Matthew C: I’m very dubious but I’ll bite. What could possibly constitute “evidence showing a non-material aspect to consciousness”, at least so long as the word “material” is construed in the broadest possible fashion, e.g. as similar in meaning to “neutral monist”.
michael_vassar3
Karma: 1,108
You know, I agree that anyone who gives a different answer from “press the green button” is overcomplicating the question. Our chief point of disagreement for years has been that it seems to me that your real life answer has long been “press the green button if I can do so without ‘being a jerk’ e.g. ‘stealing the future’”. That, it seems to me, is clearly the wrong answer.
There may be very good time tested rules telling you not to steal things, and even better though less tested rules telling you not to steal the One Ring, but maybe Gollum has it and he just plain isn’t very likely to be convinced to take it to Mt. Doom on his own, even if he knows more, thinks faster, and is more the person he wants to be.
Actually hopefully, I don’t think that one can be quite so transparent as you are about egoism and remain anonymous just by using a pseudonym, at least to those who live in NYC. How many people talk about MMPOOP?
Do you not understand what Matthew C and Nick T are saying, or do you just disagree.
Mark surely means one of Nick Bostrom’s papers. He’s the top name on the list of contributors.
I assume that most of math is being ignored for simplicity’s sake?
In practice, most of the time people figure out what to connect it to later. More precisely, most of it probably doesn’t connect to anything, but what does connect to stuff usually isn’t found to do so until much later than it is invented/discovered.
Robin sort-of generalized it so that it doesn’t. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2006/12/why_common_prio.html
My big question though is whether this exchange led to a lasting change in the fellow’s opinion as to the possibility of AI. In practice it seems to me that most of the time when people decisively loose an argument they still return to their original position within a few days just by ignoring that it ever happened.
One of my largest frustrations in life, frustrations of the type produced where one determines that one is simply not understanding something fundamental that is understood at least implicitly by many other people, is that I have generally found “to satisfy your own self-image as an X—you would have to pretend to Y much more convincingly than this woman was doing” to be falsified, but I still cannot understand what it is generally falsified by. In school, in work, etc, I have found teachers, professors, students, co-workers and management to, a small but noticeable fraction of the time, do what I think cannot even charitably be described in any way other than “doing nothing” to a degree which Scott Adams has yet to adequately describe or demonstrate in Dilbert, yet I have found that when I try to imitate this “doing nothing”, I have found myself to typically be rebuked (though not by the actual ‘do-nothings’). My best guesses are that a) the do-nothings are amiable people who seem comfortable with their behavior while when trying to not do anything I seem uncomfortable and/or disagreeable, or b) the do-nothings have jobs (like teaching Statistics) which no-one really wants done. (the degree to which business-people and scientists alike don’t even try to understand Statistics but simply mis-use it as a talisman against criticism (So long as they tow the line in their conclusions and methods. Iconoclasts will be punished for this, a-la Kinsey) without ever attempting to understand how or why or where their procedures work depresses me.) but I am very unsure of these conclusions. Can anyone do better?
Alan has a good point. His post reminds me of this
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/nerds-are-nuts.php
I will mention that I have only met one person who actually talked about religious history and secular history in conversation un-self-consciously in such a manner as to suggest that he wasn’t using separate “religious history” and “secular history” categories but fairly honestly, e.g. without typical forms of self-deception, saw them as a single thing, history. He would talk about Indian politics, current events, and history in a manner which occasionally mentioned the activities of Indira Gandhi and occasionally those or Rama or Krishna. This person was not especially nerdy, but was of fairly modest socio-economic-status (had been a hair-dresser), high gullibility (involved in Multi-Level Marketing) and probably of only moderately above average intelligence as suggested by a BS in Math from an unknown university coupled with the inability to pass the first of the eight Actuarial exams after 4 years as an Actuarial “student” (the subject is basically a fairly but not terribly difficult mix of 1st and 2nd semester Statistics, Calculus, and Financial Economics. If you competed in the Math Olympiad, think the first round AHSME test from the Math Olympiad but requiring those subjects.) Actuarial Students are given free courses, materials, past exams which provide analogous questions, and 20-30 days per year of time off (in addition to normal vacation and sick-days) formally allocated to study)
LP: ever hear of Paradise Lost? A lot of pictures. Really...
