= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
RobinZ comments on How to think like a quantum monadologist - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (266)
Question: Is this post on the LW server at the level of semiconductor physics?
It's like asking whether a book is just ink on paper. As a physical object that's all it is. As a message it also has a semantic content, but that is ascribed rather than intrinsic.
As a physical object it's a complex arrangement of subatomic particles and photons - the ink and the paper are as much ascribed qualities as the text. To pretend that the levels above the physical are not real is to commit the fallacy of greedy reductionism. See the link about "explaining vs. explaining away", elsewhere.
To make my point more explicit: what relevant difference do you see between (1) the relationship between mental phenomena and the neural physics and (2) the relationship between the message and the ink on the paper? Or better, between (1) and (3) the relationship between the videogame and the physics of the electronic systems in the console?
Physical composition is not observer-dependent, interpretation is.
In a universe made solely of causally interacting particles in motion, there are plenty of complex higher-level properties: conjunctive properties, configurational properties, averaging properties, counterfactual properties. But you will find neither colors nor meanings. When dealing with problematic entities like these, physicalists either redefine them in purely physical terms, or posit untenable identities between the real thing and its supposed physical counterpart. The first class of explanation evades the problem and is really eliminativism, and the second class of explanation is a law of psychophysical correspondence and is really dualism.
So perhaps you can anticipate how I will answer your questions. If we posit a universe such as physicists presently posit, there simply are no mental phenomena, including the interpretations required to make patterns of ink into messages and patterns of phosphor into games. If we posit a "physics" which does include mentality, then such interpretations can exist, but they only exist in the lifeworlds of those who make them, and not intrinsically in the artefacts themselves.
You asked elsewhere what I thought of How An Algorithm Feels From Inside. It is the kernel of one possible explanation of why someone might "feel an impulse to go on arguing whether the object is really a blegg", and as an explanation it's incomplete both causally and ontologically. For a causally complete explanation, Network 1 and Network 2 would need to be embedded in some larger network that determines which questions actually get asked. For an ontologically complete explanation, something has to be said about how and why an algorithm feels like anything at all, and what a feeling is in the first place. And to really tie it all together, you would have to make the feeling of the algorithm causally relevant in the larger network (this would be bringing consciousness into contact with cognition).
I'm sorry, this is just assertion with a broader vocabulary. You, personally, don't find physicalist explanations of experience like Eliezer Yudkowsky's sufficient. Nobody needed the three hundred words of pleonastic vocabulary you just foisted upon us to learn this fact - you've already told us.
What evidence do you have that reductive explanations of subjective experience are wrong?
The fact that they don't explain it. (Feel free to explain what's green about an act of classification or a neuron firing at a particular frequency, two popular reductive "explanations" of color. There's a nice instance of green up in the site banner, if you need an actual example to contemplate.)
Why do you expect a reductive explanation of the perception of green to be green? The reductive explanation of the temperature of a gas isn't a temperature - it explains temperature in terms of things which are not temperature.
Either admit that you reject any reductive explanation of sensation or describe the phenomena which refute (i.e. render scientifically problematic) any possible explanation of color in terms of neuroscience.
Something somewhere is green. So if you propose an account of the world, reductive or otherwise, which purports to be about greenness, something in it had better actually be green.
Do you dispute in any significant way my assertion that the existing reductive accounts of color seek to reduce it either to causal properties or to configurational properties? Are you willing to defend any particular form of identity theory when it comes to color?
If someone presented an analysis of sensation into parts which, when combined, really did give you back what you started with, I certainly couldn't criticize it on these grounds. Though it's rather hard to imagine what such an analysis could be like. For example, I don't think you can say that color is made of hue, saturation and intensity, in the same way that a square is made of four line segments. The line segments each have an independent existence and being part of a square is a contingent matter for each of them, whereas HSI seem to me like dependent aspects of a necessary unity. You can't have "intensity of color" without actually having a color there.
The reductive analyses being proposed, however, are of a different character. When the parts are put back together, you have a quite different sort of entity, which is why I complain that they are really dualism or eliminativism.
