aaronsw

Karma: 589

aaronsw 6 Jan 2013 19:34 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: hairyfigment’s comment on: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project
I guess you need to do some more thinking to straighten out your views on qualia.

aaronsw 5 Jan 2013 23:28 UTC
9 points
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in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project
Imagine a flashlight with a red piece of cellophane over it pointed at a wall. Scientists some day discover that the red dot on the wall is caused by the flashlight—it appears each and every time the flashlight fires and only when the flashlight is firing. However, the red dot on the wall is certainly not the same as the flashlight: one is a flashlight and one is a red dot.

The red dot, on the other hand, could be reduced to some sort of interaction between certain frequencies of light-waves and wall-atoms and so on. But it will certainly not get reduced to flashlights.

By the same token, you are not going to reduce the-subjective-experience-of-seeing-red to neurons; subjective experiences aren’t made out of neurons any more than red dots are made of flashlights.

aaronsw 5 Jan 2013 22:23 UTC
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in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project
Because the neuron firing pattern is presumably the cause of the quale, it’s certainly not the quale itself.

aaronsw 5 Jan 2013 21:46 UTC
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in reply to: nshepperd’s comment on: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project
They’re not assumptions, they’re the answers to questions that have the highest probability going for them given the evidence.

aaronsw 5 Jan 2013 21:45 UTC
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in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project
Of course not!

aaronsw 5 Jan 2013 21:45 UTC
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in reply to: hairyfigment’s comment on: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project
Who said anything about our intuitions (except you, of course)?

aaronsw 5 Jan 2013 21:36 UTC
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in reply to: MugaSofer’s comment on: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project
I guess it really depends on what you mean by free will. If by free will, pjeby meant some kind of qualitative experience, then it strikes me that what he means by it is just a form of qualia and so of course the qualia argument goes through. If he means by it something more complicated, then I don’t see how point one holds (we experience it), and the argument obviously doesn’t go through.

aaronsw 4 Jan 2013 22:10 UTC
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in reply to: MugaSofer’s comment on: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project
Because it’s the only thing in the universe we’ve found with a first-person ontology. How else do you explain it?

aaronsw 4 Jan 2013 22:08 UTC
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in reply to: nshepperd’s comment on: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project
Well, let’s be clear: the argument I laid out is trying to refute the claim that “I can create a human-level consciousness with a Turing machine”. It doesn’t mean you couldn’t create an AI using something other than a pure Turing machine and it doesn’t mean Turing machines can’t do other smart computations. But it does mean that uploading a brain into a Von Neumann machine isn’t going to keep you alive.

So if you disagree that qualia is a basic fact of physics, what do you think it reduces to? Is there anything else that has a first-person ontology the way qualia does?

And if you think physics can tell whether something is a Turing-machine-simulating-a-brain, what’s the physical algorithm for looking at a series of physical particles and deciding whether it’s executing a particular computation or not?

aaronsw 4 Jan 2013 22:01 UTC
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in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project
I guess my phrasing was unclear. What Searle is trying to do is generate reductions for things like “money” and “human rights”; I think EY is trying to do something similar and it takes him more than just one article on the Mind Projection Fallacy. (Even once you establish that it’s properties of minds, not particles, there’s still a lot of work left to do.)

aaronsw 4 Jan 2013 21:51 UTC
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in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project

Beginning an argument for the existence of qualia with a bare assertion that they exist

Huh? This isn’t an argument for the existence of qualia—it’s an attempt to figure out whether you believe in qualia or not. So I take it you disagree with step one, that qualia exists? Do you think you are a philosophical zombie?

I do think essentially the same argument goes through for free will, so I don’t find your reductio at all convincing. There’s no reason, however, to believe that “love” or “charity” is a basic fact of physics, since it’s fairly obvious how to reduce these. Do you think you can reduce qualia?

I don’t understand why you think this is a claim about my feelings.

aaronsw 25 Dec 2012 21:46 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project
I was talking about Searle’s non-AI work, but since you brought it up, Searle’s view is:
1. qualia exists (because: we experience it)
2. the brain causes qualia (because: if you cut off any other part of someone they still seem to have qualia)
3. if you simulate a brain with a Turing machine, it won’t have qualia (because: qualia is clearly a basic fact of physics and there’s no way just using physics to tell whether something is a Turing-machine-simulating-a-brain or not)
Which part does LW disagree with and why?

aaronsw 25 Dec 2012 21:27 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project
I guess I must have misunderstood something somewhere along the way, since I don’t see where in this sequence you provide “constructive accounts of how to build meaningful thoughts out of ‘merely’ effective constituents” . Indeed, you explicitly say “For a statement to be … true or alternatively false, it must talk about stuff you can find in relation to yourself by tracing out causal links.” This strikes me as parallel to Searle’s view that consciousness imposes meaning.

But, more generally, Searle says his life’s work is to explain how things like “money” and “human rights” can exist in “a world consisting entirely of physical particles in fields of force”; this strikes me as akin to your Great Reductionist Project.

aaronsw 25 Dec 2012 20:57 UTC
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in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project
It’s too bad EY is deeply ideologically committed to a different position on AI, because otherwise his philosophy seems to very closely parallel John Searle’s. Searle is clearer on some points and EY is clearer on others, but other than the AI stuff they take a very similar approach.

EDIT: To be clear, John Searle has written a lot, lot more than the one paper on the Chinese Room, most of it having nothing to do with AI.

aaronsw 1 Dec 2012 14:40 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, December 1-15, 2012
That’s a good explanation of how to do Solomonoff Induction, but it doesn’t really explain why. Why is a Kolmgorov complexity prior better than any other prior?

aaronsw 1 Dec 2012 14:36 UTC
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on: Open Thread, December 1-15, 2012
I agree with EY that collapse interpretations of QM are ridiculous but are there any arguments against the Bohm interpretation better than the ones canvassed in the SEP article?

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/#o

aaronsw 1 Dec 2012 14:18 UTC
2 points
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on: Open Thread, December 1-15, 2012
Someone smart recently argued that there’s no empirical evidence young earth creationists are wrong because all the evidence we have of the Earth’s age is consistent either hypothesis that God created the earth 4000 years ago but designed it to look like it was much older. Is there a good one-page explanation of the core LessWrong idea that your beliefs need to be shifted by evidence even when the evidence isn’t dispositive as versus the standard scientific notion of devastating proof? Right now the idea seems smeared across the Sequences.

aaronsw 1 Dec 2012 14:12 UTC
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on: Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn’t
Typo: But or many philosophical problems

aaronsw 1 Dec 2012 14:02 UTC
2 points
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on: Intuitions Aren’t Shared That Way
You might enjoy http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/moralbiases

aaronsw 29 Nov 2012 23:40 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Causal Universes
I don’t totally understand it, but Zuse 1969 seems to talk about spacetime as a sort of discrete causal graph with c as the generalization of locality (“In any case, a relation between the speed of light and the speed of transmission between the individual cells of the cellular automaton must result from such a model.”). Fredkin and Wolfram probably also have similar discussions.