Thanks for the clarifications.
Honestly, I don’t have a clear picture of what exactly you’re saying (“qualia supervene upon physical brain states”?) and we would probably have to taboo half the dictionary to make any progress. I get the sense you’re on some level confused or uncomfortable with the idea of pure reductionism. The only thing I can say is that what you write about this topic has a lot of surface level similarities with the things people write when they’re confused.
Just to clarify, does “irreducible” in (3) also mean that qualia are therefore extra-physical?
I assume that we are all in agreement that rocks do not have qualia and that dead things do not have qualia and that living things may or may not have qualia? Humans: yes. Single cell prokaryotes: nope.
So doesn’t that leave us with two options:
1) Evolution went from single cell prokaryotes to Homo Sapiens and somewhere during this period the universe went “plop” and irreducible qualia started appearing in some moderately advanced species.
2) Qualia are real and reducible in terms of quarks like everything else in the brain. As evolution produced better brains at some point it created a brain with a minor sense of qualia. Time passed. Brains got better and more introspective. In other words: qualia evolved (or “emerged”) like our sense of smell, our eyesight and so forth.
My first assumption is that almost everything you post is seen as (at least somewhat) valuable (for almost every post #upvotes > #downvotes), so the net karma you get is mostly based on throughput. More readers, more votes. More votes, more karma.
Second, useful posts do not only take time to write, they take time to read as well. And my guess is that most of us don’t like to vote on thoughtful articles before we have read them. So for funny posts we can quickly make the judgement on how to vote, but for longer posts it takes time.
Decision fatigue may also play a role (after studying something complex the extra decision of whether to vote on it feels like work so we skip it). People may also print more valuable texts, or save them for later, making it easy to forget to vote.
The effect is much more evident on other karma based sites. Snarky one-liners and obvious puns are karma magnets. LessWrong uses the same system and is visited by the same species and therefore suffers from the same problems, just to a lesser extent.
All the information you need is already out there, and I have this suspicion you have probably read a good deal of it. You probably know more about being happy than everybody else you know and yet you’re not happy. You realize that if you’re a smart rational agent you should just be able to figure out what you want to do and then just do it, right?
figure out what makes you happy
do more of those things
???
happiness manifests itself
There is no step (3). So why does it feel more complex than it really is?
What is the kind of response you’re really looking for when you start this topic? Do you (subconsciously) want people to just tell you to buck up and deal with it? Do you (subconsciously) want people to tell you not to worry and that it’s all going to be alright? Or are you just in some kind of quarter-life crisis because you don’t really see clearly where you’re going with your life and the problems you have are just side-effects of that?
Maybe you need to be held accountable for your actions?
Maybe you need additional responsibility?
Maybe you need a vacation?
Maybe you need to grow as a person in another manner?
We can’t answer these questions for you and you know we can’t answer these questions for you. Yet you ask us anyway. It doesn’t make sense.
Now, I can make a complete shot-in-the-dark guess about your situation and make the following assumptions:
you’re in social isolation
you spend much time on intellectual issues
you’re not producing, you’re almost exclusively consuming intellectual stuff
you’re not eating as well as you should
you’re letting lazy habits chip away at your life on the edges
you tell yourself that there’s nothing wrong with you and that you should just man up
you hate the fact that you procrastinate and yet you keep procrastinating
every time when you feel you’re making progress it doesn’t last and you regress every time to square one.
you have trouble making lasting changes in every single aspect of your life
Psychological help doesn’t work because you don’t need people to explain this stuff to you, you’ve done your homework already and you know all this.
I’d be happy to talk to you over skype if you want, we can talk about whatever you want to talk about. For some people talking about their problems really helps, especially if they otherwise bottle it all up.
What is the opposite of happiness? Sadness? No. Just as love and hate are two sides of the same coin, so are happiness and sadness. Crying out of happiness is a perfect illustration of this. The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is—here’s the clincher—boredom...
The question you should be asking isn’t ‘What do I want?’ or ‘What are my goals?’ but ‘What would excite me?’
Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract ‘failure.’ (T. Ferris)
Questions about deities must fade away just like any other issue fades away after it’s been dissolved.
Compartmentalization is the last refuge for religious beliefs for an educated person. Once compartmentalization is outlawed there is no defense left. The religious beliefs just have to face a confrontation of the rational part of the brain and then the religious beliefs will evaporate.
If somebody has internalized the sequences they must (at least):
be adapt at reductionism,
be comfortable with Bayes and MML, Kolmogorov complexity,
be acutely aware of which cognitive processes are running.
If you habitually ask yourself “Why am I feeling this way?”, “Am I rationalizing right now?”, “Am I letting my ego get in the way of admitting I’m wrong?”, “Did I just shift the goal post?”, “Did I make the fundamental attribution error?”, “Is this a cached thought?” and all those other questions you become very good at telling which feeling corresponds to which of those cognitive mistakes.
So, let’s assume that for these reasons the theist at least comes to this point where he realizes his earlier reasoning was unsound and decides to honestly re-evaluate his position.
A typical educated person who likes a belief he will continue to believe it until he’s proven wrong (he’s a reasonable person after all). If he doesn’t like a belief he will reject it until the evidence is so overwhelming he has no choice but to accept it (he’s open minded after all!). This is a double standard where the things you believe are dominated by whichever information enters your brain first.
The next step is to realize that religious beliefs are essentially just an exercise in privileging the hypothesis. If you take a step back and look at the data and try to go from there to the best hypothesis that conforms to the data there’s just no way you’re going to arrive at Hinduism, Taoism, Christianity or any other form of spirituality. All those holy books contain thousands of claims each of significant Kolmogorov complexity. We’re dealing with a prior of 2 ^ −100000 at the least. Only if you start out looking for evidence for a specific holy book you can end up with a “lot” of evidence and believe that it can’t be coincidence and that therefore the claims in the holy book have merit. Start out with a thousand holy books and a thousand scientific theories on equal footing (zero evidence for each, prior based on Kolmogorov complexity) and then look at all relevant things we know about the world. There’s no way a holy book is going to end up as the best explanation because holy books are just really bad at making explanations that lead to predictions that can be tested. A holy book has to make more and better accurate predictions than the equivalent scientific theories (to compensate for the unlikely prior) to come out on top after all evidence has been examined.
I don’t think it’s possible at all to internalize the sequences and still believe in a deity. I consider this almost a tautology because the sequences are basically about good thinking and about applying that good thinking in all domains of life. Religious thinking directly rejects the concept of rationality about religious topics. So if you decide to be rational in all things (not cold and unemotional; just rational) then religion just has to go.
I think that what you’re saying is technically correct. However, simplifying the thought experiment by stating that the inside of the box can’t interact with the outside world just makes the thought experiment easier to reason about and it has no bearing on the conclusions we can draw either way.
Yikes! Thanks for the warning.
Thanks for the additional info and explanation. I have some books about QM on my desk that I really ought to study in depth...
I should mention though that what you state about needing only a single-world is in direct contradiction to what EY asserts: “Whatever the correct theory is, it has to be a many-worlds theory as opposed to a single-world theory or else it has a special relativity violating, non-local, time-asymmetric, non-linear and non-measurepreserving collapse process which magically causes blobs of configuration space to instantly vanish [...] I don’t see how one is permitted to hold out any hope whatsoever of getting the naive single world back.”
My level of understanding is insufficient to debate QM on a serious level, but I’d be very interested in a high level exchange about QM here on LW. If you disagree with Eliezer’s views on QM I think it is a good thing to say that explicitly, because when you study the different interpretations it’s important to keep them apart (the subject is confusing[1] enough as is).
[1] a property of yours truly
The collapse of the wave function is, as far as I understand it, conjured up because the idea of a single world appeals to human intuition (even though there is no reason to believe the universe is supposed to make intuitive sense). My understanding is that regardless of the interpretation you put behind the quantum measurements you have to calculate as if there are multiple words (i.e. a subatomic particle can interfere with itself) and the collapse of the wave function is something you have to assume on top of that.
