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wedrifid comments on How sure are you that brain emulations would be conscious? - Less Wrong
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And, alas, approximately all of the remaining uncertainty is in the form of "my entire epistemology could be broken leaving me no ability to model or evaluate any of the related scenarios".
What exactly do you mean by "my entire epistemology could be broken"? Like, radical skepticism? The possibility that believing in God on faith is the right thing to do after all?
Edit: also, why ~1%, rather than ~5% or ~0.2% or ~0.01%? Thinking on logits might help dramatize the difference between between those four numbers.
If the perfect brain emulations do not have what I understand as consciousness then I am fundamentally confused about either reductionism in general or the physics of our universe.
Not 5% for the usual reasons that we assign probabilities to stuff we know a lot about (expect to be wrong less than once out of twenty times, etc.) It was ~1% rather than ~0.2% or ~0.01% because the question wasn't worth any more cognitive expenditure. Some questions are worth spending significant amounts of time analysing to produce increasingly reliable predictions. In this case the expected Value Of more Information fell rapidly.
Naturally I have spent significantly more time thinking on the subject in the process of writing replies after I wrote "~99%" and so were I to answer the question now my answer would be closer to (100 - 0.2)% than (100 - 1)%.
I have encountered the concept of probability previously. If you disagree with the numbers I give you are for better or for worse disagreeing with the numbers I intend to give.
Huh. Interesting. When I first heard the ~99%, I thought that was just the result of a common tendency to pick "99%" to mean "very certain," failing to consider that it's very often not certain enough to make any coherent sense.
But that is exactly what wedrifid did, only consciously so. He didn't want to expend the cognitive effort to find the value on a finer-grained scale, so he used a scale with granularity 1%. He knew he couldn't assign 100%, so the only value to pick was 99%. This is how we use numbers all the time, except in certain scientific contexts where we have the rules about significant figures, which behave slightly differently.
With the approximately already being present, Wedifrid might as well have used ~100%. 100% is not a valid probability, but it is really close to valid probabilities.
Indeed. There are several conceivable and sensible correspondence rules between the scales of various granularity; he probably generalized the rule that you're never allowed to assign 100% and 0% to anything and worked with that.
Your whole epistemology and the conscious state of ems are near equivalent for you? That feels strange, although I of course don't know how much research into consciousness and neuroscience you've done. Inside my head, sure, I've read some good LW philosophy, but I can't hold much more than an 85% likelihood on something empirical over which I hold no special knowledge.
Not equivalent, no. It is just that the conscious state of whole brain emulations being overturned would require rejecting either reductionism entirely or at least physics as currently understood. In that case I struggle to work out what decisions to make differently to hedge against being wrong because the speculative alternate reality is to alien to adequately account for.
What law of physics says consciousness is entirely in the brain? That seems more like an empirical fact about how certain kinds of animals are wired, rather than a fundamental principle of nature.
I wouldn't claim that it must be. In principle any other form of computation would suffice. I don't understand why this observation is made in this context.
Err... yes. That's why we consider whole brain emulation instead of whole foot emulation or whole slimy green tentacle emulation but this is not an important detail. The point is that they are wired in physics, not outside of it.