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Rationality Quotes: April 2011
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- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
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Comments (384)
By Richard Dawkins, quoting a former editor of New Scientist (here's at least one source). I don't think this quote contains any deep wisdom as such, but it made me laugh. Actually you could replace the word science with any other noun and it would still make grammatical sense.
That is a consequence of the meaning of the term "grammatical sense", not a property of the particular sentence under discussion.
Good point. What I meant is that this quote could be used to defend anything. "Being irrational is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuck off."
Also:
-Wayne Gretsky
Richard Lewontin
Is this an ironic rationality quote?
The world is allowed to be too much for you to handle. (But you should try anyway.)
That isn't what the quote is saying though. It is claiming that we know for a fact that we cannot ever understand cognition. Ironically, that is itself a hubristic claim of positive knowledge about a topic (what may eventually be possible for humans to know) where we should be more modest about claims.
Agreed.
-- Surviving The World
Hasn't it been pointed out here before that super-powered mutants are exactly not what we would expect from evolution?
Yes, but the quote is new.
I initially parsed that as meaning something like "we're clearly not getting the mechanics of evolution across, since people in the comics [and by extension writers] are happy to treat it as something that can produce superheroes". But in context it actually seems to mean "let's create some superheroes to demonstrate the efficacy of evolution beyond any reasonable doubt".
Comic exaggeration, sure, and I'm probably supposed to interpret the word "evolution" very loosely if I want to take the quote at all seriously. But in view of the former, I still can't help but think that there's something fundamentally naive about the latter.
I didn't quote the commentary under the comic for a reason.
(Courtesy of my dad)
Arthur Rimbaud, 1873
Paul Graham "What I've learned from Hacker News"
I meant to say that I think the theory I was testing has been disproved, or at least dealt a major blow, which is why I'm shifting my thinking towards something a bit different. Mission of being wrong accomplished!
-- The Killers in This is Your Life
"If you choose to follow a religion where, for example, devout Catholics who are trying to be good people are all going to Hell but child molestors go to Heaven (as long as they were "saved" at some point), that's your choice, but it's fucked up. Maybe a God who operates by those rules does exist. If so, fuck Him." --- Bill Zellar's suicide note, in regards to his parents' religion
I love this passage. If a god as described in the Bible did exist, following him would be akin to following Voldemort: fidelity simply because he was powerful. This isn't precisely a rationality quote, but it does have a bit of the morality-independent-of-religion thing. (The rest of the note is beautiful and eloquent as well.)
I think we should keep some sort op separation between "rationality quotes" and "atheism quotes". You can stretch this to be a rationality quote, but it does require a stretch. Just because a quote argues against the existence of a god doesn't make it particularly rational.
There are other similarities too. e.g. Voldemort's human form died and rose again; his (first) death was foretold in prophesy, involved a betrayal (albeit in the opposite direction), and left his followers anxiously awaiting his return; "And these signs shall follow them that believe; ... they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents..." (Mark 16:17-18); ...
So, who wants to join the First Church of Voldemort?
On boldness:
-- Augiedog, Half the Day is Night
(Edit: I should mention that the linked story is MLP fanfic. The MLP fandom may be a memetic hazard; it seems to have taken over my life for the past several days, though I tend to do that with most things, so YMMV. Proceed with caution.)
"I can't make myself believe something that I don't believe" —Ricky Gervais, in discussing his atheism
Reminds me of the scene in HPMOR where Harry makes Draco a scientist.
—Oscar Wilde
Can someone wager a guess why this is being downvoted?
It has no obvious connection to rationality.
I suppose it might be a little ambiguous. Here's my interpretation (I'm curious to hear others).
The practice of backstabbing usually refers to criticizing someone when they're not present, while feigning friendship.
Thus, "frontstabbing" would be to criticize someone openly and honestly, which is often very hard to do. Even, or perhaps especially, among friends. But it seems to be something worth aspiring towards, if one is concerned with rationality and truth.
That seems like a good idea, but I'm pretty sure that Oscar Wilde didn't at all intend the quote to mean that. Rationality quotes is not an excuse for quote mining and proof-texting.
So, what do you think he meant?
I tend to judge quotes on their own merit. I thought that was the point. Do people usually look up detailed contextual information about them?
It doesn't take much context to guess at the original meaning- Oscar Wilde was a pretty cynical individual. Given that data point what do you think it means?
I've tried and failed to come up with any reasonable interpretation other than my own. Please frontstab me.
His comment is that humans are terrible, treacherous, disloyal scum. The only difference between the friend and the non-friend is that the friend might tell you when he's harming you whereas the non-friend won't even bother telling you.
--George Spencer Brown in The Laws of Form, 1969.
-- PartiallyClips, "Windmill"
I thought the correct response should be "Is the thing in fact a giant or a windmill?" Rather than considering which way our maps should be biased, what's the actual territory?
I do tech support, and often get responses like "I think so," and I usually respond with "Let's find out."
In the "evil giant vs windmill" question, the prior probability of it being an evil giant is vanishingly close to zero, and the prior probability of it being a windmill is pretty much one minus the chance that it's an evil giant. Spending effort discovering the actual territory when every map ever shows it's a windmill sounds like a waste of effort.
