TheAncientGeek

Karma: 546

TheAncientGeek Aug 9, 2017, 8:02 AM
0 points
in reply to: MrMind’s comment on: Inscrutable Ideas

Your example, in my opinion, disproves your point. Einstein did not simply noticed them: he constructed a coherent explanation that accounted for both the old model and the discrepancies.

I wasn’t making a point about meta-rationality versus rationality, I was making a point about noticing-and-putting-on-a-shelf versus noticing-and-taking-seriously. Every Christian has noticed the problem of evil...in the first sense.

the more people have independently access to the phoenomenon, the more confidence I would give to its existence.

You need to distinguish between phenomena (observations, experiences) and explanations. Even something as scientifically respectable as Tegmarks’ multiverse, or MWI, isn’t supposed to be supported by some unique observation, they are supposed to be better explanations, in terms of simplicity, generality, consilience, and so on, of the same data. MWI has to give the same predictions as CI.

If it’s only one person and said person cannot communicate it nor behaves any differently… well I would equate its existence to that of the invisible and intangible dragon.

You also need to distinguish between belief and understanding. Any kind of fundamentally different, new or advanced understanding has to be not completely communicable and comprehensible to the N-1 level, otherwise it would not be fundamentally new. It is somewhere between pointless and impossible to believe in advanced understanding on the basis of faith. Sweepingly rejecting the possibility of advanced understanding proves too much, because PhD maths is advanced understanding compared high school maths, and so on.

You are not being invited to have a faith-like belief in things that are undetectable and incomprehensible to anybody, you are being invited to widen your understanding so that you can see for yourself.

TheAncientGeek Aug 8, 2017, 8:13 AM
2 points
in reply to: MrMind’s comment on: Inscrutable Ideas

Points 1 and 2 are critiques of the rationalist community that are around since the inception of LW (as witnessed by the straw Vulcan / hot iron approaching metaphors), so I question that they usefully distinguish meta- from plain rationalists

Maybe the distinction is in noticing it enough and doing something about it.. iti is very common to say “yeah, that’s a problem, let’s put it in a box to be dealt with later” and then forget about it .

Lots of people noticed the Newton/Maxwell disparities in the 1900s, but Einstein noticed them enough.

“The “controversy” was quite old in 1905. Maxwell’s equations were around since 1862 and Lorentz transformations had been discussed at least since 1887. You are absolutely correct, that Einstein had all the pieces in his hand. What was missing, and what he supplied, was an authoritative verdict over the correct form of classical mechanics. Special relativity is therefor less of a discovery than it is a capping stone explanation put on the facts that were on the table for everyone to see. Einstein, however, saw them more clearly than others. –”

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/133366/what-problems-with-electromagnetism-led-einstein-to-the-special-theory-of-relati

Point 3 is more helpful in this regard, but then if anyone made that claim then I would ask to point to what differences does such a behavior imply… I find very hard to believe in something that is both unscrutable and unnoticeable.

Inscrutable and unnoticeable to whom?

TheAncientGeek Aug 7, 2017, 4:04 PM
0 points
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

No, pain is of ethical concern because you don’t like it. You don’t have to involve consciousness here.

Is that a fact or an opinion?

What is it exactly?

“highly unpleasant physical sensation caused by illness or injury.”

Obviously, I expect that it either will not be a definition or will rely on other poorly defined concepts.

have you got an exact definition of “concept”?

Requiring extreme precision in all things tends to bite you.

TheAncientGeek Aug 7, 2017, 2:47 PM
0 points
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument
. Can you define “meaningless” for me, as you understand it? In
1. Useless for communication.
2. Meaningless statements cannot have truth values assigned to them. (But not all statements without truth values ae meaningless).
So you agree that invisible unicorns indeed do not exist? How do you know? Obviously, the unicorns I’m talking about are not just undetectable by light, they’re also undetectable by all other methods

Where is this going? You can’t stipulate that robot pain is forever immeasurable without begging the question.It is not analogous to your invisible unicorns.

TheAncientGeek Aug 2, 2017, 2:01 PM
0 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Ignorant, irrelevant, and inscrutable (rationalism critiques)

But this is not how it works. For certain definitions, meta-X is still a subset of X;

And for others, it isn’t.

If a statement is true for all algorithms, it is also true for the “algorithm that tries several algorithms”;

Theoretically, but there is no such algorithm.

Similarly, saying: “I don’t have an epistemology; instead I have several epistemologies, and I use different ones in different situations” is a kind of epistemology.

But it’s not a single algorithmic epistemology.

Also, some important details are swept under the rug, for example: How do you choose which epistemology is appropriate for which situation?

How do you do anything for whcih there isn’t an algorithm? You use experience, intuition, and other system 1 stuff.

This is such a cheap trick

It isn’t in all cases. There is a genuine problem in telling whether a claim of radically superior knowledge is genuine, You can;t round them all off to fraud.

TheAncientGeek Aug 1, 2017, 3:18 PM
1 point
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

I am, at times, talking about alternative definition

Robot pain is of ethical concern because pain hurts. If you redefine pain into a schmain that is just a behavioural twitch without hurting or any other sensory quality, then it is no longer of ethical interest. That is the fraud.

