TAG

• TAG 27 Jan 2020 16:18 UTC

  −1 points

  on: On the on­tolog­i­cal de­vel­op­ment of consciousness

  And, the world-per­cep­tion on­tol­ogy has con­scious ex­pe­rience as a com­po­nent. For, how else can what were origi­nally per­cep­tual pat­terns be ex­plained, ex­cept by posit­ing that there is a cam­era-like en­tity in the world (at­tached to some phys­i­cal body) that gen­er­ates such per­cepts?

  1. You are im­plic­itly ex­plain­ing only one as­pect or defi­ni­tion of con­scious­ness: the ex­is­tence of a sub­jec­tive point of view. Other as­pects such as high or­der thought or qualua are not dealt with.

  2. Although you use the term “on­tol­ogy” you are not at­tempt­ing to ex­plain what is ul­ti­mately real… both pat­tern on­tol­ogy and ob­ject on­tol­ogy as you de­scribe them are phe­nomenolog­i­cal, from the per­spec­tive of the sub­ject. A re­al­ist could still ob­ject that con­scious­ness hasn’t been shown to fea­ture in the ba­sic on­tol­ogy.

• TAG 27 Jan 2020 13:35 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Stuart Anderson's comment on: Mo­ral pub­lic goods

  Altru­ism is to favour sac­ri­fice to one’s group for benefit in re­turn.

  If one per­son­ally gets a re­turn , then it’s not al­tru­ism. The re­turn is to the group.

  There is no benefit to me starv­ing for peo­ple that aren’t in my group.

  There’s no per­sonal benefit to you do­ing most of the things you are eth­i­cally re­quired to do.

  When it’s just us then peo­ple will aid their own group just fine.

  Maybe, but not out of self in­ter­est.

  ‘Redis­tri­bu­tion’ (ie. theft) is an ex­er­cise in pointless­ness. As long as there is scarcity there will be haves and have nots,

  You are as­sum­ing that the only pos­si­ble pur­pose of re­dis­tri­bu­tion is to bring about an equil­ibrium of com­plete equal­ity. That is not the case. There are mul­ti­ple jus­tifca­tions for re­dis­tri­bu­tion.

  We are already achiev­ing record rates of get­ting peo­ple out of poverty, not with hand­outs, but with cap­i­tal­ism.

  Whom are you ar­gu­ing against?

• TAG 27 Jan 2020 13:24 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Stuart Anderson's comment on: Mo­ral pub­lic goods

  There’s lit­tle in the way of ethics here, it’s just in­di­vi­d­u­als mak­ing prag­matic de­ci­sions to make their own lives eas­ier.

  Ethics is in­di­vi­d­ual level al­tru­ism in pur­suit of group level prag­ma­tism. If it was just in­di­vi­d­u­als mak­ing self-cen­tered de­ci­sions, they would re­ject tax­a­tion as liber­ta­ti­anism ad­vises.

• TAG 23 Jan 2020 13:25 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: George's comment on: Ge­orge’s Shortform

  The global warm­ing meme isn’t spread­ing far enough ..or is the de­nial­ism meme spread­ing to much?

• TAG 17 Jan 2020 15:48 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: steve2152's comment on: Book re­view: Re­think­ing Consciousness

  Well, I wasn’t nit­pick­ing you. Frieden­bach was asssert­ing lo­cal­ity+de­ter­minism. You are as­sert­ing lo­cal­ity+non­de­ter­minism, which is OK.

• TAG 17 Jan 2020 15:44 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: steve2152's comment on: Book re­view: Re­think­ing Consciousness

  I am strongly dis­in­clined to be­lieve (as I think David Chalmers has sug­gested) that there’s a no­tion of p-zom­bies, in which an un­con­scious sys­tem could have ex­actly the same thoughts and be­hav­iors as a con­scious one, even in­clud­ing writ­ing books about the philos­o­phy of con­scious­ness, for rea­sons de­scribed here and el­se­where.

  Again: Chalmers doesn’t think p-zom­bies are ac­tu­ally pos­si­ble.

  If I be­lieve (1), it seems to fol­low that I should en­dorse the claim “if we have a com­plete ex­pla­na­tion of the meta-prob­lem of con­scious­ness, then there is noth­ing left to ex­plain re­gard­ing the hard prob­lem of con­scious­ness”.

