TheAncientGeek

Karma: 546

TheAncientGeek Jul 25, 2017, 6:55 PM
0 points
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument
Can you argue your point? I can argue mine.

You say that we must start with reality, but we cannot: (an accruate map of,) reality is the end point of a process of explanation. We start with pima-facie evidence, we build theories, we test them, and eventually we end up with a map of reality. What you call “reality” is a subset of empirical evidence that has certain qualities . of being public, objective, measurable and so on. Starting there means discarding any other kind of prima-facie evidence. The problem being that discarding subjective, private experience at the outset is equivalent to stating that consciousness does not exist

TheAncientGeek Jul 25, 2017, 4:00 PM
1 point
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

Oh. No then. I think this whole debate is about what the dictionary definition should be.

Dictionary definitions generally reflect popular usage. They are sometimes revised in terms of scientific discoveries—water is no longer defined as a basic element—but that requires more epistemic weigh than someone’s intuitive hunch.

Definitions aren’t handed from god in stone tablets

They aren’t , but that is not sufficient t show that you can prove things buy redefining words.

I feel comfortable offering my own definitions, especially in a case such as “pain”, where definition through behaviors matches common usage quite well.

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

Do you agree that “can some tables be chairs” is, in any sense, a stupid question? I

It’s not relevant to anything. I thunk there can be meaningless statements, and I continue to think yo have no evidence that “robot pain” is one of them.

Yes, but the “robot is experiencing” part is exactly as problematic as the whole “robot pain” you’re trying to explain.

Says you. Why should I believe that?

No, my definition of pain (“the thing that makes you say ouch” one) is very simple and makes the “robot pain” problem very easy (the actual answer depends on the robot, of course).

Are you abndoning the position that “robot in pain” is meanngless in all cases?

TheAncientGeek Jul 25, 2017, 3:52 PM
0 points
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

That’s assuming that “feeling” is a meaningful category. If you didn’t start from that assumption, and instead identified your experiences

Assuming “experience” is a meaningful category.

with brain states, you could go one step further and ask “are the states of the robot’s processor/memory similar to my brain states”, but then you hit the obvious classification problem.

You hit a classification problem, which is that you don’t know which similarities are relevant, and therefore what kind of group you are aiming at. If you don’t reject experience and feeling, you at least know that you are trying to group brains states that are experientially similar.

TheAncientGeek Jul 24, 2017, 9:01 AM
1 point
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

I didn’t start here, I wasn’t born yesterday and fully formed, I started from the same magical assumptions that everyone starts with, and eventually I found them unnecessary and unattractive. Unless you meant something else by “start”.

Of course, I mean your methodology starts..

TheAncientGeek Jul 23, 2017, 3:26 PM
2 points
in reply to: eternal_neophyte’s comment on: Can anyone refute these arguments that we live on the interior of a hollow Earth?
That is the kind of snark that is entirely justified.

TheAncientGeek Jul 23, 2017, 3:26 PM
0 points
in reply to: Manfred’s comment on: Can anyone refute these arguments that we live on the interior of a hollow Earth?

This is one of the problems with a falsificationist idea of scientific progress, where we never prove theories true but make progress by proving them false. If evidence against a theory appears (e.g. the ability to see different stars from different parts of the earth might be thought of as “refuting” the idea of a flat earth), a proponent of that theory never has to give up on it. They can just patch the theory. Maybe light does a special little dance to make all the observations look like we’re looking out at a universe, etc. If you try to refute someone, they can just refuse to be refuted and add another patch to their theory.

Criticism is a much wider concept than falsification. You can criticise a theory for having too many patches to work around apparent problems.

TheAncientGeek Jul 23, 2017, 2:00 PM
0 points
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

You mean, is saying “dunno” to everything worse than saying something is true without having absolute 100% confidence? Yes

If we assume that the sweet spot is somwhere between 0% and 100%, are you sure you are saying “dunno” enough.

TheAncientGeek Jul 23, 2017, 1:23 PM
1 point
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

Because I had faith you’d figure it out (and I like brevity). I don’t know how you failed that. Do you think I don’t know that “conscience” is a topic philosophy already deals with?

Did you mean “consciousness”? To put is bluntly, if you haven’t; heard of MR, there is probably a lot you don’t know about the subject.

That doesn’t answer the question. If we talk about conscience and experiences, that is presumably because we want to understand something about them through reason. But if we’re reasoning about experiences, we’re probably dealing with memories of experiences, rather than the experiences themselves.

We are reasoning about consciousness in general, and experience in general. That’s not at all the same as comparing the taste of today’s coffee to yesterdays.

Oh, I just use “magic” to refer to immeasurable, irreproducible things, that can’t be understood through experimentation.

You yourself are blocking off the possibility of understanding consciousness , subjectivity and experience by refusing to allow them as prima-facie, pre-theoretic phenomena.

You say that we must start with reality, but we cannot: (an accruate map of reality) is the end point of a process of explanation. We start with pima-facie evidence, we build theories, we test them, and eventually we end up with a map of reality. What you call “reality” is a subset of empirical evidence that has certain qualities . of being public, objective, measurable and so on. Starting there means discarding any other kind of prima-facie evidence. The problem being that discarding subjective, private experience at the outset is equivalent to stating that consciousness does not exist.

