Lance Bush

Karma: 110

Lance Bush 17 Aug 2021 20:27 UTC
1 point
on: Thoughts on Moral Philosophy
I don’t endorse relativism/subjectivism, however, relativist positions do not strike me as especially troublesome or implausible, nor do they seem to me to entail biting any bullets.
You state that you dislike arguments for relativism/subjectivism because they involve handwaving and biting bullets. Could you say a bit more about this? What kind of handwaving do you have in mind? And what bullets do you think these arguments lead one to bite?
I’m also interested in why you consider Parfit’s Future Tuesday thought experiment to be the best attempt (at getting around the is-ought divide I take it?), and more generally what (if anything) you think the thought experiment demonstrates or provides evidence for. I grant that “best” doesn’t necessarily mean good or convincing and I recognize that you don’t find these arguments completely persuasive, but I don’t find Parfit’s considerations even slightly persuasive.
I am also intrigued by the suggestion that “people generally believe that we can have knowledge about mathematics.” Sure, but we can also have knowledge about the rules of soccer or chess, but I don’t think that the rules of these games are stance-independently true. They are constructed. Just the same, the rules of mathematics could likewise be constructed. The fact that we can have knowledge of something does not entail realism about that thing in the sense Parfit and other non-naturalist moral realists are claiming there are objective moral facts (i.e., they don’t think these facts are true in the way the rules of soccer are). In any case, claims about what people generally believe about the metaphysics of mathematics seems like an empirical question; is there convincing data that people are generally mathematical realists?
Either way, I don’t see much reason to infer that there are objective moral facts even if there are objective mathematical facts; while I grant that identifying examples of bodies of non-empirical knowledge (like math) raises the plausibility of other bodies of non-empirical knowledge (like morality), this provides at best only marginal evidence of the possibility of the latter; it’s hardly a good reason to think moral realism is tenable.

