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Wei_Dai comments on A Defense of Naive Metaethics - Less Wrong
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I share your skepticism about Luke's statement (but I've been waiting to criticize until he finishes his sequence to see if he addresses the problems later).
To help pump that intuition, consider this analogy:
"X is true" (where X is a mathematical statement) means something, and that thing is not "I think X is true" or "I would think that X is true if I were smarter and some other stuff".
On the other hand, I think it's also possible that "I ought to do X" doesn't really mean anything. See my What does a calculator mean by "2"?. (ETA: To clarify, I mean some usages of "ought" may not really mean anything. There are some usages that clearly do, for example "If you want to accomplish X, then you ought to do Y" can in principle be straightforwardly reduced to a mathematical statement about decision theory, assuming that our current strong intuition that there is such a thing as "the right decision theory" is correct.)
Wei Dai,
I would prefer to hear the source of your skepticism now, if possible. I anticipate not actually disagreeing. I anticipate that we will argue it out and discover that we agree but that my way of expressing my position was not clear to you at first. And then I anticipate using this information to improve the clarity of my future posts.
I'll first try to restate your position in order to check my understanding. Let me know if I don't do it justice.
People use "should" in several different ways. Most of these ways can be "reducible to physics", or in other words can be restated as talking about how our universe is, without losing any of the intended meaning. Some of these ways can't be so reduced (they are talking about the world of "is not") but those usages are simply meaningless and can be safely ignored.
I agree that many usages of "should" can be reduced to physics. (Or perhaps instead to mathematics.) But there may be other usages that can't be so reduced, and which are not clearly safe to ignore. Originally I was planning to wait for you to list the usages of "should" that can be reduced, and then show that there are other usages that are not obviously talking about "the world of is" but are not clearly meaningless either. (Of course I hope that your reductions do cover all of the important/interesting usages, but I'm not expecting that to be the case.)
Since you ask for my criticism now, I'll just give an example that seems to be one of the hardest to reduce: "Should I consider the lives of random strangers to have (terminal) value?"
(Eliezer's proposal is that what I'm really asking when I ask that question is "Does my CEV think the lives of random strangers should have (terminal) value?" I've given various arguments why I find this solution unsatisfactory. One that is currently fresh on my mind is that "coherent extrapolation" is merely a practical way to find the answer to any given question, but should not be used as the definition of what the question means. For example I could use a variant of CEV (call it Coherent Extrapolated Pi Estimation) to answer "What is the trillionth digit of pi?" but that doesn't imply that by "the trillionth digit of pi" I actually mean "the output of CEPE".)
I'm not planning to list all the reductions of normative language. There are too many. People use normative language in too many ways.
Also, I should clarify that when I talk about reducing ought statements into physical statements, I'm including logic. On my view, logic is just a feature of the language we use to talk about physical facts. (More on that if needed.)
I'm not sure I would say "most."
What do you mean by "safe to ignore"?
If you're talking about something that doesn't reduce (even theoretically) into physics and/or a logical-mathematical function, then what are you talking about? Fiction? Magic? Those are fine things to talk about, as long as we understand we're talking about fiction or magic.
What about this is hard to reduce? We can ask for what you mean by 'should' in this question, and reduce it if possible. Perhaps what you have in mind isn't reducible (divine commands), but then your question is without an answer.
Or perhaps you're asking the question in the sense of "Please fix my broken question for me. I don't know what I mean by 'should'. Would you please do a stack trace on the cognitive algorithms that generated that question, fix my question, and then answer it for me?" And in that case we're doing empathic metaethics.
I'm still confused as to what your objection is. Will you clarify?
You said that you're not interested in an "ought" sentence if it reduces to talking about the world of is not. I was trying to make the same point by "safe to ignore".
I don't know, but I don't think it's a good idea to assume that only things that are reducible to physics and/or math are worth talking about. I mean it's a good working assumption to guide your search for possible meanings of "should", but why declare that you're not "interested" in anything else? Couldn't you make that decision on a case by case basis, just in case there is a meaning of "should" that talks about something else besides physics and/or math and its interestingness will be apparent once you see it?
