A very specific type of dumbass.
sxae(Sean)
Karma: 64
- [deleted]
Mary and the Black And White Memory Implant
Hey TAG, thanks for your reply and your great points.
If you could show that Mary never experiences a colour quale, whether as the result of a direct experience, or a real memory, or an implanted memory, you refute the argument.
Well, I don’t believe I’m trying to say that the color quale doesn’t exist—rather that the quale is the subject’s beliefs around that experience or memory, and that those beliefs are entirely physical constructs that exist within a physical brain.
What’s the problem? If Mary has a present experience of a blade of grass, she will have a novel colour quale, and she also will if she experiences a sufficiently vivid recollection… and that still applies if the memory was an implant.
This is based on an admittedly wild assumption that experiences memories that you know to not be yours would alter the quality of those experiences. The impact I think is lost when we deal with something as ubiquitious to the human experience as color. But Jackson seems to be making a general claim about all experiential qualia with this thought experiment, not a specific claim about color qualia, even if that is the example he chooses.
Maybe another example is implanting a memory of climbing Mount Everest—euphoric king-of-the-world moment included when you reach the peak. The belief around the veracity of that memory would alter your relationship to it, and you would gain some new qualia experience if you actually went and did it.
If there are any experiences or qualia, even changeable ones, Jackson has made his point.
Has he? As I understand it, Jackson is arguing specifically for a non-physicalist interpretation of qualia in his work, not just for the existance of qualia. He is arguing that you can have perfect information about an experience, yet actually experiencing that thing will still bring some new aspect to the experience, and whatever that aspect is is the qualia. The issue is with the nature of what the qualia of an experience is, and whether there is a physical manifestation of it, not whether it is a thing. It obviously is, as we constantly experience it. So, no, sorry if I have come across as arguing that qualia do not exist, that is not the position I’m trying to discuss here.
Sorry TAG I’m not quite sure I follow, but I do appreciate your feedback. This post is a refutation of Jackson’s view, so I’m not surprised that it is focusing on a negative. Whether something would alter the quality of those experiences is the crux of Jackson’s whole thought experiment—asking what changes between a mind with perfect information about an experience, and a mind who has genuinely had that experience. So, that question does seem at the heart of this thought experiment.
Perhaps a different way to think about Mary’s Room is the following:
You have two identical minds, A and B. You know that one mind has perfect information about an experience, and the other mind has genuinely experienced it. What questions can you ask each mind to determine which is which? Are you always able to determine an answer? Whatever pops out the end as the distinction between the perfect information and the subjective experience is, by definition, what the qualia of that experience was.
The Price Of Space Is Friendship
I think the largest issue with the general concept of moral fungibility is the following:
Moral consequences cannot be reliably predicted—“what if that chicken solved cancer” is an obviously spurious but relevant example.
Moral consequences cannot be reversed—one cannot make chickens out of chicken nuggets, and new chickens are not the same as the old ones.
Morality does not necessarily sum—“two wrongs do not make a right”—I cannot necessarily justify the torture of billions through the ectasy of other billions.
Most people optimize for price, not morality—anyone with the financial capacity and moral freedom to not buy the cheapest or most available eggs is probably already doing so.
The “free-range chicken” scenario does place some nice constraints on this. The slaughter of a single chicken may never be the thing which prevents a medical miracle. Though, at the same time, I very much doubt that the original architects of the poultry market foresaw the long-term consequences of rapid growth, for instance in ecological damage.
But I think the final point is the most significant—you are substantially increasing (doubling!) the number of decisions I need to make when buying an egg. An average person’s default response to any new, non-impactful choice is going to be “no”. Anyone who has a moral system within which they do buy an offset would probably already be seeking to minimise their ecological impact. The issue is not people being unwilling to minimise their impact—it is that minimizing their impact is not the optimal solution. So, this system would likely just preach to the choir and not really substantially impact the amount of damage we’re doing to our world. Anyone who cares enough to alter their decision already is—so if you want to have more people care more, then you need to make those decisions easier, not harder.
At a minimum they also impose harms on the people who you convinced not to eat meat (since you are assuming that eating meat was a benefit to you that you wanted to pay for). And of course they make further vegetarian outreach harder .
