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Eliezer Yudkowsky @ESYudkowsky
, 7 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
Your soul has been lost in the void and has forgotten all exact empirical identifiers such as names, URLs, empirical numbers greater than 3 (e.g. your age), etc. What's the shortest conceptual description built from common parts that uniquely identifies you on Earth?
Warning: Attempts to cheat the spirit of this question with replies like "The person who wrote this tweet" will result in your soul being forever lost in the void. (This is excluded anyways because 'this tweet' is a mere exact pointer, rather than a description, and so was lost.)
More mere exact empirical pointers, and not conceptual descriptions that uniquely pick you out: your fingerprints, the title of an essay you published, the time you came in second in a particular contest, your parents unless you can describe them conceptually. All have been lost.
In this thread: People on Twitter losing their souls forever in the void.
People keep asking for an example, so: The shortest globally unique description of myself I've come up with, using the most common concepts, is "Man who got laid by writing fanfiction."
More seriously, "Person who started a contest for three people to tell his little sister he was watching her" probably doesn't identify anyone else on Earth, and it doesn't use any of the obvious me-related concepts like fanfiction or AI that would make it too easy.
My Mom is "psychiatrist who traveled so often as a girl that people made flying squirrel jokes" and Dad is "assassin who runs the game with cups at science fiction conventions". Can you identify either of your parents? Can you identify your spouse?
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