As a child you learned through social cues to immediately put out of your mind any idea that cannot be communicated to others through words. As you grew older, you learned to automatically avoid, discard, and forget any thought avenues that seem too difficult to express in words. This is the cause of most of your problems.
Amanojack
Some neat tidbits about our ability to recall our conscious experience and about how difficult it is to hold a passing thought in memory long enough to analyze it, but it is a total strawman of Hume’s (and many others’) position that “I cannot be wrong about my subjective experience.”
What you’ve done here is equivocate on the term “subjective experience,” using it in the introduction as if it were going mean your current, right-this-moment experience (e.g., “I am in pain now,” which imparts a huge wow factor for readers, so I can see why), then proceeded to give a bunch of examples where “subjective experience” means something you subjectively experienced in the past, or had trouble bringing fully into conscious awareness in the first place.
Then, at the very end, you equivocate back to the Humean sense of this-moment conscious experience and flounder into this whopper:
We can be wrong about our own subjective conscious experiences. Thus, they cannot serve as a bedrock for certainty and a priori truth.
Sure, past subjective conscious experience is something we can be wrong about. We can misremember things. Hume’s (and others’) point is that we cannot be wrong about things like, “I am seeing blue right now.” If you doubt things like that, you must apply at least that same level of doubt to everything else, such as whether you are really reading a LessWrong comment instead of being chased by hungry sharks right now.
I’ve been enjoying your recent posts, but I wish you would resist the urge to sensationalize and overgeneralize just to grab more eyeballs.
This is more important than it looks. Most people’s beliefs are just recorded memes that bubbled up from their subconscious when someone pressed them for their beliefs. They wonder what they believe, their mind regurgitates some chatter they heard somewhere, and they go, “Aha, that must be what I believe.” Unless they take special countermeasures, humans are extremely suggestible.
Sure. He wrote about it a lot. Here is a concise quote:
The concepts of chance and contingency, if properly analyzed, do not refer ultimately to the course of events in the universe. They refer to human knowledge, prevision, and action. They have a praxeological [relating to human knowledge and action], not an ontological connotation.
Also:
Calling an event contingent is not to deny that it is the necessary outcome of the preceding state of affairs. It means that we mortal men do not know whether or not it will happen. The present epistemological situation in the field of quantum mechanics would be correctly described by the statement: We know the various patterns according to which atoms behave and we know the proportion in which each of these patterns becomes actual. This would describe the state of our knowledge as an instance of class probability: We know all about the behavior of the whole class; about the behavior of the individual members of the class we know only that they are members. A statement is probable if our knowledge concerning its content is deficient. We do not know everything which would be required for a definite decision between true and not true. But, on the other hand, we do know something about it; we are in a position to say more than simply non liquet or ignoramus. For this defective knowledge the calculus of probability provides a presentation in symbols of the mathematical terminology. It neither expands nor deepens nor complements our knowledge. It translates it into mathematical language. Its calculations repeat in algebraic formulas what we knew beforehand. They do not lead to results that would tell us anything about the actual singular events. And, of course, they do not add anything to our knowledge concerning the behavior of the whole class, as this knowledge was already perfect—or was considered perfect—at the very outset of our consideration of the matter.
Ultimately you either interpret “superintelligence” as being sufficient to predict your reaction with significant accuracy, or not. If not, the problem is just a straightforward probability question, as explained here, and becomes uninteresting.
Otherwise, if you interpret “superintelligence” as being sufficient to predict your reaction with significant accuracy (especially a high accuracy like >99.5%), the words of this sentence...
And the twist is that Omega has put a million dollars in box B iff Omega has predicted that you will take only box B.
...simply mean “One-box to win, with high confidence.”
Summary: After disambiguating “superintelligence” (making the belief that Omega is a superintelligence pay rent), Newcomb’s problem turns into either a straightforward probability question or a fairly simple issue of rearranging the words in equivalent ways to make the winning answer readily apparent.
Looking back from a year later, I should have said, “Words are not the experiences they represent.”
As for “reality,” well it’s just a name I give to a certain set of sensations I experience. I don’t even know what “concepts” are anymore—probably just a general name for a bunch of different things, so not that useful at this level of analysis.
Torture Simulated with Flipbooks
Thanks for taking the time to point out the problem with each example.
The key issue seems to be that “subjective experience” could refer to all subjective experiences, both past and present, or it could refer to one’s current, this-moment subjective experience. The OP draws people in because it sounds like it’s going to be talking about doubting the latter—which would be pretty shocking—but it ends up as a sort of bait-and-switch because it is really talking about doubting the former, more mundane and familiar sense, where one simply fails to accurately recall one’s past experience or fails to catch all aspects of one’s experiential phenomena as they whizz by.
We originally want or desire an object not because it is agreeable or good, but we call it agreeable or good because we want or desire it.
-- Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics
- 5 Apr 2010 10:34 UTC; 0 points) 's comment on Open Thread: April 2010 by (
Nice post, and great method.
On free will, I’d like to pose a question to anyone interested: What do you think it would feel like not to have free will?
(Or, what do you think it would feel like to not think you have free will?)
I’d phrase it as, rationality prevents you from experiencing irrational (i.e., pointless) emotions.
My theory is that almost all negative emotions have to be learned by imitation. They are cached responses copied from role models at an early age, almost always irrational (read: counterproductive), and unfortunately there is no automatic updating system for them.
Even worse is that whenever we experience a cached negative emotion our thinking is impaired (especially by anger), so there is even less chance that we’ll notice and update it. Still worse is that even if we notice the response is irrational and try to update, once the sour taste of the emotion has infected the mind a clean update becomes extraordinarily difficult.
My solution: Make it a habit to imagine awful or offensive situations in advance, and see yourself reacting perfectly.
Like imagine you get stuck in traffic when you’re in a hurry, but you’re totally zen about it. Since it’s your imagination you may as well be 100% chill, heck why not even find some reason to be happy about it? Then that will be the cached response next time you hit traffic.
Or say someone’s kid spills grape juice on your new white carpet (and realistically you’re not going to ask for remuneration). May as well imagine yourself reacting wonderfully, without missing a beat, no hint of irritation whatsoever. This kind of thing really impresses people.
- 21 Oct 2011 19:31 UTC; 5 points) 's comment on Feeling Rational by (
Indeed, a similar point seems to apply to the whole anti-boxing argument. Are we really prepared to say that super-intelligence implies being able to extrapolate anything from a tiny number of data points?
It sounds a bit too much like the claim that a sufficiently intelligent being could “make A = ~A” or other such meaninglessness.
Hyperintelligence != magic
I’m loving these semantics/logic posts. Well done.
The easy solution is just to realize that words are labels and nothing more—end of story. It’s just that that’s quite a hard lesson to internalize.
He’s making some interesting points, and he gets extra credit in my view for taking so radical a view while usually remaining reasonable. I find his railing against prediction to be puzzling, but his semantic points and discussion of Ptolemaic explanations have given me a lot to think about.
I also noticed that even some of his friendly, reasoned posts were being downvoted to the same extreme negative levels, which seems unwarranted. He has posted too much without familiarizing himself with the norms here, but he shows sincerity and willingness to learn and adapt. He got a little testy a few times, but he also apologized a lot.
All in all, with a few notable exceptions, it looks like he is getting downvoted mainly for unfamiliarity with LW posting style and for disagreeing with “settled science” (I myself am not too partial to that term). Perhaps also for some unconventional spellings and other idiosyncrasies.
I’m open to being corrected on this, but I think I have read this entire thread and I am pretty sure Monkeymind is not deliberately trolling. High inferential distance feels like trolling so often that it’s almost a forum trope. I myself am enjoying some of his posts and the responses.
I’ll change my mind if he continues with the present posting style, though.
Short: I, Pencil by Leonard E. Reed
Long: Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
Very long: Socialism by Ludwig von Mises, or any of F.A. Hayek’s work on spontaneous order
(All available in pdf form by googling, though some may be copyrighted)
For specific questions, the Mises forums will happily supply you with arguments and tailored links for any economic questions. Just be sure to ask for arguments on consequentialist grounds since the forum is idealogically extremely libertarian (but friendly).
If you’re looking for something more mild of the John Stossel or Milton Friedman variety, try anything by Friedman himself, or Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy—though these may not align with libertarian arguments on monetary policy.
Also, how far do you look away?
it’s true that you should do what you should even if you have no idea what “should” means.
How do I go about interpreting that statement if I have no idea what “should” means?
The only problem is, part of the meaning of the post is its context, and sometimes the author’s identity provides context. Like when multiple people are having a discussion and someone says, “As I wrote above...” or something. They could just link everything, but it’d be best if the anti-kibitzer assigned random names or numbers to each commenter in a given thread—or something like that. That way you’d at least be able to follow a discussion. Or does it already do that?
You’re aware that words have more than one definition, and in debates it is customary to define key terms before beginning? Perhaps I could interest you in this.
There is some ineffable something in those who are distinctly uncooperative with requests to define morality or otherwise have a rational discussion on the matter, both here and on all forums where I’ve discussed morality, and I think you’ve hit on what that something is. It is the fear of nihilism, the fear that without their moral compass they might suddenly want to do evil, deplorable things because they’d be A-okay.
What they don’t see, in my opinion, is that it is their very dread at such a possibility that is really what is keeping them from doing those things. “Morality” provides no additional protection; it merely serves as after-the-fact justification of the sentiments that were already there.
We don’t cringe at the thought of stealing from old ladies because it’s wrong, but rather we call it wrong to steal from old ladies because we cringe at the thought.