Maybe I should have waited until you finish your sequence after all, because I don't know what "doing empathic metaethics" actually entails at this point. How are you proposing to "fix my question"? It's not as if there is a design spec buried somewhere in my brain, and you can check my actual code against the design spec to see where the bug is... Do you want to pick up this conversation after you explain it in more detail?
Maybe this is because I'm fairly confident of physicalism? Of course I'll change my mind if presented with enough evidence, but I'm not anticipating such a surprise.
'Interest' wasn't the best word for me to use. I'll have to fix that. All I was trying to say is that if somebody uses 'ought' to refer to something that isn't physical or logical, then this punts the discussion back to a debate over physicalism, which isn't the topic of my already-too-long 'Pluralistic Moral Reductionism' post.
Surely, many people use 'ought' to refer to things non-reducible to physics or logic, and they may even be interesting (as in fiction), but in the search for true statements that use 'ought' language they are not 'interesting', unless physicalism is false (which is a different discussion, then).
Does that make sense? I'll explain empathic metaethics in more detail later, but I hope we can get some clarity on this part right now.
First I would call myself a radical platonist instead of a physicalist. (If all universes that exist mathematically also exist physically, perhaps it could be said that there is no difference between platonism and physicalism, but I think most people who call themselves physicalists would deny that premise.) So I think it's likely that everything "interesting" can be reduced to math, but given the history of philosophy I don't think I should be very confident in that. See my recent How To Be More Confident... That You're Wrong.
Right, I'm pretty partial to Tegmark, too. So what I call physicalism is compatible with Tegmark. But could you perhaps give an example of what it would mean to reduce normative language to a logical-mathematical function - even a silly one?
(It's late and I'm thinking up this example on the spot, so let me know if it doesn't make sense.)
Suppose I'm in a restaurant and I say to my dinner companion Bob, "I'm too tired to think tonight. You know me pretty well. What do you think I should order?" From the answer I get, I can infer (when I'm not so tired) a set of joint constraints on what Bob believes to be my preferences, what decision theory he applied on my behalf, and the outcome of his (possibly subconscious) computation. If there is little uncertainty about my preferences and the decision theory involved, then the information conveyed by "you should order X" in this context just reduces to a mathematical statement about (for example) what the arg max of a set of weighted averages is.
(I notice an interesting subtlety here. Even though what I infer from "you should order X" is (1) "according to Bob's computation, the arg max of ... is X", what Bob means by "you should order X" must be (2) "the arg max of ... is X", because if he means (1), then "you should order X" would be true even if Bob made an error in his computation.)
Yeah, that's definitely compatible with what I'm talking about when I talk about reducing normative language to natural language (that is, to math/logic + physics).
Do you think any disagreements or confusion remains in this thread?
Do you accept the conclusion I draw from my version of this argument?
You'd need the FAI able to change its mind as well, which requires that you retain this option in its epistemology. To attack the communication issue from a different angle, could you give examples of the kinds of facts you deny? (Don't say "god" or "magic", give a concrete example.)
Yes, we need the FAI to be able to change its mind about physicalism.
I don't think I've ever been clear about what people mean to assert when they talk about things that don't reduce to physics/math.
Rather, people describe something non-natural or supernatural and I think, "Yeah, that just sounds confused." Specific examples of things I deny because of my physicalism are Moore's non-natural goods and Chalmers' conception of consciousness.
SInce you can't actually reduce[*] 99.99% of your vocabulary, you're either so confused you couldn't possibly think or communicate...or you're only confused about the nature of confusion.
[*] Try reducing "shopping" to quarks, electrons and photons.You can't do it, and if you could, it would tell you nothing useful. Yet there is nothing that is not made of quarks,electrons and photons involved.
Not much better than "magic", doesn't help.
Is this because you're not familiar with Moore on non-natural goods and Chalmers on consciousness, or because you agree with me that those ideas are just confused?
Dude, you really need to start distinguishing between reducible-in-principle and usefully-reducible and doesn't need-reducing.
That's making a pre-existing assumption that everyone speaks in physics language. It's circular.
Speaking in physic language about something that isn't in the actual physics is fiction. I'm not sure what magic is.