Lance Bush 18 Aug 2021 6:05 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: Thoughts on Moral Philosophy
People may say those sorts of things, but it is easy to find poor representation for any position. Relativism/subjectivism as they are put forward by moral philosophers are a very different thing, and are less (or not at all) susceptible to the kinds of concerns you raise.
The persistence of intractable disagreement is the tip of a bigger iceberg for reasons to doubt moral realism; I share your view that it is not very strong evidence, but there are other reasons, and the overall picture seems to me to overwhelmingly favor the antirealist position. At the very least, the persistence of disagreement can spark a broader discussion about how one would go about determining what the allegedly objective moral facts are, and I don’t think moral realists have anything very convincing to say on the epistemic front.
Then there’s the fact that they seems to be denying people the ability to claim anything is right or wrong, except for them personally or from within the perspective of their culture, whilst simultaneously claiming the relativity or subjectivity of morality universally.
Some relativists may do this, but relativism as a metaethical stance does not require or typically entail the claim that people don’t have the ability to claim anything is right or wrong except with respect to that person’s standards or the standards of their culture.
Insofar as relativism includes a semantic thesis, the thesis is that as a matter of fact this is what people mean when they make moral claims; not that they lack the ability to do otherwise. In other words, the relativist might say “when people make moral claims, they intend to report facts that are implicitly indexicalized to themselves or their culture’s standards.” The semantic aspect of relativism is about the meaning of ordinary moral thought and discourse; it isn’t (necessarily) a strict requirement that nobody could speak or think differently.
Relativists can and do acknowledge the existence of people who don’t speak or think this way; after all, they often find themselves arguing with moral realists, whose reflective moral stance is that there are non-relative moral facts. The relativist might adopt an error theory towards these people.
I’m not entirely sure I understand the last part, about simultaneously claiming the “relativity or subjectivity of morality universally.”
Well, a lot of people who support relativism/subjectivism just want us to be more respectful of other people’s perspectives and cultures or believe that we should stay out of things that aren’t our business—if they actually saw a women being stoned to death for adultery, their position would change pretty fast.
It may be that some people’s relativism is really just a clumsy and roundabout way to endorse tolerance towards others, but that’s a problem for these people’s views, it isn’t really a problem with relativism as a metaethical position; relativism as a metaethical position doesn’t entail and isn’t really about tolerance.
Also, when you say that people’s position would change pretty fast, do you mean that they’d endorse some form of realism? People whose apparent metaethical standards change when asked about atrocities may very well be confused, as the question may give the rhetorical impression that if they don’t object to atrocities in the realist sense, that they don’t object to them at all. This simply isn’t the case. Relativists who fold under pressure when presented with atrocities don’t need to: nothing about relativism requires that one be any less opposed, disgusted, and outraged by stoning adulterers.
In any case, what kind of people do you have in mind? Are these laypeople who don’t study metaethics? I study metaethics, and I am an antirealist; my particular stance is different than relativists/subjectivists, but I share with them the denial that there are objective moral facts. My metaethical standards don’t change in response to people pointing to actions I oppose; my opposition to those actions is fully consistent with antirealism.
Well, most people agree that the Future Tuesday preference is objectively wrong or bad or mistaken.
Do they? That’s an empirical question. In any case, even if most people did, I’d just say these people are mistaken. Most people agreeing on something is at best very weak evidence for whatever it is they agree on. I’ve discussed the Future Tuesday indifference scenario several times and have yet to hear a good explanation as to how one extracts towards objectivity, or external reasons, or justify claiming the agent in the scenario is “irrational,” etc. The typical response I get is simply that it “seems intuitive” or something like that. Should we take other people’s intuitions to be probative of the truth? If so, why?
FWIW, I don’t even think the type of moral realism Parfit was going for is intelligible. So when people report that they intuit implications from the Future Tuesday thought experiment, I’m not entirely clear on what it is they’re claiming seems to be true to them; that is, I don’t think it even makes sense to say something is objectively right or wrong. Happy to discuss this further!
Finally, regarding what I think may be going on: it seems far more plausible that people reading the scenario are projecting their own notions of what would or wouldn’t be rational onto the agent in the scenario, and mistakenly thinking that there is some stance-independent standard of what is “rational.” In other words, they’re actually just imputing their own standards onto agents without realizing it. Personally, I just don’t think there’s anything irrational about future Tuesday indifference.
If we concede that some non-moral preferences are objectively better than others, then analogously it seems plausible that some moral preferences could be objectively better than others.
Unfortunately, I also do not agree with this. It’s not just that I don’t think it makes any sense to describe some preferences as objectively better than others. It’s that even if there were objective nonmoral normative facts, I don’t think this provides much support for moral realism.
I’m also simply not sure it’s true that moral facts are similar to preferences. I am not sure that’s true, and I am not sure that if it is that whatever respects in which they’re similar provide much a reason to take moral realism seriously. After all, unicorns are quite similar to horses, but the existence of horses is hardly a good reason to think the existence of unicorns is plausible.
Consider a hypothetical society that had a completely distinct sui generis category of norms that aren’t moral norms, they are, say, “zephyrian norms.” Zephyrian norms developed over the centuries in this society in response to a wide array of considerations, and are built around regulating and maintaining social order through adherence to various rituals, taboos, and ceremonial practices. For instance, one important zephyrian norm revolves around never wearing the color blue, because it is intrinsically unzephyrian to do so.
I take it you and I would find “zephyrian realism” utterly implausible. There’s just no reason to think it’s objectively bad to wear blue, or to sing the Hymn of the Aegis every 7th moon. Yet if we grew up in a society with zephyrian norms, we may regard them as distinct from and just as important as moral norms.
And we could argue that, if objectivism about preferences is true, then it seems plausible there could be objective zephyrian facts about what we should or shouldn’t do. Of course, zephyrian realism is false; there are no objective zephyrian facts.
That there might be some other normative facts does very little to increase the plausibility of zephyrian realism. I think the same holds for moral realism. Even if preference realism were true, none of us would be tempted to take zephyrian realism much more seriously. Likewise, it’s not clear why preference realism should does much to render moral realism more plausible.