I get that you hate, hate, hate dualism or anything else that threatens physical monism, but you can’t prove physical monism by begging the question against it. You are doing it no favours.

But before that, can you elaborate on what, if anything, that has to do with our “robot pain” problem?

Nobody else has a problem with robot pain as a meaningful possibility. You do because you have removed the fist person from your definitions.

TheAncientGeek Jul 23, 2017, 12:22 PM
1 point
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

Is that supposed to be a novel theory, or a dictionary definition?

Definition, as I state right in the next sentence

The question asked dictionary definition.

Uncontroversially, you can prove something, or at least obtain a high standard of justification using falsifiable empiricism. Uncontroversially, you also can achieve a good level of justification using armchair reasoning based on valid deductions from standard definitions.

The use of nonstandard—stipulated, gerrymanderd, tendentious—is much dicier. You yourself made the comparison to compatiblism. In shades of gray terms, the redefinition manoeuvre isn’t completely beyond the pale, but it is nowhere near the gold standard of epistemology either—compatibliism, the “wretched subtefuge” remains somewhat contentious. The objection is is that compatibilists have changed the subject, are not in fact talking about free will.

No, I’m suggesting that whether we use “pain” to describe the robot’s states associated with robot’s behaviors similar to human expression pain is a stupid question.

And how are you justifying that suggestion? By appeal to personal intuition, which is also low grade epistemology.

It’s actually possible to answer that kind of question in a reasonably rigorous and formal way...you can show that a certain concept is leads to contradiction. But then such arguments are only convincing if they start from definitions that bear some relation to what a word usually means.

Using the standard definition of “pain” , it is easy to see what the sentence “the robot is in pain” means. It means “the robot is experiencing a sensation similar to the sensation I feel when I stub my toe”.

Presumably, the fact that “robot in pain” seems weird to you is something to do with your weird definition of pain. But insisting on speaking a language that no one else speaks is not proving anything.

For everyone else, pain is a feeling, a sensation, a phenomenal mode, a quale. You have left all that out of your definition , which is like definining a chair as something you cannot possibly sit on.

TheAncientGeek Jul 22, 2017, 5:41 PM
1 point
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

While GWT is a model, it’s not a model of the consciousness as you use that word. It’s just a model of a human brain and some of the things happening in it

That’s still an irrelevant objection. The issue is whether the concept of consciousness can be built on and refined, or whether it should be abandoned. GWT shows that it can be built on, and it is unreasonable to demand perfection.

That’s ridiculous. Grapefruit is a fruit, bitter is taste, but somehow “grapefruit is bitter” is true and not a category error.

Because then I’d have to say “dunno” about literally almost everything, including the bitterness of purple.

Is that worse than saying you know things you don’t know?

TheAncientGeek Jul 22, 2017, 4:47 PM
1 point
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

There’s an extensive literature of arguments to the contrary

There is extensive literature of arguments in favor of god or homeopathy.

You said there was a “lack” of arguments to the contrary, and I pointed out that there wasn’t.

. Obviously, I was referring to a lack of arguments I’d find compelling. It should also be obvious that I have read most of those arguments

Then why didn’t you say lack of good arguments? And why didn’t you say what is wrong with them?

What about your own report of your experience? Is that qualitatively different from your memory of the experience?

You seem to have trouble grasping that experience is experience, as well as that the first person is the first person.

Here’s a baseless hypothesis—for you to reason about your experiences, the experiences first have to be stored in your (short term) memory. This assumes that memory is something relatively simple and objective, compared to the magic of experiences.

“Magic” is not a helpful phrase.

You need to distinguish ontology and epistemology. Experiences and memories and so on have their physical correlates—ontology—but that does not mean you can comprehend them—epistemology. We might be able to find ways of translating between correlates and experience, but only if we don’t ignore experience as an epistemology. But, again, taking 1st person experience seriously as a means to understand cosnciousness does not presuppose a dualistic ontology because epistemology and ontology are different.

internal reasoning about your experiences

Experience is experience, not reasoning about experience.

TheAncientGeek Jul 21, 2017, 4:17 PM
1 point
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

More generally, you’re repeatedly said that the concept of consciousness is very useful

I have said that actual experience is useful to pin down the meaning s of words referring to exerpeince.

You may believe that, but do you know it?

That’s a slightly weird question#

Not at all. That there is a difference betewen belief and knowledge is very standard.

I believe it thanks to some rudimentary understanding of how brains and sensory organs work, and a lack of arguments to the contrary.

There’s an extensive literature of arguments to the contrary,

But the idea that something cannot be learned through physical experiment, demands a lot of serious evidence, to say the least.

It is the idea that you can learn aout the inward or 1st person by purely outward or 3rd person means that is contentious.

If I can parse you correctly, you seem to be saying that a thought or memory is more true, in some sense, while stored in the brain, then if written down on paper.

