Yuxi Liu is a PhD student in Computer Science at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab, researching on the scaling laws of large neural networks.
Personal website: https://yuxi-liu-wired.github.io/
Yuxi_Liu(Yuxi Liu)
Karma: 580
Let’s Watch: 10-on-10: The Chronicles of Evolution—Eörs Szathmáry
Evolution “failure mode”: chickens
[Question] Reference request: human as “backup”
Physical linguistics
I am not fully committed to eliminative materialism, just trying to push it as far as possible, as I see it as the best chance at clarifying what consciousness does.
As for the last paragraph, if your analysis is correct, then it just means that a classical hedonic utilitarian + eliminative materialist would be a rare occurrence in this world, since such agents are unlikely to behave in a way that keeps itself existing.
If the project of eliminative materialism is fully finished, it would completely remove value judgments from human language. In the past, human languages refer to the values of many things, like the values of animals, plants, mountains, rivers, and some other things. This has progressively narrowed, and now in Western human language, only the values of biological neural networks that are carried in animal bodies are referred to. If this continues, this could lead to a language that does not refer to any value, but I don’t know what it would be like.
The Heptapod language seems to be value-free, and describes the past and the future in the same factual way. The human languages describes only the past factually, but the future valuefully. A value-free human language could be like the Heptapod language. In the story Story of Your Life, the human linguist protagonist who struggled to communicate with the Heptapods underwent a partial transformation of mind, and sometimes sees the past and future in the same descriptive, value-free way. She mated with her spouse and conceived a child, who she knew would die in an accident. She did it not because of a value calculation. An explanation of “why she did it” must instead be like
On a physical level, because of atoms and stuff.
On a conscious level, because that’s the way the world is. To see the future and then “decide” whether to play it out or not, is not physically possible.
I’m glad you liked it. I was expecting some harsh words like “that’s nothing new” or “that’s nihilistic and thus immoral”.
In a language consistent with deterministic eliminative materialism, value judgments don’t do anything, because there are no alternative scenarios to judge about.
I am not sure about nondeterministic eliminative materialism. Still, if consciousness and free will can be eliminated, even with true randomness in this world, value judgments still seem to not do anything.
Huntington’s Disease; power and duty of parents over offsprings
Wait, 30-50 years of good life followed by 15 years of less-good, then death. That’s “negligent”?
It’s not comparing HD-life and no-life, but comparing HD-life and non-HD-life. I think it’s obvious that HD-life is greatly worse than non-HD-life (otherwise HD wouldn’t be considered a serious disease).
You might still disagree, and that gets us into the nonidentity problem.
Dying at age −0.75 counts as nothing, as a little, or counts as a lot of a person, depending on what counts as a person and how much a person at various stages matter. If it counts as a lot of a person, then it leads to an anti-abortion stance, and some pro-abortion arguments might apply in this situation.
And an alternative to abortion is adoption. A person that is highly unlikely to have HD could even be produced on demand by surrogacy or IVF, instead of being taken from the pool of people already up to adoption, so that it is a “net gain”.
If the women would not even consider abortion or surrogacy as better alternatives than giving a high-risk natural birth, I consider that unreasonable and grossly negligent.
Free will as an appearance to others
I know about the three stances. What’s Dennett’s account of consciousness? I know that he doesn’t believe in qualias and tries to explain everything in the style of modern physics.
It’s quite clear that humans have free will relative to humans. I also conjecture that
Perhaps all complicated systems that can think are always too complicated to predict themselves, as such, they would all consider themselves to have free will.
You should not only shut your door, but also stop thinking about yourself and explaining your own behavior. People in “flow” seem to be in such a free-will-less state.
A more radical version of this idea is promoted by Susan Blackmore, which says that that consciousness (not just free will) exists only when a human (or some other thinking creature) thinks about itself:
Whenever you ask yourself, “Am I conscious now?” you always are.
But perhaps there is only something there when you ask. Maybe each time you probe, a retrospective story is concocted about what was in the stream of consciousness a moment before, together with a “self” who was apparently experiencing it. Of course there was neither a conscious self nor a stream, but it now seems as though there was.
Perhaps a new story is concocted whenever you bother to look. When we ask ourselves about it, it would seem as though there’s a stream of consciousness going on. When we don’t bother to ask, or to look, it doesn’t.
I think consciousness is still there even when self-consciousness is not, but if we replace “consciousness” with “free will” in that passage, I would agree with it.
I like your horn tooting. I’ll read it… later.
China’s neo-Confucian worldview which viewed the world through correlations and binary pairs may not have lent it itself to the causal thinking necessary for science.
I am very doubtful of this. Humans are hardwired to think in cause-and-effect terms, and Confucianism does not explicitly deny causality.
There was no Chinese equivalent to the Scholastic method of disputation, no canons of logic a la Aristotle
In very early China (about 500 BC), there was a period of great intellectual diversity before Confucianism dominated. There was a School of Names which is very interested in logic and rhetorics. Philosophers in that school have been traditionally disparaged, which seems to explain why formal logic has not developed in China. For example, the founder, Deng Xi, ’s fate was used as a cautionary tale against sophistry.
Things are not to be understood through laws governing parts, but through the unity of the whole.
This has been demonstrated to persist even in modern times, by psychology studies. A reference is (Nisbett, 2003).
What made the ancient Greeks so generative?
My guess is that in any large population of humans (~1 million), there are enough talented individuals to generate the basic scientific ideas in a few generations. The problem is to have a stable social structure that sustains these thinkers and filters out wrong ideas.
They were also lucky that they got remembered. If their work didn’t get copied that much by the Arabs, we would be praising the medieval Arabs instead of ancient Greeks.
Also, a personal perspective: in current Chinese education (which I took until high school), Chinese achievements in science and math are noted whenever possible (for example, Horner’s Method is called Qin Jiushao Method), but there was no overarching scheme or intellectual tradition. They were like accidental discoveries, not results of sustained inquiries. Shen Kuo stands out as a lone scientist in a sea of literature writers.
Confucian classics, which I was forced to recite, is suffocatingly free from scientific concern. It’s not anti-science, rather, uninterested in science. For example:
Strange occurrences, exploits of strength, deeds of lawlessness, references to spiritual beings, such-like matters the Master avoided in conversation. -- Analects chapter 7.
(子不语怪力乱神。)
Okay I posted the whole thing here now.