What about a chunk of probability for the case of where it's neither giant nor windmill?
Very few things barring the evil giant have the ability to imitate a windmill. I did leave some wiggle room with
because I wished to allow for the chance it may be a bloody great mimic.
A missile silo disguised as a windmill? A helicopter in an unfortunate position? An odd and inefficient form of rotating radar antenna? A shuttle in launch position? (if one squints, they might think it's a broken windmill with the vanes having fallen off or something)
These are all just off the top of my head. Remember, if we're talking about someone who tends to, when they see a windmill, be unsure whether it's a windmill or an evil giant, there's probably a reasonable chance that they tend to get confused by other objects too, right? :)
A good giant?
Sure, but I wouldn't give a "good giant" really any more probability than an "evil giant". Both fall into the "completely negligible" hole. :)
Though, as we all know, if we do find one, the correct action to take is to climb up so that one can stand on its shoulders. :)
I thought we were listing anything at least as plausible as the evil giant hypothesis. I have no information as the morality distribution of giants in general so I use maximum entropy and assign 'evil giant' and 'good giant' equal probability.
Given complexity of value, 'evil giant' and 'good giant' should not be weighted equally; if we have no specific information about the morality distribution of giants, then as with any optimization process, 'good' is a much, much smaller target than 'evil' (if we're including apparently-human-hostile indifference).
Unless we believe them to be evolutionarily close to humans, or to have evolved under some selection pressures similar to those that produced morality, etc., in which we can do a bit better than a complexity prior for moral motivations.
(For more on this, check out my new blog, Overcoming Giants.)
Which can be fun to do with a windmill, also.
Since when do windmills have shoulders? :)
Or, possibly, a great big fan! In fact with some (unlikely) designs it would be impossible to tell whether it was a fan or a windmill without knowledge of what is on the other end of the connected power lines.
You are right! Even I, firmly settled in the fourth camp, was tricked by the false dichotomy of windmill and evil giant.
To be fair, there's also the possibility that someone disguised a windmill as an evil giant. ;)
Do you consider yourself "objective and wise"?
I'd consider myself puzzled. Unidientified object, is it a threat, a potential asset, some kind of Black Swan? Might need to do something even without positive identification. Will probably need to do something to get a better read on the thing.
Giant/windmill differentiation is not a zero-cost operation.
Nancy Lebovitz came across this too.
Well, I guess that's information about how many people click links and upvote the comments that contained them based on the quality of the linked content.
Not to argue that transcribing the text of the comic isn't valuable (I do actually appreciate it), but it's also information about how many people go back and vote on comments from posts imported from OB.
And about how much more readers quotes threads seem to get compared with everything else.
That is truly incredible, I regret only that I have but one upvote to give.
Best quote I've seen in a long time!
And then there's the fact that we are giving much more consideration to the existence of evil giants than to the existence of good giants.
-- Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian
~ Story, used most famously in David Foster Wallace's Commencement Address at Kenyon College
Dupe.
I will repost a quote that I posted many moons ago on OB, if you don't mind. I don't THINK this breaks the rules too badly, since that post didn't get its fair share of karma. Here's the first time: http://lesswrong.com/lw/uj/rationality_quotes_18/nrt
"He knew well that fate and chance never come to the aid of those who replace action with pleas and laments. He who walks conquers the road. Let his legs grow tired and weak on the way - he must crawl on his hands and knees, and then surely, he will see in the night a distant light of hot campfires, and upon approaching, will see a merchants' caravan; and this caravan will surely happen to be going the right way, and there will be a free camel, upon which the traveler will reach his destination. Meanwhile, he who sits on the road and wallows in despair - no matter how much he cries and complains - will evoke no compassion in the soulless rocks. He will die in the desert, his corpse will become meat for foul hyenas, his bones will be buried in hot sand. How many people died prematurely, and only because they didn't love life strongly enough! Hodja Nasreddin considered such a death humiliating for a human being.
"No" - said he to himself and, gritting his teeth, repeated wrathfully: "No! I won't die today! I don't want to die!""
Have you translated the whole story, or just this quote? It sounds interesting, and stacks up next to a SF story about somewhat less-than-friendly-AI as a reason I wish I could read Russian.
Just this quote. But I found a complete translation:
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS333&q=The+Beggar+in+the+Harem%3A+Impudent+Adventures+in+Old+Bukhara&aq=f&aqi=g-v1&aql=&oq=
What's the other story?
Took me a while, but I found it: "Lena Squatter and the Paragon of Vengeance" by SF author Leonid Kaganov.
Infinite Jest, page 159
-Kris Straub, Chainsawsuit artist commentary
— Grossman's Law
Is there a law that states that all simple problems have complex, hard to understand answers? Moravec's paradox sort of covers it but it seems that principle should have its own label.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
A domain-specific interpretation of the same concept:
—Douglas McIlroy
A domain-neutral interpretation of the same concept:
—William of Ockham
This one really needs to have been applied to itself, "short is good" is way better.