Lance Bush 18 Aug 2021 17:26 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: Thoughts on Moral Philosophy
Great, thanks for clarifying. I am a very enthusiastic proponent of moral antirealism so feel free to get in touch if you want to discuss metaethics.

Lance Bush 24 Oct 2021 22:21 UTC
2 points
on: Frankfurt Declaration on the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness
I’ve seen people cite this declaration and appeal to it as authoritative on numerous occasions. Unfortunately, it is presented as though it represents some kind of expert consensus, when the people involved may not even be experts on the topic, and hardly represent any kind of consensus.

Yet, while I would want to suggest that we consult philosophers of mind, even they seem drawn to what strike me as dubious, intuition-based reasons for presuming animals are conscious in ways analogous to humans with what strikes me as far too low of standards for drawing such inferences.

My impression early on is that something like Dennett’s approach was likely to win out eventually, even if Dennett’s early account was superseded by more comprehensive and accurate accounts. The resistance to Dennett’s views, which often consists of dismissive, uncharitable caricatures, is also quite alarming.

I’d check out Dennett’s paper, “Animal Consciousness: What Matters and Why”:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40971115?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

Lance Bush 24 Oct 2021 22:23 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: Frankfurt Declaration on the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness
An eliminativist might say no, but insofar as I would say “yes,” I would be wary of thinking that we can confidently infer what the experiences (if any) of any particular animal species are like based on what strike me as premature and weak forms of evidence.

Lance Bush 29 Oct 2021 13:36 UTC
5 points
on: I Really Don’t Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Position on Consciousness
I suspect I endorse something like what Yudkowsky seems to be claiming. Essentially, I think that humans are uniquely disposed (at least among life on earth) to develop a kind of self-model, and that nonhuman animals lack the same kind of systems that we have. As a result, whatever type of consciousness they have, I think it is radically unlike what we have. I don’t know what moral value, if any, I would assign to nonhuman animals were I to know more about their mental lives or what type of “consciousness” they have, but I am confident that the current high level of confidence people have that animals have rich conscious experiences is not justified. I wrote an old comment on this I’ve shared a couple of times. Here it is:
I think that what we take to be our conscious experience involves a capacity for “checking in” on an ongoing internal narrative, or story that we are constantly “telling ourselves” that functions to provide a unified timeline which we can utilize, report on, and talk about with others. I think this “narrative center of gravity” requires a degree of cultural input, and the inculcation of specific memes/concepts that lead us to form a sense of a self that integrates our experiences and that can think about “our” past experiences and “our” future experiences. In a sense, I think that conscious experience is built up as a sort of software that we have the hardware to develop, but requires a degree of developmental and cultural input to become fully operational. I don’t think animals have or need this capacity. As such, what it is like to be us is something we can talk about, but I am not convinced that there is anything it is “like” to be an animal.
This is a largely Dennettian view of consciousness, and I believe he coined or at least used the term “narrative center of gravity.”
You identify consciousness with having qualia.
However, I don’t know what you mean by qualia. While it remains sensible to me to attribute something like consciousness to humans, I would typically deny that we “have qualia” and would not define consciousness in terms of having qualia. Were others to do so, I’d deny we have that form of qualia. Perhaps Yudkowsky would, too. It really depends on what one means by “consciousness” and “qualia.”
I don’t know exactly what Yudkowsky thinks, so I wouldn’t put a number on it as you do (i.e., 15%). But, I’ll put it this way: I don’t know of any alternatives to something like Dennett/Frankish on illusionism that seem individually more plausible than illusionism. I don’t know if the collective weight of plausibility for all competing hypotheses is enough to push illusionism below 50%, but I don’t think so. So, while I am not overwhelmingly confident that something that seems roughly in the ballpark (if not very similar) to Yudkowsky’s view is correct, I have yet to see any viable alternatives. Most seem weird and to not capture what strike me as important elements of consciousness, or they seem to appeal to intuitions I don’t have and don’t trust in others.

