Links for 2021-12-14
Cells Form Into ‘Xenobots’ on Their Own: “Embryonic cells can self-assemble into new living forms that don’t resemble the bodies they usually generate, challenging old ideas of what defines an organism.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/cells-form-into-xenobots-on-their-own-20210331/
‘Amazing science’: researchers find xenobots can give rise to offspring https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/nov/29/amazing-science-researchers-find-xenobots-can-give-rise-to-offspring
Synthetic living machines: A new window on life https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(21)00473-9
Is math discovered or invented? youtu.be/X_xR5Kes4Rs
“Gradient hacking describes how a deceptively misaligned mesa-optimizer could influence its own training process via its own outputs and thinking process.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bdayaswyewjxxrQmB/understanding-gradient-hacking
Self-Organising Textures: Neural Cellular Automata Model of Pattern Formation https://distill.pub/selforg/2021/textures/
Growing 3D Artefacts and Functional Machines with Neural Cellular Automata https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.08737
Understanding the Body Electric: Strong current can kill us, but electrical impulses let us live—a power even the ancients may have attempted to exploit. [The New Yorker] https://archive.md/KKmWK
The Future of Bioelectricity youtu.be/sBZcQ6ISbpU
When you realize that shipping containers used to transport nuclear materials are much safer than BSL-4 laboratories containing viruses that can cause pandemics youtube.com/watch?v=2jzugX2NMnk
Elon Musk is the person of the year: “This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman...In other words: Get in, loser. We’re going to Mars.” https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2021-elon-musk/ [a surprisingly good portrayal that is worthy of Musk.]
The Problem of Evil
My favorite solutions to the problem of evil/suffering: how to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God.
1. Evil doesn't exist because we are all NPCs controlled by God's mind.
God is thinking so hard about how to prevent evil that it ends up simulating some of it in its mind. That's us. But since we are just part of God's mind, it is God who is suffering voluntarily in order to guard the actual world against evil.
2. God is trying to maximize happiness [the satisfaction of complex human values]. But in order to create the maximum amount of happiness, some possible worlds need to contain some amount of evil. Because one perfect world without evil is less happiness than a second additional world that is almost perfect. So God created all possible worlds in which happiness eventually dominates. And our world is one in which there is initially a lot of evil but which eventually experiences happiness for hundreds of billions of years to come.
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