poke

Karma: 296

poke 6 Dec 2008 15:37 UTC
35 points
on: Is That Your True Rejection?
Most transhumanist ideas fall under the category of “not even wrong.” Drexler’s Nanosystems is ignored because it’s a work of “speculative engineering” that doesn’t address any of the questions a chemist would pose (i.e., regarding synthesis). It’s a non-event. It shows that you can make fancy molecular structures under certain computational models. SI is similar. What do you expect a scientist to say about SI? Sure, they can’t disprove the notion, but there’s nothing for them to discuss either. The transhumanist community has a tendency to argue for its positions along the lines of “you can’t prove this isn’t possible” which is completely uninteresting from a practical viewpoint.

If I was going to depack “you should get a PhD” I’d say the intention is along the lines of: you should attempt to tackle something tractable before you start speculating on Big Ideas. If you had a PhD, maybe you’d be more cautious. If you had a PhD, maybe you’d be able to step outside the incestuous milieu of pop sci musings you find yourself trapped in. There’s two things you get from a formal education: one is broad, you’re exposed to a variety of subject matter that you’re unlikely to encounter as an autodidact; the other is specific, you’re forced to focus on problems you’d likely dismiss as trivial as an autodidact. Both offer strong correctives to preconceptions.

As for why people are less likely to express the same concern when the topic is rationality; there’s a long tradition of disrespect for formal education when it comes to dispensing advice. Your discussions of rationality usually have the format of sage advice rather than scientific analysis. Nobody cares if Dr. Phil is a real doctor.

poke 27 Sep 2008 22:40 UTC
2 points
on: Competent Elites
It’s interesting that you mention Rodney Brooks. I’ve always found his work poorly written and lacking in clarity despite being sympathetic to his views. He must come across better in person. As Shane points out though, Brooks’ work has the rare quality in AI that it is productive and has found widespread application in industry.

As for the Venture Capitalists, I don’t find it surprising that Silicon Valley VCs share some of your interests. It’s like discovering that software engineers share an interest in AD&D and collectibles. All these guys are enthusiastic about evolutionary psychology and cognitive science and such. I wonder if your perception of competence is a product of the “keyword search” approach to assessing other people that you frequently apply here; if they mention “evolution” and “probability” enough they get to be smart.

poke 12 Sep 2008 19:04 UTC
0 points
on: Excluding the Supernatural
mtraven,

Most sane and intelligent people with religious tendencies (and there are many, although they don’t seem to get much press) understand that if “god” means anything, it is a pointer towards something unknown and perhaps unknowable, and arguing about whether it exists in the physical sense is missing the point completely.

This is just a version of my second option available to the theist. There’s a knowable “physical” world and an unknowable one beyond it. There’s no reason to believe this is the case. Moreover, if you believed something like this, you would be able to say “I’m an atheist about the physical world” and we could all agree on that and discuss whether talk of “something beyond the physical world” is coherent. You would also agree that science has established atheism about the physical world. Which is just my claim.

Matthew C. - I’m referring to neuroscience.

poke 12 Sep 2008 14:29 UTC
5 points
on: Excluding the Supernatural
This is why I claim that atheism is an established scientific result. One of the strongest lines of evidence is, indeed, that we have successfully reduced minds and shown the notion of an irreducible mind to be incoherent. Mind as an irreducible simple is basic to all monotheistic religions. Demonstrating something once thought coherent to be incoherent is, of course, one of the strongest lines of evidence in science. Other avenues through which atheism has been established by science include conservation in physics, chemistry and biology (which led directly to materialism), evolution, and the development of plausible sociological accounts of religion. I would argue that atheism is as well established as Plate Tectonics and Natural Selection. What I think is telling is that most contemporary approaches to religious apologetics implicitly recognize that science has established atheism.