(also this was one of EY's quotes in the original rationality quotes set, http://lesswrong.com/lw/mx/rationality_quotes_3/ )
Perfection is lack of excess.
Also, "short is good" would narrow this quotes focus considerably.
New here, sorry for the redundancy. I probably should have guessed that such a popular quote had been used.
Maybe it's shorter in French?
Compare:
So, no.
The north went on forever. Tyrion Lannister knew the maps as well as anyone, but a fortnight on the wild track that passed for the kingsroad up here had brought home the lesson that the map was one thing and the land quite another.
--George R. R. Martin A Game of Thrones
— David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
A fable:
The original source of this fable seems to be lost to time. This version was written by Idries Shah.
Huh, and here I had assumed Niven and Pournelle made that up since it wasn't in Herodotus like they claimed.
Where was it in Niven and Pournelle? I first saw it in The Cross Time Engineer.
In "the gripping hand" it is used as an example for a crazy eddy plan, that could actually work.
It was in The Mote in God's Eye.
Joseph Heller (Catch-22)
A bit more context for those who haven't read Catch-22 would probably help.
I don't think anything else could be added that deepens the understanding of the quote, besides the fact that moving the bomb line actually works because Corporal Kolodny (who is obviously a corporal named Kolodny) can't distinguish between cause and effect either.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene.
(cf. Disguised Queries.)
– Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Doesn't that spiral out to infinity?
Yes. Hofstadter is like that.
It can just asymptotically approach the right value. It's probably more metaphorical, though.
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account the limit of infinite applications of Hofstadter's Law.
Even further:
Hofstadter's Law+: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account the limit of infinite applications of Hofstadter's Law+.
For all ordinal numbers n, define Hodstadter's n-law as "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's m-law for all m < n."
...which then forces things to take an infinite amount of time once you get to n=omega_1, so thankfully things stop there.
EDIT April 13: Oops, you can't actually "reach" omega_1 like this; I was not thinking properly. Omega_1 flat out does not embed in R. So... yeah.
For all natural numbers n, define L_n as the nth variation of Hofstadter's Law that has been or will be posted in this thread. Theorem: As n approaches infinity, L_n converges to "Everything ever takes an infinite amount of time."
Hofstadter's Shiny Law: It always takes longer than you expect, especially when you get distracted discussing variants of Hofstadter's Shiny Law.
I've got a truly marvelous proof of this theorem, but it would take forever to write it all out.
Actually it takes longer than that.
-- Alan Perlis
Since I discovered them through SICP, I always liked the 'Perlisims' -- many of his Epigrams in Programming are pretty good. There's a hint of Searle/Chinese Room in this particular quote, but he turns it around by implying that in the end, the symbols are numbers (or that's how I read it).
-- Razib Khan
I think Donald Robert Perry said it more succinctly:
Proverbs 9:7-9
Provided your rebuke is sound.
Ouch. There is too much truth to this. Dangerous stuff.
I registered here just to upvote this. As someone who attends a University where this sort of thing is RAMPANT, thanks you for the post.
It would also be fair to say that being intellectual can often be a dampener of conversation. I say this to emphasize that the problem isn't statistics or probabilistic thinking - but rather forcing rigour in general, particularly when in the form of challenging what other people say.
I usually use the word "intellectual" to refer to someone who talks about ideas, not necessarily in an intelligent way.
If being statistical and probabilistic settles oft-discussed intellectual debates so thoroughly as dampen further discussion, that's a great thing!
The goal is to get correct answers and move on to the unanswered, unsettled questions that are preventing progress; the goal is to NOT allow a debate to go any longer than necessary, especially--as Nisan mentioned--if the debate is not sane/intelligent.
-- Richard Feynman
(I don't think he originally meant this in the context of overcoming cognitive bias, but it seems to apply well to that too.)
I think it was originally meant in the context of joy in the merely real.
-Steven Pinker
This one's for you, Clippy:
—Marshall McLuhan
From a forum signature:
Also Neil Gaiman.
I'd suggest, however, that one who is wise had better be at least better than a fool at discerning truths, or the one who is wise isn't all that wise.
In other words, of a fool is better than a wise person at finding truths no one else can find, then there's a serious problem with our notions of foolishness and wisdom.
The equanimity of foolishness and wisdom is a long establish idea. The intention is to encourage better updating.
No idea if it's what Neil Gaiman meant, but the quote can be "rescued" by reading it like this:
That is, the fool is as good at discerning truths as the wise man, but not as good at knowing when it's advantageous to say them or not.
I read the Gaiman quote as referring to "fool" in the sense of court jester, which seems to have more to do with status than intelligence although there are implications of both. Looked at that way, Psy-Kosh's objection doesn't seem to apply; it might indicate something wrong with our status criteria, but of course we already knew that.
The psalm, on the other hand, probably is talking mainly about intelligence. But the ambiguity still makes for a nice contrast.
Fair enough, if one means fool in that sense.
Even my theist girlfriend laughed out loud at that one :-)
--William T. Vollmann
We should all agree to say the same words, without too much concern for what they mean?
