this argument - so there is no world where the argument’s precondition can, even in principle, be false. Arguments are a little bit like rocketships in that they need “reaction mass” - there has to be some amount of false for the truth to push against in order to move our opinion.)

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timr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> I am criticising the argument “every past apocalyptic prediction was wrong, therefore this future apocalyptic prediction is wrong”

That is not the argument being made. That is the straw man version you are presenting. Read the full paragraph, and the one after, and it's obvious:

> There are myriad policy responses. Whatever we do, those responses will require popular consent and careful deliberation. No one person, or one company, or one movement, knows the answer and history is no guide, save that apocalyptic predictions about new technologies have, to date, all been wrong.

> History does provide a great deal of guidance, however, about the use and misuse of government power. It tells us that the state is in fact likely the worst possible custodian for the most powerful publication and data analysis technologies.

Emphasis mine.

	▲	fwlr an hour ago \| parent [-]
		“History is a guide to apocalyptic predictions in only one way: all previous apocalyptic predictions have been wrong” “History is a guide to state abuses of power in many ways, and most of them point in the same direction, that it is a very bad idea to invest powers like these with the state” These are two separate arguments. I am sympathetic to the latter and endorse it essentially as written, which is why I didn’t criticise it. My criticism of the former is not a metonymic dismissal of every other argument in the piece.

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Cthulhu_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is Pascal's Wager, which kind of brings us full circle again to AI doom predictions.