Benjy Forstadt

Karma: 65

Benjy Forstadt 11 Jun 2023 1:11 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Mergimio H. Doefevmil’s comment on: Understanding why illusionism does not deny the existence of qualia
Hmm. It gets tricky because we get into like, what does the English word “experience” mean. “Phenomenal properties” is supposed to pick out the WOW! aspect of experiences, that thing that’s really obvious and vivid that makes us speculate about dualism and zombies. I think Frankish uses “experience” basically to mean whatever neural events cause us to talk about pain, hunger etc, so I don’t think an eliminativist would deny those exist. But I’m not sure.

Benjy Forstadt 5 May 2023 3:11 UTC
6 points
5
on: Understanding why illusionism does not deny the existence of qualia
Illusionism is the doctrine that phenomenal consciousness does not exist. Frankish introduced the term, so it makes sense to anchor it to his usage.

In the essay “Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness”, Frankish makes very clear that he is not advocating a “conservative realist” position in which phenomenal properties can be reduced to brain states. Illusionism is in fact ideologically close to dualism—both agree that phenomenal properties are too weird to be explained by physical phenomena, they just disagree on what to make of this. He distinguishes between weak illusionism and strong illusionism—weak illusionists deny some of phenomenal consciousness’s putative features, whereas strong illusionism denies that it exists altogether. Illusionism is to be understood as strong illusionism. Finally, illusionism should not be understood as the denial of experiences altogether—we have sensations like pain and color, it is just that introspection falsely depicts them as possessing phenomenal properties.

NOW, there is definitely room for confusion and equivocation here, because the meaning of “phenomenal consciousness” is not perfectly clear. The main idea seems to be that introspection systematically misrepresents our own experiences in a way that gives rise to dualist intuitions. At this point I lose a grip on what is meant by statements like “An illusionist would not deny the existence of 🟩”

Benjy Forstadt 5 May 2023 1:36 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: Mergimio H. Doefevmil’s comment on: Understanding why illusionism does not deny the existence of qualia

when we say that A is B, we generally do not mean that A is strictly identical to B—which it clearly isn’t. This applies even when we say things like 2+2 = 4. Obviously, “2+2” and “4″ are not even close to being identical.

This seems to mix up labels and referents. 2+2 is strictly identical to 4. The statement “2+2=4” is not the same as the statement “‘2+2’=‘4’”

Benjy Forstadt 23 Feb 2023 16:38 UTC
6 points
4
on: AGI is likely to be cautious
It seems that this may unfortunately make s-risk more likely, as AGI may find it worthwhile to run experiments on humans. See “More on the ‘human experimentation’ s-risk” at the bottom of this page: https://www.reddit.com/r/SufferingRisk/wiki/intro/

Benjy Forstadt 17 Dec 2022 23:48 UTC
11 points
−1
on: How to Convince my Son that Drugs are Bad
Two things one might be considered about with regard to psychedelic usage are acute highly unpleasant experiences (“bad trips”) and HPPD. Anecdotally, both happened to me from my first and only psychedelic experience.

My HPPD is very mild now and doesn’t bother me, though it did at first. Some people have other drugs on hand during their psychedelic experiences as “tripkillers” in case they have a very bad psychological reaction.

Psychedelics are pretty psychologically strong stuff and I would not recommend experimenting with them at your son’s age.

Benjy Forstadt 6 Sep 2022 19:04 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: Dan’s comment on: Simulators
I think the intuition error in the Chinese Room thought experiment is that the Chinese Room doesn’t know Chinese, just because it’s the wrong size/made out of the wrong stuff.

If GPT-3 was literally a Giant Lookup Table of all possible prompts with their completions then sure, I could see what you’re saying, but it isn’t. GPT is big but it isn’t that big. All of its basic “knowledge” it gains during training but I don’t see why that means all the “reasoning” it produces happens during training as well.

Benjy Forstadt 19 Jun 2022 15:09 UTC
12 points
on: To what extent have ideas and scientific discoveries gotten harder to find?
Nabokov is less popular and more prestigious than JK Rowling, and I prefer reading him, and get more pleasure out of doing so. I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that people who say they prefer Beethoven to nightcore are lying to themselves. People’s tastes really do differ quite a lot.

I also think “only listen to/read/watch whatever gives you most units of pleasure per minute” is a meme that discourages people from seeking out a wide range of experiences. It’s suspiciously “wireheady”. If life was just guilty pleasures it would be a lot more boring. Better to take the risk of listening to jazz for a while, before realizing you’ve only been pretending to like it, then to just listen to pop music all the time and miss out on the possibly of having a new kind of experience.

Benjy Forstadt 11 Dec 2020 22:50 UTC
5 points
on: Books That Are Not Meant for Everyone
Borges is a very famous writer, so the fact that people keep mentioning him is not much evidence of coordination

Benjy Forstadt 17 Oct 2020 6:00 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ike’s comment on: This Territory Does Not Exist

Anticipated experience is just my estimate for the percentage of future-mes with said experience. Whether any of those future-mes “actually exist” is meaningless, though, it’s all just models.

So the idea is that you’re taking a percentage of the yous that exist across all possible models consistent with the data? Why? And how? I can sort of understand the idea that claims about the external world are meaningless in so far as they don’t constrain expectations. But now this thing we’ve been calling expectations is being identified with a structure inside the models whose whole purpose is to constrain our expectations. It seems circular to me.

It didn’t have to be this way, that the best way to predict experiences was by constructing models of an external world. There are other algorithms that could have turned out to be useful for this. Some people even think that it didn’t turn out this way, and that quantum mechanics is a good example.

Why? You’ll end up with many models which fit the data, some of which are simpler, but why is any one of those the “best”?

