The Horrors of the Future

Friendly AI* probably won't be a problem if, as I suspect, it turns out to be substantially easier to enhance humans than it is to create intelligence from scratch.

*The problem of ensuring that the interests of any self-improving-come-super-intelligent AIs remain aligned to human interests. For fictional examples of failed FAI see any techno-dystopic movie e.g. Terminator, the Matrix, I Robot, etcetera.

Time Travel

Forget Hawking's postulated time travel consistency principle, the principle of non-contradiction is all that's needed. If time really is much like a spatial dimension and arbitrarily traversable--if time travel is possible--no paradoxes will occur since there is no "first" run through of time. There is simply 12:24am June 24th 2011. Time paradoxes will not occur for the very same reason that a thrown ball doesn't go both left and right at the same time.

On the Nature of Evidence, and the Use of Possible World Semantics. Part 1 (draft):

N.B. In many, if not most, of the posts to this blog I will regard the universe as both temporally and spatially discrete (though not necessarily finite). In general the arguments presented are simple to extend to the continuous case, but are easier to explain and easier to follow in the discrete case.

What do we mean by "Evidence"

Evidence is the stuff that gives us reason to believe things. It is an accepted observation or statement of fact that lends support to some other statement or its negation. Evidence does not exist in a vacuum, it is always for or against some other statement.

On Possible Worlds and a Refinement Thereof

A possible world is a conceived state of affairs that we have no reason to believe is self-contradictory or otherwise impossible. In other words, it is a world which does not obtain merely because the universe happens to be otherwise. This terminology is useful but imperfect, since the set of "possible worlds" may include worlds that are not in fact possible! An example illustrates the point: imagine a world, otherwise like the real world, in which I was christened Mitt instead of Tim. I would call myself Mitt, my ID cards would say "Put, Mitt", and the url of this blog would be MittPut.blogspot.com, etcetera. In every other macroscopic way the world would be similar: the US would still have gone to war with Iraq in 2003, IBM would still be a leading computer manufacturer. Clearly we want to include this world in the set of "possible worlds"; we have no reason to believe it is not possible, it is historical accident that we live in the world we do and not in the world of Mitt Put. But we don't actually know if Mitt's world is possible. Perhaps chaotic systems really are quite common and any world up to that point similar to ours in which I am named Mitt would be drastically different. Perhaps in every world in which there is a Mitt Put the US goes to war with Iran in 2003, or with Iraq in 2005

Coming Soon

- The nature of evidence and the existence of evidence-against.

- The illusion of 'true' chance, and chance as informational uncertainty.

- The basis of knowledge as necessarily Bayesian/statistical.

- Free-will not-versus Determinism.

- A defense of IQ tests.

- Resolution of various particular paradoxes.

- Morality: basis of, universality without absolutes, relation to continuum of consciousness.

- The proper laws of multi-state logic.

- Miracles and the indefensibility of the supernatural.

- Land value taxes.

- Aboriginal land rights. Red paper/White paper.

- Hume's Is/Ought distinction is valid, those who deny it commit equivocation on 'ought' (but ought isn't a useful concept).

- Existence as a two-place predicate; namely set membership.