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ialdabaoth comments on Rationality Quotes June 2013 - Less Wrong
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The parts of your brain that generate speech and the part that generate your internal sense-of-self are less integrated than CCC's. An interesting experiment might be to stop ascribing ownership to your words when you find yourself surprised by them - i.e., instead of framing the phenomenon as "I said that", frame it as "my brain generated those words".
Learn to recognize that the parts of your brain that handle text generation and output are no more "you" than the parts of your brain that handle motor reflex control.
EDIT: Is there a problem with this post?
No! The parts of my brain that handle text generation are the only parts that... *slap*... Ow. Nevermind. It seems we have reached an 'understanding'.
Right!
I mean, I do realize you're being funny, but pretty much exactly this.
I don't recommend aphasia as a way of shock-treating this presumption, but I will admit it's effective. At some point I had the epiphany that my language-generating systems were offline but I was still there; I was still thinking the way I always did, I just wasn't using language to do it.
Which sounds almost reasonable expressed that way, but it was just about as creepy as the experience of moving my arm around normally while the flesh and bone of my arm lay immobile on the bed.
A good way I've found to reach this state is to start to describe a concept in your internal monologue but "cancel" the monologue right at the start - the concept will probably have been already synthesized and will just be hanging around in your mind, undescribed and unspoken but still recognizable.
[edit] Afaict the key step is noticing that you've started a monologue, and sort of interrupting yourself mentally.
So, FWIW, after about 20 minutes spent trying to do this I wasn't in a recognizably different state than I was when I started. I can kind of see what you're getting at, though.
Right, I mean as a way of realizing that there's something noticeable going on in your head that precedes the internal monologue. I wrote that comment wrong. Sorry for wasting your time.
Ah! I get you now. (nods) Yeah, that makes sense.
That's... hm.
I'm not sure I know what you mean.
I'll experiment with behaving as if I did when I'm not in an airport waiting lounge and see what happens.
I've had this happen to me semi-accidentally, the resulting state is extremely unpleasant.
A smash equilibrium.
I'd certainly call them much more significant to my identity than a e.g. my deltoid muscle, or some motor function parts of my brain.
It may be useful to recognize that this is a choice, rather than an innate principle of identity. The parts that speak are just modules, just like the parts that handle motor control. They can (and often do) run autonomously, and then the module that handles generating a coherent narrative stitches together an explanation of why you "decided" to cause whatever they happened to generate.
This sounds like a theory of identity as epiphenomenal homunculus. A module whose job is to sit there weaving a narrative, but which has no effect on anything outside itself (except to make the speech module utter its narrative from time to time). "Mr Volition", as Greg Egan calls it in one of his stories. Is that your view?
More or less, yes. It does have some effect on things outside itself, of course, in that its 'narrative' tends to influence our emotional investment in situations, which in turn influences our reactions.
It seems to me that the Mr. Volition theory suffers from the same logical flaw as p-zombies. How would a non-conscious entity, a p-zombie, come to talk about consciousness? And how does an epiphenomenon come to think it's in charge, how does it even arrive at the very idea of "being in charge", if it was never in charge of anything?
An illusion has to be an illusion of something real. Fake gold can exist only because there is such a thing as real gold. There is no such thing as fake mithril, because there is no such thing as real mithril.
A tape recorder is a non-conscious entity. I can get a tape recorder to talk about consciousness quite easily.
Or are you asking how it would decide to talk about consciousness? It's a bit ambiguous.
I think it's not an epiphenomenon, it's just wired in more circuitously than people believe. It has effects; it just doesn't have some effects that we tend to ascribe to it, like decisionmaking and highlevel thought.
By that analogy, then, fake gods can exist only because there is such a thing as real gods; fake ghosts can only exist because there is such a thing as real ghosts; fake magic can only exist because there is such a thing as real magic.
It's perfectly possible to be ontologically mistaken about the nature of one's world.