I care about finding the truth. I think I have experiences, and my job is to use this fact to find more truths. The easiest hypotheses for me to think of that incorporate my data make ontological claims. My priors tell me that something like simplicity is a virtue, and if we’re talking about ontological claims, that means simpler ontological claims are more likely. I manage to build up a really large and intricate system of ontological claims that I hold to be true. At the margins, some ontological distinctions feel odd to maintain, but by and large it feels pretty natural.

Now, suppose I came to realize that ontological claims were in fact meaningless. Then I wouldn’t give up my goal of finding truths, I would just look elsewhere, maybe at logical, or mathematical, or maybe even moral truths. These truths don’t seem adequate to explain my data, but maybe I’m wrong. They are also just as suspicious to me as ontological truths. I might also look for new kinds of truths. I think it’s definitely worth it too try and look at the world (sorry) non-ontologically.

Benjy Forstadt 17 Oct 2020 2:54 UTC
1 point
on: This Territory Does Not Exist
A couple thoughts:
I think of explanations as being prior to predictions. The goal of (epistemic) rationality, for me, is not to accurately predict what future experiences I will have. It’s to come up with the best model of reality that includes the experiences I’m having right now.

I’ve even lately come to be skeptical of the notion of anticipated experience. In Many Worlds, there is no such thing as “what I will experience”, there are just future people descended from me who experience different things. There are substitute notions that play the role of beliefs about future experiences, but they aren’t the same thing.

Experiences are physical processes in the world. If you have beliefs about your future experiences, then you must either have beliefs about physical processes, or you have to be a dualist. If you don’t have beliefs about experiences, but instead just “anticipate” them, then idk.
There is an odd question that I think about sometimes - why does “exist” refer to actual real world existence, as opposed to something like “exists according to Max Tegmark”, or “exists inside the observable universe”? I’m taking for granted that there is a property of existence—the question is, how do we manage to pick it out? There are a couple ideas off the top of my head that could answer this question. Reference magnetism is the idea that some properties are so special that they magically cause our words to be about them. Existence is pretty special - it’s a property that everything has. Alternatively, maybe “exist” acquires its meaning somehow through our interaction with the physical world—existent things are those things that I can causally interact with. This option has the “benefit” of ruling out the possibility of causally isolated parallel worlds.

Benjy Forstadt 11 Sep 2020 22:23 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ike’s comment on: The Short Case for Verificationism
I think for your purposes you can just define meaningless as “neither true nor false” without detouring into possibility

Benjy Forstadt 11 Sep 2020 22:21 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ike’s comment on: The Short Case for Verificationism
By cosmological multiverse, I mean Level I or II. It is arguable that the distinction between branching and diverging is meaningless, or that Level I and II should be viewed as branching, but that is not the usual view.

I think it’s clear it’s not meaningless, and that those who think it’s meaningless just favor viewing every kind of splitting as branching. Let me explain: To say the future branches, what I mean is that there is no fact of the matter what exactly will happen in the future. To say the future diverges, what I mean, is that there is a fact of the matter about what will happen in the future, but that there are observers just like me who will observe a different future.

Either there is a fact of the matter what will happen in the future, or there isn’t (?!). It may indeed be the case that the concept of diverging is incoherent, in which case the only kind of splitting is branching. This is a heterodox view, however.

Benjy Forstadt 11 Sep 2020 21:47 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ike’s comment on: The Short Case for Verificationism
I think I agree it makes verificationism a bit more plausible if you already find Tegmark IV plausible.

Regarding the quantum multiverse—yes, I agree, that is the usual way of thinking about things, moreover the usual thinking is that most ordinary statements about the future are similarly indeterminate. On the other hand, this isn’t the usual thinking about the cosmological multiverse. In a quantum multiverse, universes literally branch, in a cosmological multiverse, universes merely diverge. So, assuming the usual views about these multiverses are correct, would Level IV be like the quantum multiverse or would it be like the cosmological multiverse?

I can see both ways, but on reflection, it seems more natural to say it’s like the quantum multiverse. On the cosmological picture, for every consistent mathematical structure, you’ve got a separate self contained world, and there can be a lot of duplicate structure across worlds, but there can’t be duplicate worlds. It seems to make a weird distinction between worlds and the substructures in worlds. On the quantum picture, you can think of the observer as a mathematical structure in its own right, that is instantiated in many different larger structures, and there’s no fundamental notion of “world”.

So fine, this gives you something like verificationism.

Benjy Forstadt 11 Sep 2020 20:36 UTC
5 points
on: The Short Case for Verificationism
This looks like an argument, not for verificationism, but for the impossibility of knowing that verificationism is false. This seems unproblematic to me.

I am also skeptical of premise 3. It relies on a certain conception of personal identity in Level IV—that in some sense we are all our copies in the multiverse, so they count as a single observer

Benjy Forstadt 10 Aug 2020 5:50 UTC
8 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: What would be a good name for the view that the value of our decisions is primarily determined by how they affect causally-disconnected regions of the multiverse?
I think “acausal-focused” works well as an adjective, compare to “suffering-focused”. As a noun, perhaps “acausal-focused altruism”?

Benjy Forstadt 3 Apr 2019 2:29 UTC
1 point
in reply to: drnickbone’s comment on: [Poll] Less Wrong and Mainstream Philosophy: How Different are We?
I strongly agree. This has been discussed in the literature, I believe. For instance, it comes up in discussions of the semantic paradoxes. There is no paradox involved in “disquotation” for propositions: the proposition that p just is the proposition that it’s true that p.

When you’re talking about sentences though, you run into the liar paradox if you say that “p” is true if and only if p.