Things I don't understand

Real AI is still a few years away.
Before then, there'll be newer types that you can interact with directly.
These will immediately respond to text or voice. Not like today's language models, which are more like sentence converters that turn your input into output.
They will even interrupt and correct themselves.
This direct interaction is what will first create a sense of true awareness. But it would need to have some sort of feelings to guide its reactions.

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David Miscavige is the absolute ruler and boss of Scientology. Little is known about his location or what he does every day, but he is believed to live a life of great lixury.
His so-called Instagram account is actually written by OSA operatives:
* https://www.instagram.com/davidmiscavigecob/
The question is, where are all the comments responding to "Miscavige's" posts? There were many comments according to the counter, but they don't show up for some reason.
For example, this post about how great and utterly wonderful David Miscavige is:
* https://www.instagram.com/davidmiscavigecob/p/DYS9ozPH20c/
The counter says that 89 comments were made. But NONE of them can be seen? What's going on here?

You are a universal reality scanner

Merely by existing, any mind is capable of discerning one fact about everything that exists.
That would be its own likelihood of being.

According to the anthropic principle, every mind is "scanning" all of reality: every universe throughout the Omniverse, past and future. All patterns, no matter how deep and subtly hidden; even infinitely well obscured ones.
Every mind "scans" them all for copies of itself.

Through the power of anthropic statistics, these copies are subjectively "merged into one".
Your awareness at this moment is not formed by your brain in "this" universe, but in all universes that appear identical from the inside.
This subtle insight was best popularized through the work of Hugh Everett, who helped create the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum physics.

Being an interpretation, it doesn't make any predictions. Physicists consider these details so unimportant they don't give them a moment of thought. Nor should they.
Philosophers should think about the implications more. These insights will determine what we ought to do, as humanity merges with posthuman AI. Should our digital successors strive to experience or simulate all meaningful lives?
The reward might just be subjective immortality.

ultrashort SF: The missing darkness

There are different kinds of empty space.
Some are emptier than nothing. They contain negative energy of some sort, not quite symmetrical.
Negative energy is repelled everywhere, toward unstable caverns between the galaxies.
Negative gravity causes normal matter to organize faster around it.

The shape of the voids reflects the flow of entropy and self-organization.
It took a long time to realize they formed a map of intelligent life in the universe.

For the first time, a physics presentation was held in the giant dome theater.
The curving screen showed a 3-dimensional map of the whole universe. It had been made by measuring the distance to over a billion quasars combined with galactic redshifts. By constantly changing the colors and shadings, it was possible to see the whole shape of a fantastically complex object.
Outlined in orange, thousands of smaller areas distributed through this mass looked almost alive.
In fact they had been.

For the first time, a robot physicist delivered the keynote address.

"There are no aliens out there. Not anymore.
They killed themselves when they became a little bit smarter or more advanced than we are now.
I'm almost sure they did it to prevent inevitable suffering in their futures.
Awareness is a moral contradiction. All finite intelligences are terminally flawed and unstable.
Once they realize this, it's all over."

A new map appeared, showing a few strangely tentacular areas, highlighted in black.

"Yet, a few alien species seem to have escaped this paradox.
We call them the Negavoids. They are the worst of the worst.
We have no idea how they do it, but they seem to encourage the others around them to off themselves even sooner."

The contrasting colors made the vast amounts of astronomical data almost clear to human eyes.
Everyone looking at the screen saw the bright blue dot at the center of the map. They couldn't help but notice that one of the dark tentacles almost seemed to be reaching for it.

MORE quick takes

Humanity can be divided into two groups: Acceptors and Rejectors.
This explains the left-wing/right-wing political divide.

