RichardChappell

Karma: 533

RichardChappell 15 Jan 2014 15:04 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: To capture anti-death intuitions, include memory in utilitarianism
It’s not unusual to count “thwarted aims” as a positive bad of death (as I’ve argued for myself in my paper Value Receptacles), which at least counts against replacing people with only slightly happier people (though still leaves open that it may be worthwhile to replace people with much happier people, if the extra happiness is sufficient to outweigh the harm of the first person’s thwarted ends).

RichardChappell 19 Dec 2012 19:34 UTC
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in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Intuitions Aren’t Shared That Way
In the case you describe, the “HSC content” is just that Jesus is magic. So there’s no argument being offered at all. Now, if they offer an actual argument, from some other p to the conclusion that Jesus is magic, then we can assess this argument like any other. How the arguer came to believe the original premise p is not particularly relevant. What you call the “defeater critique”, I call the genetic fallacy.

It’s true that an interlocutor is never going to be particularly moved by an argument that starts from premises he doesn’t accept. Such is life.

The more interesting question is whether the arguer herself should be led to abandon her intuited judgments. But unless you offer some positive evidence for an alternative rational credence to place in p, it’s not clear that a “debunking” explanation of her current level of credence should, by itself, make any difference.

Think of intuitied judgments as priors. Someone might say, “There’s no special reason to think that your priors are well-calibrated.” And that may be true, but it doesn’t change what our priors are. We can’t start from anywhere but where we start.

RichardChappell 19 Dec 2012 5:04 UTC
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in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Intuitions Aren’t Shared That Way
Yes, that’s the idea. I mean, (2) is plausibly true if the “because” is meant in a purely causal, rather than rationalizing, sense. But we don’t take the fact that we stand in a certain psychological relation to this content (i.e., intuiting it) to play any essential justifying role.

Thanks for following up on this issue! I’m looking forward to hearing the rest of your thoughts.

RichardChappell 10 Dec 2012 20:25 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: By Which It May Be Judged
I’m not sure what you have in mind here. We need to distinguish (i) the referent of a concept from (ii) its reference-fixing “sense” or functional role. The way I understood your view, the reference-fixing story for moral terms involves our (idealized) desires. But the referent is “rigid” in the sense that it’s picking out the content of our desires: the thing that actually fills the functional role, rather than the role-property itself.

Since our desires typically aren’t themselves about our desires, so it will turn out, on this story, that morality is not “about” desires. It’s about “love, friendship,” and all that jazz. But there’s a story to be told about how our moral concepts came to pick out these particular worldly properties. And that’s where desires come in (as I understand your view). Our moral concepts pick out these particular properties because they’re the contents of our idealized desires. But that’s not to say that therefore morality is “really” just about fulfilling any old desires. For that would be to neglect the part that rigid designation, and the distinction between reference and reference-fixing, plays in this story.

Does that capture your view? To further clarify: the point of appealing to “rigid designation” is just to explain how desires could play a reference-fixing role without being any part of the referent of moral talk (or what it is “about”). Isn’t that what you’re after? Or do you have some other reference-fixing story in mind?

RichardChappell 10 Dec 2012 17:37 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: crazy88’s comment on: By Which It May Be Judged
Correct. Eliezer has misunderstood rigid designation here.
What links here?
- lukeprog's comment on The Level Above Mine by Eliezer Yudkowsky (20 Jan 2013 19:16 UTC; 6 points)

RichardChappell 4 Dec 2012 18:48 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Intuitions Aren’t Shared That Way
Jonathan Ichikawa, ‘Who Needs Intuitions’

Elizabeth Harman, ’Is it Reasonable to “Rely on Intuitions” in Ethics?

