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Vaniver comments on By Which It May Be Judged - Less Wrong
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Assume the subject of reprogramming is an existing human being, otherwise minimally altered by this reprogramming, i.e., we don't do anything that isn't necessary to switch their motivation to paperclips. So unless you do something gratuitiously non-minimal like moving the whole decision-action system out of the range of introspective modeling, or cutting way down on the detail level of introspective modeling, or changing the empathic architecture for modeling hypothetical selves, the new person will experience themselves as having ineffable 'qualia' associated with the motivation to produce paperclips.
The only way to make it seem to them like their motivational quales hadn't changed over time would be to mess with the encoding of their previous memories of motivation, presumably in a structure-destroying way since the stored data and their introspectively exposed surfaces will not be naturally isomorphic. If you carry out the change to paperclip-motivation in the obvious way, cognitive comparisions of the retrieved memories to current thoughts will return 'unequal ineffable quales', and if the memories are visualized in different modalities from current thoughts, 'incomparable ineffable quales'.
Doing-what-leads-to-paperclips will also be a much simpler 'quale', both from the outside perspective looking at the complexity of cognitive data, and in terms of the internal experience of complexity - unless you pack an awful lot of detail into the question of what constitutes a more preferred paperclip. Otherwise, compared to the old days when you thought about justice and fairness, introspection will show that less questioning and uncertainty is involved, and that there are fewer points of variation among the motivational thought-quales being considered.
I suppose you could put in some extra work to make the previous motivations map in cognitively comparable ways along as many joints as possible, and try to edit previous memories without destroying their structure so that they can be visualized in a least common modality with current experiences. But even if you did, memories of the previous quales for rightness-motivation would appear as different in retrospect when compared to current quales for paperclip-motivation as a memory of a 3D greyscale forest landscape vs. a current experience of a 2D red-and-green fractal, even if they're both articulated in the visual sensory modality and your modal workspace allows you to search for, focus on, and compare commonly 'experienced' shapes between them.
Consider Bob. Bob, like most unreflective people, settles many moral questions by "am I disgusted by it?" Bob is disgusted by, among other things, feces, rotten fruit, corpses, maggots, and men kissing men. Internally, it feels to Bob like the disgust he feels at one of those stimuli is the same as the disgust he feels at the other stimuli, and brain scans show that they all activate the insula in basically the same way.
Bob goes through aversion therapy (or some other method) and eventually his insula no longer activates when he sees men kissing men.
When Bob remembers his previous reaction to that stimuli, I imagine he would remember being disgusted, but not be disgusted when he remembers the stimuli. His positions on, say, same-sex marriage or the acceptability of gay relationships have changed, and he is aware that they have changed.
Do you think this example agrees with your account? If/where it disagrees, why do you prefer your account?
I think this is really a sorites problem. If you change what's delicious only slightly, then deliciousness itself seems to be unaltered. But if you change it radically — say, if circuits similar to your old gustatory ones now trigger when and only when you see a bright light — then it seems plausible that the experience itself will be at least somewhat changed, because 'how things feel' is affected by our whole web of perceptual and conceptual associations. There isn't necessarily any sharp line where a change in deliciousness itself suddenly becomes perceptible; but it's nevertheless the case that the overall extension of 'delicious' (like 'disgusting' and 'moral') has some effect on how we experience deliciousness. E.g., deliciousness feels more foodish than lightish.
When I look at the problem introspectively, I can see that as a sensible guess. It doesn't seem like a sensible guess when I look at it from a neurological perspective. If the activation of the insula is disgust, then the claim that outputs of the insula will have a different introspective flavor when you rewire the inputs of the insula seems doubtful. Sure, it could be the case, but why?
When we hypnotize people to make them disgusted by benign things, I haven't seen any mention that the disgust has a different introspective flavor, and people seem to reason about that disgust in the exact same way that they reason about the disgust they had before.
This seems like the claim that rewiring yourself leads to something like synesthesia, and that just seems like an odd and unsupported claim to me.