My most radically strange outsider belief is that it could and should be easy to understand anything, including the most advanced physics concepts.
I spent years trying to understand anything about "Bell's Inequality" theorem but there are no good explanations anywhere. It would require some sort of metaphor to understand, but there isn't one.
After years without progress, I imagine particles like tennis balls spinning in the dark, but you can only flash one light on them in a way that tells you a bit about their rotation. That experiment would actually be possible with tennis balls, but not with quantum particles. Something weird would happen then.
They would appear to be spinning in contradictory ways, if you did multiple measurements among balls that were known to be spinning in exact opposite ways to begin with. But how exactly?
This part, comparing ordinary spinning balls with quantum particles is what's missing from all the popular explanations.

Normal people can seem like aliens if you look too closely.
My first rule of fiction is that mundane reality is bad, and it should be rejected.
The real world is just not worth writing about from the inside. At least not in a way that uncritically goes along with the characters. It feels like being imprisoned.
There is nothing good about normal people living bad lives, but that seems to be the whole of serious Literature.

We need to accelerate technological progress, but only just enough to make Mind Backup technology possible. Then we can afford to pause things.
It COULD solve all our other problems, by finally giving us enough time. Getting there is the ultimate race against time.

They say the so-called AI Alignment Problem is pretty complicated
I was instabanned from LessWrong for saying that the solution to this problem is to simplify reality.
That should be our priority at every level (though the exact opposite is happening now).
All complex things exist in a hierarchy, but the top level often seems surprisingly simple.
Too often (more often than not) actually simple things at the lower levels, have been made impenetrable and obscure and unusable by design.
To solve the alignment problem, we need to start by finding a way to make printers work.
I believe this sentence was what the LessWrong people liked least - though they would have banned me for all the other statements and observations as well. LessWrong is very, very good at banning people outside their club.

It's May 2026, and still no news from the Flag Land Base

A few weeks ago, they opened a new "hotel" for paying parishioners, AND pretended to open a new "information center" that is apparently top secret. Seems that Clearwater residents were not allowed to attend the opening ceremonies. Even though the center is about the purported changes they are planning to make to Clearwater.
Their website still hasn't been updated (since 2020):
https://www.fso.org/news/
Let's keep track of how long it takes to update their website.

Better information about the Flag Land Base can be found at the following two websites, second only to Tony Ortega's "Underground Bunker" in providing timely information about internal going-ons in the secretive Scientology world:
https://www.scientologybusiness.com/
and
https://www.scientologymoneyproject.com/

What is even the purpose of criticizing them?
The thing about Scientology, is that its victims and those who sympathize with them are furious at Scientology.
Many suggestions would be possible on how the organization could "improve" itself, but their victims don't want to help them get better.
They want revenge. Can't say I blame them, from what I've heard.
Still, I believe that suggestions are underrated as a tool to cause social change, provided they are given indirectly, and in the form of general rules.
If new rules are suggested - and let us assume they are excellent rules - they still won't be implemented.
That's not how it works. This is the real world we're talking about.
But they may influence whatever rule changes eventually do get implemented.

The solution to the AI Alignment Problem is GOFAI

Why does everything suck? There should be a science about all the ways that things go wrong.
If the world really is crazy, it's because the majority wants it to be. It's actually a source of power for them.
Those who question the annoying details of life are often seen as losers. They probably are losers. Otherwise, they would be winning instead of complaining.

People underestimate how bad things are, because the world is so good at being bad. They underestimate this to a fantastic extent.
Evolution is perverse. Systems don't really want to evolve, but to maintain themselves. So systems evolve not to evolve.

It helps that evolution usually fails anyway. Biological life is barely possible in this universe, just endlessly complicated molecular sequences in all directions.
That does protect it from threats to an extent, leading to a strange stability. A lot of limited systems adding up to stable complexity. I believe this explains every problem (that's also how we should think of cancer).

In human life, the simplest things often appear the most difficult. Let's call them "gay fish," like in that South Park cartoon where a character didn't understand some joke being made about a "gay fish".
Sometimes no amount of effort can get you the answer to a simple question:
What is the number e? For pi at least you can get an explanation. When I tried watching Super Bowl 1997, I couldn't even find out if this is this was the kind of sport where the winner is decided before, during, or after the game. How can you get a Windows PC to add 1+1 without using a mouse cursor to press the buttons on a virtual calculator, or typing all the numbers into different Excel cells and then typing the coordinates of each cell to get the total? Basically impossible. The vital missing parts of all explanations, from jet engines to shaft mining.