Lance Bush 29 Oct 2021 21:54 UTC
3 points
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: I Really Don’t Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Position on Consciousness
The lack of an internal monologue is a distressing question to me. I run a constant inner monologue, and can’t imagine thinking differently. There may be some sense in which people who lack an inner monologue lack certain features of consciousness that others who do have one possess.
Part of the issue here is to avoid thinking of consciousness as either a discrete capacity one either has or doesn’t have, or even to think of it as existing a continuum, such that one could have “more” or “less” of it. Instead, I think of “consciousness” as a term we use to describe a set of both qualitative and quantitatively distinct capacities. It’d be a bit like talking about “cooking skills.” If someone doesn’t know how to use a knife, or start a fire, do they “lack cooking skills”? Well, they lack a particular cooking skill, but there is no single answer as to whether they “lack cooking skills” because cooking skills break down into numerous subskills, each of which may be characterized by its own continuum along which a person could be better or worse. Maybe a person doesn’t know how to start a fire, but they can bake amazing cakes if you give them an oven and the right ingredients.
This is why I am wary of saying that animals are “not conscious” and would instead say that whatever their “consciousness” is like, it would be very different from ours, if they lack a self-model and if a self-model is as central to our experiences as I think it is.
As for someone who lacks an inner monologue, I am not sure what to make of these cases. And I’m not sure whether I’d want to say someone without an inner monologue “isn’t conscious,” as that seems a bit strange. Rather, I think I’d say that they may lack a feature of the kinds of consciousness most of us have that strikes me, at first glance, as fairly central and important. But perhaps it isn’t. I’d have to think more about that, to consider whether an enculturated construction of a self-model requires an inner monologue. I do think it probably requires exposure to language...at least in practice, for humans (at least in practice, since I don’t think an AI would have to proceed through the same developmental stages as humans would to become conscious. And, of course, in principle you could print out an adult human brain, which could be conscious without having to itself have ever been subjected to childhood enculturation).
However, once the relevant concepts and structures have been “downloaded,” this may not require a very specific type of phenomenology. Maybe it does, but at the very least, we could point to substantial overlap in many of the functional outputs of people who lack inner monologues, analogues to those of us who do have an inner monologue that we would not observe in animals. People who lack inner monologues can still speak meaningfully about themselves in the past, make plans for the future, talk about themselves as agents operating within the world, employ theory of mind, would probably report that they are conscious, could describe their phenomenal experiences, and so on. In other words, there would be substantial functional overlap in the way they spoke, thought, and behaved, with only a few notable differences in how they describe their phenomenology. At least, I am supposing all this is the case. Maybe they are different in other ways, and if I knew about them, and really thought about this, it might have really disturbing implications. But I doubt that will turn out to be the case.
This reminds me of an idea for a science fiction novel. I don’t know where it came from, but I’m not sure I was the first to think if a scenario like this:
Suppose we discovered that some subset of the population definitely did not have conscious experiences, and that the rest of us did. And suppose we had some reliable test for determining who was or was not conscious. It was easy to administer, and we quickly found that our spouses, children, parents, closest friends, and so on, were not conscious at all. Such people were simply automata. There were no lights on inside. In short: they simply had no qualia at all.
How would society react? What would people do? One could imagine a story like this addressing both interpersonal relationships, and the broader, societal-scale implications of such discoveries. I hope someone can take that idea and run with it, and turn it into something worth reading or watching.

Lance Bush 29 Oct 2021 22:01 UTC
1 point
in reply to: J Bostock’s comment on: I Really Don’t Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Position on Consciousness
Yudkowsky specifically using the term is a good reason. Thanks for pointing that out, and now I feel a little silly for asking. He says, “I mean qualia, yes.” You can’t get more blunt than that.

