I reject MWI, reject consequentialism/utilitarianism, reject reductionism, reject computationalism, reject Eliezer’s metaethics. There’s probably more. I think most of the core sequences are wrong/wrongheaded. Large parts of it trade in nonsense.
I appreciate the scope of Eliezer’s ambition though, and enjoy Less Wrong.
One silly assumption is that consciousness is reducible to quarks and leptons, whereas it is pretty clear by now that many different substrates can be used to run a Turing machine and hence human mind.
I would be surprised if this is an assumption that Eliezer is actually making. My understanding, and my interpretation of his, is that consciousness doesn’t work because it’s made of quarks and leptons, but you can make a consciousness using nothing but quarks and leptons, and the consciousness won’t be a result of anything else entering in on some other level.
If you want to build a consciousness in our universe, quarks and leptons are the building blocks you’ve got.
that consciousness doesn’t work because it’s made of quarks and leptons, but you can make a consciousness using nothing but quarks and leptons, and the consciousness won’t be a result of anything else entering in on some other level.
This is quite true, but accidental and so irrelevant. Indeed, the intermediate levels between consciousness and quarks can vary wildly: it can be built on neurons or, potentially, on silicon gates. Worse yet, if you get a sandboxed emulated mind, the lowest level they have access to is whatever the host system decides to provide. Such a sandboxed EY would argue that everything is reducible to the API calls, which are the fundamental building blocks of matter.
I don’t think he actually holds the position you’re attributing to him. I don’t know what probability he assigns to the possibility that our universe is a simulation, but I’m confident that he does not believe that as a matter of logical necessity quarks and leptons are the only things out of which one could build a consciousness, just that in our universe, these are the things that there are to build consciousnesses out of.
Hmm, I suppose his position is not that everything is reducible to quarks and leptons, but that everything is reducible to something basic, in a sense that there are no magical “qualia” preventing one from building consciousness from whatever building blocks are available. This is certainly quite reasonable, and all the currently available evidence points that way.
So is the 747 made of something other than quarks? No, you’re just modeling it with representational elements that do not have a one-to-one correspondence with the quarks of the 747. The map is not the territory.
To me it is an irrelevant accident that physical objects, unlike informational objects, happen to be reducible to quarks. After all, if you accept the possibility that we live in a simulation, I see no reason other than laziness to use the same substrate for different entities. But I agree that the best examples come from “computationalism”: the same FAT file system can be implemented in multiple ways, some reducible to magnetic domains on a floppy disk, others only to the API calls from a sandboxed virtual machine.
I reject MWI, reject consequentialism/utilitarianism, reject reductionism, reject computationalism, reject Eliezer’s metaethics. There’s probably more. I think most of the core sequences are wrong/wrongheaded. Large parts of it trade in nonsense.
I appreciate the scope of Eliezer’s ambition though, and enjoy Less Wrong.
Can you explain all that to someone who largely agrees with EY?
This one I’m curious to hear about. Of everything on that list, this is generally pretty uncontroversial.
One silly assumption is that consciousness is reducible to quarks and leptons, whereas it is pretty clear by now that many different substrates can be used to run a Turing machine and hence human mind.
I would be surprised if this is an assumption that Eliezer is actually making. My understanding, and my interpretation of his, is that consciousness doesn’t work because it’s made of quarks and leptons, but you can make a consciousness using nothing but quarks and leptons, and the consciousness won’t be a result of anything else entering in on some other level.
If you want to build a consciousness in our universe, quarks and leptons are the building blocks you’ve got.
This is quite true, but accidental and so irrelevant. Indeed, the intermediate levels between consciousness and quarks can vary wildly: it can be built on neurons or, potentially, on silicon gates. Worse yet, if you get a sandboxed emulated mind, the lowest level they have access to is whatever the host system decides to provide. Such a sandboxed EY would argue that everything is reducible to the API calls, which are the fundamental building blocks of matter.
I don’t think he actually holds the position you’re attributing to him. I don’t know what probability he assigns to the possibility that our universe is a simulation, but I’m confident that he does not believe that as a matter of logical necessity quarks and leptons are the only things out of which one could build a consciousness, just that in our universe, these are the things that there are to build consciousnesses out of.
Hmm, I suppose his position is not that everything is reducible to quarks and leptons, but that everything is reducible to something basic, in a sense that there are no magical “qualia” preventing one from building consciousness from whatever building blocks are available. This is certainly quite reasonable, and all the currently available evidence points that way.
That would be an interesting way of interpreting “reject reductionism” but the next step on scientism’s list is “reject computationalism.”
EY says:
To me it is an irrelevant accident that physical objects, unlike informational objects, happen to be reducible to quarks. After all, if you accept the possibility that we live in a simulation, I see no reason other than laziness to use the same substrate for different entities. But I agree that the best examples come from “computationalism”: the same FAT file system can be implemented in multiple ways, some reducible to magnetic domains on a floppy disk, others only to the API calls from a sandboxed virtual machine.
Not entirely. Electrons are not of quarks. You can’t have a 747 made from quarks only. [Nitpicking.]
I’m guessing that this reply is to the EY’s original post and is here by mistake.
In fact it is. But let it stay here.