8 minute clip of EY talking with Scott Aaronson about Schrödinger’s Cat
Yep, the box is supposed to be a completely sealed off environment so that the contents of the box (cat, cyanide, Geiger counter, vial, hammer, radioactive atoms, air for the cat breathe) cannot be affected by the outside world in any way. The box isn’t a magical box, simply one that seals really well.
The stuff inside the box isn’t special. So the particles can react with each other. The cat can breathe. The cat will die when exposed to the cyanide. The radioactive material can trigger the Geiger counter which triggers the hammer, which breaks the vial which releases the cyanide which causes the cat to die. Normal physics, but in a box.
Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment. The cat is supposed to be real in the experiment. The experiment is supposed to be seen as silly.
People can reason through the math at the level of particles and logically there should be no reason why the same quantum logic wouldn’t apply to larger systems. So if a bunch of particles can be entangled and if on observation (unrelated to consciousness) the wavefunction collapses (and thereby fully determines reality) then the same should be able to happen with a particle and a more complex system, such as a real live cat. After all, what is a cat except for a bunch of particles? This means the cat is literally both alive and dead until the superposition resolves.
The problem is that philosophers have sometimes abused this apparent paradox (both alive and dead!?) as some sort of Deep Mystery of quantum physics. It’s not a deep mystery at all. It’s just something that illustrates that if you take the Copenhagen interpretation literally then you have to bite the bullet and admit that a cat (or a human, etc) can be both alive and dead at the same time. Not just seemingly so, but actually so in reality. As that’s the only thing that’s consistent with the small scale quantum experiments. Schrödinger came up with this thought experiment because he realized the implications of the Copenhagen interpretation and concluded the implications were absurd.
If you’re not willing to bite that bullet (and most quantum physicists nowadays aren’t) then you have to look at other possibilities. For instance that the world splits and that in one world the cat is alive and in the other the cat is dead. In one world you’ll observe the cat being alive and in the other world you observe the cat as dead. Both worlds are equally real and in both worlds you have the sensation of being in the only real world.
(I only have an elementary understanding of QM)
If you’re starting out (read: don’t yet know what you’re doing) then optimize for not getting injured. If you haven’t done any weight lifting then you’ll get results even if you start out slowly.
Optimize for likelihood of you not quitting. If you manage to stick to whatever plan you make you can always make adjustments where necessary. Risk of quitting is the #1 bottleneck.
Personally, I think you shouldn’t look for supplements until you feel you’re reached a ceiling with regular workouts. Starting with a strict diet (measure everything) is a good idea if you’re serious about this.
Site looks great!
The first sentence is “Here you’ll find scholarly material and popular overviews of intelligence explosion and its consequences.” which parses badly for me and it isn’t clear whether it’s supposed to be a title (what this site is about) or just a single-sentence paragraph. I think leaving it out altogether is best.
I agree with the others that the mouse-chimp-Einstein illustration is unsuitable because it’s unlikely to communicate clearly to the target audience. I went through the slides of the “The Challenge of Friendly AI” talk but I couldn’t find a more suitable illustration.
Maybe the illustration can be “fixed” by simply replacing the Village Idiot and Einstein arrows by a single arrow labeled “human”. Then the picture becomes a trivial depiction that humans are closer to chimps in intelligence than to post-intelligence explosion AIs. The more interesting insight (that Einstein and the village idiot have the same log-intelligence) will be gone but you can’t really convey that in 4 seconds anyway.
Welcome to Less wrong!
This may be stating the obvious, but isn’t this exactly the reason why there shouldn’t be a subroutine that detects “The AI wants to cheat its masters” (or any similar security subroutines)?
The AI has to look out for humanity’s interests (CEV) but the manner in which it does so we can safely leave up to the AI. Take for analogy Eliezer’s chess computer example. We can’t play chess as well as the chess computer (or we could beat Grand Masters of chess ourselves) but we can predict the outcome of the chess game when we play against the computer: the chess computer finds a winning position against us.