Indeed. There is real agency, so people have imagined really big agents that created and rule the world. People's consciousness persists, even after the interruptions of sleep, and they imagine it persists even after death. People's actions appear to happen purely by their intention, and they imagine doing arbitrary things purely by intention. These are the real things that the fakes, pretences, or errors are based on.
But how do the p-zombie and the homunculus even get to the point of having their mistaken ontology?
The p-zombie doesn't, because the p-zombie is not a logically consistent concept. Imagine if there was a word that meant "four-sided triangle" - that's the level of absurdity that the 'p-zombie' idea represents.
On the other hand, the epiphenomenal consciousness (for which I'll accept the appelature 'homunculus' until a more consistent and accurate one occurs to me) is simply mistaken in that it is drawing too large a boundary in some respects, and too small a boundary in others. It's drawing a line around certain phenomena and ascribing a causal relationship between those and its own so-called 'agency', while excluding others. The algorithm that draws those lines doesn't have a particularly strong map-territory correlation; it just happens to be one of those evo-psych things that developed and self-reinforced because it worked in the ancestral environment.
Note that I never claimed that "agency" and "volition" are nonexistent on the whole; merely that the vast majority of what people internally consider "agency" and "volition", aren't.
EDIT: And I see that you've added some to the comment I'm replying to, here. In particular, this stood out:
I don't believe that "my" consciousness persists after sleep. I believe that a new consciousness generates itself upon waking, and pieces itself together using the memories it has access to as a consequence of being generated by "my" brain; but I don't think that the creature that will wake up tomorrow is "me" in the same way that I am. I continue to use words like "me" and "I" for two reasons:
Social convenience - it's damn hard to get along with other hominids without at least pretending to share their cultural assumptions
It is, admittedly, an incredibly persistent illusion. However, it is a logically incoherent illusion, and I have upon occasion pierced it and seen others pierce it, so I'm not entirely inclined to give it ontological reality with p=1.0 anymore.
Do you believe that the creature you are now (as you read this parenthetical expression) is "you" in the same way as the creature you are now (as you read this parenthetical expression)?
If so, on what basis?
Mesh mail "mithril" vest, $335.
Setting aside the question of whether this is fake iron man armor, or a real costume of the fake iron man, or a fake costume designed after the fake iron man portrayed by special effects artists in the movies, I think an illusion can be anything that triggers a category recognition by matching some of the features strongly enough to trigger the recognition, while failing to match on a significant amount of the other features that are harder to detect at first.
That's not fake mithril, it's pretend mithril.
To have the recognotion, there must have already been a category to recognise.
Suppose I am standing next to a wall so high that I am left with the subjective impression that it just goes on forever and ever, with no upper bound. Or next to a chasm so deep that I am left with the subjective impression that it's bottomless.
Would you say these subjective impressions are impossible?
If possible, would you say they aren't illusory?
My own answer would be that such subjective impressions are both illusory and possible, but that this is not evidence of the existence of such things as real bottomless pits and infinitely tall walls. Rather, they are indications that my imagination is capable of creating synthetic/composite data structures.
I scrawl on a rock "I am conscious." Is the rock talking about consciousness?
No, you are.
I run a program that randomly outputs strings. One day it outputs the string "I am conscious." Is the program talking about consciousness? Am I?
No, see nsheppard's comment.
In the same way that a philosophy paper does... yes. Of course, the rock is just a medium for your attempt at communication.
I write a computer program that outputs every possible sequence of 16 characters to a different monitor. Is the monitor which outputs 'I am conscious' talking about consciousness in the same way the rock is? Whose attempt at communication is it a medium for?
Your decision to point out the particular monitor displaying this message as an example of something imparts information about your mental state in exactly the same way that your decision to pick a particular sequence of 16 characters out of platonia to engrave on a rock does.
See also: on GLUTs.
The reader's. Paradolia is a signal-processing system's attempt to find a signal.
On a long enough timeline, all random noise generators become hidden word puzzles.
