metaphysicist

• metaphysicistAug 20, 2012, 3:12 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: [Link] Red­dit, help me find some peace I’m dy­ing young

  I do hope you cited the aphorism rather than taking credit for it as original. But seeing it repeated once again forced me for once to pay attention to its meaning: to find it vacuous. The point should be stated Don’t confuse functional and mechanistic explanations. Organisms don’t “execute” their adaptations, this being just another confusion of kinds of explanation, at least if taken literally. And organisms can be said to be fitness maximizers, once it is realized that functional generalizations are always riddled with exceptions.

• metaphysicistAug 19, 2012, 10:40 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Bayes for Schizophren­ics: Rea­son­ing in Delu­sional Disorders

  You seem to be conflating the original schizophrenic state with the residual after the patients get antipsychotic medication: the latter may be readily amenable to reason; the former, the therapist would breach rapport with the patient, by challenging full delusions.

  Medication is part of the standard treatment for schizophrenia—usually, the major part. Drawing conclusions about delusions from the residuals following treatment seems to shield you from what would be obvious had you observed unmedicated patients. Delusions aren’t failures of Bayesian rationality: they involve, typically, accepting a few self-evident priors, and these are driven by intense affect.

• metaphysicistAug 19, 2012, 6:26 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: JB3’s comment on: Against Mo­dal Logics

  then why read Hanson also? if they are colleagues and co-bloggers there must be something about EY that Robin thinks is first rate, no?

  Not necessarily. Hanson might be a good thinker who is also a personal opportunist who’ll do anything to enhance his status, where co-publishing with Yudkowsky helped put Hanson’s blog on the map. Hanson could have “admired” Yudkowsky for his fan-club building capacities rather than for the high quality of his thinking.

• metaphysicistAug 19, 2012, 6:01 PM

  5 points

  on: Pro­posed rewrites of LW home page, about page, and FAQ

  LW is called a “community blog,” but there’s no information on how the “community” acts. Who adopts the new page? Is the vote binding? If so, on whom? Who pays for the fancy Reddit machinery on this blog? (Who refuses to pay for better machinery?)

  Most people only invest themselves in conceiving changes in practices when they have some actual power to bring those changes to fruition. If the mere existence of a British monarch dampens popular enthusiasm for government, what’s the effect of having an essentially autocratic “owner”?

  Added September 1:

  Then the proposed FAQ says, “Sequence posts provide Less Wrong’s philosophical foundation.”

  Which goes to a worry more important than relating to public relations: philosophical foundations at the discretion of the Compiler of the Sequences.

• metaphysicistAug 19, 2012, 5:44 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Dolores1984’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] Against Mo­dal Logics

  It is possible, I suppose, that the thing that makes us conscious is different from the thing that makes us talk about consciousness—but there’s certainly no evidence for it, and it’s a damned silly idea in any case.

  True, but it seems to me almost trivially true that explaining why we talk about consciousness makes a theory positing that we “are conscious” otiose. What other evidence is there? What other evidence could there be? The profession of belief in mysterious “raw experience” merely expresses a cognitive bias, the acceptance of which should be a deep embarrassment to exponents who call themselves rationalist.

  The term “self-awareness,” however, is quite misleading. I can have awareness of my inner states—some knowledge about what I’m thinking—without having mysterious raw experience. “Self-awareness” here is used by raw-experience believers to mean something special: knowledge of “what it is like to be me.” (Thomas Nagel.) The ambiguous usage of self-awareness obfuscates the problem, making belief in “raw experience” seem reasonable, when it’s really a believed (and beloved) superstition.

• metaphysicistAug 16, 2012, 7:49 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Pentashagon’s comment on: Why Don’t Peo­ple Help Others More?

  You’re reffering to the experiment itself; they’re talking about the experiment within the experiment.

  I was compelled to post that clarification after being primed for “helping behavior.”

• metaphysicistAug 9, 2012, 12:32 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: pragmatist’s comment on: Nat­u­ral Laws Are De­scrip­tions, not Rules

  Conceiving of laws as rules activates all sorts of unconscious inferences stemming from the part of our brain that processes social rules, such as the intuitions that motivate nomic fundamentalism. So whether or not there is a genuine distinction between determination and description, there is certainly a cognitive difference in how we respond to those concepts.