Certain patterns of behavior at the insula correlate with disgust. But we don't know whether they're sufficient for disgust, nor do we know which modifications within or outside of the insula change the conscious character of disgust. There are lots of problems with identity claims at this stage, so I'll just raise one: For all we know, activation patterns in a given brain region correlate with disgust because disgust is experienced when that brain region inhibits another part of the brain; an experience could consist, in context, in the absence of a certain kind of brain activity.
Hypnosis data is especially difficult to evaluate, because it isn't clear (a) how reliable people's self-reports about introspection are while under hypnosis; nor (b) how reliable people's memories-of-hypnosis are afterward. Some 'dissociative' people even give contradictory phenomenological reports while under hypnosis.
That said, if you know of any studies suggesting that the disgust doesn't have at all a different character, I'd be very interested to see them!
If you think my claim isn't modest and fairly obvious, then it might be that you aren't understanding my claim. Redness feels at least a little bit bloodish. Greenness feels at least a little bit foresty. If we made a clone who sees evergreen forests as everred and blood as green, then their experience of greenness and redness would be partly the same, but it wouldn't be completely the same, because that overtone of bloodiness would remain in the background of a variety of green experiences, and that woodsy overtone would remain in the background of a variety of red experiences.
I'm differentiating between "red evokes blood" and "red feels bloody," because those seem like different things to me. The former deals with memory and association, and the second deals with introspection, and so I agree that the same introspective sensation could evoke very different memories.
The dynamics of introspective sensations could plausibly vary between people, and so I'm reluctant to discuss it extensively except in the context of object-level comparisons.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "red evokes blood." I agree that "red feels bloody" is intuitively distinct from "I tend to think explicitly about blood when I start thinking about redness," though the two are causally related. Certain shades of green to me feel fresh, clean, 'naturey;' certain shades of red to me feel violent, hot, glaring; certain shades of blue feel cool; etc. My suggestion is that these qualia, which are part of the feeling of the colors themselves for most humans, would be experientially different even when decontextualized if we'd gone through life perceiving forests as blue, oceans as red, campfires as green, etc. By analogy, the feeling of 'virtue' may be partly independent of which things we think of under the concept 'virtuous;' but it isn't completely independent of those things.
I am aware that many humans have this sort of classification of colors, and have learned it because of its value in communication, but as far as I can tell this isn't a significant part of my mental experience. A dark green might make it easier for me to think of leaves or forests, but I don't have any experiences that I would describe as feeling 'naturey'. If oceans and forests swapped colors, I imagine that seeing the same dark green would make it easier for me to think of waves and water, but I think my introspective experience would be the same.
If I can simplify your claim a bit, it sounds like if both oceans and forests were dark green, then seeing dark green would make you think of leaves and waves / feel associated feelings, and that this ensemble would be different from your current sensation of ocean blue or forest green. It seems sensible to me that the ensembles are different because they have different elements.
I'm happier with modeling that as perceptual bleedover- because forests and green are heavily linked, even forests that aren't green are linked to green, and greens that aren't on leaves are linked with forests- than I am modeling that as an atom of consciousness- the sensation of foresty greens- but if your purposes are different, a different model may be more suitable.
Part of the problem may be that I'm not so sure I have a distinct, empirically robust idea of an 'atom of consciousness.' I took for granted your distinction between 'evoking blood' and 'feeling bloody,' but in practice these two ideas blend together a great deal. Some ideas -- phonological and musical ones, for example -- are instantiated in memory by certain temporal sequences and patterns of association. From my armchair, I'm not sure how much my idea of green (or goodness, or clippiness) is what it is in virtue of its temporal and associative dispositions, too. And I don't know if Eliezer is any less confused than I.
It wouldn't surprise me if the sensation of disgust has some variation from one person to another, and even for the same person, from one object to another.
I just wanted to tell everyone that it is great fun to read this in the voice of that voice actor for the Enzyte commercial :)
I think this is easier because disgust is relatively arbitrary to begin with, in that it seems to implement a function over the world-you relation (roughly, things that are bad for you to eat/be near). We wouldn't expect that relation to have much coherence to begin with, so there'd be not much loss of coherence from modifying it - though, arguably, the same thing could be said for most qualia - elegance is kind of the odd one out.