While I agree that qualia is less ambiguous than other terms, I am still not sure it is sufficiently unambiguous. I don’t know what you mean by the term, for instance. Generally, though, I would say that I think consciousness exists, but that qualia do not exist.
I think illusionism does offer an account of consciousness; it’s just that consciousness turns out not to be what some people thought that it was. Personally, I don’t have and apparently have never had qualia intuitions, and thus never struggled with accepting Dennett’s views. This might be unusual, but the only view I ever recall holding on the matter was something like Dennett’s. His views immediately resonated with me and I adopted them the moment I heard them, with something similar to a “wow, this is obviously how it is!” response, and bewilderment that anyone could think otherwise.
I’m glad we agree most alternatives are poor. I do happen to agree that this isn’t especially good evidence against the plausibility of some compelling alternative to illusionism emerging. I definitely think that’s a very real possibility. But I do not think it is going to come out of the intuition-mongering methodology many philosophers rely on. I also agree that this is probably due to the difficulty of coming up with alternative models. Seems like we’re largely in agreement here, in that case.

Lance Bush 30 Oct 2021 5:40 UTC
1 point
in reply to: AprilSR’s comment on: I Really Don’t Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Position on Consciousness
I’m not sure I understand. What do you mean when you say it was coined to “describe a particular thing that humans experience”? Or maybe, to put this another way: at least in this conversation, what are you referring to with the term “qualia”?

Lance Bush 30 Oct 2021 16:17 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: I Really Don’t Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Position on Consciousness
Unfortunately, I don’t think the account of qualia you’ve presented is adequate.
First, I don’t know what is meant by “perceived sensation” of the pain of a headache. This could be cashed out in functional terms that don’t make appeal to what I am very confident philosophers are typically referring to when they refer to qualia. So this strikes me as a kind of veiled way of just using another word or phrase (in this case, “perceived sensation”) as a stand-in for “qualia,” rather than a definition. It’s a bit like saying the definition of morality is that it is “about ethics.”
I’m likewise at a loss about the second part of this. What is the qualitative character of a sensation? What does it mean to say that you’re referring to “what it is directly like to be experiencing” rather than a belief about experiences? Again, these just seem like roundabout ways of gesturing towards something that remains so underspecified that I still don’t know what people are talking about.
Whereas illusionism is almost impossible to define coherently.
Illusionism holds that our introspections about the nature of our conscious experiences are systematically mistaken in particular ways that induce people to hold the incorrect belief that our experiences have phenomenal properties.
I think this is a coherent position, and I’m reasonably confident it comports with how Dennett and Frankish would characterize it.
Where is that quote from? It seems to imply that all mental states are other propositional attitudes or perceptions. If so, that doesn’t seem right to me. Also, the complaint primarily seems to be with the name “illusionism.” I’m happy to call it delusionism. If we do that, do they still have an objection? If so, I’m not quite sure what the objection is.

Lance Bush 30 Oct 2021 17:01 UTC
1 point
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: I Really Don’t Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Position on Consciousness
Satisfactory for whom? I use examples because they are sufficient to get the point across to people who aren’t too biased.
It’s not satisfactory to me. Does this mean I am “too biased?” That seems like a potentially unjustified presumption to make, and not a fair way to have a discussion with others who might disagree with you.
Anyone could offer a definition then state in advance that anyone who doesn’t accept it is “too biased” then, when someone says they don’t accept it say “see, I told you so,” even if an unbiased person would judge the definition to be inadequate.
In any case, I’m not making a selective demand for rigor. Even if I were, I’d probably just shrug and raise the challenge, anyway. I don’t know what people talking about qualia are talking about. But I am also pretty confident they don’t know what they are talking about. I suspect qualia is a pseudoconcept invented by philosophers, and that to the extent that we adequately characterize it, it faces pretty serious challenges.
Where are the calls for rigourous definitions of “matter”, “computation”, etc?
The main person I discuss illusionism and consciousness with specializes in philosophy of computation and philosophy of science, with an emphasis on broad metaphysical questions. We both endorse illusionism, and have for years, so there’s little to say there. Instead, regularly we mostly discuss their views on computation and metaphysics, and I’m often asked to read their papers on these topics. So, in the past few years, I have read significantly more work on what computers and matter are than I have on consciousness.
Thus, ironically, I have more discussions about rigorous attempts to define computers and features of the external world than I do about consciousness. So if you think that, in denying qualia, I am somehow failing to apply a similar degree of rigor as I do to other ideas, you could not have picked worse examples. It is not the case that I’m especially tough on the notion of qualia.