  That’s question begging, in that the question is just what are those differences when applied to physics rather than sociology. The connotation of ‘rule’ that survives transfer to physics might be just the one that’s useful: choose from the parts of the intuition and discard the irrelevant.

  The distinction that physics seems to have retained from the original intuition is that between a determinate and finite set of rules (or laws or universals of a particular kind) and an infinitely large set of potential descriptions.

  To collapse the distinction between rules and descriptions as you suggest is to invite gliding over what the distinction really represents. The empiricist armory may not have the conceptual equipment to distinguish our restrictive expectations for laws of physics from the broad pragmatic tolerance in other fields and in ordinary description. You have to mark that distinction, and that’s accomplished with ‘rules’ and ‘descriptions.’ If you choose to mark it some other way, then the difference is merely rhetorical. But the empiricists really don’t want to mark it—they have seemingly principled objections to the distinction’s coherence—have you noticed? That’s what the dispute about rules and descriptions is really about. To say the universals are ‘causes’ of physical events under realism really does introduce connotations into your descriptions that I’d be surprised to see Lewis himself endorse.

• metaphysicistAug 9, 2012, 12:08 AM

  −1 points

  in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Nat­u­ral Laws Are De­scrip­tions, not Rules

  What do you think of Max Tegmark’s answer, that it’s because universes with every possible (i.e., non-contradictory) set of laws of physics exist

  If I can be frank, this is insane. This is the ontological argument for god revisited. Possibility does not imply necessity, and to think it does means you can rationally posit entities by defining them: defining them into existence.

• metaphysicistAug 8, 2012, 5:01 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: torekp’s comment on: The sup­pos­edly hard prob­lem of con­scious­ness and the nonex­is­tence of sense data: Is your dog a con­scious be­ing?

  That doesn’t commit us to infinities, just to a non-vicious circularity, of the Neurath’s Boat variety.

  Not my point. I’m saying whether actual infinities exist physically does not appear to be empirical (or else is resolved by empirical evidence we already have), and there are good rational grounds—endorsed by Yudkowsky, if I’m not mistaken—for rejecting actual infinities, grounds that already existed for the classical Greeks, who rejected the concept . The comparison was between the contention that qualia don’t exist and the contention that absolute infinities don’t exist: speculative but rationally grounded.

  I wish to revise my statement: understanding the reference of terms as well as possible requires doing empirical work.

  It requires empirical evidence, but that’s not to say we don’t have it, absent experiments. But here, we’re not really talking about the reference of concepts but whether the concepts could even have referents—because of conceptual incoherence.

  That would have a chance to be convincing if you stated an alternative account of what philosophers have called qualia.

  Philosophers don’t have an account of qualia, but philosophers of mind do have a consensus about what qualia are not, which is what you said qualia are. So, you haven’t correctly defined what “philosophers call qualia”; you’ve defined the topic of the “easy question of consciousness.”

  The motivation of the lead essay is to give a (novel) account of the illusion of qualia; it’s in red. But if you’re saying you don’t know what I’m talking about when I refer to raw experience, then either you’re “lying” or I’m wrong, as I do in fact rely on your ability to understand me when I speak of raw experience—at least after reading the philosophers of mind, who mainly accept a concept of qualia distinct from the “easy question” you address. These philosophers work hard at pumping your intuitions to be sure you grasp the concept in question. Shoemaker’s inverted-spectrum thought experiments are particularly useful. You can probably guess what’s involved; and if so, you really do understand the concept of qualia and how the “hard question” is distinct from the “easy question.”

  Saying “raw experience” leaves everything open, including the possibility that some internal aspects of the way we sense the world are raw experience.

  What it leaves open is the subject of this discussion. To have the discussion, we must agree in our basic intuitions about qualitative experience. I’m actually not sure whether you’re saying we disagree on our intuitive understanding of the concept of “raw experience,” but given that understanding, we can then talk about whether it makes sense to say that unknown neural processes might constitute raw experience. Let’s take it more modestly: which account of raw experience, neural underpinnings or illusion (as described in the red in the main article), best explains the intuition.

