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MixedNuts comments on Uncritical Supercriticality - Less Wrong
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Dude, you don't get to distrust "ism"s when you belong to an organized religion. Some even-handedness, please!
I've seen a lot of things, like bananas, planes, philosophical dissertations, moods, religious experiences, and equations. In each case where I was able to look, I found that those things were made of parts, and that if you removed the parts and their interactions there was nothing left over. In each case where someone told me otherwise, they had no convincing evidence. Therefore, I don't believe anyone who says "Maybe the true laws of nature aren't reductionist after all" if they can't show me an exception to current theories that looks non-reductionist.
You said earlier
and talk about reality being intelligent. The way I understand your claim is a sort of pantheism, where the universe is an intelligent, divine being. (I know very little of Muslim worldviews but that's not the sort of theological claim I associate with Islam.) I can see the appeal, but if there's intelligence, where's the brain? I've never seen intelligence that didn't come from a very specific kind of structure. Show me how the universe has that structure, or why the mountains of evidence against disembodied intelligence are invalid.
You also said
Augh what the fuck is wrong with you, reality kills 150000 people everyday and does nothing against torture, why would you ever trust it?
On an unrelated note, which bits of the Qur'an struck you most? I've tried to read the thing several times, but it's even more boring that the genealogical parts of the Bible, and all I've gathered so far is "OBEY", which is right there in the name, and platitudes like "Be just, don't be evil".
"Belong to an organized religion." Huh? Do they own me? MixedNuts thinks I don't mistrust "Islamism?" Where did that come from?
Problem is, this is a non-reductionist point of view, because it asserts that a map is the territory. "Reductionist" is, as described by Yudkowsky, an absence rather than a presence, but it is being asserted here as an absolute quality of "the true laws of nature." Nature doesn't have laws, AFAIK, we invent them as summary methods for predicting our experience, and someone who believes Nature does have this construct called "laws" is not reductionist. Want to be a reductionist, toss that belief.
I'm not seeing that I'm being read carefully. I did not "talk about Reality being intelligent." I asked a question.
I didn't claim what was asserted. Rather, I note it as some kind of possibility. In one sense, though, I can state something logically. If we are intelligent, and if we are real, then Reality must be intelligent. However, I do have some doubt about our intelligence, as well as our reality.
MixedNuts, you have a concept of "Muslim" as if it comprehensively identifies the world view of someone who admits being Muslim. I pointed to the Mu'tazila as a historical counter-example, what is called the "rationalist" school in Islam. Not that I "believe in" the "Mu'taziliyya positions."
It seems to be that you are attempting to stuff the thinking of an individual (me) into some set of fixed categories. How does that work for you? Does it help you to understand people?
Fascinating. Where is your brain, MixedNuts? Does it exist in the universe? (These are questions, not insults!) Does your brain have the quality of "intelligence"?
If so, then does not Reality necessarily have the quality of intelligence?
Where did you get this "disembodied" from? (That might be something to do with SuperTheostoa.) I asked a question about Reality and intelligence. It could also be considered to be a question as to the nature of intelligence.
I'm being read with a pile of assumptions being added. That may be useful if it leads to the assumptions being identified as such. Is that possible?
There is no "mountain of evidence" against "disembodied intelligence." In fact, I haven't seen one piece of such. Which is no reason to accept disembodied intelligence, we don't accept propositions merely because there is no evidence against them. Unless, of course, we want to, or choose to. It might be useful, for this or that purpose.
It seems my comment about trust in reality struck home in some way. MixedNuts does not trust Reality, many people don't trust Reality. I mentioned that as a possibility. I did not suggest that one should trust reality. For some people, there may be no possibility of choice, for starters, but an irresolvable distrust in Reality is a psychopathology, it leads to many dysfunctions.
Why would I trust Reality?
Because I've got no fucking choice, that's why. Or, more accurately, a Hobson's choice. If I don't trust Reality, I have no way of knowing anything, not to mention I have a life of utter insecurity. And, yes, people live such lives.
Apparently there is a meme here that death is horrible, and so too is torture. I can get on board the latter, because torture doesn't seem to be inevitable, but death is inevitable. Sooner or later. Run the math on the risks. (But this is a factual assertion, and, of course, could be wrong. I just wouldn't bet on it.)
Stuff exists -- or appears to exist -- that many of us detest as human beings. That's obvious. What does this mean about Reality itself? It does demolish naive conceptions of Reality, for sure. Or of God. Same thing!