Timothy Williamson, ‘Evidence in Philosophy’, chp 7 of The Philosophy of Philosophy.
What links here?
- lukeprog's comment on Intuitions Aren’t Shared That Way by lukeprog (19 Dec 2012 3:30 UTC; 1 point)

RichardChappell 3 Dec 2012 21:53 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Intuitions Aren’t Shared That Way

The debate over intuitions is one of the hottest in philosophy today

But it—at least the “debate over intuitions” that I’m most familiar with—isn’t about whether intuitions are reliable, but rather over whether the critics have accurately specified the role they play in traditional philosophical methodology. That is, the standard response to experimentalist critics (at least, in my corner of philosophy) is not to argue that intuitions are “reliable evidence”, but rather to deny that we are using them as evidence at all. On this view, what we appeal to as evidence is not the psychological fact of my having an intuition, but rather the propositional content being judged.

The purpose of thought experiments, on this view, is to enable one to grasp new evidence (namely, the proposition in question) that they hadn’t considered before. Of course, this isn’t a “neutral” methodology because only those who intuit the true proposition thereby gain genuine evidence. But the foolishness of such a “neutrality” constraint (and the associated “psychological” view of evidence) is one of the major lessons of contemporary epistemology (see, esp., Williamson).
What links here?
- lukeprog's comment on Intuitions Aren’t Shared That Way by lukeprog (19 Dec 2012 3:30 UTC; 1 point)

RichardChappell 29 Oct 2012 3:50 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Causal Reference
And this responds to what I said… how?

RichardChappell 28 Oct 2012 15:56 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Causal Reference
It’s a nice parable and all, but it doesn’t seem particularly responsive to my concerns. I agree that we can use any old external items as tokens to model other things, and that there doesn’t have to be anything “special” about the items we make use of in this way, except that we intend to so use them. Such “derivative intentionality” is not particularly difficult to explain (nor is the weak form of “natural intentionality” in which smoke “means” fire, tree rings “signify” age, etc.). The big question is whether you can account for the fully-fledged “original intentionality” of (e.g.) our thoughts and intentions.

In particular, I don’t see anything in the above excerpt that addresses intuitive doubts about whether zombies would really have meaningful thoughts in the sense familiar to us from introspection.

RichardChappell 28 Oct 2012 5:12 UTC
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in reply to: novalis’s comment on: Causal Reference

This is somewhat absurd

More than that, it’s obviously incoherent. I assume your point is that the same should be said of zombies? Probably reaching diminishing returns in this discussion, so I’ll just note that the general consensus of the experts in conceptual analysis (namely, philosophers) disagrees with you here. Even those who want to deny that zombies are metaphysically possible generally concede that the concept is logically coherent.

RichardChappell 27 Oct 2012 18:30 UTC
−1 points
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in reply to: novalis’s comment on: Causal Reference

Well, you could talk about how she is covered with soft fur, but it’s possible to imagine something fuzzy and not covered with fur, or something covered with fur but not fuzzy. Because it’s possible to imagine these things, clearly fuzziness must be non-physical.

Erm, this is just poor reasoning. The conclusion that follows from your premises is that the properties of fuzziness and being-covered-in-fur are distinct, but that doesn’t yet make fuzziness non-physical, since there are obviously other physical properties besides being-covered-in-fur that it might reduce to. The simple proof: you can’t hold ALL the other physical facts fixed and yet change the fuzziness facts. Any world physically identical to ours is a world in which your cat is still fuzzy. (There are no fuzz-zombies.) This is an obvious conceptual truth.

So, in short, the reason why you can’t just “pick any concept and declare it a bedrock case” is that competent conceptual analysis would soon expose it to be a mistake.

RichardChappell 27 Oct 2012 18:20 UTC
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in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: Causal Reference
I’m not sure I follow you. Why would you need to analyse “thinking” in order to “get a start on building AI”? Presumably it’s enough to systematize the various computational algorithms that lead to the behavioural/functional outputs associated with intelligent thought. Whether it’s really thought, or mere computation, that occurs inside the black box is presumably not any concern of computer scientists!

RichardChappell 27 Oct 2012 18:17 UTC
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in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Causal Reference
I couldn’t help one who lacked the concept. But assuming that you possess the concept, and just need some help in situating it in relation to your other concepts, perhaps the following might help...