  The advantages of the illusion account are:

  1. We are spared finding explanation for a fact that would be so ill-suited to the reigning scientific ontology that nobody who has understood the problem claims to have any idea what kind of theory might explain this fact;

  2. We have a solution to the long-standing problem of why there’s no private language. (Wittgenstein saw that there could not be, but didn’t intelligibly explain why.) There’s no private language because what we always assume a private language would have to be anchored to—qualitative experience—doesn’t exist.

  3. We are delivered from the dominant form of epistemological skepticism—that based on sensationalism.

  Now, what is gained conceptually by accepting raw experience as an empirical reality that can be nailed down neurologically.

  1. Only the implausibility that a single belief held very strongly is false—which is to say, we gain hardly anything.

  It’s more sensible to conclude that we have a single very wrong belief.

  Updated with last section 11:09 PM. August 7

• metaphysicistAug 8, 2012, 3:49 AM

  13 points

  on: Nat­u­ral Laws Are De­scrip­tions, not Rules

  If I were an economist, I wouldn’t be interested (at least not qua economist) in deductive systems that talked about quarks and leptons. I would be interested in deductive systems that talked about prices and demand. The best system for this coarser-grained vocabulary will give us the laws of economics, distinct from the laws of physics.

  There’s this difference between economics and physics. The axioms of economics don’t come close to completely explaining prices and demand, and we don’t expect them to, even in principle. It would be a miracle if they did: finding coarse-grained descriptions at different levels of abstraction that are exceptionless would be miraculous.

  We want a complete physics; we know we can’t have a complete economics. The expectation that physics can be complete reflects an assumption that we can cut physical reality at its seams, but we have no similar expectation for economics. Physical descriptions are more than mere descriptions because we expect a finite number of them to describe the (physical) universe; we don’t expect axiomatized economics to describe the coarse grain of the economics universe, only what’s really a small part.

  Accusing realists about physical laws as conceiving of them as “pushing matter around” is to substitute a metaphorical description of the philosophical landscape for an actual analysis. Here’s an analysis. On a realist view—that is, laws are “rules”—you expect a finite number of axioms to be exhaustive. This is what makes them like laws—their finite number. On the other hand, descriptions are infinite in their variety. What makes the laws of physics “real” is that, if they work as supposed, they describe the structure of matter. That we see matter as having a structure leads us to expect a finite number of principles to describe that structure. We don’t think that way about ordinary descriptions or the “laws” of the “special sciences.” There, we take what we can get, and don’t expect exhaustiveness.

• metaphysicistAug 7, 2012, 8:00 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Bayesi­ans vs. Barbarians

  What function describes your threshold as the negative values go below −1?

• metaphysicistAug 7, 2012, 7:36 PM

  −4 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: The sup­pos­edly hard prob­lem of con­scious­ness and the nonex­is­tence of sense data: Is your dog a con­scious be­ing?

  I think it’s a cool font!

• metaphysicistAug 7, 2012, 7:36 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Pentashagon’s comment on: The sup­pos­edly hard prob­lem of con­scious­ness and the nonex­is­tence of sense data: Is your dog a con­scious be­ing?

  you can then think about exactly how your brain turns a sentence about consciousness into meaning and it will exactly mirror the actual process your brain used to turn the sentence into the meaning you experience.

  We don’t experience meanings. An organism without qualia could—without contradiction—grasp the meaning of a sentence.

• metaphysicistAug 7, 2012, 7:24 PM

  −2 points

  in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: The sup­pos­edly hard prob­lem of con­scious­ness and the nonex­is­tence of sense data: Is your dog a con­scious be­ing?

  Not at all the same. Yudkowsky points out that science can explain events and things in ways that a layman may not even conceive. Here, the question is whether it even makes sense to call qualia an event.

• metaphysicistAug 7, 2012, 7:21 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: torekp’s comment on: The sup­pos­edly hard prob­lem of con­scious­ness and the nonex­is­tence of sense data: Is your dog a con­scious be­ing?

  Some of our experience amounts to cognition or alleged cognition of the external world—the apple is red, it is sitting on the table, etc. But some does not—it is just an internal aspect of the way we sense the world. Philosophers call the latter “qualia”.

  You’re the victim of the basic cognitive fallacy called substitution (Kahneman). In place of the difficult problem (the existence of raw experience), you substitute the easy problem of our ability to recognize our own internal states. Philosophers have distinguished the two problems, and have even dubbed them the hard and easy problem of consciousness. While I deny the problem is very hard (except perhaps emotionally, if you’re religiously committed to raw experience as your essence), it remains true that you have substituted the easy problem for the hard. In short, that’s not what “philosophers have called qualia.”

