This post looks to me like an extreme case of an isolated demand for rigor. People release reports with assumptions in them all the time. People release reports with not 100% rigorously defined terms in them all the time. Ditto for academic papers.
The fact that the authors of the report don’t give us any proximate theories of consciousness, unfortunately, damns the whole project to h∄ll, which is where poor technical philosophies go when they make contact with reality (good technical philosophies stick around if they’re true, or go to h∃aven if they’re false).[3]
You have to provide a full theory of consciousness to release a report about priorities? Really? How is this different from arguing that Ajeya Cotra’s report on AI timelines is worthless because it doesn’t provide a theory of intelligence? (Not a definition of intelligence, mind you, but a theory?)
Unitarianism smuggles in an assumption of “amount” of valence, but the authors don’t define what “amount” means in any way, not even to give competing theories of how to do so.
So the failure to define the word “amount” is the smoking gun? What if the report had added a fourth assumption
Quantifiability: valence can be quantified as a scalar number that behaves additively
Now they have defined what amount means. But they essentially did this anyway by saying that
There is an objective thing called ‘valence’ which we can assign to four-volumes of spacetime using a mathematical function (but we’re not going to even speculate about the function here)
This essentially already says that they think valence, under the right theory of consciousness, amounts to a number. The implication is that once you have the right ToC, it will tell you how to quantify valence, and then you just add it up using addition.
Obviously you can disagree with these assumptions, and of course many people do. But the post accuses the report of “smuggling in an assumption about amount of valence”. How is this smuggling in anything??? It’s explicitly listed as an assumption.
I fail to see how this post provides any value beyond just stating that the author disagreed with the conclusions/assumptions of the report, and I think it’s highly likely that the only reason it got upvoted is that most other people also disagreed with both the assumptions and the conclusions. I don’t see how anyone who does agree with the assumptions could change their mind based on reading this, or how anyone who doesn’t like the report couldn’t have already explained why before reading this. Please tell me what I’m missing.
This post looks to me like an extreme case of an isolated demand for rigor. People release reports with assumptions in them all the time. People release reports with not 100% rigorously defined terms in them all the time. Ditto for academic papers.
You have to provide a full theory of consciousness to release a report about priorities? Really? How is this different from arguing that Ajeya Cotra’s report on AI timelines is worthless because it doesn’t provide a theory of intelligence? (Not a definition of intelligence, mind you, but a theory?)
So the failure to define the word “amount” is the smoking gun? What if the report had added a fourth assumption
Now they have defined what amount means. But they essentially did this anyway by saying that
This essentially already says that they think valence, under the right theory of consciousness, amounts to a number. The implication is that once you have the right ToC, it will tell you how to quantify valence, and then you just add it up using addition.
Obviously you can disagree with these assumptions, and of course many people do. But the post accuses the report of “smuggling in an assumption about amount of valence”. How is this smuggling in anything??? It’s explicitly listed as an assumption.
I fail to see how this post provides any value beyond just stating that the author disagreed with the conclusions/assumptions of the report, and I think it’s highly likely that the only reason it got upvoted is that most other people also disagreed with both the assumptions and the conclusions. I don’t see how anyone who does agree with the assumptions could change their mind based on reading this, or how anyone who doesn’t like the report couldn’t have already explained why before reading this. Please tell me what I’m missing.