hairyfigment 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: hairyfigment 05 January 2013 12:21:35AM -1 points [-]

Do you think you can reduce qualia?

Well, would that mean writing a series like this?

My intuition certainly says that Martha has a feeling of ineffable learning. Do you at least agree that this proves the unreliability of our intuitions here?

Comment author: aaronsw 05 January 2013 09:45:02PM -1 points [-]

Who said anything about our intuitions (except you, of course)?

Comment author: hairyfigment 06 January 2013 05:26:14AM 0 points [-]

You keep making statements like,

the neuron firing pattern is presumably the cause of the quale, it's certainly not the quale itself.

And you seem to consider this self-evident. Well, it seemed self-evident to me that Martha's physical reaction would 'be' a quale. So where do we go from there?

(Suppose your neurons reacted all the time the way they do now when you see orange light, except that they couldn't connect it to anything else - no similarities, no differences, no links of any kind. Would you see anything?)

Comment author: aaronsw 06 January 2013 07:34:20PM 1 point [-]

I guess you need to do some more thinking to straighten out your views on qualia.

Comment author: Exiles 12 January 2013 10:12:13AM *  2 points [-]

Goodnight, Aaron Swartz.

Comment author: MugaSofer 06 January 2013 10:39:26PM *  0 points [-]

Or you do. You claim the truth of your claims is self-evident, yet it is not evident to, say, hairyfigment, or Eliezer, or me for that matter.

If I may ask, have you always held this belief, or do you recall being persuaded of it at some point? If so, what convinced you?

Comment author: hairyfigment 06 January 2013 11:13:28PM *  -1 points [-]

Let's back up for a second:

  • You've heard of functionalism, right? You've browsed the SEP entry?
  • Have you also read the mini-sequence I linked? In the grandparent I said "physical reaction" instead of "functional", which seems like a mistake on my part, but I assumed you had some vague idea of where I'm coming from.