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ZoneSeek comments on Rationality quotes: June 2010 - Less Wrong
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"You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt—species die—and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is."
--Jukka Sarasti, rationalist vampire in Peter Watts's Blindsight. Great book on neuroscience and map != territory.
Um, wasn't he more of a p-zombie who just happened to be rational?
(In that novel, vampires are a near-human species who lack consciousness -- so all the vampires are a bit like p-zombies, except they don't claim to be conscious.)
I'm not entirely sure what your criticism is. I'll take it as meaning 'isn't it just an arbitrary accident that the vampires happen to be more rational than humans, and not an intrinsic part of those characters?'
No. It isn't. If you remember, one of the running suggestions in Blindsight is that consciousness is a useless spandrel that sucks up tons of brainpower, and which can/will be discarded with much benefit. The vampires may be rationally superior to humans because they are p-zombies, and they evolved that way in order to effectively predict human actions and hunt them. The arbitrary accident was the cross glitch - otherwise the vampires would have won rather than died out. If the vampires could as well have been less-rational-than-humans p-zombies, that would undo that major theme.
I actually meant that "rationalist" is a label that doesn't make sense when applied to an entity that's already rational, but I'll admit my phrasing was confusing... probably because my attention was mainly focused on trying to make a joke about p-zombie vampires. ;-)
Er, what? How exactly do you tell the difference between a p-zombie and a being with conscious thought? I thought the whole freaking point is that there is no way, so the story can't hinge on it, right?
No, the whole point is if you have two entities, one of whom is a zombie and one of whom is conscious, there must be some physical difference in their brains. ('p-zombie' normally is used in the context of the (impossible) thought experiment where there is no physical difference in the two brains, but only one is conscious.)
In Blindsight, the vampires' brains have a very different architecture than ours, and IIRC they explicitly state they do not have consciousness.
Please don't misunderstand -- I agree with all of that! I meant that the whole point of using the term "p-zombie" is to specify a being with the (hypothetical) properties that it looks just like a human (or being that is normally accepted as conscious), in all physically discernable ways, but (somehow) lacks consciousness. So I was confused as to how it could affect the storyline for some being to be specified as a p-zombie, since you wouldn't know the difference.
I agree that such a being can't exist, for the standard reasons.
If the vampires actually have different brain architectures, then they shouldn't be called p-zombies, because they don't have the form of something normally conscious, like a human. It would make as much sense as saying that a rock is a p-zombie.
You're right that the term is being used incorrectly (or at least very loosely). However, I think it makes slightly more sense than calling a rock a p-zombie, since the vampires in Blindsight do behave like humans and have normal conversations like humans: that is, they would pass the Turing test. Entities like this are sometimes called "behavioral zombies" (as opposed to "physical zombies"), and it's not clear whether they are possible, though Eliezer seems to think so.
qwern is using p-zombie slightly incorrectly. In this case, these are entities that act more or less like humans but functionally state their own lack of conscious awareness.
Yes; in my defense, pjeby started it!
I lack conscious awareness.
There, do you regard me as a p-zombie now?
"More or less" requires unpacking approximately equal in length to the novel, but the non-sentience of the vampires is weakly implied, (spoiler) juvyr gur aba-fragvrapr bs gur nyvraf gurl zrrg vf rkcyvpvg naq abg ng nyy zrgnculfvpny.
I thought it was more implied by the ending, myself. (Does Blindsight really need spoilers ROT13ing? I mean, the book is right there for anyone to read.)
The fact of information being available does not make it known. Billions of people have never read The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, despite it being freely available in most places around the world, for example. The use of spoilers is not to protect the copyright of the writers, but to protect the surprise of the readers when they discover what has been written.
Nearly everything else that people do not want spoilers for is right there for anyone to consume. I do not think that is the point...
RobinZ seconded... I may go read both these stories due to this thread and I'd prefer not to see spoilers.
By the way: if you like The Woman in White, try also The Moonstone. Those two are Wilkie Collins' famous stories.