The primary argument for convincing someone to not eat meat is that the long term costs outweigh the short term benefits, so I’m not sure that you can categorically state that convincing someone to stop eating meat is causing them harm. Sure, they don’t get to eat a steak, but the odds of their grandchildren not dying from catastrophic climate collapse go up.
If we expected increased outreach and prosletyization from vegetarians to uniformly make further outreach harder, would we expect to see the rapid and exponential growth of vegetarianism (as it seems to be)?
Thanks for the thoughtful reply Daniel!
Cheaper spaceships are definitely cheaper to replace if some oppositional nation-state blows them up, but there’s only so many times you can play that game before you end up with the Kessler syndrome issues.
If you’re referring to the vertical launch and takeoff of SpaceX shuttles, that really only affects the last moments of reentry. A SpaceX shuttle still does the vast majority of its braking in the atmosphere.
Launching in weird orbits is absolutely a strategy that nation-states could use to mitigate these risks, but in a field where your margins are already white-knuckle tight, such an arbitrary restraint is at best a huge inefficiency on our ability to progress space exploration.
The $/kg price point is the driving metric of how quickly we can expand our space colonization, so increasing that by an order of magnitude because we can’t just get along seems suboptimal.
Ships cannot simply be allocated to arbitrary launch manuevers—fuel tanks need to be made bigger, designs adjusted, missions planned.
Hohmann transfers, as mentioned, carry with them an arbitrary amount of LEO over an arbitrary stretch of airspace. Restricting your space of possible Hohmann transfers to only “safe” ones will possibly reduce your launch windows to an unmanageable level.
[Question] What does the reaction to NFTs tell us about how people evaluate ecological damage?
Hi gilch! I apologise that this was confusing, hopefully I can clarify what I am trying to say here. Thanks for your in-depth response.
Nothing.
Yes, this was the answer that was meant to be inferred here. Maybe I could have been more clear that this is the correct answer. There isn’t really any question that you can perform to determine which Mary genuinely had the experience and the Mary which did not.
I think it might be useful to think about Mary’s room in more abstract terms, to avoid these contextual assumptions we make about the nature of qualia like with colour. Because colour is a general qualia of existence, as opposed to a specific experience (e.g. the example given elsewhere in the comments of the qualia of climbing Mt. Everest) we have different expectations around it. I would be curious to know if the more abstracted version of Mary’s Room outlined in this comment here would make this clearer.
Because that test reveals what the actual qualia of the experience is—what separates all of the information about an experience from the subjective essence of that experience. The qualia of an experience is not simply the ability to recall that experience, or simulate that experience in your mind.
I apologise TAG, I can’t say I’m trying to “gotcha” anything intentionally, just to discuss an interesting thought experiment.
I don’t know what the test is that you could perform, though I tried to present one possibility—your beliefs around that memory.
It matters here because I am specifically addressing Jackson’s views on Physicalism as presented in the original thought experiment, not all general views of qualia. The core of the question is if that is because of some physical phenomena.
Maybe that is subjectivity itself. Maybe qualia are how observes perceive their own brain states.
Yes, that is a good summary of what I am proposing here.
Gotchas aren’t an entirely bad thing, because at least you would be making a discernable point.
Well, I apologize that this has not been clear for you. I am somewhat surprised that you can so elegantly summarize my position while simultaneously saying I haven’t made that position, but maybe I’m just a lot, lot worse at expressing myself than I think I am haha.
I asked you directly whether you were asking or answering …and you did not answer!
Sorry, I’m not sure what this is regarding exactly. As in, am I asking Mary questions? Yes. Or am I asking a question about the thought experiment? Also yes. Or if the thought experiment is designed to provide a question as to what qualia is, or an answer? You tell me! I think it reveals something about what qualia is, at least, as the distinction between information about a thing and subjective experience of a thing.
Well, I think that is technically a departure from physicalism. But you said you are a physicalist!
Why is a belief a non-physical thing? It’s just a state within a system, arrangement of neurons, etc. The fact that it is a belief, and therefore something that has physical and real presence, is my whole refutation of Jackson’s view that it is something immeasurable or materially unknowable.
Was that your point/conclusion?
I mean it was a point that I made from just playing around with the thought experiment. I don’t know if it is the point, that’s why I’m trying to dissect it a little here.
What I’m not understanding is your argument for getting there. Either it’s not valid, or I don’t understand what you mean.