Perhaps, then, color can't be reduced, only described. But that doesn't mean it has to be disconnected from a causal scientific account of the world. If the actual nature of color is that it is a component of certain monadic states, plays a certain specific causal role in the interaction of monads, etc - there's nothing there which is inherently beyond the reach of scientific reasoning.
That doesn't make any sense. Something, somewhere, is a violin. If I propose a reductive account of the violin, none of the component parts I talk about will be a violin. Something, somewhere, is shaped exactly like the building in which I live. A reductive explanation of the building in which I live won't contain any components that are shaped like the building in which I live.
On consideration of Robin Z's earlier example (temperature), I see that in the usual case of reduction, we have a phenomenon (temperature sensations) with a putative cause ("temperature"), and reduction simply clarifies or changes the nature of the cause. But when we have a reductive "explanation" of consciousness, we are engaging with the phenomenon as such and trying to say what sort of thing it is, not what sort of thing it is caused by. And these proposals for what color is are all missing the mark. It is as if I were to say that a violin is really a sentence in a dictionary.
What Alicorn said. Furthermore, the things which are green are things like the leaves on an evergreen, the modern John Deere tractors, and Mountain Dew cans - what we are talking about is the experience associated with seeing green things such as these, which is completely different. (See the comment comparing "blue" to "bluep".)
Your use of technical terminology here is confusing. I imagine color is perceived as a function of the visual response of the cones to the incident light, and the brain uses this input among others to form its internal model of the world - i.e. your subjective experience. Does that answer your question?
And see the discussion which followed. When you define greenness to mean physical greenness, and then say that the experience of green is not itself green in that sense, you are dodging the issue. In naive realism there is no distinction between experience and object of experience, and the only meaning of greenness is the original one. Once you depart from naive realism and distinguish between experience and physical reality, there is a new meaning of greenness which applies to physical reality, and the original meaning of greenness now applies to the experience. And it is greenness in the original sense - the obvious sense, the sense used by everyone when they are not being physicalists - that we are discussing.
Maybe. Do you understand my distinction between the original meaning of greenness, and the derivative meaning of reflecting light at a certain wavelength? If you do understand that distinction, then how do you explain greenness in the original sense? Where is it, in your account of color?
I have to agree with you there: it feels like Mitchell_Porter unnecessarily throws around jargon in these discussions :-/ But the post you replied to wasn't the worst case: I'd nominate the fourth paragraph here.
You realize he can read this, right? :P
But seriously: Mitchell, drop the big words. We won't think less of you for it.
Yes, but he generally avoids reading my comments anyway ;-)
But just for the record:
@Mitchell_Porter: You unnecessarily throw around jargon in these discussions. A case in point is the fourth paragraph here.
ETA: Word of advice: Never criticize someone unless you'd be willing to say it directly to their monad ;-)
I'm not actually avoiding you. I've picked a few comments to answer each day, and there's a growing unanswered backlog. At some point I'll go back and tie up loose ends, if I can figure out a way to do so that won't drive everyone to exasperation.
The examples of prose held up as jargon-ridden or redundant seem pretty tame to me, and do actually say something. Consider that list of "constituting relations of consciousness", for example. Every item in that list is either a specific relation that ties things together (e.g. simultaneity) or a structure held together by a particular relationship (e.g. a logical conjunction). The issue was whether or not the relations which make up a conscious state can be identified with physical relations, and I was providing a partial inventory of the relations in question. Without such a list there was no prospect of a real discussion.
Similarly, in the comment above which Robin Z dismissed, I stated aspects of my position for context, answered her questions, and provided an evaluation of one of Eliezer's articles.
Strictly speaking, you didn't explicitly answer my question about the videogame, but for the most part this is true. Nevertheless, I defend my response: the content of your response was, in fact, the assertion of the very claims I wanted you to defend.
You misunderstand the criticism of jargon. It's not there's no meaning, or redundancy, or you're using them incorrectly. It's that you're making it unnecessarily difficult to follow, and thus causing any possible errors on your part to be less obvious yet seem more sophisticated.
As a rationalist, your beliefs should be taboo-invariant. If you can only communicate your ideas using rare phrases, you don't really understand your own point; if you deliberately chose not to make it easier to follow, I have no sympathy. Either way, there's no point to spending time considering your arguments.