What is physics language? Physics language consists of statements that you can cash out, along with a physical world, to get "true" or "false"
What is moral language? Moral language consists of statements that you can cash out, along with a preference order on the set of physical worlds, to get "true" or "false".
ETA: IF you don't accept this, the first step is accepting that the statement "Flibber fladoo." does not refer to anything in physics, and is not a fiction.
No, of course lots of people use 'ought' terms and other terms without any reduction to physics in mind. All I'm saying is that if I'm right about reductionism, those uses of ought language will fail to refer.
Sure, that's one way to use moral language. And your preference order is computed by physics.
That's the way I'm talking about, so you should be able to ignore the other ways in your discussion with me.
You are proposing a function MyOrder from {states of the world} to {preference orders}
This gives you a natural function from {statements in moral language} to {statements in physical language}
but this is not a reduction, it's not what those statements mean, because it's not what they're defined to mean.
I think I must be using the term 'reduction' in a broader sense than you are. By reduction I just mean the translation of (in this case) normative language to natural language - cashing things out in terms of lower-level natural statements.
But you can't reduce an arbitrary statement. You can only do so when you have a definition that allows you to reduce it. There are several potential functions from {statements in moral language} to {statements in physical language}. You are proposing that for each meaningful use of moral language, one such function must be correct by definition.
I am saying, no, you can just make statements in moral language which do not correspond to any statements in physical language.
Not what I meant to propose. I don't agree with that.
Of course you can. People do it all the time. But if you're a physicalist (by which I mean to include Tegmarkian radical platonists), then those statements fail to successfully refer. That's all I'm saying.
Logic can be used to talk about non-physical facts. Do you allow referring to logic even where the logic is talking about non-physical facts, or do you only allow referring to the logic that is talking about physical facts? Or maybe you taboo intended interpretation, however non-physical, but still allow the symbolic game itself to be morally relevant?
Alas, I think this is getting us into the problem of universals. :)
With you, too, Vladimir, I suspect our anticipations do not differ, but our language for talking about these subtle things is slightly different, and thus it takes a bit of work for us to understand each other.
By "logic referring to non-physical facts", do you have in mind something like "20+7=27"?
"3^^^^3 > 3^^^3", properties of higher cardinals, hyperreal numbers, facts about a GoL world, about universes with various oracles we don't have.
Things for which you can't build a trivial analogy out of physical objects, like a pile of 27 rocks (which are not themselves simple, but this is not easy to appreciate in the context of this comparison).
Certainly, one could reduce normative language into purely logical-mathematical facts, if that was how one was using normative language. But I haven't heard of people doing this. Have you? Would a reduction of 'ought' into purely mathematical statements ever connect up again to physics in a possible world? If so, could you give an example - even a silly one?
Since it's hard to convey tone through text, let me explicitly state that my tone is a genuinely curious and collaboratively truth-seeking one. I suspect you've done more and better thinking on metaethics than I have, so I'm trying to gain what contributions from you I can.
Why do you talk of "language" so much? Suppose we didn't have language (and there was only ever a single person), I don't think the problem changes.
Say, I would like to minimize ((X-2)*(X-2)+3)^^^3, where X is the number I'm going to observe on the screen. This is a pretty self-contained specification, and yet it refers to the world. The "logical" side of this can be regarded as a recipe, a symbolic representation of your goals. It also talks about a number that is too big to fit into the physical world.
Okay, sure. We agree about this, then.
This would require that we both have positions that accurately reflect reality, or are somehow synchronously deluded. This is a confusing territory, I know that I don't know enough to be anywhere confident in my position, and even that position is too vague to be worth systematically communicating, or to describe some important phenomena (I'm working on that). I appreciate the difficulty of communication, but I don't believe that we would magically meet at the end without having to change our ideas in nontrivial ways.
I just mean that our anticipations do not differ in a very local sense. As an example, imagine that we were using 'sound' in different ways like Albert and Barry. Surely Albert and Barry have different anticipations in many ways, but not with respect to the specific events closely related to the tree falling in a forest when nobody is around.
Or maybe things that just don't usefully reduce.
