= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
turchin comments on Zombies Redacted - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (165)
Such an entity is possible, but would not be an atom-exact copy of you.
We don't know how qualia are encoded in the brain. And how to distinguish a person and his copy with inverted spectrum.
I didn't say I knew which parts of the brain would differ, but to conclude therefore that it wouldn't is to confuse the map with the territory.
We can't conclude that they would not differ. We could postulate it and then ask: could we measure if equal copies have equal qualia. And we can't measure it. And here we return to "hard question": we don't know if different qualia imply different atom's combinations.
Either (1) your saying "this looks red to me" versus "this looks green to me" is completely unaffected by the red/green qualia you are experiencing;
or (2) your brain works by magic instead of (or as well as) physics;
or (3) different qualia imply different physical states.
For me #1 is kinda-imaginable but would take away all actual reasons for believing in qualia; #2 is kinda-imaginable but the evidence against seems extremely strong; which leaves #3 a clear enough winner that saying "we don't know" about it is in the same sort of territory as "we don't know whether there are ghosts" or "we don't know whether the world has been secretly taken over by alien lizardmen".
[EDITED to add: Of course my argument here is basically Eliezer's argument in the OP. Perhaps turchin has a compelling refutation of that argument, but I haven't seen it yet.]
My point was to show that using possibility of phenomenological judgments as an argument against epiphenomenalism is not working as intended.
Because more subtle form of epiphenomenalism is still possible. It is conceivable, but I don't know if it is true.
But your appeal to "alien lizardmen" as an argument against "don't know" is unfair as we have large prior knowledge against lizardmen, but we don't have any priors of experiences of other people.
No one in all history was able to feel the feeling of other being (maybe one-cranial siam twins will be able), so we have no any prior knowledge about if this qualia all similar or all disimilar in different beings.
Your (1) point also could be true in my opinion, or, more exact, we don't have instruments to show that it is true.
Imagine, that I met exact my copy and could ask him any questions, and want to know if he has inverted spectrum... More here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/
The alien lizardmen aren't intended as an argument against "don't know", just as an example of something else about which in some sense we "don't know" but where there's not much scope for doubt.
So, anyway, you're proposing that perhaps turchinA and turchinB have different qualia but the same behaviour because the connection between qualia and behaviour is wired differently; so for turchinA seeing red things produces red qualia which provoke saying "red", while for turchinB seeing red things produces green qualia which provoke saying "green".
So, what is the actual difference between turchinA's red qualia and turchinB's so-called green qualia? They produce the exact same behaviour. In particular, turchinB's so-called green qualia lead turchinB to say things like "that looks red to me". And they are provoked by the exact same stimuli that give turchinA red qualia. So, er, what reason is there for calling them green qualia?
I don't know about you, but my red qualia call up all kinds of specific associations. Blood, stop-signs, lipstick, sunsets. And these are, or at least are indirectly observable via, external questioning. "What does this colour make you think of?", etc. And red, in particular, produces lower-level effects that also feed into the experience of seeing red -- IIRC, people looking at bright red things have elevated pulse rate, for instance. So turchinB's so-called green qualia have to produce these same results. Similarly, my green qualia call up associations -- grass, sickness, emeralds, etc. -- and turchinB's so-called green qualia had better not remind turchinB of those things, at least not in any way that spills over into turchinB's actions, responses to questions, etc.
Do you find it reasonable to say that these qualia of turchinB's -- evoked by seeing blood and tomatoes and the like, calling up memories of blood and tomatoes and the like, increasing arousal in the autonomic nervous system, etc., etc., etc. -- can be subjectively identical to turchinA's green qualia (calling up memories of grass, not increasing autonomic nervous system arousal, etc.)? Because I don't. What would that even mean?
I see it simple: Turchin A sees red object - feels red qualia - associates it with blood - calls it "red". TurchinB - sees red object - feels green qualia - associates it with blood - calls it "red".
So all associations and behavior are the same, only the qualia is different. From objective point of view there is no difference. From my-subjective point of view there is a difference.
To my mind the following
is incoherent. The associations are part of how seeing something red or green feels. So if turchinB sees something and associates it with blood, then turchinB's subjective experience is not the same as that of turchinA seeing something green.
Now, it looks as if you've retreated a bit from the full "inverted spectrum" scenario and are maybe now just saying that maybe turchinA and turchinB experience different qualia on seeing red, even though their behaviour is the same. That's not so obviously incoherent. Or is it?
Any way of probing turchinB's experience of seeing a tomato has to produce exactly the same result as for turchinA. Any question I might ask turchinB about that experience will produce the same answer. If I hook turchinB up to a polygraph machine while asking the questions, the readings will be the same as turchinA's. If I present turchinB with the tomato and then ask other questions in the hope that the answers will be subtly biased by whatever not-so-conscious influences the tomato may have had -- same results, again.
So whatever differences there are between turchinA's subjective experiences and turchinB's, they have to be absolutely undetectable by turchins A and B: any attempt at describing those experiences will produce the exact same effects; any effect of the experience on their mood will have no detectable consequences; and so on and so forth.
The situation still seems to me the way I described it before. If turchinA's and turchinB's brains run on physics rather than magic, and if their physical states are the same, then everything we can see of their subjective states by asking them questions, or attaching electrodes to them, or having sex with them, or showing them kitten pictures and seeing whether they smile, or any other kind of observation we can make, matches exactly; which means that any differences in their qualia are so subtle that they have no causal influence on turchinA's and turchinB's behaviour, mood, unconscious physiological reactions, etc.
I see no reason to believe in such subtle differences of qualia; I see no reason to think that asking about them is even meaningful; and they seem to me a violation of Ockham's razor. What am I missing? Why should we take this idea more seriously than lizardmen in the White House?
You say: "The situation still seems to me the way I described it before. If turchinA's and turchinB's brains run on physics rather than magic, and if their physical states are the same, then everything we can see of their subjective states by asking them questions, or attaching electrodes to them, or having sex with them, or showing them kitten pictures and seeing whether they smile, or any other kind of observation we can make, matches exactly; which means that any differences in their qualia are so subtle that they have no causal influence on turchinA's and turchinB's behaviour, mood, unconscious physiological reactions, etc."
I replied to this logic in the another comment to OP here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nqv/zombies_redacted/dcwi
In short: If we postulate that physicalism is true, than there is no qualia by definition.
But if we use empirism - that is the idea that experiences is more important than theories, than I have to look on my experience for new knowledges, and in them I have qualia. So, my empirical experiences contradict my best theory of reality. And this contradiction is the essence of so called "hard problem".
I think that we need some updated version of physicalism and I have some ideas about how to create them, to get rid of any form of epiphenomenalism, which of course is ugly theory.
Returning to your point: You are arguing that if all associations are the same, the experience must be the same. I don't think that this thesis is proved (It may happen to be true, but we need some instruments to prove it, and I didn't see the yet)
I could imagine my self looking of large red field and looking on large green field, without any associations about them and still having different experiences of their colour.
I also had similar discussions before and we never came to agreement about nature of qualia.
If the copies are different, the question is not interesting. If the copies aren't different, what causes you to label what he sees as red? It can't be the wavelength of the light that actually goes in his eye, because his identical brain would treat red's wavelength as red.