The theist has three avenues of response. The first is to attack specific parts of science. This is what Fundamentalist Christians do. The second, by far the most popular, is to attack the very possibility of scientific knowledge. This is what nearly all “liberal” religious believers who claim there is no conflict between science and religion do. They generally adopt a skeptical epistemology, holding that no knowledge claim can be true, or instrumentalism about science, holding that scientific claims are nonfactual, or a quasi-Kantian constructivist metaphysics wherein “true” reality is forever out of reach. The weird thing is that this position, which essentially rejects all of science, is considered more “sophisticated” and acceptable than the Fundamentalist position which rejects only select parts of science but remains realist about the rest. The third approach is to adopt some sort of nonfactualism about religious claims; essentially to hold that your religious practice is merely tradition. I think this nearly exhausts contemporary positions on religious apologetics and is therefore evidence that people implicitly accept that science has established atheism.

poke 27 Aug 2008 23:44 UTC
2 points
on: Against Modal Logics
It’s true that contemporary philosophy is still very much obsessed with language despite attempts by practioners to move on. Observation is talked about in terms of observation sentences. Science is taken to be a set of statements. Realism is taken to be the doctrine that there are objects to which our statements refer. Reductionism is the ability to translate a sentence in one field into a sentence in another. The philosophy of mind concerns itself with finding a way to reconcile the lack of sentence-like structures in our brain with a perverse desire for sentence-like structures. But cognitive science is itself a development of this odd way of thinking about the world; sentences become algorithms and everything carries on the same. I don’t think you’re really too far removed from this tradition.

poke 17 Aug 2008 1:50 UTC
5 points
on: When Anthropomorphism Became Stupid
If you look through a microscope you’ll notice the only major difference between the nervous system and other tissues is that the nervous system exhibits network connectivity. Cells in tissues are usually arranged in such a way that they only connect to their nearest neighbor. Many tissues exhibit electrical activity, communication between cells, coordinated activity, etc, in the same way as neurons. If networks of neurons can be said to be performing computations then so can other tissues. I’m not familar with the biology of trees but I don’t see why they couldn’t be said to be ‘thinking’ if we’re going to equate thinking with computation.

poke 16 Aug 2008 14:57 UTC
−1 points
on: Hot Air Doesn’t Disagree
This demonstrates quite nicely the problem with the magical notion of an “internal representation.” (Actually, there’s two magical notions, since both “internal” and “representation” are separately magical.) You could easily replace “internal representation” with “soul” in this essay and you’d get back the orthodox thinking about humans and animals of the last two thousand years. Given that there is both no evidence nor any chance of evidence either for “internal representations” or “souls” and neither is well-defined (or defined at all), you might as well go ahead and make the substitution. This entire essay is pure mysticism.

poke 4 Aug 2008 11:55 UTC
−2 points
on: No Logical Positivist I
It’s not clear that you’re a verificationist but you’re clearly an Empiricist. I think that’s problematic. Unless you believe something magical happens at the retina, then there’s no more reason to privilege what happens at the retina or in the brain, than there is the wire connecting the dial to the voltmeter. It’s all causal linkage. We can use the same standards of reliability for people as we do wires. The sensory periphery is just not particularly interesting.

poke 3 Aug 2008 13:51 UTC
0 points
on: The Comedy of Behaviorism
Richard Kennaway,

Whatever views his belief may be compatible with, it is not compatible with reality. That is, it is false. Intentionality is explainable in physical terms. An intention is the reference signal of a control system, and a control system is something that acts so as to maintain a perceptual signal close to its reference signal.

Everybody has a pet theory of intentionality. The problem isn’t intentionality but why anybody would want to explain intentionality in the first place. You’re either explaining: (a) a part of what you take to be your experience of the world; or (b) a part of our folk psychological explanations of behavior. Either way, you’re not doing science to begin with, so it’s unlikely you’d stumble upon science along the way.

poke 3 Aug 2008 13:17 UTC
4 points
0
on: The Comedy of Behaviorism
Methodological behaviorism took private mental events to be off limits but (most) behaviorists still believed they existed. Skinner took introspection and self-knowledge to by types of behavior and explicitly denied the mental. Eliezer’s analysis is correct insofar as Skinner denied the mental but the passages about not being able to account for complex behavior are wrong. Skinner took behavior to be a product of environmental conditioning and evolved physiology.