Obey. Great! I'm not sure what passage is being referred to, and this is certainly coming from translation. The only common equivalent I come up with in Arabic for "to obey" is aslam. It means to accept. Accept what?
Reality.
Aslamtu li r-rabbi 'l-^alamiyn. I accept the Lord of the Worlds (^alamiyn). I think it was Abraham who said that, but I forget. "Worlds" is a term that could refer to nations, but I find more meaning from the root, ^ilm, to know. The realms of knowledge.
I could look up Qur'anic usages of the root SLM, and of other words that might mean "obey," if anyone is interested.
Yes, reading the Qur'an will be boring, if you read the translation of someone with a boring world-view. If you are looking for what is wrong with it, you will also be bored. It will be slogging through piles of symbols that are mostly meaningless.
Just an idea: you create the meaning. You see what you choose to see, when it comes to seeing "meaning."
Finding deep meaning is difficult with narrow translations. Someone familiar with Arabic, but stuck with piles of traditional interpretations (the "right" ones), may just find confirmation of them. Nevertheless, I've found Muslim scholars to be usually quite open-minded. There are exceptions, scholars who pander to the fundamentalists.
My approach was different. I had to depend, initially, on translations, but when a verse seemed "difficult," I looked up the words, and I usually had come to know the biases of the translator. Then I read the whole book in Arabic. Initially, I knew only the pronunciations, roughly. (I eventually got some classical training.) Then I read it again. And again.... I started to memorize it, from the beginning. As I did this, meaning that made sense -- the only useful kind -- started to pop out commonly, instead of just occasionally. I started to have the basis for routine recognition. Like a child.
I used to hate memorization, I had no respect for rote learning. Goes to show.
I don't think you don't mistrust Islam as a concept. I think you tackle the concepts directly, rather than adding an extra barrier of "this is an abstracted ideology, I don't buy those". You call yourself a Muslim, not an independent theologian with ideas from Islam.
Well obviously, once you accept that everything else follows. What I'm asking is why you think that, give that it looks very lawful: objects fall down, energy is conserved, if a prediction is true on Monday it stays true on Tuesday, every exception to known rules turns out to obey deeper rules with practical consequences we can exploit. Why can't we just say "The thing has looked absolutely lawful for millenia, case closed"?
?!?!??
As I see it, the reduction that works best is "Here are the elementary particles, here are the laws that govern them, everything else follows from that. Maybe the particles and laws are also made of parts, we're still looking.". I can't see what's non-reductionist about natural laws - I'm not even sure reductions are possible without some laws, though they don't have to be as rigorous as ours look.
Cell membranes are permeable to water, I contain cell membranes, I am not permeable to water. By "reality" we do mean the set of cell phones and pineapples and copies of Alice in Wonderland and horses and so on, right? Clearly, whether it's real-in-some-philosophical-sense or not, it contains intelligence: you, me, Deep Blue. But the whole set doesn't seem to be intelligent itself; to coordinate its intelligent parts into a higher-level structure, or to build intelligence out of non-intelligent parts.
And if it's not an intelligent being that can make decisions, or even a perfectly lawful mechanism you can control if you understand it well enough, I have to stop asking why you trust it and ask what trusting it even means.
I have no clue what I said that sounded even vaguely like that. I mean, I know at least two Muslims, so I can see there's no Muslim hive mind. And I said in so many words that I don't understand either your worldview or any other Islam-flavored worldview.
Dichotomy. Either it's embodied, and I want to know where and why it can be called "reality's intelligence" rather than "several billion entirely unrelated intelligences", or it's not and I want to know how that works.
You don't have to trust the whole thing. You can trust your perceptions not to go so wonky you won't be able to correct for them, or individual people not to stab you in the face, for example. If you trust anything to keep you out of major trouble, that's certainly going to be relaxing but you can in fact get in major trouble.
I do not accept that inevitable things are thereby okay. It doesn't seem that I can make torture less bad by building a world where torture is very likely, so by continuity making it inevitable changes nothing. If a horrible dictator conquers the world and nobody can escape I don't endorse accepting that. How do you derive an "ought" from that "is"?
So what is the sophisticated answer that makes it okay? I've seen attempts, but they were less than convincing.
Nah, I'm referring to a general idea, not a specific passage. Things about submitting (probably the kind of acceptance you're talking about), being humble, playing by the rules, encouraging others to do the same, and so on. Which I'm used to seeing as an introduction to "Now here are the specific intricate rules about tying shoes", not as the main point.
