TheOtherDave comments on A (small) critique of total utilitarianism - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 26 June 2012 12:36PM

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Comment author: TheOtherDave 27 June 2012 04:05:21PM 0 points [-]

It isn't clear to me what the phrase "exactly-duplicated" is doing there. Is there a reason to believe that each individual dust-speck-in-eye event is exactly like every other? And if so, what difference does that make? (Relatedly, is there a reason to believe that each individual moment of torture is different from all the others? If it turns out that it's not, does that imply something relevant?)

In any case, I certainly agree that one could reasonably expect the negvalue of suffering to flatten out no matter how much of it there is. It seems unlikely to me that fifty years of torture is anywhere near the asymptote of that curve, though... for example, I would rather be tortured for fifty years than be tortured for seventy years.

But even if it somehow is at the asymptotic limit, we could recast the problem with ten years of torture instead, or five years, or five months, or some other value that is no longer at that limit, and the same questions would arise.

So, no, I don't think the TvDS problem depends on intuitions about the linear-additive nature of suffering. (Indeed, the more i think about it the less convinced i am that I have such intuitions, as opposed to approaches-a-limit intuitions. This is perhaps because thinking about it has changed my intuitions.)

Comment author: private_messaging comment score below threshold [+] (14 children)

Comment author: TheOtherDave 27 June 2012 04:40:29PM * 0 points [-]

[edit: this response was to an earlier version of the above comment, before it was edited. Some of it is no longer especially apposite to the comment as it exists now.]

I was referring to linear-additive nature of dust specks.

Well, I agree that 3^^^3 dust specks don't quite add linearly... long before you reach that ridiculous mass, I expect you get all manner of weird effects that I'm not physicist enough to predict. And I also agree that our intuitions are that dust specks add linearly.

But surely it's not the dust-specks that we care about here, but the suffering? That is, it seems clear to me that if we eliminated all the dust specks from the scenario and replaced them with something that caused an equally negligible amount of suffering, we would not be changing anything that mattered about the scenario.

And, as I said, it's not at all clear to me that I intuit linear addition of suffering (whether it's caused by dust-specks, torture, or something else), or that the scenario depends on assuming linear addition of suffering. It merely depends on assuming that addition of multiple negligible amounts of suffering can lead to an aggregate-suffering result that is commensurable with, and greater than, a single non-negligible amount of suffering.

It's not clear to me that this assumption holds, but the linear-addition objection seems like a red herring to me.

You can only be dust-speck-ing something like 10^(10^20) distinct human-like entities maximum.

Ah, I see.

Yeah, sure, there's only X possible ways for a human to be (whether 10^(10^20) or some other vast number doesn't really matter), and there's only Y possible ways for a dust speck to be, and there's only Z possible ways for a given human to experience a given dust speck in their eye. So, sure, we only have (XYZ) distinct dust-speck-in-eye events, and if (XYZ) << 3^^^3 then there's some duplication. Indeed, there's vast amounts of duplication, given that (3^^^3/(XYZ)) is still a staggeringly huge number.

Agreed.

I'm still curious about what difference that makes.

Comment author: private_messaging comment score below threshold [+] (12 children)

Comment author: CarlShulman 29 June 2012 05:39:07AM 1 point [-]

Lead to severe discounting of the 'reasoning method' that arrived at 3^^^3 dust-specks>torture conclusion without ever coming across the exhaustion of states issue.

This is mistaken. E.g. see this post which discusses living in a Big World, as in eternal inflation theories where the universe extends infinitely and has random variation so that somewhere in the universe every possible galaxy or supercluster will be realized, and all the human brain states will be explored.

Or see Bostrom's paper on this issue, which is very widely read around here. Many people think that our actions can still matter in such a world, e.g. that it's better to try to give people chocolate than to torture them here on Earth, even if in ludicrously distant region there are brains that have experienced all the variations of chocolate and torture.

Comment author: Mark_Lu 28 June 2012 08:55:15AM * 0 points [-]

similar to trying to recognize cats in pictures by reading R,G,B number value array and doing some arithmetic

But a computer can recognize cats by reading pixel values in pictures? Maybe not as efficiently and accurately as people, but that's because brains have a more efficient architecture/algorithms than today's generic computers.

Comment author: private_messaging 28 June 2012 09:08:10AM * 0 points [-]

Yes, it is of course possible in principle (in fact I am using cats as example because Google just did that). The point is that a person can't do anything equivalent to what human visual cortex does in a fraction of a second by using paper and pencil for multiple lifetimes. The morality and the immorality, just like cat recognition, rely on some innate human ability of connecting symbols with reality.

edit: To clarify. To tell which images are cats and which are dogs, you employ some method that is hopelessly impossible for you to write down. To tell what actions are moral or not, humans employ some method that is likewise hopelessly impossible for them to write down. All you can do is write down guidelines, and add some picture examples of cats and dogs. Various rules like utilitarianism are along the lines of "if the eyes have vertical slits, it's a cat" which mis-recognize a lizard as a cat but do not recognize the cat that closed the eyes. (There is also the practical matter of law making, where you want to restrict the diversity of moral judgment to something sane, and thus you use principles like 'if it doesn't harm anyone else it's okay')

Comment author: Mark_Lu 28 June 2012 09:30:52AM * 0 points [-]

To tell which images are cats and which are dogs, you employ some method that is hopelessly impossible for you to write down.