With a friendly AI you can’t predict what it will do, or even why it will do it, but if we get FAI right then we can predict that the actions will steer humanity in the right direction.
(Also building an AI by giving it explicit axioms or values we desire is a really bad idea. Much like the genie in the lamp it is bound to turn out that we don’t get what we think we asked for. See http://singinst.org/upload/CEV.html if you haven’t read it already)
Sure, unanimous acceptance of the ideas would be worrying sign. Would it be a bad sign if we were 98% in agreement about everything discussed in the sequences? I think that depends on whether you believe that intelligent people when exposed to the same arguments and the same evidence should reach the same conclusion (Aumann’s agreement theorem). I think that disagreement is in practice a combination of (a) bad communication (b) misunderstanding of the subject material by one of the parties (c) poor understanding of the philosophy of science (d) emotions/signaling/dissonance/etc.
I think it’s just really difficult to have a fundamental disagreement that isn’t founded on some sort of personal value. Most disagreements can be rephrased in terms of an experiment where both parties will confidently claim the experiment will have different outcomes. By the time such an experiment has been identified the disagreement has dissolved.
Discussion is to be expected because discussions are beneficial for organizing one’s thoughts and because most of us like to discuss the subject material on LW. Persistent disagreement I see mainly as a result of insufficient scholarship.
Thanks for the explanation, that helped a lot. I expected you to answer 0.5 in the second scenario, and I thought your model was that total ignorance “contaminated” the model such that something + ignorance = ignorance. Now I see this is not what you meant. Instead it’s that something + ignorance = something. And then likewise something + ignorance + ignorance = something according to your model.
The problem with your model is that it clashes with my intuition (I can’t find fault with your arguments). I describe one such scenario here.
My intuition is that the probability of these two statements should not be the same:
A. “In order for us to succeed one of 12 things need to happen”
B. “In order for us to succeed all of these 12 things need to happen”
In one case we’re talking about a disjunction of 12 unknowns and in the second scenario we’re talking about a conjunction. Even if some of the “things” are not completely uncorrelated that shouldn’t affect the total estimate that much. My intuition is that saying P(A) = 1 − 0.5 ^ 12 and P(B) = 0.5 ^ 12. Worlds apart! As far as I can tell you would say that in both cases the best estimate we can make is 0.5. I introduce the assumption of independence (I don’t stipulate it) to fix this problem. Otherwise the math would lead me down a path that contradicts common sense.
I think I agree completely with all of that. My earlier post was meant as an illustration that once you say C = A & B that you’re no longer dealing with a state of complete ignorance. You’re in complete ignorance of A and B, but not of C. In fact, C is completely defined as being the conjunction of A and B. I used the illustration of an envelope because as long as the envelope is closed you’re completely ignorant about its contents (by stipulation) but once you open it that’s no longer the case.
The answer for all three envelopes is, in the case of complete ignorance, 0.5.
So the probability that all three envelopes happen to contain a true hypothesis/proposition is 0.125 based on the assumption of independence. Since you said “mostly independent” does that mean you think we’re not allowed to assume complete independence? If the answer isn’t 0.125, what is it?
edit:
If your answer to the above is “still 0.5” then I have another scenario. You’re in total ignorance of A. B denotes the probability of rolling a a 6 on a regular die. What’s the probability that A & B are true? I’d say it has to be 1⁄12, even though it’s possible that A and B are not independent.
It’s purely a formality
I disagree with this bit. It’s only purely a formality when you consider a single hypothesis, but when you consider a hypothesis that is comprised of several parts, each of which uses the prior of total ignorance, then the 0.5 prior probability shows up in the real math (that in turn affects the decisions you make).
I describe an example of this here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/73g/take_heed_for_it_is_a_trap/4nl8?context=1#4nl8
If you think that the concept of the universal prior of total ignorance is purely a formality, i.e. something that can never affect the decisions you make, then I’d be very interested in your thoughts behind that.