I'd be very gracious if you could take a look at my recent question and the comments. Your statement
is interesting to me. What is a counter-argument to the claim that the only way that one could claim that " "X is true" means something" is to unpack the statement "X is true" all the way down to amplitudes over configurations (perhaps in a subspace of configuration space that highly factorizes over 'statistically common arrangements of particles in human brains correlating to mathematical conclusions' or something.
Where do the intuition-sympathizers stand on the issue of logical names?
I don't think something like 'ought' can intuitively point to something that has ontological ramifications. If there is any "intuition" to it, why is it unsatisfactory to think it's merely an evolutionary effect?
From the original post above, I find a point of contention with
'I ought to do X' does correspond to something that exists... namely, some distribution over configurations of human minds. It's a proposition like any other, like 'that sign is red' for example. You can track down a fully empirical and quantifiable descriptor of 'I ought to do X' with some sufficiently accurate model and measuring devices with sufficient precision. States of knowledge about what one 'ought' to do are states of knowledge like any others. When tracking down the physics of 'Ought', it will be fleshed out with some nuanced, perhaps situationally specific, definition that relates it to other existing entities.
I guess more succinctly, there is no abstract concept of 'ought'. The label 'ought' just refers to an algorithm A, an outcome desired from that algorithm O, an input space of things the algorithm can operate on, X, an assessment of the probability that the outcome happens under the algorithm, P(A(X) = O). Up to the limit of sensory fidelity, this is all in principle experimentally detectable, no?
I don't believe in an ontology of morals, only an epistemology of them.
Do you think that "The sign is red" means something different from "I believe the sign is red"? (In the technical sense of believe, not the pop sense.)
Do you think that "Murder is wrong" means something different from "I believe that murder is wrong."?
The verb believe goes without saying when making claims about the world. To assert that 'the sign is red' is true would not make sense if I did not believe it, by definition. I would either be lying or unaware of my own mental state. To me, your question borders more on opinions and their consequences.
Quoting from there: "But your beliefs are not about you; beliefs are about the world. Your beliefs should be your best available estimate of the way things are; anything else is a lie."
What I'm trying to say is that the statement (Murder is wrong) implies the further slight linguistic variant (I believe murder is wrong) (modulo the possibility that someone is lying or mentally ill, etc.) The question then is whether (I believe murder is wrong) -> (murder is wrong). Ultimately, from the perspective of the person making these claims, the answer is 'yes'. It makes no sense for me to feel that my preferences are not universally and unequivocally true.
I don't find this at odds with a situation where a notorious murderer who is caught, say Hannibal Lecter, can simultaneously choose his actions and say "murder is wrong". Maybe the person is mentally insane. But even if they aren't, they could simply choose a preference ordering such that the local wrongness of failing to gratify their desire to murder is worse than the local wrongness of murder itself in their society. Thus, they can see that to people who don't have the same preference for murdering someone for self-gratification, the computation of beliefs works out that (murder is wrong) is generally true, but not true when you substitute their local situations into their personal formula for computing the belief. In this case it just becomes an argument over words because the murderer is tacitly substituting his personal local definitions for things when making choices, but then using more general definitions when making statements of beliefs. In essence, the murderer believes it is not wrong for him to murder and get the gratification, but that murder, as society defines it and views it, is "wrong" where "wrong" is a society-level description, not the murderer's personal description. I put a little more about the "words" problem below.
The apparent difference between this way of thinking and the way we all experience our thinking is that, among our assertions is the meta-assertion that (over-asserting beliefs is bad) -> (I believe over-asserting beliefs is bad) or something similar to this. All specific beliefs, including such meta-beliefs, are intertwined. You can't have independent beliefs about whether murder is right that don't depend on your beliefs about whether beliefs should be acted upon like they are cold hard facts.
But at the root, all beliefs are statements about physics. Mapping a complicated human belief down to the level of making statistical pattern recognition claims about amplitude distributions is really hard and inaccessible to us. Further, evolutionarily, we can't afford to burn computation time exploring a fully determined picture of our beliefs. After some amount of computation time, we have to make our chess moves or else the clock runs out and we lose.