Here’s Skinner explaining radical behaviorism in the opening of About Behaviorism:

“Mentalism kept attention away from the external antecedent events which might have explained behavior, by seeming to supply an alternative explanation. Methodological behaviorism did just the reverse; by dealing exclusively with external antecedent events it turned attention away from self-observation and self-knowledge. Radical behaviorism restores some kind of balance. … It does not call these events unobservable, and it does not dismiss them as subjective. It simply questions the nature of the object observed and the reliability of the observations.”

(Note how similar the final sentence is to eliminativists like Chruchland and Dennett who emphasize that introspection is fallible.)

“The position can be stated as follows: what is felt or introspectively observed is not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind or mental life but the observer’s own body. … An organism behaves as it does because of its current structure, but most of this is out of reach of introspection.”

“[W]e can look at those features of behavior which have led people to speak of an act of will, of a sense of purpose, of experience as distinct from reality, of innate or acquired ideas, of memories, meanings, and the personal knowledge of the scientist, and of hundreds of other mentalistic things or events. Some can be ‘translated into behavior,’ others discarded as unnecessary or meaningless.” (Emphasis mine.)

Skinner was essentially an eliminative materialist who relied too heavily on the tools of his time (operant conditioning). He denied that the brain had the structure of folk psychology (what the behaviorists called mentalism) and emphasized conditioning and evolved physiology (he talked about evolution explicitly).

poke 2 Aug 2008 21:32 UTC
−2 points
on: The Comedy of Behaviorism
Skinner was correct that mind, intentionality, thought, desire, etc, are unscientific. Where behaviorism went wrong was ascribing behavior to conditioning and underplaying the role of biology (although Skinner never denied the importance of biology; unlike Chomsky and the computationalists). I’d accuse computationalism of being “cryptodualism” except that Chomsky’s project was explicitly Cartesian and was only non-dualistic in the sense that he believed the laws of physics would have to change to incorporate non-biological computational models of the mind.

If your view is simply that the brain is performing computations and that it makes sense to talk about them in terms of algorithms then that’s fine. I have no problem with that. If you’re going to argue, as some philosophers do, that this somehow vindicates “the mind” and the posits of folk psychology then you’re making a very different argument altogether. Skinner’s belief that intentionality is on par with Aristotelian teleological physics is perfectly compatible with the first view. The notion that calling the brain a computer and talking about algorithms naturalizes dualism (i.e., the algorithms are the mind and the brain is the implementation), on the other hand, is pure mysticism.

poke 19 Jul 2008 23:05 UTC
0 points
on: Existential Angst Factory
I wouldn’t want to be a wirehead. I do things like exercise to keep my mood up now but I think of it terms of wanting to be productive rather than happy. (I find that exercise, health and regular sleep/wake cycles are essential for this.) If you could wire me up to be smarter and more productive (intellectually), but the cost was chronic pain, I’d probably sign up for that. (I can’t really imagine how you could reconcile higher productivity with chronic pain though; the experience of pain seems to necessarily involve restricted attention.)

poke 19 Jul 2008 19:37 UTC
1 point
on: Existential Angst Factory
Andy Wood,

I’m just curious—was the despair about anything? Did it have no referent at all? You had a stable environment, good relationship with parents, self-confidence, social success, and yet still despaired? Was there no consistent content in your despairing thoughts?

I had all those things. Before I became depressed I stopped being sociable and started having problems with school attendance; I don’t know if that was the cause of my depression or just an early development of it. I was certainly very bored at school and my home environment didn’t offer any alternative intellectual stimulation. But, whether these things caused my depression or not, I can honestly say that I never felt it had any content. Even when the depression caused problems in my life I found the depression itself more overwhelming than the problems. I tend to be very unaffected by life events even now actually. I’ve considered that perhaps I had two problems and one of them was/remains an inability to fully appreciate consequences.