Meaninglessness is not the default.

Well, it should be

That can’t possible work, as entirelyuseless has explained.

Sure, in a similar way that people discussing god or homeopathy bothers me.

God and homeopathy are meaningful, which is why people are able to mount arguments against them,

in your case the definition Z does not exist, so making up a new one is the next best thing.

The ordinary definition for pain clearly does exist, if that is what you mean.

Yes, that’s because your language is broken.

Prove it.

TheAncientGeek Aug 1, 2017, 3:04 PM
0 points
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

but you have brought in a bunch of different issues without explaining how they interrelate Which issues exactly

Meaningfulness, existence, etc.

Is this still about how you’re uncomfortable saying that invisible unicorns don’t exist?

Huh? It’s perfectly good as a standalone stament , it’s just that it doens’t have much to do with meaning or measurabiltiy.

Does “‘robot pain’ is meaningless” follow from the [we have no arguments suggesting that maybe ‘robot pain’ could be something measurable, unless we redefine pain to mean something a lot more specific] better?

Not really, because you haven’t explained why meaning should depend on measurability.

TheAncientGeek Jul 31, 2017, 5:35 PM
0 points
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

So I assumed you understood that immeasurability is relevant here

I might be able to follow an argument based on immeasurabilty alone, but you have brought in a bunch of different issues without explaining how they interrelate. you

Expressed in plain terms “robots do not feel pain” does not follow from “we do not know how to measure robot pain”.

No, but it follows from “we have no arguments suggesting that maybe ‘robot pain’ could be something measurable, unless we redefine pain to mean something a lot more specific”.

No, still not from that.

You can make any sentence come out true or false by juggling definitions...which is why people distrust argument by definition.

TheAncientGeek Jul 31, 2017, 5:17 PM
1 point
in reply to: MrMind’s comment on: Ignorant, irrelevant, and inscrutable (rationalism critiques)
You are taking the inscrutability thing a bit too strongly. Someone can transition from rationality to meta rationality, just as someone can transition to pre rationality to rationality. Pre rationality has limitations because yelling tribal slogans at people who aren’t in your tribe doesn’t work.

What does meta-rationality even imply, for the real world?

What does rationality imply? You can’t actually run Solomonoff Induction, so FAPP you are stuck with a messy plurality of approximations. And if you notice that problem...

TheAncientGeek Jul 28, 2017, 1:11 PM
1 point
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Ignorant, irrelevant, and inscrutable (rationalism critiques)
It’s usually the case that the rank and file are a lot worse than the leaders.

TheAncientGeek Jul 28, 2017, 9:04 AM
1 point
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Ignorant, irrelevant, and inscrutable (rationalism critiques)
If common sense, and its associated logic, could answer the questions it poses, there would never have been philosophy, or a desire for it. The classic philosophical questions like “where did everything come from” cannot be answered by common sense, and therefore the answer, whatever it is, must be crazy, in common sense terms.

To take an analogy, mathematicians could not answer every question in terms of integers, the counting numbers of common sense, so they had to invent fractions, and then real numbers, and eventually complex numbers, which include the notoriously crazy “imaginary” numbers.

And then there is physics...the subject that gave us, thanks to Wolfgang Pauli, the phrase “not crazy enough to be true”.

And physics gave us physicalism, the default philosophy of sensible, uncrazy philosophers. What can that tell us about the origins of the world, the nature of consciousness, or how one should live ones life? If you are lucky, the answer will be “consult science”..if not it will be “don’t ask that question”. Denial, dissolution and deflation are the fate of anything that doesn’t fit physicalism’s Procrustean bed. Consciousness is an illusion, ethics merely subjective, and so on.

TheAncientGeek Jul 28, 2017, 8:56 AM
2 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Ignorant, irrelevant, and inscrutable (rationalism critiques)

Speaking for myself, I would mostly like to have some assurance that what you are trying to explain is not one of the following:..

try “there is no one-size-fits-all epistemology”. With a side of “no one-size-fits-all smartness”.

Frankly, this all seems to me, from outside, like another status move. First you have a group that claims higher status by being inscrutable.

That issue, if it is an issue, reduplicates itself with rationalists versus pre-rationalists.

TheAncientGeek Jul 28, 2017, 8:26 AM
2 points
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

most statements about consciousness are unfalsifiable

That’s not the problem.

The assumption that “consciousness” is a meaningful (but supposedly poorly understood) concept that explains something happening either in the outside world or in my own head.

The assumption is more that consciousness is something that needs explaining,

I also recall explaining how a “meaningless” statement can be considered “false”.

That’s wrong. If you can put a truth-value on a sentence , it is meaningful.

The question is, why are you so uncomfortable with paraphrasing?

I think it is better to express yourself using words that mean what you are trying to express.

Do you feel that there are some substantial differences?

Yes. “Meaningless” , “immeasurable”, “unnecessary” and “non existent” all mean different things.

Honestly, I mostly do this to clarify what I mean, not to obscure it.

