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Wix comments on Rationality Quotes June 2012 - Less Wrong
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Comments (413)
When I read the opening line I guessed he was going to go in the opposite direction - as Paul Graham probably would have.
I can see uses to both ways of simplifying one's relationship with the rest of the universe.
Aren't Graham and Dennett talking about different things entirely? Dennett is trying to help us understand better how materialism is compatible with having free will and a conscious self; his prescription here is to avoid a common pitfall, that of dismissing all "upwards" processing of perception and all "downwards" action-starting signals as "mechanical computing, not part of the self" and locating the Cartesian self at the zero-extension intersection of these two processes. It is better to think of the self as extended in both directions. When Graham says "keep your identity small", he is talking about a different sense of "identity" and "small", roughly "do not describe yourself with labels because you might become overly invested in them and lose objectivity and perspective".
I now want to make up bumper stickers that read "What Would Paul Graham Do?"
Granted, I want to do other things that preclude doing so even more.
Wanting to associate your identity with a person, in part because they have a very good argument for why you shouldn't associate your identity with things, and then doing something more important instead... there's something almost poetic or ironic about it.
Poetic? Nice call.
On the plus side at least it indicates that they aren't so caught up in affiliation that we aren't able to ignore his dogmas when it isn't useful to us.
This is only tangentially related, but:
It's probably really important to notice when you feel a desire to signal affiliation with someone or something by purchasing paraphernalia or, e.g., getting a bumper sticker. Wanting to signal that you like something generally means that your identity has expanded to include that thing. This, of course, can be both a symptom and a cause of bias (although it isn't necessarily so). See also all this stuff. Or, more concisely: "I want to buy a bumper sticker/t-shirt/pinup calendar/whatever" should sound an alarm and prompt some introspection.
(I'm not trying to imply that you have a bias towards Paul Graham, just making a general statement.)
Yeah, I agree with (at least the core of) this.
Of course, that's why you what to identify with Paul Graham.
Looking briefly at a few sites specializing in custom bumper stickers, I estimate you could probably make and pay for some in half an hour to an hour. Do you want to do those other things that badly?
You know, it's actually a really good question.
I think what's true here, now that I'm considering it for more than five seconds, is that I don't actually want to do this at all, I just think it's a funny idea and wanted to share it, and I chose "I want to X" as a conventional way of framing the idea... a habit I should perhaps replace with "It would be funny to X" in the spirit of not misrepresenting my state to no purpose.
Yes, I figured as much. :)
How would Paul Graham approach it?
http://paulgraham.com/identity.html
Why?
Because if you don't you'll fail to see what is doing all the thinking, you can't strip a car of all it's parts and still expect it to run, if you do, you're left with saying "nothing is making the wheels turn".
This comment and the quote make absolutely no sense to me. Splitting a mysterious things like a "me" concept into less mysterious things like a smaller "me" and a "queryable reason store" is the heart of reductionism and explanation. Doing that doesn't remove the wheels from the car, it just relabels the car into "wheels" and "smaller car which is also up for decomposition." When you break the "car" concept down, you're not left with nothing, or with wheels that turn on missing axles; you're left with a bunch of parts that all work together, which were all parts of the original car but which all now have different names. Names like engine, exhaust manifold, spark plug, carburetor, wind shield fluid, map of Florida, fiberglass, electron. We can talk about all of these things and never reference "car". "Car" vanishes, but the actual car does not.
And at any point in that reduction, it's possible (in principle, if not cognitively realistic) to draw a boundary around the parts to reintroduce the car concept. Whether I say "I am beliefs, desires, plans, intentions, wayfinding algorithms, multisensory categories, image schemas, a hippocampus, the concept of digital publishing, a lateral geniculate nucleus, some belief propagation and reinforcement learning, post-synaptic potentials, and everything else science knows about minds" or just "internal dialogue", there's nothing erroneous about a small self concept. And even if I don't stop the reduction to draw a boundary, the imagery doesn't "shrink back to a singularity", it just bottoms out at physics.
I think you have misunderstood my point. The quote - or my comment is not disputing reductionism, but rather that the act of deconstructing the mind removes the person - one has to recognize that person or car for that mater consists of parts.
Agreed, I expressed myself poorly but by "strip" I meant "not include into concept car", so more over if you assign driving as a function of a car, and then reduce the car into parts, finding that the engine, wheels and so on, are in fact the the things that do the work, it is a fallacy to conclude "AHA the car is not doing the driving it's the engine, wheels. . . ." since car = it's parts. That is how many people with dualistic intuitions approach the mind.
That depends on what you include in your concept of self - we don't want this to turn this into a discussion about trees falling in the forest. But I was assuming that a lot of people have the same sens of self as I have, we are all human after all. I think "shrink back to singularity" is a metaphor, not a physical singular point.
Defining yourself down to nothing reduces your willingness to engage with the larger world. Mote-person doesn't care so much about the loss of a handful of pocket change, a court case, a car, a limb, but that sort of stuff adds up.
Appeal to consequences?
yes?
Last I checked that was a fallacy...
I mean what about truth of the matter? Accuracy? Is there no difference between possible definitions in how well they carve reality, or how deep an understanding they reflect?
Or is it that anything goes, and we can define it however we please and might as well choose whatever is most beneficial.
Not a fallacy when designing.
Identity is not a feature of the world to be understood. It is a feature of a cognitive system to be designed.
I suppose you could ask empirical questions about what form identity actually takes in the human mind, but Strange's comment is referring to instrumental usefulness of a design.
Spot the fallacy in:
It's appeal to consequences, after all. Ooh, or better yet, spot the fallacy in:
Unless you expect some factual, objective truth to arise about how one should define oneself, it seems fair game for defining in the most beneficial way. It's physics all the way down, so I don't see a factual reason not to define yourself down to nothing, nor do I see a factual reason to do so.
Why yes, when I ask who I am, I am indeed interested in objective truth, or whatever objective truth of the matter may or may not exist. What the relation actually is, between our sense of self, and the-stuff-out-there-in-reality. I don't understand why this seems so outlandish.
If identity really were up for grabs like that, then that just seems to me to mean that there really ain't no such critter in the first place, no natural joint of reality at which it would make most sense to carve. In that case that would be what I'd want to believe, rather than invent some illusion that's pleasing or supposedly beneficial.
It might be more fruitful to ask instead "How is my sens of self generated? - Whatever that may be" and "What work do the self preform - might there an evolutionary advantage for an organism to have a self?"
Where is that from? I think I'd like to read it.
In addition to what Wix said, if you'd like a deeper elaboration of his point the book to read is "Freedom Evolves". (There are very similar passages there--I thought that was the source before seeing Wix's response). This is the book that really sold compatibilism to me, changing my view of it from "hmm, interesting argument, but isn't it a bit of a cop-out?" to "wow, free will makes much more sense viewed this way".
Interesting reaction. I shall admit that even though Eliezer's free will sequence was intellectually convincing to me, it did not change my alief that free will just isn't there and isn't even a useful allusion. So this is going on my reading list.
What? You are clearly anticipating as if you have control over your actions, or you would not have attempted to type that comment.
(assuming you are acting approximately like a decision maker. Only agents need to anticipate as if they have free will)
No, it just happened. You're underestimating the degree to which people can have different aliefs.
Precisely what I currently think, except with a little more emphasis and more colorful words.
Guess I'll have to look at that book.
Thanks! It's being delivered to my Kindle right now.
That particular quote is from Susan Blackmore's book Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human, the book is divided into specific interviews with philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists. Great read.
Though I think that the point of quote is something that imbue most of his work.
Thanks!