Our thoughts (and, derivatively, our assertions) have subject-matters. They are about things. We might make claims about these things, e.g. claiming that certain properties go together (or not). When I write, “Grass is green”, I mean that grass is green. I conjure in my mind’s eye a mental image of blades of grass, and their colour, in the image, is green. So, I think to myself, the world is like that.

Could a zombie do all this? They would go “through the motions”, so to speak, but they wouldn’t actually see any mental image of green grass in their mind’s eye, so they could not really intend that their words convey that the world is “like that”. Insofar as there are no “lights on inside”, it would seem that they don’t really intend anything; they do not have minds.

If you can understand the above two paragraphs, then it seems that you have a conception of meaning as a distinctively mental relation (e.g. that holds between thoughts and worldly objects or states of affairs), not reducible to any of the purely physical/functional states that are shared by our zombie twins.

RichardChappell 26 Oct 2012 1:12 UTC
−1 points
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in reply to: novalis’s comment on: Causal Reference
You can probably give a functionalist analysis of computation. I doubt we can reductively analyse “thinking” (at least if you taboo away all related mentalistic terms), so this strikes me as a bedrock case (again, like “qualia”) where tabooing away the term (and its cognates) simply leaves you unable to talk about the phenomenon in question.

RichardChappell 26 Oct 2012 0:36 UTC
−1 points
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in reply to: novalis’s comment on: Causal Reference

But what are brains thinking, if not thoughts?

Right, according to epiphenomenalists, brains aren’t thinking (they may be computing, but syntax is not semantics).

If it doesn’t appear in the causal diagram, how could we tell that we’re not living in a totally meaningless universe?

Our thoughts are (like qualia) what we are most directly acquainted with. If we didn’t have them, there would be no “we” to “tell” anything. We only need causal connections to put us in contact with the world beyond our minds.

RichardChappell 25 Oct 2012 23:21 UTC
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in reply to: novalis’s comment on: Causal Reference
Meaning doesn’t seem to be a thing in the way that atoms and qualia are, so I’m doubtful that the causal criterion properly applies to it (similarly for normative properties).

(Note that it would seem rather self-defeating to claim that ‘meaning’ is meaningless.)

RichardChappell 25 Oct 2012 23:10 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: bryjnar’s comment on: Causal Reference
In my experience, most philosophers are actually pretty motivated to avoid the stigma of “epiphenomenalism”, and try instead to lay claim to some more obscure-but-naturalist-friendly label for their view (like “non-reductive physicalism”, “anomalous monism”, etc.)

RichardChappell 22 Oct 2012 22:43 UTC
8 points
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on: Causal Reference
FWIW, my old post ‘Zombie Rationality’ explores what I think the epiphenomenalist should say about the worry that “the upper-tier brain must be thinking meaningless gibberish when the upper-tier lips [talk about consciousness]”

One point to flag is that from an epiphenomenalist’s perspective, mere brains never really mean anything, any more than squiggles of ink do; any meaning we attribute to them is purely derivative from the meaning of appropriately-related thoughts (which, on this view, essentially involve qualia).

Another thing to flag is that epiphenomenalism needn’t imply that our thoughts are causally irrelevant, but merely their experiential component. It’d be a mistake to identify oneself with just one’s qualia (as Eliezer seems to attribute to the epiphenomenalist). It’s true that our qualia don’t write philosophy papers about consciousness. But we, embodied conscious persons, do write such papers. Of course, the causal explanation of the squiggles depends only on our physical parts. But the fact that the squiggles are about consciousness (or indeed anything at all) depends crucially upon the epiphenomenal aspects of our minds, in addition.

RichardChappell 17 Oct 2012 20:34 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: The Fabric of Real Things
Nope. Epiphenomenalism is motivated by the thought that you could (conceivably, in a world with different laws from ours) have the same bundles of neurons without any consciousness. You couldn’t conceivably have the same bundles of trees not be a forest.

RichardChappell 15 Oct 2012 18:19 UTC
0 points
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on: LW Philosophers versus Analytics
Did this ever happen? (If so, updating the OP with links would be very helpful.)