Right, but if/when we get to (partial) brain emulations (in large quantities) we might be able to do the same thing for 'morality' that we do today to recognize cats using a computer.

Comment author: private_messaging 28 June 2012 10:03:12AM * 1 point [-]

Agreed. We may even see how it is that certain algorithms (very broadly speaking) can feel pain etc, and actually start defining something agreeable from first principles. Meanwhile, all that 3^^^3 people with dustspeck worse than 1 person tortured stuff is to morality as scholasticism is to science. The only value it may have is in highlighting the problem with approximations, and with handwavy reasoning (nobody said that the number of possible people is >3^^^3 (which is false) , even though such statement was a part of reasoning and should have been stated and then rejected invalidating everything that followed. Or a statement that identical instances matter should have been made, which in itself leads to multitude of really dumb decisions whereby the life of a conscious robot that has thicker wires in its computer (or uses otherwise redundant hardware) is worth more)

Comment author: CarlShulman 29 June 2012 05:46:40AM 1 point [-]

Or a statement that identical instances matter should have been made

Not many people hold the view that if eternal inflation is true then there is nothing wrong with hitting people with hot pokers, since the relevant brain states exist elsewhere anyway. In Bostrom's paper he could only find a single backer of the view. In talking to many people, I have seen it expressed more than once, but still only a very small minority of cases. Perhaps not including it in that post looms large for you because you have a strong intuition that it would be OK to torture and kill if the universe were very large, or think it very unlikely that the universe is large, but it's a niche objection to address.

After all, one could include such a discussion as a rider in every post talking about trying to achieve anything for oneself or others: "well, reading this calculus textbook seems like it could teach you interesting math, but physicists say we might be living in a big universe, in which case there's no point since brains in all states already exist, if you don't care about identical copies."

Comment author: private_messaging 29 June 2012 08:58:17AM * 0 points [-]

If there is any nonzero probability that universe is NOT very large (or the copy counting is a bit subtle about the copies which are effectively encoding state onto coordinates), all you did is scaled all the utilities down, which does not affect any decision.

That's incredibly terrible thing to do for our friends the people who believe themselves to be utilitarian, as those people are going to selectively scale down just some of the utilities and then act, in self interest or otherwise, out of resulting big differences, doing something stupid.

edit: also, the issue with multiple-counting redundant hardware and the thick-wired utility monsters in the utilitarianism that does count extra copies doesn't go away if the world is big. If you have a solid argument that utilitarianism without counting the extra copies the same does not work, that means utilitarianism does not work. Which I believe is the case. The morals are an engineered / naturally selected solution to problem of peer to peer intellectual and other cooperation, which requires nodes not to model each other in undue detail, which rules out direct straightforward utilitarianism. The utilitarianism is irreparably broken. It's fake-reductionism where you substitute one irreducible concept for another.

continue this thread »

Comment author: TheOtherDave 27 June 2012 05:06:36PM -2 points [-]

Lead to severe discounting of the 'reasoning method' that arrived at 3^^^3 dust-specks>torture conclusion without ever coming across the exhaustion of states issue.

Even better, to my mind, is to think about the scenario from the ground up and form my own conclusions, rather than start with some intuitive judgment about someone else's writeup about it and then update that judgment based on things they didn't mention in that writeup.

If someone haven't got visual cortex they can't see, even if they do insane amount of reasoning deliberately

It's not clear to me that I correctly understand what you mean here, but given my current understanding, I disagree. All my visual cortex is doing is performing computations on the output of my eyes; if that's seeing, then anything else that performs the same computations can see just as well.

Comment author: private_messaging 27 June 2012 07:44:05PM * 2 points [-]

Even better, to my mind, is to think about the scenario from the ground up and form my own conclusions, rather than start with some intuitive judgment about someone else's writeup about it and then update that judgment based on things they didn't mention in that writeup.

The point is that the approach is flawed; one should always learn on mistakes. The issue here is in building an argument which is superficially logical - conforms to the structure of something a logical rational person might say - something you might have a logical character in a movie say - but is fundamentally a string of very shaky intuitions which are only correct if nothing outside the argument interferes, rather than solid steps.

It's not clear to me that I correctly understand what you mean here, but given my current understanding, I disagree. All my visual cortex is doing is performing computations on the output of my eyes; if that's seeing, then anything else that performs the same computations can see just as well.

In theory. In practice it takes ridiculous number of operations, and you can't chinese-room vision without slow-down by factor of billions. Decades for single-cat recognition versus fraction of a second, and that's if you got an algorithm for it.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 27 June 2012 08:02:08PM 1 point [-]

I disagree with pretty much all of this, as well as with most of what seem to be the ideas underlying it, and don't see any straightforward way to achieve convergence rather than infinitely ramified divergence, so I suppose it's best for me to drop the thread here.

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