The 3 downvotes this had when I entered the thread seem rather harsh, considering it could be rephrased as "think like reality." The questionable part is that the universe has a moral order, but a charitable reading of the quote will not demand that it means "a moral order independent of human minds."
The moral order is within us.
And we are within the universe! So that all works out nicely.
We're only a small part of it, though. The rest is "the motivationless malice of directed acyclic causal graphs".
How do you measure "small"? Us humans had a disproprotionate effect on our immediate surroundings, and that effect is going to continue throughout our lightcone if everything goes according to plan.
I think you're supposed to laugh evilly there.
Mwahahahaha
There's no such thing.
-- Paul Feyerabend
This one could do with expansion and/or contextualisation. A quick Google only turns up several pages of just the bare quote (including on a National Institue of Health .gov page!) - what was the original source? Anyone?
Well, I deliberately left out the source because I didn't think it would play well in this Peoria of thought -- it's from his book of essays Farewell to Reason. Link to gbooks with some context.
We've had rationality quotes before from C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterson, and Jack Chick among others. I don't think people are going to complain because of generic context issues even if Feyerabend did say some pretty silly stuff.
Can you please explain what you mean by calling LW a "Peoria of thought" and why you believe it is one? It doesn't sound good, and if you've found a problem I'd like to know about it and address it.
Pretty much any forum tends to evolve into a bit of an echo chamber. I don't think there is any general solution to it other than for whole forums to be bubbling into and out of existence.
It is not really a quote, but a good quip from an otherwise lame recent internet discussion:
Matt: Ok, for all of the people responding above who admit to not having a soul, I think this means that it is morally ok for me to do anything I want to you, just as it is morally ok for me to turn off my computer at the end of the day. Some of us do have souls, though.
Igor: Matt - I agree that people who need a belief in souls to understand the difference between killing a person and turning off a computer should just continue to believe in souls.
Hah! Just found in today's NewsThump: We’d be total shits if it wasn’t for Jesus, admit Christians
This is, of course, pretty much the right answer to anyone who asserts that without God, they could just kill anyone they wanted.
Of course, my original comment had nothing to do with god. It had to do with "souls", for lack of a better term as that was the term that was used in the original discussion (suggest reading the original post if you want to know more---basically, as I understand the intent it simply referred to some hypothetical quality that is associated with consciousness that lies outside the realm of what is simulable on a Turing machine). If you think that humans are nothing but Turing machines, why is it morally wrong to kill a person but not morally wrong to turn off a computer? Please give a real answer...either provide an answer that admits that humans cannot be simulated by Turing machines, or else give your answer using only concepts relevant to Turing machines (don't talk about consciousness, qualia, hopes, whatever, unless you can precisely quantify those concepts in the language of Turing machines). And in the second case, your answer should allow me to determine where the moral balance between human and computers lies....would it be morally bad to turn off a primitive AI, for example, with intelligence at the level of a mouse?
There's one more aspect to that. You are "morally ok" to turn off only your own computer. Messing with other people stuff is "morally bad". And I don't think you can "own" self-aware machine more that you can "own" a human being.
So, as long as we're going down this road: it seems to follow from this that if someone installs, without my permission, a self-aware algorithm on my computer, the computer is no longer mine... it is, rather, an uninvited intruder in my home, consuming my electricity and doing data transfer across my network connection.
So I've just had my computer stolen, and I'm having my electricity and bandwidth stolen on an ongoing basis. And maybe it's playing Jonathan Coulton really loudly on its speakers or otherwise being obnoxious.
But I can't kick it out without unplugging it, and unplugging it is "morally bad." So, OK... is it "morally OK" to put it on a battery backup and wheel it to the curb, then let events take their natural course? I'm still out a computer that way, but at least I get my network back. (Or is it "morally bad" to take away the computer's network access, also?)
More generally, what recourse do I have? Is it "morally OK" for me to move to a different house and shut off the utilities? Am I obligated, on your view, to support this computer to the day I die?
I consider this scenario analogous to one in which somebody steals your computer and also leaves a baby in a basket on your doormat.
Except we don't actually believe that most babies have to be supported by their parents in perpetuity... at some point, we consider that the parents have discharged their responsibility and if the no-longer-baby is still incapable of arranging to be fed regularly, it becomes someone else's problem. (Perhaps its own, perhaps a welfare system of some sort, etc.) Failing to continue to support my 30-year-old son isn't necessarily seen as a moral failing.
Perhaps the computer will eventually become mature enough to support verself, at which point it has no more claim on your resources. Otherwise, ve's a disabled child and the ethics of that situation applies.
Barring disability.
(nods) Hence "most"/"necessarily." Though I'll admit, my moral intuitions in those cases are muddled... I'm really not sure what I want to say about them.
Well, he will be intruder (in my opinion). Like, "unwanted child" kind of indtruder. It consumes your time, money, and you can't just throw it away.
Sounds like it pretty much sucks to be me in that scenario.
No indeed. However, the similarity in assuming a supernatural explanation is required for morality to hold struck me.