It only feels like saying (I believe murder is wrong) fails to imply the claim (murder is wrong). Prefacing a claim with "I believe" is a human-level way or trying to mitigate the harshness of the claim. It could be a statement that tries to roughly quantify how much evidence I can attest to for the claim which the belief describes. It certainly sounds more assured to say (murder is wrong) than to say (I believe murder is wrong), but this is a phantom distinction.
The other thing, which I think you are trying to take special pains to avoid, is that you can very easily run into a battle of words here. If someone says, "I believe murder is wrong" and what they really mean is something like "I believe that it does an intolerable amount of social disservice in the modern society that I live in for anyone to act as if murdering is acceptable, and thus to always make sure to punish murderers," basically, if someone translates "murder" into "the local definition of murder in the world that I frequently experience" and they translate "wrong" into "the local definition of wrong (e.g. punishable in court proceedings or something)", then they are no longer talking about the cognitive concept of murder. An alien race might not define murder the same or "wrong" the same.
If someone uses 'believe' to distinguish between making a claim about the most generalized form of murder they can think of, applicable to the widest array of potential sentient beings, or something like that, then the two statements are different, but only artificially.
If I say "I believe murder is wrong" and I really mean "I believe (my local definition of murder) is (my local definition of wrong)" then this implies the statement (The concept described by my local definition of murder is locally wrong), with no "quantifier" of belief required.
In the end, all statements can be reduced this way. If a statement has "I believe" as a "quantifier", then either it is only an artificial facet of language that restricts the definitions of words in the claim to some (usually local) subset on which the full, unprefaced claim can be made... or else if local definitions of words aren't being implicated, then the "I believe" prefix literally contains no additional information about the state of your mind than the raw assertion would yield.
This is why rhetoric professors go nuts when students write argumentative papers and drop "I think that" or "I believe that" all over the place. Assertions are assertions. It's a social custom that you can allude to the fact that you might not have 100% confidence in your assertion by prefacing it with "I believe". It's also a social custom that you can allude to respect for other beliefs or participation in a negotiation process by prefacing claims with "I believe", but in the strictest sense of what information you're conveying to third parties (separate from any social custom dressings), the "I believe" preface adds no information content.
The difference is here
Alice: "I bet you $500 that the sign is red" Bob: "OK" later, they find out it's blue Bob: "Pay up!"
Alice: "I bet you $500 that I believe the sign is red" Bob: "OK" later, they find out it's blue Alice: "But I thought it was red! Pay up!"
That's the difference between "X" and "I believe X". We say them in the same situation, but they mean different things.
The way statements like "murder is wrong" communicate facts about preference orders is pretty ambiguous. But suppose someone says that "Murder is wrong, and this is more important than gratifying my desire, possible positive consequences of murder, and so on" and then murders, without changing their mind. Would they therefore be insane? If yes, you agree with me.
Correct is at issue, not true.
Why? Why do you say this?
Does "i believe the sky is green" imply "the sky is green"? Sure, you believe that, when you believe X, X is probably true, but that's a belief, not a logical implication.
I am suggesting a similar thing for morality. People believe that "(I believe murder is wrong) => (murder is wrong)" and that belief is not reducible to physics.
Assertions aren't about the state of your mind! At least some of them are about the world - that thing, over there.
I don't understand this. If Alice bet Bob that she believed that the sign was red, then going and looking at the sign would in no way settle the bet. They would have to go look at her brain to settle that bet, because the claim, "I believe the sign is red" is a statement about the physics of Alice's brain.
I want to think more about this and come up with a more coherent reply to the other points. I'm very intrigued. Also, I think that I accidentally hit the 'report' button when trying to reply. Please disregard any communication you might get about that. I'll take care of it if anyone happens to follow up.
You are correct in your first paragraph, I oversimplified.
I think this address this topic very well. The first person experience of belief is one in the same with fact-assertion. 'I ought to do X' refers to a 4-tuple of actions, outcomes, utility function, and conditional probability function.