No, I am saying that my first person is me, and your first person is you. SO my first person information is my experience, not someone else’s report of their experience.

Of course, the choice is quite arbitrary here. I don’t see any confusion coming from it.

Well, you said that the two R words mean the same hting , when by established usage, they don’t That looks like a source of confusion to me.

TheAncientGeek Jul 21, 2017, 4:07 PM
1 point
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

No, I’m treating the identity of pain with the memories thoughts and behaviors that express pain, as unfalsifiable.

Is that supposed to be a novel theory, or a dictionary definition?

I don’t recall suggesting that something isn’t MR

Your suggesting pain can’t be instantiated in robots..

TheAncientGeek Jul 21, 2017, 11:18 AM
0 points
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

I’m not assigning any different meanings to those words, at least not in this context. Are you? Interestingly, both words are pretty awkward to use here. And maybe I can agree that “realization” is a little better.

The chair you are sitting on is a realisation; Van Gogh’s painting of his chair at Arles is a representation. You can’t sit on it.

But the idea that Pain definitely is a thing that exists, rather than just a label for a set of things that your brain sometimes does, that are in some ways similar, is something I do find in your posts. I

That’s very vaguely phrased. There’s are questions of whether pain has phenomenal qualities, whether it is totally reducible to physical behaviour, and whether it is multiply realisable. If pain doesn’t have phenomenal properties, how do you decide which set of brain states get labelled as pain states?

But the concern is that you have no way of coming to know the answers to those questions. You have predetermined that everything must be treated as physics from the outset, so you will ineveitably get out the answer you put in. You are not treating the identity of pain with brain states as a falsifiable hypothesis.

There are uncontentious examples of multiply realisable things. Everything in computer science is MR—all algorithms, data structures , whatever. For the purposes of AI research, intelligence is assumed to be MR. There is no implication that MR things are things that “exist apart” from their realisations. So I don’t know where you are getting that from.

In particular, you have to believe this to even ask whether robots feel pain.

I would have to believe pain is MR to believe that; but the objection cannot be that nothing is MR. You are apparently being inconsistent about MR.

“purple is not bitter

Colour and taste are different categories, therefore category error.

TheAncientGeek Jul 21, 2017, 8:18 AM
1 point
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

I know that the experience of stubbing my toe is called pain, and I know that what I’m sitting on is called a chair. But I don’t know the “precise descriptions of the full gamut of atomic configurations which implement” them in either case. This is very normal.

But not much of an argument for using semantics grounded in (physical) reality. Doing so does not buy you maximum precision in absolute terms, and , what is worse, the alternative , of grounding terms for types of experience is 1st person experience, can give you more precision.

You seem to be under impression that I advocate certain methods of examining brains over others. I don’t know where you got that? I do believe that everything that could be learned about a brain could be learned by zapping one set of neurons and seeing if another set fires.

You may believe that, but do you know it?

But if it’s more practical for you to show the brain something purple, and ask it to rate how bitter that felt, from 1 to 5, I have no problems with it. This method, while less direct, can be more useful (especially depending on the exact questions you want to answer). The problem, as I understand, is that you believe these two methods to be radically different, when they are not.

The difference is that I accept the possibility that first person evidence could falsify 3rd person theory.

It’s as if you assume something is real, just because it comes out of people’s mouths.

I’m not taking 1st person to mean 3rd person reports of (someone elses) 1st person experience.

TheAncientGeek Jul 20, 2017, 5:56 PM
2 points
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

Well, for one, you have been unwilling to share any such knowledge. Is it a secret, perhaps?

It’s very difficult to prove that something is impossible, and you can’t do it by noting that it has never happened yet.

Where are your subjective experiences in it?

I was responding to your claim that “there is nothing that you know about consciousness, from which you can derive a more accurate and more material description.”. This has been done, so that claim was false. You have shifted the ground.

that “is purple bitter” is a stupid question.

Purple is a colour, bitter is taste, therefore category error.

Proof is a high bar

Then why be so sure about things? Why not say “dunno” to “can robots feel pain?”.

TheAncientGeek Jul 20, 2017, 4:14 PM
0 points
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument
Because we are trying to communicate now, but your semantic scheme requires knowledge that is only available in the future , if at all.

TheAncientGeek Jul 20, 2017, 4:10 PM
0 points
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument
Height is not a subjective judgement because it is not a judgement. If judgements are going to vary, that matters, because then who knows what the truth is?

TheAncientGeek Jul 20, 2017, 3:18 PM
0 points
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

All of these things have perfectly good physical representations.

Not if “perfectly good” means “known”.

TheAncientGeek Jul 20, 2017, 2:10 PM
1 point
in reply to: tadasdatys’s comment on: Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument

There is nothing that you know about consciousness, from which you can derive a more accurate and more material description.

How do you know? And what of things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Workspace_Theory ?

It buys me the ability to look at “do robots feel pain” and see that it’s a stupid question.

It doesn’t seem to have given you the ability to prove that it is a stupid question.
What links here?
- tadasdatys's comment on Steelmanning the Chinese Room Argument by cousin_it (Jul 26, 2017, 5:56 PM; 0 points)