poke 19 Jul 2008 16:53 UTC
10 points
on: Existential Angst Factory
I’ve suffered from clinical depression with absolutely zero correlation to social factors and life circumstances. Between onset at age 11 and my early 20s I experience pervasive, uninterrupted despair. Oddly enough, it never affected my goals or terminal values, just my ability to achieve them. Then again, many people (perhaps the majority) die with many of the same goals they had in their youth, having done absolutely no work toward achieving them; so I’m not convinced explicitly held goals have a strong causal relation to behavior; perhaps having a goal is like getting a tattoo. But I digress. Biology matters a lot. I wouldn’t say clinical depression is the same as being unhappy about something; even at the most basic level, there’s obviously a lot more going on when someone’s unhappy about a life event than if they have wonky receptors for some neurotransmitter or another. (I never experienced the sort of confabulation that makes the clinically depressed try to attach their depression to life events though; perhaps because I was young.) I think we could achieve some working simulacrum of happiness biologically though.

poke 19 Jul 2008 14:42 UTC
6 points
on: Existential Angst Factory
What could be more exciting than embracing nihilism?

poke 18 Jul 2008 14:09 UTC
10 points
on: Could Anything Be Right?
“Should” has obvious non-moral uses: you should open the door before attempting to walk through it. “Right” and “better” too: you need the right screwdriver; it’s better to use a torque driver. We can use these words in non-problematic physical situations. I think this makes it obvious that morality is in most cases just a supernatural way of talking about consequences. “You shouldn’t murder your rival” implies that there will be negative consequences to murdering your rival. If you ask the average person they’ll even say, explicitly, that there will be some sort of karmic retribution for murdering your rival; bad things will happen in return. It’s superstition and it’s no more difficult to reject than religious claims. Don’t be fooled by the sophisticated secularization performed by philosophers; for most people morality is magical thinking.

So, yes, I know something about morality; I know that it looks almost exactly like superstition exploiting terminology that has obvious real world uses. I also know that many such superstitions exist in the world and that there’s rarely any harm in rejecting them. I know that we’re a species that can entertain ideas of angry mountains and retributive weather, so it hardly surprises me that we can dream up entities like Fate and Justice and endow them with properties they cannot possibly have. We can find better ways for talking about, for example, the revulsion we feel at the thought of somebody murdering a rival or the sense of social duty we feel when asked to give up our seat to a pregnant woman. We don’t have to accept our first attempt at understanding these things and we don’t have to make subsequent theories to conform to it either.

poke 16 Jul 2008 14:24 UTC
2 points
on: Whither Moral Progress?
As I said previously, I think “moral progress” is the heroic story we tell of social change, and I find it unlikely that these changes are really caused by moral deliberation. I’m not a cultural relativist but I think we need to be more attuned to the fact that people inside a culture are less harmed by its practices than outsiders feel they would be in that culture. You can’t simply imagine how you would feel as, say, a woman in Islam. Baselines change, expectations change, and we need to keep track of these things.

As for democracy, I think there are many cases where democracy is an impediment to economic progress, and so causes standards of living to be lower. I doubt Singapore would have been better off had it been more democratic and I suspect it would have been much worse off (nowadays it probably wouldn’t make a lot of difference either way). Likewise, I think Japan, Taiwan and South Korea probably benefited from relative authoritarianism during their respective periods of industrialization.

My own perspective on electoral democracy is that it’s essentially symbolic and the only real benefit for developing countries is legitimacy in the eyes of the West; it’s rather like a modern form of Christianization. Westerners tend to use “democracy” as a catch-all term for every good they perceive in their society and imagine having an election will somehow solve a country’s problems. I think we’d be better off talking about openness, responsiveness, lawfulness and how to achieve institutional benevolence rather than elections and representation.

Now, you could argue that because I value things like economic progress, I have a moral system. I don’t think it’s that clear cut though. One of the distinctive features of moral philosophy is that it’s tested against people’s supposed moral intuitions. I value technological progress and growth in knowledge but, importantly, I would still value them if they were intuitively anti-moral. If technological progress and growth in knowledge were net harms for us as human beings I would still want to maximize them. I think many people here would agree (although perhaps they’ve never thought about it): if pursuing knowledge was somehow painful and depressing, I’d still want to do it, and I’d still encourage the whole of society to be ordered towards that goal.

poke 13 Jul 2008 15:31 UTC
6 points
on: Rebelling Within Nature
I remember first having this revelation as something along the lines of: “You know when you’re in love or overcome by anger, and you do stupid things, and afterward you wonder what the hell you were thinking? Well, your ‘normal’ emotional states are just like that, except you never get that moment of reflection to wonder what the hell you were thinking.” I tried to resolve it with the kind of reflective deliberation that I think you’re prescribing here. Later I adopted a sort of happy fatalism: We’re trapped inside our own psychology and that’s fine!

