What exactly do you mean by “my entire epistemology could be broken”?
If the perfect brain emulations do not have what I understand as consciousness then I am fundamentally confused about either reductionism in general or the physics of our universe.
Edit: also, why ~1%, rather than ~5% or ~0.2% or ~0.01%?
Not 5% for the usual reasons that we assign probabilities to stuff we know a lot about (expect to be wrong less than once out of twenty times, etc.) It was ~1% rather than ~0.2% or ~0.01% because the question wasn’t worth any more cognitive expenditure. Some questions are worth spending significant amounts of time analysing to produce increasingly reliable predictions. In this case the expected Value Of more Information fell rapidly.
Naturally I have spent significantly more time thinking on the subject in the process of writing replies after I wrote “~99%” and so were I to answer the question now my answer would be closer to (100 − 0.2)% than (100 − 1)%.
Thinking on logits might help dramatize the difference between between those four numbers.
I have encountered the concept of probability previously. If you disagree with the numbers I give you are for better or for worse disagreeing with the numbers I intend to give.
Huh. Interesting. When I first heard the ~99%, I thought that was just the result of a common tendency to pick “99%” to mean “very certain,” failing to consider that it’s very often not certain enough to make any coherent sense.
But that is exactly what wedrifid did, only consciously so. He didn’t want to expend the cognitive effort to find the value on a finer-grained scale, so he used a scale with granularity 1%. He knew he couldn’t assign 100%, so the only value to pick was 99%. This is how we use numbers all the time, except in certain scientific contexts where we have the rules about significant figures, which behave slightly differently.
With the approximately already being present, Wedifrid might as well have used ~100%. 100% is not a valid probability, but it is really close to valid probabilities.
Indeed. There are several conceivable and sensible correspondence rules between the scales of various granularity; he probably generalized the rule that you’re never allowed to assign 100% and 0% to anything and worked with that.
If the perfect brain emulations do not have what I understand as consciousness then I am fundamentally confused about either reductionism in general or the physics of our universe.
Not 5% for the usual reasons that we assign probabilities to stuff we know a lot about (expect to be wrong less than once out of twenty times, etc.) It was ~1% rather than ~0.2% or ~0.01% because the question wasn’t worth any more cognitive expenditure. Some questions are worth spending significant amounts of time analysing to produce increasingly reliable predictions. In this case the expected Value Of more Information fell rapidly.
Naturally I have spent significantly more time thinking on the subject in the process of writing replies after I wrote “~99%” and so were I to answer the question now my answer would be closer to (100 − 0.2)% than (100 − 1)%.
I have encountered the concept of probability previously. If you disagree with the numbers I give you are for better or for worse disagreeing with the numbers I intend to give.
Huh. Interesting. When I first heard the ~99%, I thought that was just the result of a common tendency to pick “99%” to mean “very certain,” failing to consider that it’s very often not certain enough to make any coherent sense.
But that is exactly what wedrifid did, only consciously so. He didn’t want to expend the cognitive effort to find the value on a finer-grained scale, so he used a scale with granularity 1%. He knew he couldn’t assign 100%, so the only value to pick was 99%. This is how we use numbers all the time, except in certain scientific contexts where we have the rules about significant figures, which behave slightly differently.
With the approximately already being present, Wedifrid might as well have used ~100%. 100% is not a valid probability, but it is really close to valid probabilities.
Indeed. There are several conceivable and sensible correspondence rules between the scales of various granularity; he probably generalized the rule that you’re never allowed to assign 100% and 0% to anything and worked with that.