roystgnr comments on Rationality Quotes May 2014 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (294)
I'm not sure Scott isn't just falling victim to the sorites paradox here. There are lots of macroscale definitions which seem to break down at their smallest application, and it's not immediately obvious that consciousness couldn't be one of them.
The question is whether to interpret such a falling apart of a definition (which I take to mean that related decision problems cannot be clearly answered anymore) as an inherent or even necessary attribute of concepts which 'live' at a macroscale, or as a weakness of said definition, as a sign that we're mistaking a fuzzy word cloud for a precisely defined set.