Good posts. This series is the first thing in a while to make me really glad to participate here.
I think that the stereotype of Alabama bars is pretty reliable. OTOH, the stereotype of suicide bombers is much much less so. If you read the rhetoric of radical Islam, or for that matter if you read ancient mythology such as Homer or the Egyptian Book of the Dead, you will see people who are occupying a VERY VERY different moral universe from us Platonized Christianized (that includes the secular children of “modern orthodox” Jews) post-Enlightenment Westerners.
In terms of realistic psychology fitting neither the SSSM nor the Evolutionary Psychology brand (which you really should spend more times reading non-leftist criticisms of), the Muslims who flew planes into the World Trade Center undoubtedly saw themselves as heros, but in some sense that we would have a VERY hard time empathizing with or relating to. They are NOT a mirror reflection of ourselves, but genuinely something that has to be understood with empiricism, not empathy and wishful thinking.
Empathy is hard. Cultures differ. We Americans (especially secular Americans?) really don’t have a clue what it feels like to (for instance) feel an obligation to kill our daughters or our sisters in order to preserve our family honor. Some actions in the name of causes may be psychologically modular, but some really aren’t. What’s the parallel for honor killing? Pressuring one’s schizophrenic philosophy post-doc son to go to law school where he thinks he’ll be miserable for the bragging rights? Sending your kids to Hebrew School or Day Camps they hate because your parents made you do it? It just doesn’t work. Even within a culture, I have no idea what it’s like to identify with a sports team and very few people can relate to the horror that I feel at some Psychological data or philosophical ideas. You once pointed out that most of us can no longer even understand why the Psycho shower scene was once considered terrifying. I would recommend Silvia Plath’s diary for what are to me stranger attitudes than those.
Actually, I think that much of www.xkcd.com including the current one can be though of as an enumeration of feelings that people who aren’t either quite young or quite nerdy have not analogues to. Philosophy is full of others, such as existential despair and satori.
HA: I chose my examples carefully to to try to match as closely as possible as many of the categories, relationship types, motivations, etc as I could, and the examples I came up with are both pervasively American and truly ugly from my perspective in the closest way that I could think of (matching type of motive, e.g. content of emotional state, not degree of emotional state or degree of ugliness) to honor killings. My point was that we don’t have any very close matches. Your examples still don’t match the intensity of honor killings, but more importantly, the emotional quality is utterly utterly different. Anger, retaliation, maintenance of public order, prevention of repetition, deterrence, The motivations for execution are simple and easy to understand, as is the balance calculation which compares the costs and benefits implicitly, even if a more careful calculation would disagree. At the most visceral level, honor killings are not in retaliation for some harm nor are they motivated by preventing a harm. This article is probably worth looking at for everyone who is still reading this thread, by the way.
http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=1445
By the way Honor killings != state sanctioned killing.
HA: It seems to me that you think I have changed the topic. I agree with all of the sentences of your most recent comment, except for the first, but they don’t seem to be about what I was saying.
Likewise, I agreed with Eliezer’s post, but I thought that his analogy was, well, lacking in appreciation of the difficulties involved in analogy.
Basically, I think that Douglas Hofstadter’s writings on the difficulties of natural language translation, the proper translation of literature, etc, are all in relevant to the issue of the translation of inferred emotion. Evolution provides a scaffold for our brains to develop, biasing us, strongly or weakly in certain directions, http://compbiol.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.0030147&ct=1&SESSID=08a65728475c8bb59fcfb7e7aff1cfde sometimes strongly enough that translation is at least almost always possible (maybe not with the Piraha?) and we can speak of human universals, and sometimes weakly enough that we can talk about Liberal insensitivity to 3 of Haidt’s 5 domains of morality. When the biases are strong or when atypical emotional mixes emerge and propagate memetically, empathy ceases to be useful and “the other” must, in some respect or another, be understood empirically, e.g. without the benefit of our specialized social processing capabilities. In such cases, our anticipation suffers, but it suffers even more if we force bad analogies and continue to use our social processing capabilities in inappropriate circumstances.