  That doesn’t fol­low from (1). It would fol­low from the claim that ev­ery­one is a zom­bie, be­cause then there would be noth­ing to con­scious­ness ex­cept false claims to be con­scious. How­ever, if you take the view that re­ports of con­scious­ness are caused by con­scious­ness per se, then con­scious­ness per se ex­ists and needs to be ex­plained sep­a­rately from re­ports and be­havi­our.

• TAG 17 Jan 2020 13:42 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach's comment on: Book re­view: Re­think­ing Consciousness

  Pos­tu­lat­ing hard emer­gence re­quires a non-lo­cal pos­tu­late.

  That is not ob­vi­ous.

• TAG 17 Jan 2020 13:40 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach's comment on: Book re­view: Re­think­ing Consciousness

  Tak­ing (2) to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion seems to im­ply that we live in a de­ter­minis­tic block uni­verse,

  That was not im­plied by (2) as stated, and isn’t im­plied by physics in gen­eral. Both the block uni­verse and de­ter­minism are open ques­tions (and not equiv­a­lent to each other).

  One of the chief prob­lems here is that physics, so far as we can tell, is en­tirely lo­cal.

  [emph. added]

  Nope. What is speci­fi­cally ruled out by test’s of Bell’s in­equal­ities is the con­junc­tion of (lo­cal, de­ter­minis­tic). The one thing we know is that the two things you just as­serted are not both true. What we don’t know is which is false.

• TAG 14 Jan 2020 14:32 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: romeostevensit's comment on: Red Flags for Rationalization

  Be­com­ing defen­sive and frus­trated and re­treat­ing to vague lan­guage when asked for more speci­fics.

  Sub­va­ri­ety: down­vot­ing with­out re­ply­ing.

• TAG 14 Jan 2020 13:58 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: shminux's comment on: Real­ism about rationality

  You can figure out whether an al­gorithm halts or not with­out be­ing ac­ci­den­tally stuck in an in­finite loop.

  In spe­cial cases, not in the gen­eral case.

• TAG 12 Jan 2020 18:23 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: steve2152's comment on: Book re­view: Re­think­ing Consciousness

  I re­ally just meant the more gen­eral point that “con­scious­ness doesn’t ex­ist (if con­scious­ness is defined as X)” is the same state­ment as “con­scious­ness does not mean X, but rather Y”

  If you stipu­late that con­scious­ness means Y con­scious­ness, not X con­scious­ness, you haven’t proven any­thing about X con­scious­ness.

  If I stipu­late that when I say, “duck”, I mean mal­lards, I im­ply noth­ing about the ex­is­ten­tial sta­tus of mus­covys or teals. In or­der to figure out what is, real you have to look, not jug­gle defi­ni­tions.

  If you have an in­fal­lible way of es­tab­lish­ing what re­ally ex­ists, that in some way by­passes lan­guage, and a nor­ma­tive rule that ev­ery term must have a re­al­world refer­ent, then you might be in a place where you you can say what a word re­ally means.

  Other­wise, lan­guage is just cus­tom.

  I’m in­ter­ested in whether you can say more about how ex­actly you define con­scious­ness such that illu­sion­ism is not con­scious­ness. (As I men­tioned, I’m not sure I’ll dis­agree with your defi­ni­tion!)

  Illu­sion­ism is not con­scious­ness be­cause it is a the­ory of con­scious­ness.

  Illu­sion­ism ex­plic­itly does not ex­plain con­scious­ness as typ­i­cally defined, but in­stead switches the topic to third per­son re­ports of con­scious­ness.

  Edit1:

  I think that if at­ten­tion schema the­ory can ex­plain ev­ery thought and feel­ing I have about con­scious­ness (as in my silly ex­am­ple con­ver­sa­tion in the “meta-prob­lem of con­scious­ness” sec­tion), then there’s noth­ing left to explain

  Ex­plain­ing con­scious­ness as part of the hard prob­lem of con­scious­ness is differ­ent to ex­plain­ing-away con­scious­ness (or ex­plain­ing re­ports of con­scious­ness) as part of the meta prob­lem of con­scious­ness.

  Edit2:

  There are two ways of not know­ing the cor­rect ex­pla­na­tion of some­thing: the way where no one has any idea, and the way where ev­ery­one has an idea… but no one knows which ex­pla­na­tion is right be­cause they are ex­plain­ing differ­ent things in differ­ent ways.