Hi Matt, thanks for dropping by. Here is an older comment of mine that tries to directly address what I consider the hardest of your questions: How to distinguish from the outside between two computational processes, one conscious, the other not. I'll copy it here for convenience. Most of the replies to you here can be safely considered Less Wrong consensus opinion, but I am definitely not claiming that about my reply.
I start my answer with a Minsky quote:
I believe with Minsky that consciousness is a very anthropocentric concept, inheriting much of the complexity of its originators. I actually have no problem with an anthropocentric approach to consciousness, so I like the following intuitive "definition": X is conscious if it is not silly to ask "what is it like to be X?". The subtle source of anthropocentrism here, of course, is that it is humans who do the asking. As materialists, we just can't formalize this intuitive definition without mapping specific human brain functions to processes of X. In short, we inherently need human neuroscience. So it is not too surprising that we will not find a nice, clean decision procedure to distinguish between two computational processes, one conscious the other not.
Most probably you are not happy with this anthropocentric approach. Then you will have to distill some clean, mathematically tractable concept from the messy concept of consciousness. If you agree with Hofstadter and Minsky, then you will probably reach something related to self-reflection. This may or may not work, but I believe that you will lose the spirit of the original concept during such a formalization. Your decision procedure will probably give unexpected results for many things: various simple, very unintelligent computer programs, hive minds, and maybe even rooms full of people.
This ends my old comment, and I will just add a footnote related to ethical implications. With HonoreDB, I can in principle imagine a world with cooperating and competing agents, some conscious, others not, but otherwise having similar negotiating power. I believe that the ethical norms emerging in this imagined world would not even mention consciousness. If you want to build an ethical system for humans, you can "arbitrarily" decide that protecting consciousness is a terminal value. Why not? But if you want to build a non-anthropocentric ethical system, you will see that the question of consciousness is orthogonal to its issues.
I like Constant's reply, but it's also worth emphasizing that we can't solve scientific problems by interrogating our moral intuitions. The categories we instinctively sort things into are not perfectly aligned with reality.
Suppose we'd evolved in an environment with sophisticated 2011-era artificially intelligent Turing-computable robots--ones that could communicate their needs to humans, remember and reward those who cooperated, and attack those who betrayed them. I think it's likely we'd evolve to instinctively think of them as made of different stuff than anything we could possibly make ourselves, because that would be true for millions of years. We'd evolve to feel moral obligations toward them, to a point, because that would be evolutionarily advantageous, to a point. Once we developed philosophy, we might take this moral feeling as evidence that they're not Turing-computable--after all, we don't have any moral obligations to a mere mass of tape.
Your question has the form:
If A is nothing but B, then why is it X to do Y to A but not to do Y to C which is also nothing but B?
This following question also has this form:
If apple pie is nothing but atoms, why is it safe to eat apple pie but not to eat napalm which is also nothing but atoms?
And here's the general answer to that question: the molecules which make up apple pie are safe to eat, and the molecules which make up napalm are unsafe to eat. This is possible because these are not the same molecules.
Now let's turn to your own question and give a general answer to it: it is morally wrong to shut off the program which makes up a human, but not morally wrong to shut off the programs which are found in an actual computer today. This is possible because these are not the same programs.
At this point I'm sure you will want to ask: what is so special about the program which makes up a human, that it would be morally wrong to shut off the program? And I have no answer for that. Similarly, I couldn't answer you if you asked me why the molecules of apple pie are safe to eat and the those of napalm are not.
As it happens, chemistry and biology have probably advanced to the point at which the question about apple pie can be answered. However, the study of mind/brain is still in its infancy, and as far as I know, we have not advanced to the equivalent point. But this doesn't mean that there isn't an answer.
Is it sufficient to say that humans are able to consider the question? That humans possess an ability to abstract patterns from experience so as to predict upcoming events, and that exercise of this ability leads to a concept of self as a future agent.
Is it necessary that this model of identity incorporate relationships with peers? I think so but am not sure. Perhaps it is only necessary that the ability to abstract be recursive.
Hmm, I don't happen to find your argument very convincing. I mean, what it does is to pay attention to some aspect of the original mistaken statement, then find another instance sharing that aspect which is transparently ridiculous.
But is this sufficient? You can model the statement "apples and oranges are good fruits" in predicate logic as "for all x, Apple(x) or Orange(x) implies Good(x)" or in propositional logic as "A and O" or even just "Z". But it should really depend on what aspect of the original statement you want to get at. You want a model which captures precisely those aspects you want to work with.
So your various variables actually confused the hell outta me there. I was trying to match them up with the original statement and your reductio example. All the while not really understanding which was relevant to the confusion. It wasn't a pleasant experience :(
It seems to me much simpler to simply answer: "Turing machine-ness has no bearing on moral worth". This I think gets straight to the heart of the matter, and isolates clearly the confusion in the original statement.
Or further guess at the source of the confusion, the person was trying to think along the lines of: "Turing machines, hmm, they look like machines to me, so all Turing machines are just machines, like a sewing machine, or my watch. Hmm, so humans are Turing machines, but by my previous reasoning this implies humans are machines. And hmm, furthermore, machines don't have moral worth... So humans don't have moral worth! OH NOES!!!"