Man, I just wanted to Have Read An Important Cultural Work. So I suppose I need to read it with the eyes of a typical reader. Which I can't have because I haven't read the thing. Well, crap.
Huh, interesting. Why is the Qur'an then superior to the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tintin, or a blank piece of paper?
Also, how do you know that you accept the Qur'an, rather than just projecting on it what you already believe? Or is there no difference?
I mistrust all concepts, in theory.
In fact, of course, I rely on concepts in daily life. In practice, I trust some. But they are all suspect, because, compared to the pure possibility of emptiness, they limit us. We trade that loss for utility.
Concepts are great! But the map is not the territory. If I want to know the territory, I have to experience the territory, any map will distract me. If I have chosen to travel from A to B, then a map can be very useful.
Ideally, I have the map, I can plot a course from A to B, but if I pass by C, of greater interest than B, I'll still see C, even if it's not on the map of All Places of Interest.
It's more fundamental than that. I mistrust any interpretation. Abstracted ideologies are merely further from what I do trust, Reality. Sensory data is an aspect of reality. What that data can be made to mean is interpretation.
I wear a Muslim hat.
I'm not a theologian, though I do think about what might be called theology. Islam, as I define it -- which happens to resemble the sources -- is not theology, though it has theological implications.
In many ways my approach is Buddhist, if one wants an "ism" to try to contain it.
Most of us are so distracted by words.
"Okay" is a human judgment. Any story that makes it "okay" is a human story, invented, because "okay" does not exist in Reality, just as "not okay" does not exist.
So you aren't convinced by this or that story. That only tells us something about you, not about Reality, and "you" don't exist, in Reality. "You" are a concept, an illusion, not a reality. As am I.
You are looking for explanations of an illusion. It can be done, I'll claim. That is, by the way, a reductionist claim. Right?
I will also claim that an experience, a state of being, is possible that doesn't make "evil" okay, "evil" being shorthand for the "detestable," but it leads to something else, an acceptance of Reality that also gives us maximum power to change, to create transformation. Call it clear thinking if you like, that leads to maximized probability for effective action, rooted in fundamental values.
What's "fundamental"? Well it's probably written in our DNA. It isn't an absolute, it's a quality of life as it evolved, so this is reductionist. Or there is something beyond Theostoa, there is SuperTheostoa, and I can't tell the difference. Not yet, anyway, and it may not be possible.
Thanks for replying. Unfortunately I understand exactly nothing of what you wrote.
Certainly "okay" is not fundamental. And certainly any judgement and subsequent action of something being okay or not is going to come from an okayness-judging being (that would be humans), which may be flawed. (And whether "okay" comes from humans or not is confusing, but not germane to my point.)
But I'd be... surprised... if "okay" didn't refer to a thing that exists. Marlene is happily married and raises her long-awaited child. Manda died at seven in a freak accident. Those situations evoke strong emotions in me. I desire to create more situations like the former and fewer like the latter. I desire to ally with those who share such desires, and oppose those who don't. Is this mistaken?
If you cut me, do I not bleed? Maybe the knife is a concept and the blood is an illusion, but I still want to know how the concept and illusion work.
Well yeah, if you're telling me "Don't rage against malaria", you've got some splainin away to do.
I don't understand the words and can't parse the sentence. Does "detestable" mean the usual stuff - people starving to death or being burned alive or dropping their ice cream on the sidewalk and so on? If not, can you give some examples?
What do you mean by "acceptance"? Is it something like "Yes, I am lost in the wilderness - no whining about how terrifying that is, no denial about how likely I am to die, it's time to focus on survival alone."?
If so, that's a beneficial attitude. But there's no trust or security here - you know on a gut level that bad things happen, and want them to stop happening. And you don't like the universe that lets such things happen. So unless you're arguing for "Reality is evil, burn it" that's either not what you mean or I'm missing a step.
Well, "superior" has a lost, unspecified standard. I've never encountered anything else like the Qur'an. It claims that it is not the first "message", and I can see traces elsewhere. However, the best alternative mentioned above is the "blank piece of paper." If you can receive the message in a blank piece of paper, you would receive the message in all the rest.
I could justify this statement from the Qur'an itself.
Setting aside issues with "believe," there is no difference. You could say that the Qur'an is a mirror which shows me, if I pay attention, what I know, or think I know.
Yes, there is a danger. However, if the basic message is accepted, if I stick with the blank piece of paper, and don't believe anything that is not on it, I won't actually create persistent error.