I would be happy to keep trying to explain. Let me try to lay it out again in a different way, and I’d be interested to hear what you think:
Mary has perfect knowledge—that is, all knowable information she possibly can—about an experience
At the start of the experiment, Mary knows with certainty that they have not actually had that experience
Mary goes through a door, and I randomly flip two coins—one to determine if we implant the memory or actually give Mary the experience, and one to determine if we inform Mary of the first coin flip. I don’t tell you about the outcomes of either flip.
Mary comes back through the door, and your task is to interrogate Mary to find out the coin flips.
What questions can you ask Mary to determine these answers? When can you be confident, and when is the answer indeterminable?
A second way to think about it is if you sent Mary through the door a 2nd time, in which scenarios would Mary learn something new—and therefore experience the qualia they did not posess at the start of the experiment, despite their perfect information?
May I clarify, when you said:
Maybe that is subjectivity itself. Maybe qualia are how observes perceive their own brain states.
You then said that this summary was a departure from physicalism. Could you explain what you meant by that? It was that statement that made me think you were saying that a belief was non-physical, as you said qualia being a belief was a departure from physicalism.
If you are saying that qualia are just beliefs that is a different claim, and one that you havent supported.
Oh dear… I think we might be in a bit of trouble, as I’m under the impression that’s pretty much the claim we’ve been talking about this whole time. It seems like another rephrasing of your previous summary, and exactly what I’ve been trying to say. The testable differences are the beliefs about that memory, and beliefs are a physical thing, so qualia don’t need to be supernatural or immeasureable.
Is this true? e.g. Gallup shows the fraction of US vegetarians at 6% in 2000 and 5% 2020 (link), so if there is exponential growth it seems like either their numbers are wrong or the growth is very slow.
Well the nature of exponential growth includes a long tail, but yes, it does appear that over the past few decades there has been substantial growth in many areas, with the UK reporting 150,000 vegans in 2006 compared to 600,000 vegans in 2018. Additionally, the vegan food industry “$14.2 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $31.4 billion by 2026, registering a CAGR of 10.5% from 2019 to 2026.” That’s a really high growth rate—I doubt that there is no other sector of the food industry expanding as rapdily as that, though I can’t say for sure.
It seems implausible to me that the individual benefits from reducing climate change are comparable to the costs or benefits of diet change over the short term. Even if everyone changing their diet decreased extinction risk by 1% (I think that’s implausible, but you could try to tell a story about non-extinction environmental impacts being crazy large), being vegetarian would reduce your grandchildren’s probability of death by well under < 1/billion which is completely negligible.
Culture is a thing, and the decisisons that you express shape the social valuations of the people around you. A single person going against a carnivorous tide will indeed change nothing, but a single person choosing to engage in a wider, growing movement can have substantial knock-on effects. I think you may be underestimating the impact of modern animal agriculture here, I would say that the difference between a timelines that drastically reduces its meat intake would be measureably better environmentally—primarily because it would drastically reduce the land requirements of feeding the world, which would in turn mean we could rewild large parts of it for a lot cheaper. No drastic change means that the freefall collapse of the biosphere continues unabated, whereas change could plausibly improve the situation like I describe.
That’s a great point! There is that possibility, but do we need to make that assumption? I’m not sure.
Mary would be able to tell us if “qualia did not differ in ways known only to the person who had them”, even if she might not be able to describe to us exactly how. She’d be able to say “that was different”, even if the precise words to describe how it was different escaped her, and that true/false response is enough to draw some meaningful conclusion about the existance of something, even if it doesn’t tell you anything about the nature of that thing. And if it’s completely imperceptable to Mary, then it can’t be qualia, as qualia is by definition about subjective perception.
Mary aquires the new, novel experience of believing that she has seen the color red, when she previously held the belief that she only had perfect, but non-subjective knowledge. Qualia does not necessarily need to be new information as this attempts to demonstrate, it just is whatever is different about your mind when you actually experience a thing.
I suppose the question is whether we can predict the “hidden inner mind” through some purely statistical model, as opposed to requiring some deeper understanding of human psychology of an AI. I’m not sure that a typical psychologist would claim to be able to predict behaviour through their training, whereas we have seen cases where even simple, statistical predictive systems can know more about you than you know about yourself - [1].
There’s also the idea that social intelligence is the ability to simulate other people, so perhaps that is something that an AI would need to do in order to understand other consciousnesses—running shallow simulations of those other minds.