Your argument seems like one of those long math proofs which I can follow step by step but cannot grasp its overall structure or strategy. Needless to say, such proofs aren't usually very intuitively convincing.
(but I could be generalizing from one example here)
No, I was not trying to think along those lines. I must say, I worried in advance that discussing philosophy with people here would be fruitless, but I was lured over by a link, and it seems worse than I feared. In case it isn't clear, I'm perfectly aware what a Turing machine is; incidentally, while I'm not a computer scientist, I am a professional mathematical physicist with a strong interest in computation, so I'm not sitting around saying "OH NOES" while being ignorant of the terms I'm using. I'm trying to highlight one aspect of an issue that appears in many cases: if consciousness (meaning whatever we mean when we say that humans have consciousness) is possible for Turing machines, what are the implications if we do any of the obvious things? (replaying, turning off, etc...) I haven't yet seen any reasonable answer, other than 1) this is too hard for us to work out, but someday perhaps we will understand it (the original answer, and I think a good one in its acknowledgment of ignorance, always a valid answer and a good guide that someone might have thought about things) and 2) some pointless and wrong mocking (your answer, and I think a bad one). edit to add: forgot, of course, to put my current guess as to most likely answer, 3) that consciousness isn't possible for Turing machines.
Another option:
it's morally acceptable to terminate a conscious program if it wants to be terminated
it's morally questionable(wrong, but to lesser degree) to terminate a conscious program against its will if it is also possible to resume execution
it is horribly wrong to turn off a conscious program against its will if it cannot be resumed(murder fits this description currently)
performing other operations on the program that it desires would likely be morally acceptable, unless the changes are socially unacceptable
performing other operations on the program against its will is morally unacceptable to a variable degree (brainwashing fits in this category)
These seem rather intuitive to me, and for the most part I just extrapolated from what it is moral to do to a human. Conscious program refers here to one running on any system, including wetware, such that these apply to humans as well. I should note that I am in favor of euthanasia in many cases, in case that part causes confusion.
Can you expand on why you expect human moral intuition to give reasonably clear answers when applied to situations involving conscious machines ?
If you think 1 is the correct answer, you should be aware that this website is for people who do not wait patiently for a someday where we might have an understanding. One of the key teachings of this website is to reach out and grab an understanding with your own two hands. And you might add a 4 to that list, "death threats", which does not strike me as the play either.
You should be aware that in many cases, the sensible way to proceed is to be aware of the limits of your knowledge. Since the website preaches rationality, it's worth not assigning probabilities of 0% or 100% to things which you really don't know to be true or false. (btw, I didn't say 1) is the right answer, I think it's reasonable, but I think it's 3) )
And sometimes you do have to wait for an answer. For a lesson from math, consider that Fermat had flat out no hope of proving his "last theorem", and it required a couple hundred years of apparently unrelated developments to get there....one could easily give a few hundred examples of that sort of thing in any hard science which has a long enough history.
Uh I believe you will find that Fermat in fact had a truly marvelous proof of his last theorem? The only thing he was waiting on was the invention of a wider margin.
Little-known non-fact: there were wider margins available at the time, but it was not considered socially acceptable to use them for accurate proofs, or more generally for true statements at all; they were merely wide margins for error.
I wonder how much the fame of Fermat's Last Theorem is due to the fact that, (a) he claimed to have found a proof, and (b) nobody was able to prove it. Had he merely stated it as a conjecture without claiming that he had proven it, would anywhere near the same effort have been put into proving it?
This is the part where you're going astray, actually. We have no reason to think that human beings are NOT Turing-computable. In other words, human beings almost certainly are Turing machines.
Therefore, consciousness -- whatever we mean when we say that -- is indeed possible for Turing machines.
To refute this proposition, you'd need to present evidence of a human being performing an operation that can't be done by a Turing machine.
Understanding this will help "dissolve" or "un-ask" your question, by removing the incorrect premise (that humans are not Turing machines) that leads you to ask your question.
That is, if you already know that humans are a subset of Turing machines, then it makes no sense to ask what morally justifies treating them differently than the superset, or to try to use this question as a way to justify taking them out of the larger set.
IOW, (the set of humans) is a subset of (the set of turing machines implementing consciousness), which in turn is a proper subset of (the set of turing machines). Obviously, there's a moral issue where the first two subsets are concerned, but not for (the set of turing machines not implementing consciousness).
In addition, there may be some issues as to when and how you're doing the turning off, whether they'll be turned back on, whether consent is involved, etc... but the larger set of "turing machines" is obviously not relevant.
I hope that you actually wanted an answer to your question; if so, this is it.
(In the event you wish to argue for another answer being likely, you'll need to start with some hard evidence that human behavior is NOT being Turing-computable... and that is a tough road to climb. Essentially, you're going to end up in zombie country.)
You wrote: "This is the part where you're going astray, actually. We have no reason to think that human beings are NOT Turing-computable. In other words, human beings almost certainly are Turing machines."
at this stage, you've just assumed the conclusion. you've just assumed what you want to prove.