Aristotelian logic, right? Look at the assumption:
"entirely unrelated." Where did that come from? If they are intelligent, and if the Reality that they encounter is connected, they are not unrelated.
Something is missing here. There is an intelligence that transcends human intelligence, and it is possible for any of us to experience it. Landmark routinely accomplishes this, failure is rare. It's called the Self in Landmark, sometimes they capitalize the whole word, SELF.
My theory or understanding is that the Self is what arises or is experienced when two (or more) human brains are entrained, when their thinking is coherent and free. It's not mere "social reality," where people agree on memes. The intelligence of the Self. compared to that of an individual human, could be like the intelligence of an ant colony compared to that of an individual ant. To me, faced with this experience, the Self seems to be unlimited. However, I do assume that it is limited, in fact, it's simply operating in another realm, a realm not accessible to me as an individual.
By the way, in Landmark, this distinction is communicated in the Advanced Course. The Forum brings people into contact with it, but not explicitly.
I tested this. I told a story to people who had taken the Advanced Course (and that requires the Forum as a prerequisite).
"The Forum is about becoming free of the limitations of our past -- they nod -- the Advanced Course is about this."
Everyone who has taken the AC, when I've said that, has lit up. It's palpable, I'm sure it could be measured psychometrically. (And I just met a neurologist, a scientist, just completing the same training I completed, who is working on that). People who haven't, mostly, ask "About what?"
And if I try to explain it, well, I may be reacting from within my own world of survival, looking good, being right, blah blah. I'm not being there. And for that test to work as a test, I have to be there, with that very person.
While people who have experienced this, in any of various approaches -- Landmark certainly doesn't own this -- can talk about it with each other, I've never seen it successfully explained to anyone who hadn't experienced it. And I didn't experience anything like this, myself, until my mid-thirties. I was way too caught in my own head.
In other words, "multiple intelligences" may not be independent at all. In the example I gave from Landmark, there is a high-bandwidth connection. It's not just words, which are very low-bandwidth. It's the small muscle movements, the eyes, tone of voice, the presence of the person, that allows this connection. To experience that presence, we have to have dropped, or be able to drop, the "chatter" that normally dominates most brain activity, and attend to what is actually present. Reality, right here, right now.
I.e., the collective intelligence of a group might be far higher than that of any individual, so much higher that the individual may not be able to perceive on understand it, but can only notice it, by certain marks, and accept it.
The mark that I would point to first is clarity, but there are also other marks like love, joy, compassion, courage, that are not about individual survival. Landmark is not just about this experience, however, because it's understood that this can be merely something pleasant (or transiently ecstatic), so it's tested, against real-world measures, that show the operation of higher intelligence. Long story.
So, your deity-like thing is distributed among human brains, and synchronizes by communication between humans?
Once when attending Mass a a child, I felt like I was connected to some unfathomable entity, and connected through it to the other people in the church. Is that anything like what you're referring to? (The other people were actually bored out of their skulls and discreetly making fun of the prayers. Probably a bad example.)
So, yeah, if groups of appropriately behaving people can and do act as morally better and smarter than individuals, that's awesome and possibly worship-worthy. (Possibly because I worship anything that looks at me the right way, but still.)
But I was under the impression that Islam involved a deity that created the universe, and had more power over it than a group of well-coordinated humans. (Like, programming an oven to announce floods.) The only way I see this claim could be salvaged is heavy solipsism (well, it's more like pluripsism in that case), that non-sentient objects are created by this hive mind. In which case, who's the asshole who decided on malaria?
Okay, this is a "deity-like thing." It's not a deity. It's a thing. I gave examples showing the arising of something more than individual intelligence, and by that I mean immediate intelligence, not something built up (like the collection of experimental reports -- which is another kind of intelligence).
I assume that your experience was real. What you were experiencing, and what you might make it mean, are distinct. I'm referring, though, to something more demonstrable, that might have been present for you in that moment as a beginning, a taste. Not as the full monte.
Someone else might have a similar experience with scientific insight. Suppose that the "unfathomable entity" was simply Reality, and everyone there was in some kind of relationship with Reality. Some might be bored, contemptuous, but some might be in awe as well. Frankly, I think Reality is awesome.
You are still defining all this as if your personal judgment of "better" is real, but, yes. It's not that your personal judgment is "wrong," that would be just as much of a story.
And your comment about your response to what "looks at you the right way" is an accurate description of what most of us do, most of the time, even if we think we are "rational."