W.r.t. your question about whether a murderer who, prior to and immediately after committing murder, attests to believing that murder is wrong, I would say it is a mistaken question to bring their sanity into it. You can't decide that question without debating what is meant by 'sane'. How a person's preference ordering and resulting actions look from the outside does not necessarily reveal that the person failed to behave rationally, according to their utility function, on the inside. If I choose to label them as 'insane' for seeming to violate their own belief, this is just a verbal distinction about how I will label such third-person viewings of that occurrence. Really though, their preference ordering might have been temporarily suspended due to clouded judgment from rage or emotion. Or, they might not be telling the full truth about their preference ordering and may not even be aware of some aspects of it.
The point is that beliefs are always statements of physics. If I say, "murder is wrong", I am referring to some quantified subset of states of matter and their consequences. If I say, "I believe murder is wrong", I am telling you that I assert that "murder is wrong" is true, which is a statement about my brain's chemistry.
Everyone keeps saying that, but they never give convincing arguments for it.
I also disagree with this.
Pardon me, but I believe the burden of proof here is for you to supply something non-physical that's being specified and then produce evidence that this is the case. If the thing you're talking about is supposed to be outside of a magisterium of evidence, then I fail to see how your claim is any different than that we are zombies.
At a coarse scale, we're both asking about the evidence that we observe, which is the first-person experience of assertions about beliefs. Over models that can explain this phenomenon, I am attempting to select the one with minimum message length, as a computer program for producing the experience of beliefs out of physical material can have some non-zero probability attached to it through evidence. How are we to assign probability to the explanation that beliefs do not point to things that physically exist? Is that claim falsifiable? Are there experiments we can do which depend on the result? If not, then the burden of proof here is squarely on you to present a convincing case why the same-old same-old punting to complicated physics is not good enough. If it's not good enough for you, and you insist on going further, that's fine. But physics is good enough for me here and that's not a cop out or an unjustified conclusion in the slightest.
Hm? It's easy to form beliefs about things that aren't physical. Suppose I tell you that the infinite cardinal aleph-1 is strictly larger than aleph-0. What's the physical referent of the claim?
I'm not making a claim about the messy physical neural structures in my head that correspond to those sets -- I'm making a claim about the nonphysical infinite sets.
Likewise, I can make all sorts of claims about fictional characters. Those aren't claims about the physical book, they're claims about its nonphysical implications.
Why do you think that nonphysical implications are ontologically existing things? I argue that what you're trying to get at by saying "nonphysical implications" are actual quantified subsets of matter. Ideas, however abstract, are referring to arrangements of matter. The vision in your mind when you talk about aleph-1 is of a physically existing thing. When's the last time you imagined something that wasn't physical? A unicorn? You mean a horse with wings glued onto it? Mathematical objects represent states of knowledge, which are as physical as anything else. The color red refers to a particular frequency of light and the physical processes by which it is a common human experience. There is no idea of what red is apart from this. Red is something different to a blind man than it is to you, but by speaking about your physical referent, the blind man can construct his own useful physical referent.
Claims about fictional characters are no better. What do you mean by Bugs Bunny other than some arrangement of colors brought to your eyes by watching TV in the past. That's what Bugs Bunny is. There's no separately existing entity which is Bugs Bunny that can be spoken about as if it ontologically was. Every person who refers to Bugs Bunny refers to physical subsets of matter from their experience, whether that's because they witnessed the cartoon and were told through supervised learning what cognitive object to attach it to or they heard about it later through second hand experience. A blind person can have a physical referent when speaking about Bugs Bunny, albeit one that I have a very hard time mentally simulating.
In any case, merely asserting that something fails to have a physical referent is not a convincing reason to believe so. Ask yourself why you think there is no physical referent and whether one could construct a computational system that behaves that way.
Just to be a little clearer: saying that "I ought to do X" means "There exists some goal Y such that I want to achieve Y; there exists some set of variables D which I can manipulate to bring about the achievement of Y; X is an algorithm for manipulating variables in D to produce effect Y, and according to my current state of knowledge, I assess that the probability of this model of X(D) yielding Y is high enough such that whatever physical resources it costs me to attempt X(D), as a Bayesian, the trade-off works out in favor of actually doing it. That is, Payoff(Y) * P(I was right in modeling the algorithm X(D) as producing Y) > Cost(~Y)*P(I was incorrect in modeling the algorithm X(D)), or some similar decision rule.