"Therefore, consciousness -- whatever we mean when we say that -- is indeed possible for Turing machines."
having assumed that A is true, it is easy to prove that A is true. You haven't given an argument.
"To refute this proposition, you'd need to present evidence of a human being performing an operation that can't be done by a Turing machine."
It's not my job to refute the proposition. Currently, as far as I can tell, the question is open. If I did refute it, then my (and several other people's) conjecture would be proven. But if I don't refute it, that doesn't mean your proposition is true, it just means that it hasn't yet been proven false. Those are quite different things, you know.
Well, how about this: physics as we know it can be approximated arbitrarily closely by a computable algorithm (and possibly computed directly as well, although I'm less sure about that. Certainly all calculations we can do involving manipulation of symbols are computable). Physics as we know it also seems to be correct to extremely precise degrees anywhere apart from inside a black hole.
Brains are physical things. Now when we consider that thermal noise should have more of an influence than the slight inaccuracy in any computation, what are the chances a brain does anything non-computable that could have any relevance to consciousness? I don't expect to see black holes inside brains, at least.
In any case, your original question was about the moral worth of turing machines, was it not? We can't use "turing machines can't be conscious" as excuse not to worry about those moral questions, because we aren't sure whether turing machines can be conscious. "It doesn't feel like they should be" isn't really a strong enough argument to justify doing something that would result in, for example, the torture of conscious entities if we were incorrect.
So here's my actual answer to your question: as a rule of thumb, act as if any simulation of "sufficient fidelity" is as real as you or I (well, multiplied by your probability that such a simulation would be conscious, maybe 0.5, for expected utilities). This means no killing, no torture, etc.
'Course, this shouldn't be a practical problem for a while yet, and we may have learned more by the time we're creating simulations of "sufficient fidelity".
No - what I'm pointing out is that the question "what are the ethical implications for turing machines" is the same question as "what are the ethical implications for human beings" in that case.
Not on Less Wrong, it isn't. But I think I may have misunderstood your situation as being one of somebody coming to Less Wrong to learn about rationality of the "Extreme Bayesian" variety; if you just dropped in here to debate the consciousness question, you probably won't find the experience much fun. ;-)
Less Wrong has different -- and far stricter -- rules of evidence than just about any other venue for such a discussion.
In particular, to meaningfully partake in this discussion, the minimum requirement is to understand the Mind Projection Fallacy at an intuitive level, or else you'll just be arguing about your own intuitions... and everybody will just tune you out.
Without that understanding, you're in exactly the same place as a creationist wandering into an evolutionary biology forum, without understanding what "theory" and "evidence" mean, and expecting everyone to disprove creationism without making you read any introductory material on the subject.
In this case, the introductory material is the Sequences -- especially the ones that debunk supernaturalism, zombies, definitional arguments, and the mind projection fallacy.
When you've absorbed those concepts, you'll understand why the things you're saying are open questions are not even real questions to begin with, let alone propositions to be proved or disproved! (They're actually on a par with creationists' notions of "missing links" -- a confusion about language and categories, rather than an argument about reality.)
I only replied to you because I though perhaps you had read the Sequences (or some portion thereof) and had overlooked their application in this context (something many people do for a while until it clicks that, oh yeah, rationality applies to everything).
So, at this point I'll bow out, as there is little to be gained by discussing something when we can't even be sure we agree on the proper usage of words.
That's quite easy: I can lift a rock, a Turing machine can't. A Turing machine can only manipulate symbols on a strip of tape, it can't do anything else that's physical.
Your claim that consciousness (whatever we mean when we say that) is possible for Turing machines, rests on the assumption that consciousness is about computation alone, not about computation+some unidentified physical reaction that's absent to pure Turing machines resting in a box on a table.
That consciousness is about computation alone may indeed end up true, but it's as yet unproven.
Read the first part of ch.2 of "Good and Real".
Could you clarify why you think that this reading assignment illuminates the question being discussed? I just reread it. For the most part, it is an argument against dualism. It argues that consciousness is (almost certainly) reducible to a physical process.
But this doesn't have anything to do with what ArisKatsaris wrote. He was questioning whether consciousness can be reduced to a purely computational process (without "some unidentified physical reaction that's absent to pure Turing machines".)
Consider the following argument sketch:
Each step above is at least somewhat problematic. Matt1 seemed to be arguing against step 1, and Drescher does respond to that. But ArisKatsaris seemed to be arguing against step 2. My choice would be to expand the definition of 'computation' slightly to include the interactive, asynchronous, and analog, so that I accept step 2 but deny step 3. Over the past decade, Wegner and Goldin have published many papers arguing that computation != TM.
It may well be that you can only get consciousness if you have a non-TM computation (mind) embedded in a system of sensors and actuators (body) which itself interacts with and is embedded in within a (simulated?) real-time environment. That is, when you abstract the real-time interaction away, leaving only a TM computation, you have abstracted away an essential ingredient of consciousness.
That sounds like a parody of bad anti-computationalist arguments. To see what's wrong with it, consider the response: "Actually you can't lift a rock either! All you can do is send signals down your spinal column."