Lance Bush 30 Oct 2021 18:50 UTC
1 point
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: I Really Don’t Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Position on Consciousness
Is “unmarried man” a mere stand-in for “bachelor”?

In some cases, but not others. One can reasonably ask whether the Pope is a bachelor, but for the purposes of technical philosophical work one might treat “unmarried man” and “bachelor” as identical in the context of some technical discussion.
They are ways of gesturing towards your own experience. If you refuse to introspect you are not going to get it.
I can understand if someone who doesn’t know me or my educational background might think that I just haven’t thought about the topic of qualia enough, or that I am refusing to introspect about it, but that isn’t the case. This isn’t a topic I’ve thought about only casually; it is relevant to my work.
That being said, I have introspected, and I have come to the conclusion that there isn’t anything to get with respect to qualia. Nothing about my introspection gives me any insight into what you or others mean by qualia. Instead, I have concluded that the notion of qualia that has trickled out from academic philosophy is most likely a conceptual confusion enshrining the kinds of introspective errors Dennett and others argue that people are prone to make.
Me.
Okay, thanks. I apologize for having had to ask but you provided a paragraph in quotation with no attribution, and it was difficult for me to interpret what that meant.
The phenomenon properties you mentioned...those are qualia. You have the concept , because you need the concept to say it’s illusory.
I have a kind of meta-concept: that other people have a concept of qualia but I myself am not personally acquainted with them, and would not say that I have the concept. One does not need to personally be subject to an illusion to believe that others are.
I know that other people purport to have a notion of qualia, but I do not. But thinking other people have mistaken or confused concepts does not require that one have the concept in the sense of possessing or understanding it. In other words, other people might tell me that there’s, e.g., “something it’s like” to see red or taste chocolate that somehow defies explanation, is private, is inaccessible, and so on. But I myself do not have such experiences.In such cases, I think people are simply confused, and that this can result in the case of believing in qualia in developing pseudoconcepts.
This isn’t the only case where I think this could or does occur. If people insisted they had a concept that was unintelligible or self-contradictory, such as a “colorless color” or if they insisted something could be “intrinsically north-facing,” I could hold that they are mistaken in having such concepts, , and maintain that I don’t “have the concept,” in that I am not actually capable of personally entertaining entertaining the notion of colorless colors or intrinsically north-facing objects.

In fact, this is exactly my position on non-naturalist moral realism: I regard the notion of stance-independent moral facts to be unintelligible. I can talk about “stance-independent moral facts,” as a concept other people purport to “have” in the sense of understanding it without understanding it myself. That is, I don’t actually have the concepts non-natural moral realists purport to have, while still regarding the people who hold such views to be subject to an intellectual or experiential error of some kind.

Lance Bush 30 Oct 2021 19:23 UTC
1 point
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: I Really Don’t Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Position on Consciousness
I have introspected and it has not resulted in acquaintance with qualia.

I believe people can introspect and then draw mistaken conclusions about the nature of their experiences, and that qualia is a good candidate for one of these mistaken conclusions.