In your example before we have any information we’d assume P(A) = 0.5 and after we have information about the alphabet and how X is constructed from the alphabet we can just calculate the exact value for P(A|B). So the “update” here just consists of replacing the initial estimate with the correct answer. I think this is also what you’re saying so I agree that in situations like these using P(A) = 0.5 as starting point does not affect the final answer (but I’d still start out with a prior of 0.5).
I’ll propose a different example. It’s a bit contrived (well, really contrived, but OK).
Frank and his buddies (of which you are one) decide to rob a bank.
Frank goes: “Alright men, in order for us to pull this off 4 things have to go perfectly according to plan.”
(you think: conjunction of 4 things: 0.0625 prior probability of success)
Frank continues: the first thing we need to do is beat the security system (… long explanation follows).
(you think: that plan is genius and almost certain to work (0.9 probability of success follows from Bayesian estimate). I’m updating my confidence to 0.1125)
Frank continues: the second thing we we need to do is break into the safe (… again a long explanation follows).
(you think: wow, that’s a clever solution − 0.7 probability of success. Total probability of success 0.1575)
Frank continues: So! Are you in or are you out?
At this point you have to decide immediately. You don’t have the time to work out the plausibility of the remaining two factors, you just have to make a decision. But just by knowing that there are two more things that have to go right you can confidently say “Sorry Frank, but I’m out.”.
If you had more time to think you could come up with a better estimate of success. But you don’t have time. You have to go with your prior of total ignorance for the last two factors of your estimate.
If we were to plot the confidence over time I think it should start at 0.5, then go to 0.0625 when we understand a estimate of a conjunction of 4 parts is to be calculated and after that more nuanced Bayesian reasoning follows. So if I were to build an AI then I would make it start out with the universal prior of total ignorance and go from there. So I don’t think the prior is a purely mathematical trick that has no bearing on we way we reason.
(At the risk of stating the obvious: you’re strictly speaking never adjusting based on the prior of 0.5. The moment you have evidence you replace the prior with the estimate based on evidence. When you get more evidence you can update based on that. The prior of 0.5 completely vaporizes the moment evidence enters the picture. Otherwise you would be doing an update on non-evidence.)
As far as I can tell you identify two options: 1) continue doing the PhD you don’t really enjoy 2) get a job you won’t really enjoy.
Surely you have more options!
3) You can just do a PhD in theoretical computer vision at a different university.
4) You can work 2 days a week at a company and do your research at home for the remaining 4 days
5) Become unemployed and focus on your research full time
6) Save some money and then move to Asia, South America or any other place with very low cost of living so you can do a few years of research full time.
7) Join a startup company that is doing groundbreaking computer vision work
8) See if there is something else that you can be passionate about and do that.
Life’s too short to do something you don’t enjoy and you’re now at a point in your life where the decisions you make are going to have real consequences. So do some soul searching and figure out what you really want and then figure out what you have to do to make it happen. That’s life 101.
When you’re spending the majority of your time doing something you don’t really enjoy you have a big problem. This is the only life you have and it’s easy to waste it 5 years at the time! Maybe your true dream is to work on the next Pixar movie, or to design special effects for the next CGI blockbuster! But if you aren’t going to explore your options seriously you’re not going to find out what you really want to do in life. If, on the other hand, you’re absolutely sure you want to do theoretical computer vision research, then JUST DO THAT. There are thousands of universities with good computer vision departments. So unless you got a 1000 rejection letters on your desk you haven’t even seriously explored your options yet.
(PS: Forget about doing research in the evenings after you get home from a day job. It doesn’t work. Many people do this and then they figure out that after a full day’s work you don’t have the energy anymore to do really difficult stuff. Your lifestyle will change and you’ll grow dependent on your job. Then as you get older you’ll look back and call it a “silly dream” and wisely observe that you have to make compromises in life and that your ability to compromise on what you want makes you a responsible adult.)
(PPS: I’m trying to convey that being unhappy with your job should trigger “hair on fire” like panic.)