I think ti is likely that your entire argument is based on vagueness and semantic confusion,

robot pain” problem is the problem where you think that maybe robots could feel pain, but you have not even a shred of an idea how to test if they do.

There is a real problem of not being able to test for a pain sensation directly.

Why did it take you so long too express it that way? Perhaps the problem is this:

Expressed in plain terms “robots do not feel pain” does not follow from “we do not know how to measure robot pain”. Perhaps you have to use vagueness and confusion to make the invalid inference seem valid.

TheAncientGeek Jul 28, 2017, 8:12 AM
0 points
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

No, I used “experience” as a label.

As opposed to what?

That’s assuming that “experience”, as you use that word, is a meaningful category.

Does “meaningful” mean “meaningful” here , or is it being used as a misleading proxy for something like “immeasurable” or “unnecessary” or “tadasdatys doens’t like it”?

What vocabulary relating to what mental states do I reject?

You keep saying various words are meaningless. One would not want to use meaningless words, generally. OTOH, you have revealed elsewhere that you don’t use “meaningless” to mean “meaningless”. So who knows?

More importantly, can you actually offer an argument why “chairness” doesn’t exist, other than pointing out that I just made it up? Preferably an argument that I couldn’t make about consciousness just by swapping a few words?

Consciousness is in the dictiionary, chariness isn’t.

Consciousness is a concept used by science, chairness isn’t.

Consciousness is supported by empirical evidence, chairness isn’t.

TheAncientGeek Jul 26, 2017, 6:25 PM
1 point
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument
Your solution is unconvincing because it can be fulfilled by code that is too simple to be to be convincing. If you change the definition of pain to remove the the subjective, felt aspect, then the resulting problem is easy to solve...but it’s not the original problem. It’s not that I can’t understand you, it’s that it’s hard to believe anyone could pull such a fraudulent manoeuvre.

Meaninglessness is not the default. Other member’s of your language community are willing to discuss things like robot pain. Does that bother you?

If definitions do not prove statements , you have no proof that robot pain is easy.

If you redefine pain, you are not making statements about pain in my language. Your schmain might be a trivially easy thing to understand, but it’s not what I asked about.

TheAncientGeek Jul 26, 2017, 3:39 PM
1 point
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

. With a strict physical definition the problem is easy,

Solve it , then.

with your definition the phrase is meaningless.

Prove that.

I don’t think I’ve ever tried to prove anything by redefining any words [..] my definitions are better,

But using them proves nothing?

Who are you communicating to when you use your own definitions?

You’re asking this as though I maliciously misinterpreted what you mean by consciousness.

I am wondering who you communicate with when you use a private language>

TheAncientGeek Jul 26, 2017, 3:30 PM
0 points
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

Yes, “feeling” and “experience”, are pretty much the same thing,

So they are either both meaningful, or both meaningless. But you have used “experience” as though it is meaningful, and you have implied that “feeling” is meaningless.

That was a predictable problem. Physical identity theory requires statements of the form ” is equivalent to ”. if you reject all vocabulary relating to mental sates, you cannot make that kind of statement, and so cannot express identity theory.

At this point someone could suggest that, if we started with the assumption that each object has an associated “chairness”, then that is what we would want to compare. I’m sure you can see why that doesn’t solve anything. And yet this is exactly what you do with experiences, from my point of view.

Whereas, from my point of view, 1st person experience was there all along.

TheAncientGeek Jul 26, 2017, 2:45 PM
0 points
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

I start from where I last stopped—discarding all of my progress would be weird.

There is a difference between a working hypothesis and an unfalsifiable dogma. It seems to you that there is nothing to explain about consciousness because you only accept 3rd-person empirical data, because of your ontology.

You may think that dropping an initial assumption is inherently wrong,

Could explain what assumption you are dropping, and why, without using the word magical.

but it’s quite normal, not only in physical sciences, but also in math. Note that I’m not contradicting consciousness, I just find it meaningless or, if you prefer, unnecessary.

I’d prefer if you settled on one claim.

the “robot pain” problem.

That would be the problem for which there is no evidence except your say-so.

You see, if I started from the assumption that gravity does not exist, my life would be very hard and I’d eventually have to introduce some concept that’s like gravity but by another name.

You can function practically without a concept of gravity, as people before Newton did. What you can get away with theoretically depends on what you are trying to explain. Perhaps there is a gravity sceptic out there somewhere insisting that “falling object” is a meaningless term, and that gravity is magic.

TheAncientGeek Jul 26, 2017, 1:38 PM
0 points
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

started from the same magical assumptions that everyone starts with, and eventually I found them unnecessary and unattractive.

There’s that word again.

TheAncientGeek Jul 26, 2017, 8:33 AM
0 points
in reply to: Furcas’s comment on: What Are The Chances of Actually Achieving FAI?
“Friendliness” is a rag-bag of different things—benevolence, absence of malevolence, the ability to control a system whether it’s benevolent or malevolent , and so on. So the question is somewhat ill-posed.

As far as control goes, all AI projects involve an element of control, because if you can;t get the AI to do what you want, it is useless.So the idea that AI and FAI are disjoint is wrong.