DavidAgain

Karma: 740

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 11:48 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2013
Are you saying you don’t experience qualia and find them a bit surprising (in a way you don’t for containerness)? I find it really hard to not see arguments of this kind as a little disingenous: is the issue genuinely not difficult for some people, or is this a rhetorical stance intended to provoke better arguments, or awareness of the weakness of current arguments?

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 11:43 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2013
Indeed: though artificial systems are more intuitively difficult as we don’t have as clear an intuitive expectation.

You can take an outside view and say ‘this will dissolve like the other mysteries’. I just genuinely find this implausible, if only because you can take steps towards the other mysteries (speaking bad Russian occasionally) and because you have a clear empirical standard (russians). Whereas for consciousness I don’t have any standard for identifying another’s consciousness: I do it only by analogy with myself and by the implausibility of me having an apparently causal element that others who act similarly to me lack.

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 11:39 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2013
I have no reliable answers! And I have low meta-confidence levels (in that it seems clear to me that people and most other creatures are conscious but I have no confidence in why I think this)

If the Dennett position still sees this as a complete bafflement but thinks it will be resolved with the so-called ‘soft’ problem, I have less of an issue than I thought I did. Though I’d still regard the view that the issue will become clear one of hope rather than evidence.

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 11:35 PM
2 points
in reply to: Kawoomba’s comment on: On manipulating others
A truly effective altruist might be justified in doing all sorts of things on consequentialist grounds. But I think incredibly few people are effective altruists. Once someone has reached the point of giving away almost all their money, doing things that make them clearly unhappy etc. for the point of the greater good, then I would see their manipulative actions in a different way. Where people actually inhabit a border-world where they can wield wider influence outside of a social context I think some radical positions can be justified: at the apex of revolution, killing the children can be justified for the greater good etc.

I just think there’s a natural scepticism about these sort of reasons when they’re used to justified to trick your way into getting laid.

Using ‘selfish’ to mean maximising your own utility function also bleeds meaning out of things: by what possible definition would someone not be selfish here? Does selfish simply mean incompetent: a person who actually values others but in practice tries to accumulate wealth and power is unselfish in this sense? You’re doing violence to language here. It might be justified if the main tension in life was between different models of utility, but given that for most people the immediate tension is between what you should do and what suits you, redefining selfishness is incredibly unhelpful.

I’d also be interested in what ‘valuing people’ you got from what I was responding to:

“I empathize with some girl about whatever dopey thing she and her girlfriends have got in to, which I couldn’t have the least bit of interest in, but I am a nice guy. Later we have sex.”

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 10:49 PM
0 points
in reply to: Decius’s comment on: On manipulating others
It doesn’t uniquely determine it: but again, in any common usage sense it’s important. Phrases like ‘fair weather friend’ and similar stories etc. denote the basic human understanding that we see friendship motivated directly for favours isn’t friendship. If someone seemed to be my friend and it turned out they just like the fact I buy drinks, I would feel betrayed as they’d exploited what friendship is understood to be.

Are you saying that this view should be overturned, or that it isn’t actually the common understanding of friendship?

Would it not matter to you if a close friend turned out to be your ‘friend’ purely for the assoicated favours?

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 10:45 PM
4 points
in reply to: Kawoomba’s comment on: On manipulating others
The fact I’m not convinced it gives the girl utilons is basically my point: I’m a consequentialist at heart. My experience suggests that people sleeping with people who pretend to like them but actually hold them in contempt does not lead to good things. Not sure where avatars or crying in the corner comes into that.

The ‘people are people’ paradigm is translating an incredibly detailed, recursive consequentialist approach into a rule you can actually live by. It’s theoretically possible this person who screws people they detest is maximising mutual happiness, but it’s implausible to me. That person could probably sleep with someone who doesn’t hold them in contempt, for starters. I get the attraction of acting as a disinterest benefit-maximiser for the world—in my most recent real-world moral dispute I got in trouble for precisely this sort of attempt to tinker—but when it happens to correlate with getting laid I’m not convinced many people are good at analysing the situation.

If that’s the genuine intention, I think it shows a failure to allow for human nature. But I think in practice, one of the problems of the approach is that it makes it all too easy to justify whatever you feel like doing in terms of utilons.

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 10:23 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2013
Ok, well given that responses to pain/pleasure can equally be explained by more direct evolutionary reasons, I’m not sure that the inference from action to experience is very useful. Why would you ever connect these things with expereince rather than other, more directly measurable things?

But the point is definitely not that I have a magic bullet or easy solution: it’s that I think there’s a real and urgent question—are they conscious—which I don’t see how information about responses etc. can answer. Compare to the cases of containment, or heat, or life—all the urgent questions are already resolved before those issues are even raised.

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 10:17 PM
0 points
in reply to: Kawoomba’s comment on: On manipulating others
I was asked where I draw the line, and this to me is beyond the line. So far beyond the line that it’s a dot to you etc. etc.. There may be plenty of people who agree that this sort of thing is fine, although I’m not clear on what they’re agreeing with. Are you saying it can be a moral good to ‘manipulate people who you hold into contempt into sleeping with you’ because everyone wins: they get the benefit of your (false) empathy and nice-guyness and you get sex? Or that this is a misrepresentation and everything’s more innocent than that.