  Hav­ing an ex­pla­na­tion is only use­ful in the first situ­a­tion. Other­wise, the whole prob­lem is the differ­ence be­tween “an ex­pla­na­tion” and “the ex­pla­na­tion”.

• TAG 12 Jan 2020 12:21 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: shminux's comment on: Book re­view: Re­think­ing Consciousness

  “Why do I think re­al­ity ex­ists?” Is already an­swer­able. You can list a num­ber of rea­sons why you hold this be­lief.

  There are also rea­sons for be­liev­ing in non-illu­sory forms of free will and con­scious­ness. If that ar­gu­ment is suffi­cient to es­tab­lish re­al­ism in some cases, it is suffi­cient in all cases.

  You are not sup­posed to dis­solve the new ques­tion, only re­for­mu­late the origi­nal one in a way that is be­comes an­swer­able.

  Sup­posed by whom? EY gives some in­struc­tions in the im­per­a­tive voice, but that’s not how logic works.

  His ar­gu­ment is that if free will is pos­si­bly an illu­sion then it is an illu­sion. If valid, this ar­gu­ment would also show that con­scious­ness and ma­te­rial re­al­ity are definitely illu­sions.

  So it dis­proves too much.

  But there is a valid form of the ar­gu­ment where you ar­gue against the re­al­ity of X on ad­di­tion to ar­gu­ing for the pos­si­ble illu­sory na­ture of X.

  There are no “unique ex­cep­tions”, we are al­gorithms,

  That’s much more con­jec­tural than most of the claims made here.

• TAG 12 Jan 2020 11:35 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ESRogs's comment on: Book re­view: Re­think­ing Consciousness

  “Illu­sion­ist” is in prin­ci­ple a one place pred­i­cate like “re­al­ist” and “scep­tic”. You can be a re­al­ist about X and a scep­tic about Y. In prac­tice, it tends to mean illu­sion­ism about qualia.

• TAG 11 Jan 2020 17:50 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach's comment on: Un­der­ap­pre­ci­ated points about util­ity func­tions (of both sorts)

  You are prov­ing that if prefer­ences are well-defined , they also need to be con­sis­tent.

  What does it feel like from the in­side to have badly defined prefer­ences? Pre­sum­ably it feels like some­times be­ing un­able to make de­ci­sions, which you re­port is the case.

  You can’t prove that prefer­ences are con­sis­tent with­out first prov­ing they are well defined.

• TAG 11 Jan 2020 15:36 UTC

  −1 points

  in reply to: steve2152's comment on: Book re­view: Re­think­ing Consciousness

  If you say that free will and con­scious­ness are by defi­ni­tion non-phys­i­cal, then if course nat­u­ral­ist ex­pla­na­tions ex­plain them away.

  Ob­ject level re­ply: I don’t. Most con­tem­po­rary philoso­phers don’t. If you see that sort of thing it is al­most cer­tainly a straw man.

  meta level re­ply: And nat­u­rally ideal­ists re­ject any no­tion of mat­ter ex­cept as a bun­dle of sen­sa­tion. Just be­cause some­thing is nor­mal and nat­u­ral, does not mean it is nor­ma­tively cor­rect. It is nor­mal and nat­u­ral to be tribal, bi­ased and oth­er­wise ir­ra­tional. Im­mu­nity to ev­i­dence is a Bad Thing from the point of view of ra­tio­nal­ity.

  But you can also choose to define the terms to en­com­pass what you think is re­ally go­ing on

  You can if you re­ally know, but con­fus­ing as­sump­tions and knowl­edge is an­other Bad Thing. We know that atoms can be split, so re­defin­ing an atom to be a di­visi­ble unit of mat­ter.

  I’m definitely signed up for com­pat­i­bil­ism on free will and have been for many years

  Ex­plain­ing com­pat­i­bil­ist free will is au­to­mat­i­cally ex­plain­ing away liber­tar­ian free will. So what is the case against liber­tar­ian free will? It isn’t false be­cause of nat­u­ral­ism, since it isn’t su­per­nat­u­ral by defi­ni­tion—and be­cause nat­u­ral­ism needs to be defea­si­ble to mean any­thing. EY dis­misses liber­tar­ian free will out of hand. That is not knowl­edge.

  but I don’t yet feel 100% com­fortable call­ing Grazi­ano’s ideas “con­scious­ness” (as he does), or if I do call it that, I’m not sure which of my in­tu­itions and as­so­ci­a­tions about “con­scious­ness” are still ap­pli­ca­ble.