Bob: Great post.
Eliezer: I was not saying anything cannot be understood, but rather that using our specialized “empathic” capabilities for understanding human behavior in terms of our own hypothetical behavior is counterproductive to understanding many instances of human behavior when the humans in question are from different cultures or otherwise very different from one’s self. It’s easy to model it, possibly even to model it well (Chronicles of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez tries to), but next to useless to model it by reference to your own feelings. If we couldn’t model it at least somewhat we couldn’t even form the concept and talk about it, but we don’t have the special advantages here that we have when modeling a hungry person eating or the like.
For a less politically charged example, fairly young (7 or 8, maybe 9?) could learn to model sexual desire, but they can’t empathize. Adults cannot empathize with a child’s enjoyment of TV shows targeting young children even though they have been children and may remember watching the same shows and enjoying them. Actually, since enjoyment is virtuous, that example answers your question, though across ages rather than across cultures. For ‘virtuous’, cross cultural, and impossible to empathically model (ignoring that to some degree there is a contradiction here, as without the ability to model the state it is hard to be confident of its intrinsic virtuousness, only of the virtuousness of the actions it brings about, which could also have been pursued for utilitarian or other deeply generally human reasons such as caring. The symmetry with abhorrent actions is broken in this respect) there are surely many different types of meditation or other altered mental states, enjoyment of a vast number of foods (I can understand liking kumiss via a “comfort food” schema, but not *kumiss AS kumiss), entertainments, and art forms, and probably more subtle and general feelings having to do with attachment to the land, etc, though I can model these empathically to some degree.
Most generally of all, I already had given examples, in citing Haidt’s 5 moral domains.
Hmm. Criticism of Haidt’s theory. Haidt, and most other people, probably see conservatives and liberals as having equal lack of understanding of one another. (the point of his theory is that he lacks such empathic understanding, hence the need of an empirically derived theory). However, his theory suggests that conservatives should easily understand liberals. The magnitude of one’s disagreement shouldn’t be the cause of empathy failure. Rather, empathy failure should follow from the apparent pointlessness of the action being criticized. For instance, it’s probably easy for us to empathize with Joseph Mengele’s actions while still strongly disapproving, as scientific curiosity is a shared motivation and the difference between his actions and actions we would approve of is because of his not applying enough weight to caring/sympathy considerations that we consider important. The opposite is true of one’s experience reading about Isaac Bashevais Singer’s father in “My Father’s Court” or other good works of anthropology dealing with rich cultures. We are bemused by the apparent pointlessness of all of the ritual details that this silly man takes so very seriously, but he is harmless and we are not indignant at all.
Konrad: Not to repeat myself yet again, but no, understanding psychology never requires unusual emotional insight. It takes analytical ability, but it gives a different type of understanding from that which emotional insight gives.
From a practical perspective, it seems to me that we need religion to bolster the arrogance of the non-religious. It seems a-priori impossible that I could be right when my opinions go strongly against social consensus. I am thus tempted towards a weak form of philosophical majoritarianism http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/03/on_majoritarian.html but then I remember religion and it sets me back on the right track.
Humans are not monolithic egos. We have inconsistent desires, weird internal structure in our motivational systems, competing neural processes (not just goals), etc, but we are FAR more monolithic and integrated than corporations are. A corporation could probably hire Bill Clinton to do any of a fairly large space of tasks, but could it get perfectly solve the problem of organizing incentives in such a manner as to make him serve its goals as well as he serves his own? If I recall, it seems to me that he served his own goals to the detriment of his party to a significant degree a decade or so back. The Swiss patent office had some trouble a few years back motivating one of their clerks to be as productive for money as he was in following his own curiosity.
Eliezer: Almost no-one believes in the specific description of heaven you provided. Dante’s heaven is much closer to what a thoughtful person might believe in, but most people’s beliefs in Heaven are simply vague promises of abstract perfection.