Lance Bush 30 Oct 2021 21:31 UTC
1 point
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: I Really Don’t Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Position on Consciousness
I’m not sure how to answer the first question. I’m sure my introspection revealed all manner of things over the course of years, and I’m also not sure what level of specificity you are going for. I don’t want to evade actually reporting on the contents of my mental states, so perhaps a more specific question would help me form a useful response.
I may very well not have even the illusion of phenomenal consciousness, but I’m not sure I am alone in lacking it. While it remains an open empirical question, and I can’t vouch for the methodological rigor of any particular study, there is some empirical research on whether or not nonphilosophers are inclined towards thinking there is a hard problem of consciousness:
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2021/00000028/f0020003/art00002
It may be that notions of qualia, and the kinds of views that predominate among academic philosophers are outliers that don’t represent how other people think about these issues, if they think about them at all.

Lance Bush 30 Oct 2021 21:32 UTC
1 point
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: I Really Don’t Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Position on Consciousness
But the qualiaphilic claim is typical, statistically.
Typical of who?

Lance Bush 30 Oct 2021 21:36 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: I Really Don’t Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Position on Consciousness
See above; I posted a link to a recent study. There hasn’t been much work on this. While my views may be atypical, so too might the views popular among contemporary analytic philosophers. A commitment to the notion that there is a legitimate hard problem of consciousness, that we “have qualia,” and so on might all be idiosyncrasies of the specific way philosophers think, and may even result from unique historical contingencies, such that, were there many more philosophers like Quine and Dennett in the field, such views might not be so popular.

Some philosophical positions seem to rise and fall over time. Moral realism was less popular a few decades ago, but as enjoyed a recent resurgence, for instance. This suggests that the perspectives of philosophers might result in part from trends or fashions distinctive of particular points in time.

Lance Bush 30 Oct 2021 21:48 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: I Really Don’t Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Position on Consciousness
Like, Lance, do you not feel like you experience that things seem ways?
I don’t know what that means, so I’m not sure. What would it mean for something to seem a certain way?

Or just that they don’t seem to be ways in ways that seem robustly meaningful or something?
I don’t think it’s this. It’s more that when people try to push me to have qualia intuitions, I can introspect, report on the contents of my mental states, and then they want me to locate something extra. But there never is anything extra, and they can never explain what they’re talking about, other than to use examples that don’t help me at all, or metaphors that I don’t understand. Nobody seems capable of directly explaining what they mean. And when pressed, they insist that the concept in question is “unanalyzable” or inexplicable or otherwise maintain that they cannot explain it.

Despite his fame, the majority of students who take Dennett’s courses that I encountered do not accept his views at all, and take qualia quite seriously. I had conversations that would last well over an hour where I would have one or more of them try to get me to grok what they’re talking about, and they never succeeded. I’ve had people make the following kinds of claims:

(1) I am pretending to not get it so that I can signal my intellectual unconventionality.

(2) I do get it, but I don’t realize that I get it.

(3) I may be neurologically atypical.

(4) I am too “caught in the grip” of a philosophical theory, and this has rendered me unable to get it.

One or more of these could be true, but I’m not sure how I’d find out, or what I might do about it if I did. But I strangely drawn to a much more disturbing possibility, that an outside view would suggest is pretty unlikely:

(5) all of these people are confused, qualia is a pseudoconcept, and the whole discussion predicated on it is fundamentally misguided

I find myself drawn to this view, in spite of it entailing that a majority of people in academic philosophy, or who encounter it, are deeply mistaken.

I should note, though, that I specialize in metaethics in particular. Most moral philosophers are moral realists (about 60%) and I consider every version of moral realism I’m familiar with to be obviously confused, mistaken, or trivial in ways so transparent that I do think I am justified in thinking that, on this particular issue, most moral philosophers really are mistaken.

Given my confidence about moral realism, I’m not at all convinced that philosophers generally have things well-sorted on consciousness.

Lance Bush 31 Oct 2021 2:33 UTC
1 point
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: I Really Don’t Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Position on Consciousness
Thanks for clarifying. Not all statistical claims in e.g., psychology are intended to generalize towards most people, so I didn’t want to assume you meant most people.
If the claim is that most people have a concept of qualia, that may be true, but I’m not confident that it is. That seems like an empirical question it’d be worth looking into.
Either way, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if most people had the concept, or (I think more likely) could readily acquire it on minimal introspection (though on my view I’d say that people are either duped or readily able to be duped into thinking they have the concept).

