lsparrish comments on Open Thread, October 16-31, 2012 - Less Wrong

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Comment author: lsparrish 20 October 2012 07:15:22PM 0 points [-]

In the new sequence Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners EY has made use of exercise questions / statements intended to be pondered prior to continuing. He has labeled these "koans" but is open to suggestions for a better word, as a koan means something a bit more specific than that to Zen people. Any ideas? Here are the "koans" from this sequence in order of appearance:

The Useful Idea of Truth

If the above is true, aren't the postmodernists right? Isn't all this talk of 'truth' just an attempt to assert the privilege of your own beliefs over others, when there's nothing that can actually compare a belief to reality itself, outside of anyone's head?

If we were dealing with an Artificial Intelligence that never had to argue politics with anyone, would it ever need a word or a concept for 'truth'?

What rule could restrict our beliefs to just propositions that can be meaningful, without excluding a priori anything that could in principle be true?

The Fabric of Real Things

"You say that a universe is a connected fabric of causes and effects. Well, that's a very Western viewpoint - that it's all about mechanistic, deterministic stuff. I agree that anything else is outside the realm of science, but it can still be real, you know. My cousin is psychic - if you draw a card from his deck of cards, he can tell you the name of your card before he looks at it. There's no mechanism for it - it's not a causal thing that scientists could study - he just does it. Same thing when I commune on a deep level with the entire universe in order to realize that my partner truly loves me. I agree that purely spiritual phenomena are outside the realm of causal processes, which can be scientifically understood, but I don't agree that they can't be real."

"Does your rule there forbid epiphenomenalist theories of consciousness - that consciousness is caused by neurons, but doesn't affect those neurons in turn? The classic argument for epiphenomenal consciousness has always been that we can imagine a universe in which all the atoms are in the same place and people behave exactly the same way, but there's nobody home - no awareness, no consciousness, inside the brain. The usual effect of the brain generating consciousness is missing, but consciousness doesn't cause anything else in turn - it's just a passive awareness - and so from the outside the universe looks the same. Now, I'm not so much interested in whether you think epiphenomenal theories of consciousness are true or false - rather, I want to know if you think they're impossible or meaningless a priori based on your rules."

Does the idea that everything is made of causes and effects meaningfully constrain experience? Can you coherently say how reality might look, if our universe did not have the kind of structure that appears in a causal model?

Comment author: Dolores1984 20 October 2012 07:35:25PM 3 points [-]

I propose that we continue to call them koans, on the grounds that changing involves a number of small costs, and it really, fundamentally, does not matter in any meaningful sense.

Comment author: lsparrish 20 October 2012 08:28:52PM 2 points [-]

There is a cost to doing nothing as well. Calling them koans potentially has the following effects:

  1. Makes people think that rationality is Zen.
  2. Makes people think Zen is rational.
  3. Irritates people who know/care more about Zen than average.
  4. Signals disrespect of specialized knowledge.
  5. Encourages a norm of misusing/inflating terms beyond their technical use.

The question is whether it is more costly to make the change or not. How costly is the change? Are the costs long-term or short-term? (The costs of not making the change are mostly long-term.)

Also relevant: Apart from avoiding the above costs, are there benefits to changing it to something else? (For example, a better term could make the articles more interesting and intuitive to beginners than "koan" does.)

Comment author: [deleted] 21 October 2012 10:28:00AM *  2 points [-]

Knowing the kind of people who read LW, I guess that on reading “koan” more people will think about hacker koans than Zen kōans (also given no macron on the O).

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