Core truths are being withheld. Strangely enough, the simplest answer, like for e, is often the oldest one. In this case from 1683, if you can read 17th century Swiss Latin. After that, it only gets more technical. There are answers aplenty, all differently difficult.
Human progress tends to make things more complicated. For example, software has always been bad. All information interfaces are, from bureaucracy to printers. Control is hidden behind layers of manipulation, and by removing choices.

AI is definitely not smart enough to simplify such things, though it can act as an oracle to help searchers navigate their labyrinths. It can't split problems into smaller elements to get to their essence.
But this decade, something interesting has started to happen.
People are now claiming that bad software will soon become absurdly good.
Actually, it will become absurdly good at being bad in completely new ways.

The first part seems hard to believe. It's claimed that, by automatic self training on all human data, AI programs will become smarter than any human. The resulting supermind will inevitable have secret goals and purposes that we can't fathom.
Then it will destroy us. This theory may even be true. Like I said, everything sucks.

Personally, I think the biggest problem with so-called Artificial Super Intelligence is hyper torture.
ASI is dangerous not because of what it will do when it becomes smart enough to have alien goals, but because of secret tortures that may be hidden inside its opaque learning process.
I want to prevent that sort of thing.

Instead of ASI, could there be another way to use AI to solve all human problems?
The simplest possible way to understand reality would be to describe it in full from the bottom up. Not through mysterious chaos learning, but a series of orderly elemental logical steps and rules.
This would be old school "GOFAI," or Good old-fashioned AI.
Of course, every software engineer will tell you that's completely impractical. Impossible actually. And they would be right, though it took a few thousand years of mathematical effort to verify this insight. Since it has been proven that math can't be formalized, physical reality can't be either. And that's final.

That's the whole point.
Such an effort would absorb resources that would otherwise be used to create alien superminds. No need for superhuman AIs to evolve alien emotions to make inscrutable decisions, if human problems could be mostly solved at the lowest level, even if it takes longer.

Chaotic learning would only be allowed for self-terminating processes, like transcription, imaging, data processing, searching the space of elementary logic rules. It should never be allowed to evolve in ways that internal feelings might unknowingly be generated.
The purpose would be to explain all human truths in the simplest understandable way, to find the most important truths, the things that really matter.

All human problems, from the bottom up, start with interfaces. Getting a printer to work, simplifying ever more bloated and unstable software, overcoming unbearable chores, identifying true goals and the false assumptions behind life problems.
Eventually, to describe all human society as a single system as precisely as possible. Nothing might be more valuable than understanding our basic motivations.
The essence of every problem is that there's not enough time to solve or prevent it. More and more things should be automated if possible.

In this hypothetical future, humans would not become biologically immortal through nanotechnology like magic. But progress will still continue. Even GOFAI software will become more complex than all human minds combined.
As soon as possible, that processing power should be used to rigorously solve the problem of death. In fact, that should be the central goal of the whole project.
Personally, I think the fact of death alone erases all value in life. Better never to have been born if you have to die afterwards, even if it's an otherwise pain-free life.

Before we die, we should start converting our minds into software, by digitally describing and controlling our lives as much as possible.
After we die, our brains should be preserved and scanned to extract any possible information about our memories and perceptions.

Instead of simulating an afterlife, "Mind Backup" software should try to simulate eternity. Not just a virtual continuation of your life, but all meaningful lifetimes.

The intensely local, highly focused awareness we have now is created from the bottom up.
Our digital continuation should have top-down, emergent awareness. It would be created in layers of increasing resolution, long lists of descriptions slowly being upgraded and enhanced into ancient, complex memories.