Ben Jones:
Subjective phenomena are the objective measurements. Measuring proxies for them may be useful for many reasons, but the phenomena are the basic stuff that we are presented with. An AGI doesn’t try to prove that it has an “objective measurable” bitstream of inputs. Rather, it has one and tries to derive the nature of the world and self within which that bitstream probably exists.
Richard:
I think that scientism is real, common, and a serious problem, but I don’t think that your “precise” use of the term characterizes anything real. Rather, scientism is a lack of philosophical reflection, lack of knowledge that there exist communities of reasonably committed truth seekers other than scientists, and identity, expressed through mimicry of common surface features, with the typical members of said community. Such features include naive atheism, incoherent skepticism, credentialism, denunciation of large numbers of academic communities as existing on the other side of an imaginary line between the ‘scientific’ and ‘non-scientific’ and fairly useless and clueless futzing around in laboratories. Aggressive questioning of such people may cause them to make the claims that you attribute to scientism, but bad poll design can elicit all sorts of confabulation. These people no more believe in verificationism than naive theists believe in an omniscient god who “tested” Abraham. Less really. When not hounded by philosophers they don’t even believe in their belief in it. It doesn’t guide their actions, thoughts, or verbalizations, all of which speak to the belief in mathematical analysis, skilled question and hypothesis formation, skilled observation and tool and experiment design, thought experiments (with Einstein as the exemplar of their use), visualization, and even to some extent rigorous logical argument (though they have no idea how far this can be taken by those truly skilled in it, and thus trust it less than they should while holding it to much lower standards than they should). They aren’t helped to escape from their confusion by a philosophy profession that does tolerate much that simply is religion (think Hegel) so long as it is promoted by someone who once did even a bit of genuine good philosophy. Think what the prestige of science would be like if the scientific community a) wasn’t involved in producing technology and b) advocated familiarity with Newton’s extensive alchemical and theological discourses as on par with his theory of gravity.
It seems to me that Eliezer has just presented a fairly good demonstration of how there might very plausibly contain a logical contradiction. His argument is, as yet, far from compelling, but it is a strong enough analogy that it seems to me that rational pseudo-Bayesian truth seekers, as opposed to adherents of traditional rules of debate, must at least accept the possibility as very plausible, especially given the fact that currently prestigious and fairly scientifically competent (but not really at the level of general scientific competence that I have seen to characterize even ordinary science professors at top-50 US universities) philosophers do make arguments assuming confusions Exactly analogous to that in Eliezer’s example, for instance, by positing a world exactly like ours except that water on this world is not H2O.
P.S. any chance you could convince Chalmers to make an appearance in the comments here?
Ben Jones: Subjective phenomena are the objective measurements. Measuring proxies for them may be useful for many reasons, but the phenomena are the basic stuff that we are presented with. An AGI doesn’t try to prove that it has an “objective measurable” bitstream of inputs. Rather, it has one and tries to derive the nature of the world and self within which that bitstream probably exists.
Richard: I think that scientism is real, common, and a serious problem, but I don’t think that your “precise” use of the term characterizes anything real. Rather, scientism is a lack of philosophical reflection, lack of knowledge that there exist communities of reasonably committed truth seekers other than scientists, and identity, expressed through mimicry of common surface features, with the typical members of said community. Such features include naive atheism, incoherent skepticism, credentialism, denunciation of large numbers of academic communities as existing on the other side of an imaginary line between the ‘scientific’ and ‘non-scientific’ and fairly useless and clueless futzing around in laboratories. Aggressive questioning of such people may cause them to make the claims that you attribute to scientism, but bad poll design can elicit all sorts of confabulation. These people no more believe in verificationism than naive theists believe in an omniscient god who “tested” Abraham. Less really. When not hounded by philosophers they don’t even believe in their belief in it. It doesn’t guide their actions, thoughts, or verbalizations, all of which speak to the belief in mathematical analysis, skilled question and hypothesis formation, skilled observation and tool and experiment design, thought experiments (with Einstein as the exemplar of their use), visualization, and even to some extent rigorous logical argument (though they have no idea how far this can be taken by those truly skilled in it, and thus trust it less than they should while holding it to much lower standards than they should). They aren’t helped to escape from their confusion by a philosophy profession that does tolerate much that simply is religion (think Hegel) so long as it is promoted by someone who once did even a bit of genuine good philosophy. Think what the prestige of science would be like if the scientific community a) wasn’t involved in producing technology and b) advocated familiarity with Newton’s extensive alchemical and theological discourses as on par with his theory of gravity.
It seems to me that Eliezer has just presented a fairly good demonstration of how there might very plausibly contain a logical contradiction. His argument is, as yet, far from compelling, but it is a strong enough analogy that it seems to me that rational pseudo-Bayesian truth seekers, as opposed to adherents of traditional rules of debate, must at least accept the possibility as very plausible, especially given the fact that currently prestigious and fairly scientifically competent (but not really at the level of general scientific competence that I have seen to characterize even ordinary science professors at top-50 US universities) philosophers do make arguments assuming confusions Exactly analogous to that in Eliezer’s example, for instance, by positing a world exactly like ours except that water on this world is not H2O.
P.S. any chance you could convince Chalmers to make an appearance in the comments here?