The concept behind the impression is one that separates the "deity" from the "universe," one object that controls another. Reality allows us to imagine that we have power over it, but that's a product of how we think about it.
For survival, we have found that results are usually correlated with our actions, in certain ways. If our actions are not founded in an acceptance of reality-as-it-is, however, they are likely to be ineffective, so the more effective actions likely involve "acceptance." Islam is the Arabic word for this.
(If we have developed an inaccurate model, that perhaps worked under some circumstance but not others, what happens when we encounter the "deviations" depends on whether we believe the model or not. I.e., believe that the model is real, that it is not merely a model.
If we believe the model, our strong human tendency is to reject observations of difference, violations, if we even notice them.
If we don't believe the model, but simply use it -- or, in the case of many models, weallow it to function without explicit consciousness that it is a model, but without formalizing it as a belief -- we have the possibility of improving the model, or even of discarding it in favor of something else, or nothing at all.) We, in this case, place Reality as superior to any model.
The power of Reality, though, is without effort. (Qur'an.) There is no separation between the intention and the realization.
The asshole who decided on malaria had less intelligence than a mosquito. Apparently, intelligence is over-rated.
Okay, malaria exists. We are developing the power to choose otherwise, and that power already applies over much of the Earth. The same power is also bringing new risks. I propose that we are responsible. This is not merely happening to us, we are creating it.
Do you mean "Reality" as in "this stick of deodorant, and this penguin, and this meson, and this symphony, and this greengrocer, and so on"? Because it is pretty cool, and everything in it has ties of various natures and strengths to everything else which is pretty cool to, and totally has the number two spot on the list of things I worship. (Number one is the ability to feel worshippy-awed emotions. Bootstraps.)
But it seems to want things like "quantum evolution should be unitary", not things like "no child should be driven to suicide". I admire the set-of-things-that-exist, but I don't approve of it. Yes, it contains moral agents, and those agents have to change it from the inside because there's no outside, but it also contains shitty parts. Can't see why I should be accepting the whole deal.
Dude. You need separate words for "believing it exists" and "not shrieking 'Augh kill it with fire'". Of course if I pretend the stove can't burn people it won't be harmless. That doesn't mean I'm fine with the stove burning people.
Behaving as if a model works is most of what I mean by "belief" in the first place. Sure, don't get overattached to a model, and keep checking it.
I'm not sure I get it. If you mean "Whatever happens is what reality wants to happen", then clearly reality only ever wants the force to be equal to the charge times the electric field or something. Yeah, fine, it also wants some people to have a desire to eradicate malaria and a good shot at succeeding after a few millennia. But since it can do anything, why didn't it want malaria not to exist in the first place?
If your answer is along the lines of "It can't decide to want stuff", please explain why it's something you like rather than an extremely shiny toy. If it's along the lines of "It decided that way", please explain why it's something you like rather than an unspeakably evil cosmic monster. If it's along the lines of "Foolish mortal, your talk of 'good' and 'evil' is a mere human illusion", please explain why I should care about philosophical judgements about human illusions more than about a pile of corpses.
Uh, I propose that we are responsible for the risks of the things we do about malaria, but not for malaria existing? It doesn't sound so hard to me.
This would be a good time to define what you mean by a physical law. Likely it is not the same as what Abd means. I am guessing that you assign some meaning to this term other than "it's a useful mathematical model for humans to explain and predict some of the stuff they see sometimes". I'm guessing further that Abd concludes from your implied (and possibly misunderstood) definition that if physical laws are guiding "reality" than they are not reducible to quarks and leptons themselves, which does call the whole idea of reductionism in question.
I'd suggest clarifying this concept first before arguing about it.
Thanks, shminux. Yes, you understood me. I do get the sense, though, that MixedNuts is getting it. We'll see.
How?
Incidentally, I suspect that you would not hold some of the beliefs you appear to hold if you had read the sequences. That's not a criticism as such, but still.
Yes.
No. A few small parts of it do: human brains, to a lesser extent other animals, and that's it, as far as we've seen. There might also be intelligent aliens somewhere in the vastness.
If that's enough to say that Reality has the quality of intelligence, it is also enough to say the Reality has the qualities of being inebriated, sober, radioactive, inert, rarefied, dense, at 3 degrees C, at 10 million degrees C, every possible colour and none.
ETA: In other words, "Reality has the quality of intelligence" is a deepity: true in a trivial sense and false in a trivial sense, but when the two senses are expressed by the same sentence, it sounds profound.