I don’t know if I am different, or if so, why. It’s possible I do have the concept but don’t recognize it, or am deceiving myself somehow.
It’s also possible I am somehow atypical neurologically. I went into philosophy precisely because I consistently found that I either didn’t have intuitions about conventional philosophical cases at all (e.g., Gettier problems), or had nonstandard or less common views (e.g. illusionism, normative antirealism, utilitarianism). That led me to study intuitions, the psychological underpinnings of philosophical thought, and a host of related topics. So there is no coincidence in my presenting the views expressed here. I got into these topics because everyone else struck me as having bizarre views.

Lance Bush 31 Oct 2021 2:56 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: I Really Don’t Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Position on Consciousness
No worries, it’s not a gotcha at all, and I already have some thoughts about this.
I was more interested in this topic back about seven or eight years ago, when I was actually studying it. I moved on to psychology and metaethics, and haven’t been actively reading about this stuff since about 2014.
I’m not sure it’d be ideal to try to dredge all that up, but I can roughly point towards something like Robbins and Jack (2006) as an example of the kind of research I’d employ to develop a type of debunking explanation for qualia intuitions. I am not necessarily claiming their specific account is correct, or rigorous, or sufficient all on its own, but it points to the kind of work cognitive scientists and philosophers could do that is at least in the ballpark.
Roughly, they attempt to offer an empirical explanation for the persistent of the explanatory gap (the problem of accounting for the consciousness by appeal to physical or at least nonconscious phenomena). Its persistence could be due to quirks in the way human cognition works. If so, it may be difficult to dispel certain kinds of introspective illusions.
Roughly, suppose we have multiple, distinct “mapping systems” that each independently operate to populate their own maps of the territory. Each of these systems evolved and currently functions to facilitate adaptive behavior. However, we may discover that when we go to formulate comprehensive and rigorous theories about how the world is, these maps seem to provide us with conflicting or confusing information.
Suppose one of these mapping systems was a “physical stuff” map. It populates our world with objects, and we have the overwhelming impression that there is “physical stuff” out there, that we can detect using our senses.
But suppose also we have a “important agents that I need to treat well” system, that detects and highlights certain agents within the world for whom it would be important to treat appropriately, a kind of “VIP agency mapping system” that recruited a host of appropriate functional responses: emotional reactions, adopting the intentional stance, cheater-detection systems, and so on.
On reflecting on the first system, we might come to form the view that the external world really is just this stuff described by physics, whatever that is. And that includes the VIP agents we interact with: they’re bags of meat! But this butts up against the overwhelming impression that they just couldn’t be. They must be more than just bags of meat. They have feelings! We may find ourselves incapable of shaking this impression, no matter how much of a reductionist or naturalist or whatever we might like to be.
What could be going on here is simply the inability for these two mapping systems to adequately talk to one another. We are host to divided minds with balkanized mapping systems, and may find that we simply cannot grok some of the concepts contained in one of our mapping systems in terms of the mapping system in the other. You might call this something like “internal failure to grok.” It isn’t that, say, I cannot grok some other person’s concepts, but that some of the cognitive systems I possess cannot grok each other.
You might call this something like “conceptual incommensurability.” And if we’re stuck with a cognitive architecture like this, certain intuitions may seem incorrigible, even if we could come up with a good model, based on solid evidence, that would explain why things would seem this way to us, without us having to suppose that it is that way.

Lance Bush 31 Oct 2021 13:45 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Lance Bush’s comment on: I Really Don’t Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Position on Consciousness
I forgot to add a reference to the Robbins and Jack citation above. Here it is:
Robbins, P., & Jack, A. I. (2006). The phenomenal stance. Philosophical studies, 127(1), 59-85.