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The language Gwern uses here is slightly confusing. They're never actually talking about time-travel, but about precognition. They briefly state that precogniti

The language Gwern uses here is slightly confusing. They're never actually talking about time-travel, but about precognition. They briefly state that precognition is equivalent to time-travel in terms of philosophical consequences, and then use the term time-travel almost exclusively.

beaconstudios 10y ago
Gwern often writes in the style of lesswrong's perspective on rationalism - this comes with a tendency to assume the reader is also reading from this perspective and thus will automatically accept propositions like "precognition is the same as time travel".
- gwern 10y ago
  I think it's unfair to attribute my assumption to LessWrong or rationalism... The reason I assume it is because it is true in physics and because Chiang explicitly says so in https://boingboing.net/2010/07/22/ted-chiang-interview.html https://boingboing.net/2010/07/22/ted-chiang-interview.html and I quoted him in the footnote: "I think free will is what underlies most everything interesting about time travel. And when I say time travel, I'm including receiving information from the future, because that's essentially equivalent to someone traveling from the future."
  - beaconstudios 10y ago
    Hm, I stand corrected. I did find that your review jumped somewhat headfirst into accepting their equivalence though. The first line of your interpretation establishes their equivalence, and the linked quote just states that the author has the same opinion. It's a little disorienting to build from this as an established fact, if the reader does not agree. Also, your suggestion that they are equivalent in physics may be true from an information-theoretic perspective but it certainly isn't intuitive. My assumption that the statement was linked to LessWrong was due to other similar radical statements I've seen posited by members, especially Yudkowsky's ideas around the equivalence of a consciousness and its simulation.
dri_ft 10y ago
Yeah, it is confusing. At first I thought he was arguing against an interpretation involving (actual, non-precognitive) time travel, which seemed so obviously right that I found it hard to believe that anyone could ever have claimed that interpretation. Then when I realised he was actually talking about precognition as time travel, he seemed obviously wrong.

beaconstudios 10y ago

Gwern often writes in the style of lesswrong's perspective on rationalism - this comes with a tendency to assume the reader is also reading from this perspective and thus will automatically accept propositions like "precognition is the same as time travel".

gwern 10y ago
I think it's unfair to attribute my assumption to LessWrong or rationalism... The reason I assume it is because it is true in physics and because Chiang explicitly says so in https://boingboing.net/2010/07/22/ted-chiang-interview.html https://boingboing.net/2010/07/22/ted-chiang-interview.html and I quoted him in the footnote: "I think free will is what underlies most everything interesting about time travel. And when I say time travel, I'm including receiving information from the future, because that's essentially equivalent to someone traveling from the future."
- beaconstudios 10y ago
  Hm, I stand corrected. I did find that your review jumped somewhat headfirst into accepting their equivalence though. The first line of your interpretation establishes their equivalence, and the linked quote just states that the author has the same opinion. It's a little disorienting to build from this as an established fact, if the reader does not agree. Also, your suggestion that they are equivalent in physics may be true from an information-theoretic perspective but it certainly isn't intuitive. My assumption that the statement was linked to LessWrong was due to other similar radical statements I've seen posited by members, especially Yudkowsky's ideas around the equivalence of a consciousness and its simulation.

dri_ft 10y ago

Yeah, it is confusing. At first I thought he was arguing against an interpretation involving (actual, non-precognitive) time travel, which seemed so obviously right that I found it hard to believe that anyone could ever have claimed that interpretation. Then when I realised he was actually talking about precognition as time travel, he seemed obviously wrong.