  Armchair philosophy cannot reveal the full and exact reference of terms, “qualia” included. Understanding the reference of terms requires doing science.

  This must be a revisionist version of Yudkowskyism. Somewhere Eliezer points out that science is merely an institution that proves things so rigorously that every moron must accept it. He points out (in an essay I can’t locate—help would be appreciated) that the Greeks already saw the impossibility of actual infinities.

• metaphysicistAug 7, 2012, 7:12 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: selylindi’s comment on: The sup­pos­edly hard prob­lem of con­scious­ness and the nonex­is­tence of sense data: Is your dog a con­scious be­ing?

  It’s not a matter of closing off inquiry. Rational argument (metaphysical analysis) is never certain. I wouldn’t say I’m more than 85% or 90% sure of the correctness of these conclusions. I don’t believe actual inifinities exist (sorry, you can’t do ontology if you taboo “exists”!)—but that doesn’t mean I would close off scientific inquiry into theories that assume they do exist. Deny that qualia exist doesn’t close off scientific inquiry, but what you’re suggesting is closing off rational thinking about what could be true.

• metaphysicistJun 9, 2012, 3:45 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: “Progress”

  First, this belongs in Discussion.

  Why?

  I prefer it when posts are promoted to Main, not started there.

  So, you wrote this belongs in Discussion to express your position that posts generally should start there? That’s somewhat disingenuous.

• metaphysicistMay 22, 2012, 2:25 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Thoughts on the Sin­gu­lar­ity In­sti­tute (SI)

  Well, it was a hasty generalization on my part. Flawed descriptivism, not prescriptivism. But you’re losing sight of the issue, even as you refute an unsound argument. In the particular case—check it out—Grognor resolved the ambiguity in favor of the universal quantifier. This would be uncharitable in the general case, but in context it’s—as I said—a ridiculous argument. I stretched for an abstract argument to establish the ridiculousness, and I produced a specious argument. But the fact is that it was Grognor who had accused Loosemore of “abuse of language,” on the tacit ground that the universal quantifier is automatically implied. There was the original prescriptivism.

• metaphysicistMay 21, 2012, 6:07 PM

  −14 points

  in reply to: Grognor’s comment on: Thoughts on the Sin­gu­lar­ity In­sti­tute (SI)

  Richard: Alex, I did not say that ALL dissent is ruthlessly suppressed

  Grognor: This is an abuse of language since it is implicated by the original statement.

  No. Normally the absence of any quantifier implies an existential quantifier, not a universal quantifier. That would seem clearly the case here.

  Grognor, this is an error so ridiculous that you should conclude your emotional involvement is affecting your rationality.

• metaphysicistMay 18, 2012, 5:10 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Thoughts on the Sin­gu­lar­ity In­sti­tute (SI)

  Is deleting one post such an issue to get worked up over? Or is this just discussed because it’s the best criticism one can come up with besides “he’s a high school dropout who hasn’t yet created an AI and so must be completely wrong”?

  Like JoshuaZ, I hadn’t known a donor was involved. What’s the big deal? People donote to SIAI because they trust Eliezer Yudkowsky’s integrity and intellect. So it’s natural to ask whether he’s someone you can count on to deliver the truth. Caving to donors is inauspicious.

  In a related vein, I also found disturbing that Eliezer Yudkowsky repeated his claim that that Loosemoore guy “lied.” Having had years to cool off, he still hasn’t summoned the humility to admit he stretched the evidence for Loosemoore’s deceitfulness: Loosemoore is obviously a cognitive scientist.

  These two examples paint a picture of Eliezer Yudkowsky as a person subject to strong personal loyalties and animosities that exceed his dedication to the truth. In the first incident, his loyalty to a donor induced him to suppress information; in the Loosemoore incident, his longstanding animosity to Loosemoore made him unable to adjust his earlier opinion.

  I hope these impressions aren’t accurate. But one thing seems for sure: Eliezer Yudkowsky is not a person for serious self-criticism. Has he admitted any significant intellectual error since he became a rationalist? [Serious question.]