But my problem is not any feigned interest at all—that’s part of a whole host of social dynamics—it’s about treating people as things. Feigning interest can actually be part of recognising that people are people. But doing it to get what you came for? Not so much.

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 10:06 PM
0 points
in reply to: Decius’s comment on: On manipulating others
Of being someone’s friend? Maybe: I guess the question is how the word is used in practice. Worth asking other people about; is someone who cultivate a relationship with someone for favours a friend? I think it’s almost the definition of not a friend, but I may be using words unusually.

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 10:04 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2013
I have a lot of sympathy for this. The most plausible position of reductive materialism is simply that at some future scientific point this will become clear. But this is inevitably a statement of faith, rather than acknoweldging current acheivement. It’s very hard to compare current apparent mysteries to solved mysteries—I do get that. Having said that, I can’t even see what the steps on the way to explaining consciousness would be, and claiming there is not such thing seems not to be an option (unlike ‘life’, ‘free will’ etc.) whereas most other cases you rely on saying that you can’t see how the full extent could be achieved: a machine might speak crap Russian in some circumstances etc.

Also, if a machine can speak Russian, you can check that. I don’t know how we’d check a machine was conscious.

BTW, when I said ‘it seems subjective experience is just being ignored’, I meant ignored in your and Dennett’s arguments, not in specific explanations. I have nothing against analysing things in ways that ignore consciousness, if they work.

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 9:56 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2013
Maybe we couldn’t, but A is simply asserting that containership is a concept beyond its parts, whereas I’m appealing directly to experience: the relevance of this is that whether something has experience matters. Ultimately for any case, if others just express bewilderment in your concepts and apparently don’t get what you’re talking about, you can’t prove it’s an issue. But at any rate, most people seem to have subjective experience.

Being conscious isn’t a label I apply to certain conscious-type systems that I deem ‘valuable’ or ‘true’ in some way. Rather, I want to know what systems should be associated with the clearly relevant and important category of ‘conscious’

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 9:49 PM
−2 points
in reply to: Decius’s comment on: On manipulating others
It depends on your ethical approach. At core, I think utilitarianism is true. But it’s complex to apply to dynamic situatuons, and as a practical rule of thumb for normal cases, virtue ethics helps. And in that model (as well as in any natural discussion), ‘being someone’s friend’ to get favours is not in fact being someone’s friend. It’s deceiving them, and possibly you.

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 9:46 PM
1 point
in reply to: DavidAgain’s comment on: On manipulating others
Follow-up: I’m a little drunk, but my instincts are SCREAMING against your post’s whole language: ‘some girl’, ‘whatever dopey thing’, the false sincerity or lack of awareness in ‘I’m a nice guy’ etc. This just reads like an approach of trying to manipulate people who hold in contempt into sleeping with you. Hopefully it’s a hypothetical or I’m misreading it, but at a gut level this is pretty sad, and pretty horrible.

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 9:41 PM
0 points
in reply to: mwengler’s comment on: On manipulating others
Bit of a random question. Are you saying that in the system the person above me used is ’I am providing her incentives to benefit me in the form of believing I care about her life—and ultimately it leads to most benefit for me (sex) but also benefit for her (faked sympathy? sex? not clear from your account)

If you mean where do I draw the line in manipulation, this doesn’t look like ‘providing incentives’, and given it involves open deception it looks more like trickery. Though frankly if I thought someone was trying to ‘provide incentives’ for a friend of mine to sleep with them, I’d advise my friend to run a mile. There’s no absolute line here, but a good rule of thumb is provided by Terry Pratchett: don’t treat people as things.

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 3:51 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2013
I may not remember Chalmer’s soft problem well enough either for reference of that to help!

If experiences are a consequence of our neurobiology, fine. Presumably a consequence that itself has consequences: experiences can be used in causal explanations? But it seems to me that we could explain how a bat uses echolocation without knowing what echolocation looks like (sounds like? feels like?) to a bat. And that we could distinguish how well people distinguish wavelengths of light etc. without knowing what the colour looks like to them.

It seems subjective experience is just being ignored: we could identify that an AI could carry out all sorts of tasks that we associate with consciousness, but I have no idea when we’d say ‘it now has conscious experiences’. Or whether we’d talk about degrees of conscious experience, or whatever. This is obviously ethically quite important, if not that directly pertinent to me, and it bothers me that I can’t respond to it.

With a container, you describe various qualities and that leaves the question ‘can it contain things’: do things stay in it when put there. You’re adding a sort of purpose-based functional classification to a physical object. When we ask ‘is something conscious’, we’re not asking about a function that it can perform. On a similar note, I don’t think we’re trying to reify something (as with the case where we have a sense of objects having ongoing identity, which we then treat as a fundamental thing and end up asking if a ship is the same after you replace every component of it one by one). We’re not chasing some over-abstracted ideal of consciousness, we’re trying to explain an experienced reality.