.> How would a non-conscious entity, a p-zombie, come to talk about consciousness?
By functional equivalence. A zombie Chalmers is bound to will utter sentences asserting its possession of qualia, a zombie Dennett will utter sentences denying the same.
The only getout is to claim that it is not really talking at all.
The epiphenomenal homunculus theory claims that there's nothing but p-zombies, so there are no conscious beings for them to be functionally equivalent to. After all, as the alien that has just materialised on my monitor has pointed out to me, no humans have zardlequeep (approximate transcription), and they don't go around insisting that they do. They don't even have the concept to talk about.
The theory that there is nothing but zombies runs into the difficulty of explaining why many of them would believe they are non-zombies. The standard p-zombie argument, that you can have qualia-less functional duplicates of non-zombies does not have that problem.
The theory that there is nothing but zombies runs into the much bigger difficulty of explaining to myself why I'm a zombie. When I poke myself with a needle, I sure as hell have the qualia of pain.
And don't tell me it's an illusion - any illusion is a qualia by itself.
The standard p-zombie argument still has a problem explaining why p-zombies claim to be conscious. It leaves no role for consciousness in explaining why conscious humans talk of being conscious. It's a short road (for a philosopher) to then argue that consciousness plays no role, and we're back with consciousness as either an epiphenomenon or non-existent, and the problem of why -- especially when consciousness is conceded to exist, but cause nothing -- the non-conscious system claims to be conscious.
Why would we have these modules that seem quite complex, and likely to negatively effect fitness (thinking's expensive), if they don't do anything? What are the odds of this becoming a prevalent without a favourable selection pressure?
High, if they happen to be foundational.
Sometimes you get spandrels, and sometimes you get systems built on foundations that are no longer what we would call "adaptive", but that can't be removed without crashing systems that are adaptive.
Evo-psych just-so stories are cheap.
Here's one: it turns out that ascribing consistent identity to nominal entities is a side-effect of one of the most easily constructed implementations of "predict the behavior of my environment." Predicting the behavior of my environment is enormously useful, so the first mutant to construct this implementation had a huge advantage. Pretty soon everyone was doing it, and competing for who could do it best, and we had foreclosed the evolutionary paths that allowed environmental prediction without identity-ascribing. So the selection pressure for environmental prediction also produced (as an incidental side-effect) selection pressure for identity-ascribing, despite the identity-ascribing itself being basically useless, and here we are.
I have no idea if that story is true or not; I'm not sure what I'd expect to see differentially were it true or false. My point is more that I'm skeptical of "why would our brains do this if it weren't a useful thing to do?" as a reason for believing that everything my brain does is useful.
It's a bit rude to try to change others' definition of themselves unasked.
Where does that intersect with "that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be"?
"I'm dying to know whether we're stumbling on a difference in the way we think or the way we describe what we think, here." wasn't asking?
I appear to be confused.
Are you implying that subjective self-image is something that we should respect rather than analyze?
I think there's a difference between analysis and authoritive-sounding statements like "X is not actually a part of you, you are wrong about this", especially when it comes to personal attributes like selfness, especially in a thread demonstrating the folly of the typical-mind assumption.
Interesting. It was not my intent to sound any more authoritative than typical. Are there particular signals that indicate abnormally authoritarian-sounding statements that I should watch out for? And are there protocols that I should be aware of here that determine who is allowed to sound more or less authoritarian than whom, and under what circumstances?
FWIW, I understood you in the first place to be saying that this was a choice, and it was good to be aware of it as a choice, rather than making authoritarian statements about what choice to make.
I should have mentioned this earlier, but I did not downvote you so this is somewhat conjectured. In my opinion it's not a question of who but of topic - specifically, and this holds in a more general sense, you might want to be cautious when correcting people about beliefs that are part of their self-image. Couch it in terms like "I don't think", "I believe", "in my opinion", "personally speaking". That'll make it sound less like you think you know their minds better than they do.