roystgnr comments on Rationality Quotes May 2014 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: elharo 01 May 2014 09:45AM

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Comment author: roystgnr 31 May 2014 02:05:07PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Kawoomba 31 May 2014 02:40:50PM *  2 points [-]

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.