MugaSofer comments on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project - Less Wrong

29 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 December 2012 12:26AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (353)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: pjeby 26 December 2012 12:20:35AM 0 points [-]

Searle's view is:

  1. qualia exists (because: we experience it)
  2. the brain causes qualia (because: if you cut off any other part of someone they still seem to have qualia)
  3. if you simulate a brain with a Turing machine, it won't have qualia (because: qualia is clearly a basic fact of physics and there's no way just using physics to tell whether something is a Turing-machine-simulating-a-brain or not)

Which part does LW disagree with and why?

The whole thing: it's the Chinese Room all over again, a intuition pump that begs the very question it's purportedly answering. (Beginning an argument for the existence of qualia with a bare assertion that they exist is a little more obvious than the way that the word "understanding" is fudged in the Chinese Room argument, but basically it's the same.)

I suppose you could say that there's a grudging partial agreement with your point number two: that "the brain causes qualia". The rest of what you listed, however, is drivel, as is easy to see if you substitute some other term besides "qualia", e.g.:

  1. Free will exists (because: we experience it)
  2. The brain causes free will (because if you cut off any part, etc.)
  3. If you simulate a brain with a Turing machine, it won't have free will because clearly it's a basic fact of physics and there's no way to tell just using physics whether something is a machine simulating a brain or not.

It doesn't matter what term you plug into this in place of "qualia" or "free will", it could be "love" or "charity" or "interest in death metal", and it's still not saying anything more profound than, "I don't think machines are as good as real people, so there!"

Or more precisely: "When I think of people with X it makes me feel something special that I don't feel when I think of machines with X, therefore there must be some special quality that separates people from machines, making machine X 'just a simulation'." This is the root of all these Searle-ian arguments, and they are trivially dissolved by understanding that the special feeling people get when they think of X is also a property of how brains work.

Specifically, the thing that drives these arguments is our inbuilt machinery that classifies things as mind-having or not-mind-having, for purposes of prediction-making. But the feeling that we get that a thing is mind-having or not-mind-having is based on what was useful evolutionarily, not on what the actual truth is. Searlian (Surly?) arguments are thus in exactly the same camp as any other faith-based argument: elevating one's feelings to Truth, irrespective of the evidence against them.

Comment author: aaronsw 04 January 2013 09:51:39PM *  0 points [-]

Beginning an argument for the existence of qualia with a bare assertion that they exist

Huh? This isn't an argument for the existence of qualia -- it's an attempt to figure out whether you believe in qualia or not. So I take it you disagree with step one, that qualia exists? Do you think you are a philosophical zombie?

I do think essentially the same argument goes through for free will, so I don't find your reductio at all convincing. There's no reason, however, to believe that "love" or "charity" is a basic fact of physics, since it's fairly obvious how to reduce these. Do you think you can reduce qualia?

I don't understand why you think this is a claim about my feelings.

Comment author: MugaSofer 04 January 2013 11:46:10PM *  -1 points [-]

I do think essentially the same argument goes through for free will

Could you expand on this point, please? It generally agreed* that "free will vs determinism" is a dilemma that we dissolved long ago. I can't see what else you could mean by this, so ...

[*EDIT: here, that is]

Comment author: aaronsw 05 January 2013 09:36:42PM 0 points [-]

I guess it really depends on what you mean by free will. If by free will, pjeby meant some kind of qualitative experience, then it strikes me that what he means by it is just a form of qualia and so of course the qualia argument goes through. If he means by it something more complicated, then I don't see how point one holds (we experience it), and the argument obviously doesn't go through.