So to answer A, I’d say ‘there is no fundamental property of ‘containment’. It’s just a word we use to describe one thing surrounded by another in circumstances X and Y. You’re over-idealising a useful functional concept’. The same is not true of consciousness, because it’s not (just) a function.

It might help if you could identify what, in light of a Dennett-type approach, we can identify as conscious or not. I.e. plants, animals, simple computers, top-level computers, theoretical super-computers of various kinds, theoretical complex networks divided across large areas so that each signal from one part to another takes weeks…

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 2:22 PM
4 points
in reply to: Decius’s comment on: On manipulating others
Benefits compared to what? The main issue in any (personal, business or whatever) relationship is presumably opportunity cost. Convincing someone to make you their agent (and take 95% of their income from a groundbreaking novel they’ve written) benefits both of you financially compared to it not being sold. But it benefits them less than selling it through someone more fair-minded.

Also, manipulation does not just exist in providing incentives: it can involve misleading people on facts/reasoning, or psychologically tricking them into acting against their own interests.

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 2:15 PM
5 points
in reply to: Mestroyer’s comment on: Why do theists, undergrads, and Less Wrongers favor one-boxing on Newcomb?
It may well be the strength of argument. It could also be the lead of a very influential/respected figure and the power of groupthink. In my experience, 2 forums with similar mission statements (‘political debating sites’, say, or ‘atheist sites’) often end up having distinct positions on all sorts of things that most of their posters converge around. The same is true of any group, although if ‘theists’ was a genuine survey of theists the world over it’s at least a far more representative group.

It would be very interesting to add a control group in some way: confront someone with the issue who was of a typical LessWrong demographic but hadn’t read anything about Newcomb on Less Wrong for instance.

If it’s not just a quality of this sort of group-think, my best guess is that it’s to do with the greater practical focus (or at least theoretical belief in practical focus!) on LessWrong. I suspect most people automatically parse this sort of philosophical question as ‘what is more abstractly logical’ whereas people on here probably parse it more as ‘what should I do to win’. But I think these sort of ‘our inherent group qualities’ explanations are almost always locatable but often unnecessary in light of group-think.

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 1:54 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2013
But I don’t think conscious experience (qualia if you like) have been explained. I think we have some pretty good explanations of how people act, but I don’t see how it pierces through to consciousness as experienced, and linked questions such as ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ or ‘how do I know my green isn’t your red’

It would help if you could sum up the merely mechnical things that are ‘just what consciousness is’ in Dennett’s (or your!) sense. I’ve never been clear on what confident materialists are saying on this: I’m sometimes left with the impression that they’re denying that we have subjective experience, sometimes that they’re saying it’s somehow an inherent quality of other things, sometimes that it’s an incidental byproduct. All of these seem to be problematic to me.

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 1:18 PM
3 points
in reply to: bojangles’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2013
I’m not sure pleasure/pain is that useful, because 1) they have such an intuitive link to reaction/function 2) they might be meta-qualities: a similar sensation of pain can be strongly unpleasant, entirely tolerable or even enjoyable depending on other factors.

What you’ve done with colours is combine what feels like a somewhat arbitary/ineffable qualia and declare it inextricable associated with one that has direct behavioural terms involved. Your talk of what’s required to ‘make the inversion succesfully’ is misleading: what if the monkey has GREEN and antsiness rather than RED and antsiness?

It seems intuitive to assume ‘red’ and ‘green’ remain the same in normal conditions: but I’m left totally lost as to what ‘red’ would look like to a creature that could see a far wider or narrower spectrum than the one we can see. Or to that matter to someone with limited colour-blindness. There seems to me to be the Nagel ‘what is it like to be a bat’ problem, and I’ve never understood how that dissolves.

It’s been a long time since I read Dennett, but I was in the camp of ‘not answering the question, while being fascinating around the edges and giving people who think qualia are straightforward pause for thought’. No-one’s ever been able to clearly explain how his arguments work to me, to the point that I suggest that either I or they are fundamentally missing something.

If the hard problem of consciousness has really been solved I’d really like to know!

DavidAgain Jun 19, 2013, 12:57 PM
0 points
in reply to: taelor’s comment on: The Classic Literature Workshop
I’m not sure what I liked about the film so much: I’m a sucker for Lurhmann in general. But there’s something more general about privilege and carelessness, and the dismissal of those outside an enchanted circle, going on in it for me: these might be particularly well-shown in the jazz age, but they aren’t limited to it. There’s clearly something about the American Dream going on—apparently Fitzgerald tried to change the title to ‘Under the Red, White and Blue’, but I think being British I don’t fully get the American Dream either intellectually or emotionally.

Then again, this is
- just the film
  - probably heavily influenced by half-hearing about it and expecting an entirely different story (I thought Gatsby was the dangerously careless one and that the narrator would be drawn into his glitzy world but wouldn’t have the money and power to escape the bad sides and would be discarded)
I saw the film with people who’d read (and possibly briefly studied) it, and I suspect my view isn’t typical. For instance, I saw a clear and direct read-across between Gatsby and Steerpike (from Gormenghast), and everyone thought I was just being weird...