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zslastman comments on Why Bayes? A Wise Ruling - Less Wrong
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Bizarre. In lieu of a reply by Eliezer himself clarifying things, I am left to understand he thinks that some portion of humans otherwise possessing the structural and anatomical necessities for sensation don't experience anything even when all their sense organs are working fine, and that animals in general are basically just meat-automata with no inner life at all. Even when they're communicating about those inner states and have the same structural correlates of various sensations we'd expect to see, and react in ways that sure look like expression of sensation or emotion (even if you sometimes need to be familiar with their particular body language).
That feels a lot more like a strawman than anything, because it's just so obviously bollocks. If I step on my cat's tail by mistake, she doesn't yowl and run from me because "Nociceptor activation threshold met; initiate yowl-and-run subroutine." She does it because it's painful and it startled her. I know there are people who honestly believe something like that about nonhuman life across the board, but I hadn't gotten the impression Eliezer was one.
Someone clear this up for me?
1)"Nociceptor activation threshold met; initiate yowl-and-run subroutine." 2)She does it because it's painful and it startled her.
What's the difference between 1 and 2?
1 presumes that minimalist descriptions of superficially-visible output are all you need to reconstruct the actual drivers behind the behavior. 2 presumes that the evolutionarily-shared neural architecture and its basic components of perception, cognition and soforth are not seperated by a barrier of magical reality fluid.
Ah. If you're saying that 1) implies lesser internal machinery than 2), and that the internal machinery (cognition and soforth) is what's important, then I agree.
The problem I think is just that, to me, they both sound to me like perfectly reasonable (if vague) descriptions of complex, sentient human pain. It seemed like you were saying nociceptors and subroutines were incapable of producing pain and startlement.
1 sounds to me like an attempt to capture output in the form of a flowchart. It's like trying to describe the flocking behavior of birds by reference to the Boids cellular automaton -- and insisting not that there are similar principles at work in how the birds go about solving the problem of flocking, but that birds literally run an instance of Boids in their heads and that's all there is to their flocking behavior.