Architeuthis

This was posted on catholic easter sunday on the ssc subreddit. It’s a posted-on-April 1st-for-plausible-deniability siskind post from back in 2018, where he outlines a kind of argument about how an all-powerfull entity that’s God in all but name (and obviously emanated from a culture discovering AGI) is actually “logically necessary”. He calls the whole thing “The Hour I First Believed”. I think it’s notable for being a bit of a treasure trove of rationalist weird accepted truths, such as: All copies of a consciousness share a self, because consciousness is like an equation, or something: But if consciousness is a mathematical object, it might be that two copies of the same consciousness are impossible. If you create a second copy, you just have the consciousness having the same single stream of conscious experience on two different physical substrates. Which is both the original transhumanist cope to enable so-called consciousness upload so it’s not just copying a simulacrum of your personality to a computer while you continue to rot away, and also what makes the basilisk torturing you possible. And it’s corollary, Simulation Capture: This means that an AI can actually “capture” you, piece by piece, into its simulation. First your consciousness is just in the real world. Then your consciousness is distributed across one real-world copy and a million simulated copies. Then the AI makes the simulated copies slightly different, and 99.9999% of you is in the simulation. which is a kind of nuts I hadn’t happened upon before. There’s also a bunch of rationalist decision theory stuff which I think make obvious how they were concocted to serve this type of narrative in the first place, instead for being broadly useful, Yud posing as a decision theory trailblazer notwithstanding.