Not long after, I read the obscurantist French philosopher Alain Badiou (who I do not recommend!), and was inspired by his account of truth. Badiou takes truth to be “fidelity to the event.” We are witness to a transformative event and take it upon ourselves to alter the world in its name. What I realized was (and not to disappoint my fans) the only thing that can interrupt business-as-usual for us is science. Science is the only thing truly alien to us; it’s the only thing that can rupture the fatalistic clockwork playing-out of our psychology on our environment. The potential of science lies in its ability to transform us. So I adopted a sort of utilitarianism where the goal is to maximize the amount of science being done and maximize the degree to which it transforms our lives.

That’s enough morality for me.

poke 13 Jul 2008 2:47 UTC
6 points
on: Fundamental Doubts
Unknown and Hopefully Anonymous, If basing your beliefs on established science and systematically rejecting every incompatible methodology is “religion” then stick a ridiculous hat on my head and call me the Pope of Reality.

poke 12 Jul 2008 18:03 UTC
3 points
on: Fundamental Doubts
I don’t buy this sort of skepticism at all. Yes, we can imagine that the external world in an illusion, but the basic flaw is (like so much in philosophy) privileging our ability to imagine something over science. Whether we can be deceived in this way is an empirical matter. Yes, you can say “everything you learned about empirical science is part of the illusion,” but all you’ve done is taken your ability to imagine an outcome and privileged that above scientific experiment. Science always trumps imagination. It is therefore, I think, impossible to formulate the skeptical thesis.

This is difficult to think about. Philosophy has given us a view of the world where perception is essentially a subset of imagination. We have pictures in our head and sometimes, if we’re lucky, they correspond to the world. The scientific view of perception, however, is that it’s just physics-as-usual. The philosophical story is an a priori psychology; if you reject the a priori, yet still buy that story, then you haven’t doubted “all the branches and leaves of that root” sufficiently. The scientific story of perception involves photons and receptors and neurons and macromolecules and all that good stuff. It can’t be used to call those things into doubt.

The correct view of all this is a (restricted) Quinean one: You have to accept the ontology of science as basic ontology. Science undermines our methods of determining other (metaphysical) ontologies (i.e., a priori reasoning); in everything we do, beginning with thought and perception, science should be our starting point. Nothing we know about thought and perception can undermine what we know about physics and chemistry and molecular biology because thought and perception are high-level areas of biology: everything we know about them is based on scientific ontology. No skeptical theses that undermines science can be constructed (science, however, can still undermine our common sense view of the world) and without skepticism epistemology reduces to neurobiology and sociology.

This is the difficult part: Even if it’s empirically possible to totally deceive somebody, to run a simulation of them inside a supercomputer and manipulate their entire life and history, we still have no reason to doubt science. Personally I doubt that this is possible. I think the whole concept of a “subjectively real” simulation is a basic error of reasoning and I doubt that cognition and memory can be so arbitrarily manipulated anyway. Regardless, if my doubts turn out to be unfounded, it will be empirical science that proves them unfounded and the argument itself will only be as strong as empirical science itself. We cannot formulate this argument based on what we can merely imagine happening to ourselves.

Descartes had it backwards. If he’d thrown out “I think therefore I am” and taken the new physics and mathematics as his starting point he would have had a very powerful form of naturalism on his hands. A naturalism that doubts common sense and accepts science as the starting point of all reason. As I like to say, there’s no distance between ourselves and the world, what happens at the retina is no more privileged than what happens at the microscope or the voltage clamp. We can just as easily take those as our starting point.