  What would it take for it to be false? If the an­swer is “noth­ing”, then you are look­ing at sup­pres­sion of ev­i­dence.

• TAG 11 Jan 2020 13:16 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: shminux's comment on: Book re­view: Re­think­ing Consciousness

  Ex­cept that EY is not an illu­sion­ist about con­scious­ness! When con­sid­er­ing free will, he as­sumes right off the bat that it can’t pos­si­bly be real, and has to be ex­plained away in­stead. But in the gen­er­al­ised anti zom­bie prin­ci­ple, he goes in the op­po­site di­rec­tion, in­sist­ing that re­ports of con­scious­ness are always caused by con­scious­ness. [*]

  So there is no unique can­di­date for be­ing an illu­sion. Any­thing can be. Some peo­ple think con­scious­ness is all, and mat­ter is an illu­sion.

  Lead­ing to the anti-Au­mann prin­ci­ple: two par­ties will never agree if they are al­lowed to dis­miss each oth­ers ev­i­dence out of hand.

  [*] Make no mis­take, as­sert­ing illu­sion­ism about con­scious­ness is as­sert­ing you your­self are a zom­bie.

• TAG 11 Jan 2020 12:14 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: TAG's comment on: Ge­orge’s Shortform

  And the thing I said that isn’t fac­tu­ally cor­rect is...

• TAG 10 Jan 2020 13:08 UTC

  −4 points

  in reply to: George's comment on: Ge­orge’s Shortform

  Re­gard­ing MIRI/​SIAI/​Yud­kowsky, I think you are con­sid­er­ably over­es­ti­mat­ing the ex­tent to which the early AI safety move­ment took any no­tice of re­search. Early MIRI ob­sessed about stuff like AIXI, that AI re­searchers didn’t care about, and based a lot of their nigh­mare sce­nar­i­ous on “ge­nie” style rea­son­ing de­rived from fairy tales.

• TAG 9 Jan 2020 0:41 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach's comment on: Do­minic Cum­mings: “we’re hiring data sci­en­tists, pro­ject man­agers, policy ex­perts, as­sorted weirdos”

  an en­tity who feels their rights are vi­o­lated.

  If I feel that I have a right to a swim­ming pool, does your failure to buy me a swim­ming pool mean that a right has been vi­o­lated?

• TAG 9 Jan 2020 0:26 UTC

  −1 points

  in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach's comment on: Do­minic Cum­mings: “we’re hiring data sci­en­tists, pro­ject man­agers, policy ex­perts, as­sorted weirdos”

  For whom” doesn’t mat­ter.

  It mat­ters be­cause your eth­i­cal/​de­ci­sion the­ory will give differ­ent re­sults de­pend­ing on whose util­ities you are tak­ing into ac­count.

  If I take an ac­tion, the world that re­sults as a con­se­quence has an en­tity who feels their rights are vi­o­lated. When I sum over the util­ity of that world, that rights vi­o­la­tion is a nega­tive term, if I’m the kind of per­son cares about peo­ple’s rights (which I am, but is a sep­a­rate is­sue).

  It’s the heart of the is­sue. If you don’t care about their rights, but they do, then you will vi­o­late their rights.

  If there is some ob­jec­tive no­tion of the nega­tive util­ity that comes from a rights vi­o­la­tion, you will vi­o­late their their rights un­less your per­sonal UF hap­pens to be ex­actly al­igned with the ob­jec­tive value.

  For “the ends don’t jus­tify the means” to mean some­thing, it im­plies that there is some­thing of in­trin­sic nega­tive moral­ity in the ac­tions I take, even if the re­sults are identical

  You can’t calcu­late what the ul­ti­mate re­sults are. You have to use heuris­tics. That’s why there is a real para­dox about the trol­ley prob­lem. The lo­cal (nec­es­sar­ily) calcu­la­tion says, that kil­ling the fat man saves lives, the heuris­tic says “dont kill peo­ple”