I’m not sure what’s the thing you argue with? Like, yes, you can modify my retina which is actually part of my brain, if you look at embryology, or my specialized neural pathways that shuffle info, like LGN.
If you meddle with higher regions, then uhh how do I know that the guy on the other end of this is me actually? You can meddle in such ways that I definitely would not think he is me, like reshaping my brain to match someone else’s and ways that would probably preserve it, like deleting 10 random neurons? It’s kinda question begging.
Thus, people’s values are in fact pointing to the context of their experiences, to their qualia, not to actual world states
Uhh, they are part of the world, and as you just pointed to, they have brain states that can be modified, so they dislike their brains being in some states, right?
Celene’s first question which cascaded to this post was ~”what should I do if I wasn’t sure if I was conscious?”. It seems here Celene is considering whether she ~uniquely is unconscious, is lacking a quality of experience most other people have. Fwiw I do think she is lacking a quality of experience many people have, which is the intuitive feeling that qualia are a thing separate from the world, but that particular feeling is not what consciousness is imo.
Imagine someone who misunderstood what weight was as a concept, didn’t find it meaningful or interesting, then went around claiming “I am weightless! I am weightless!”. Maybe they even found some definition of weight for which that’s true, and maybe they even talked to very confused people who couldn’t explain what weight is to their satisfaction. Nevertheless, they would not be weightless under the common understanding and usage people have for weight.
I think Celene is doing something in that category of mistake, though it is more understandable since qualia/consciousness are even more confusing than weight and have even more disagreement on definitions and pointers. It wouldn’t be wrong to think for a given definition she has that she isn’t conscious, but I think she’s wrong if she thinks she isn’t conscious while thinking others are.
> Uhh, they are part of the world, and as you just pointed to, they have brain states that can be modified, so they dislike their brains being in some states, right?
In those cases the experiences would be terminal values, with the brain states being instrumental values.
To illustrate the difference, consider a mind who knows of height and width, who is designing a rectangle. They want a rectangle of a particular heigh, but happen to be working in software which only allows squares, so to get the right height is equivalent to getting the width right. While they’re in the software, you can’t measure whether height or width is their terminal goal, but given another software which allow rectangles, you could realize they only cared about the height.
Similarly, there exist currently minds who value their experiences (eg. not experiencing suffering), but who’s only way to mediate that is affecting their brain states. If it were possible to just modify the experiences without affecting the brain states, then we could see the difference. Whether it is logically possible to separate experiences from physical states I am unsure of, and lean negative. But you could now see how someone who does believe they can be separated would be valuing the experiences and not the brain states.
I’m not sure what’s the thing you argue with? Like, yes, you can modify my retina which is actually part of my brain, if you look at embryology, or my specialized neural pathways that shuffle info, like LGN.
If you meddle with higher regions, then uhh how do I know that the guy on the other end of this is me actually? You can meddle in such ways that I definitely would not think he is me, like reshaping my brain to match someone else’s and ways that would probably preserve it, like deleting 10 random neurons? It’s kinda question begging.
Uhh, they are part of the world, and as you just pointed to, they have brain states that can be modified, so they dislike their brains being in some states, right?
Sometimes people get confused and think their qualia are epiphenomenal, and SFAICT this doesn’t make them much less selfish.
Celene’s first question which cascaded to this post was ~”what should I do if I wasn’t sure if I was conscious?”. It seems here Celene is considering whether she ~uniquely is unconscious, is lacking a quality of experience most other people have. Fwiw I do think she is lacking a quality of experience many people have, which is the intuitive feeling that qualia are a thing separate from the world, but that particular feeling is not what consciousness is imo.
Imagine someone who misunderstood what weight was as a concept, didn’t find it meaningful or interesting, then went around claiming “I am weightless! I am weightless!”. Maybe they even found some definition of weight for which that’s true, and maybe they even talked to very confused people who couldn’t explain what weight is to their satisfaction. Nevertheless, they would not be weightless under the common understanding and usage people have for weight.
I think Celene is doing something in that category of mistake, though it is more understandable since qualia/consciousness are even more confusing than weight and have even more disagreement on definitions and pointers. It wouldn’t be wrong to think for a given definition she has that she isn’t conscious, but I think she’s wrong if she thinks she isn’t conscious while thinking others are.
> Uhh, they are part of the world, and as you just pointed to, they have brain states that can be modified, so they dislike their brains being in some states, right?
In those cases the experiences would be terminal values, with the brain states being instrumental values.
To illustrate the difference, consider a mind who knows of height and width, who is designing a rectangle. They want a rectangle of a particular heigh, but happen to be working in software which only allows squares, so to get the right height is equivalent to getting the width right. While they’re in the software, you can’t measure whether height or width is their terminal goal, but given another software which allow rectangles, you could realize they only cared about the height.
Similarly, there exist currently minds who value their experiences (eg. not experiencing suffering), but who’s only way to mediate that is affecting their brain states. If it were possible to just modify the experiences without affecting the brain states, then we could see the difference. Whether it is logically possible to separate experiences from physical states I am unsure of, and lean negative. But you could now see how someone who does believe they can be separated would be valuing the experiences and not the brain states.