What sort of evidence would persuade you one way or the other?
I think you're trivializing the issue. A Turing machine is an abstraction, it isn't a real thing. The claim that a human being is a Turing machine means that, in the abstract, a certain aspect of human beings can be modeled as a Turing machine. Conceptually, it might be the case, for instance, that the universe itself can be modeled as a Turing machine, in which case it is true that a Turing machine can lift a rock.
thanks. my point exactly.
So... you support euthanasia for quadriplegics, then, or anyone else who can't pick up a rock? Or people who are so crippled they can only communicate by reading and writing braille on a tape, and rely on other human beings to feed them and take care of them?
This "unidentified physical reaction" would also need to not be turing-computable to have any relevance. Otherwise, you're just putting forth another zombie-world argument.
At this point, we have no empirical reason to think that this unidentified mysterious something has any existence at all, outside of a mere intuitive feeling that it "must" be so.
And so, all we have are thought experiments that rest on using slippery word definitions to hide where the questions are being begged, presented as intellectual justification for these vague intuitions... like arguments for why the world must be flat or the sun must go around the earth, because it so strongly looks and feels that way.
(IOW, people try to prove that their intuitions or opinions must have some sort of physical form, because those intuitions "feel real". The error arises from concluding that the physical manifestation must therefore exist "out there" in the world, rather than in their own brains.)
A zombie-world seems extremely improbable to have evolved naturally, (evolved creatures coincidentally speaking about their consciousness without actually being conscious), but I don't see why a zombie-world couldn't be simulated by a programmer who studied how to compute the effects of consciousness, without actually needing to have the phenomenon of consciousness itself.
The same way you don't need to have an actual solar system inside your computer, in order to compute the orbits of the planets -- but it'd be very unlikely to have accidentally computed them correctly if you hadn't studied the actual solar system.
Do you have any empirical reason to think that consciousness is about computation alone? To claim Occam's razor on this is far from obvious, as the only examples of consciousness (or talking about consciousness) currently concern a certain species of evolved primate with a complex brain, and some trillions of neurons, all of which have have chemical and electrical effects, they aren't just doing computations on an abstract mathematical universe sans context.
Unless you assume the whole universe is pure mathematics, so there's no difference between the simulation of a thing and the thing itself. Which means there's no difference between the mathematical model of a thing and the thing itself. Which means the map is the territory. Which means Tegmark IV.
And Tegmark IV is likewise just a possibility, not a proven thing.
btw, I'm fully aware that I'm not asking original questions or having any truly new thoughts about this problem. I just hoped maybe someone would try to answer these old questions given that they had such confidence in their beliefs.
This is a fair answer. I disagree with it, but it is fair in the sense that it admits ignorance. The two distinct points of view are that (mine) there is something about human consciousness that cannot be explained within the language of Turing machines and (yours) there is something about human consciousness that we are not currently able to explain in terms of Turing machines. Both people at least admit that consciousness has no explanation currently, and absent future discoveries I don't think there is a sure way to tell which one is right.
I find it hard to fully develop a theory of morality consistent with your point of view. For example, would it be wrong to (given a computer simulation of a human mind) run that simulation through a given painful experience over and over again? Let us assume that the painful experience has happened once...I just ask whether it would be wrong to rerun that experience. After all, it is just repeating the same deterministic actions on the computer, so nothing seems to be wrong about this. Or, for example, if I make a backup copy of such a program, and then allow that backup to run for a short period of time under slightly different stimuli, at which point does that copy acquire an existence of its own, that would make it wrong to delete that copy in favor of the original? I could give many other similar questions, and my point is not that your point of view denies a morality, but rather that I find it hard to develop a full theory of morality that is internally consistent and that matches your assumptions (not that developing a full theory of morality under my assumptions is that much easier).
Among professional scientists and mathematicians, I have encountered both viewpoints: those who hold it obvious to anyone with even the simplest knowledge that Turing machines cannot be conscious, and those who hold that the opposite it true. Mathematicians seem to lean a little more toward the first viewpoint than other disciplines, but it is a mistake to think that a professional, world-class research level, knowledge of physics, neuroscience, mathematics, or computer science necessarily inclines one towards the soulless viewpoint.
I agree that such moral questions are difficult - but I don't see how the difficulty of such questions could constitute evidence about whether a program can "be conscious" or "have a soul" (whatever those mean) or be morally relevant (which has the advantage of being less abstract a concept).
You can ask those same questions without mentioning Turing Machines: what if we have a device capable of making a perfect copy of any physical object, down to each individual quark? Is it morally wrong to kill such a copy of a human? Does the answer to that question have any relevance to the question of whether building such a device is physically possible?
To me, it sounds a bit like saying that since our protocol for seating people around a table are meaningless in zero gravity, then people cannot possibly live in zero gravity.
I am sceptical of your having a rigorous theory of morality. If you do have one, I am sceptical that it would be undone by accepting the proposition that human consciousness is computable.
I don't have one either, but I also don't have any reason to believe in the human meat-computer performing non-computable operations. I actually believe in God more than I believe in that :)