"My usual reply ends with the phrase: "If we cannot learn to take joy in the merely real, our lives will be empty indeed." I shall expand on that tomorrow."

How many times do we take joy in things that are, not only imaginary, but physically impossible? If our utility function values XYZ, and XYZ is currently imaginary, it seems rather silly to adjust the utility function to no longer value XYZ, rather than adjusting the universe so that XYZ exists. My utility function doesn't value drugs (or drug-equivalents) that zero the human utili... (read more)

In my experience, mysterians merely object to reductionism applied to consciousness. Characterizing them as being opposed to reductive explanation of rainbows seems to misrepresent them. Of course, I may not know the contours of the group as well as Eliezer does.

Nowadays, this blog seems less a forum for discussing bias than an arena for Eliezer to propound his materialist take on the world and criticize its naysayers. Nothing wrong with that, but posts are touching less and less on the blog title.

Along the lines of my comment on your previous reductionism post, perhaps there would be fewer howls of protest at the declaration that rainbows are not fundamental were you not contrasting them with other things which you are claiming are fundamental (without evidence, I might add).

Scott, I swapped "mysterian" for "anti-reductionist", since you're correct that the term "mysterian" has been used to refer specifically to those who think consciousness can't be explained.

However, if you google on, for example, "objections to materialism", the second google hit will turn up a page that includes a short list of "objections to materialism in general", of which the first is, verbatim:

(1) If materialism is correct, then even materialist philosophy is nothing other than the motion of matter. It can hardly be said to be "true" or to "explain" anything, then, for an explanation of something (seemingly) would be different from that which it claims to explain.

I really am not attacking a strawman here! If you already understand scientific reductionism, that's great. Not everyone does.

"I can't predict the tomorrow's weather; does that mean atmospheres have free will?"

It's not the fact that you can't predict other people's actions that proves the existence of free will, it's that you observe your own self making choices. You can introspect and see yourself weighing the options and then picking one.

Frank Hirsch: "I don't think you can name any observations that strongly indicate (much less prove, which is essentially impossible anyway) that people have any kind of "free will" that contradicts causality-plus-random... (read more)

"It takes a strong mind, a deep honesty, and a deliberate effort to say, at this point, "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be," and "The scientist hasn't taken the gnomes away, only taken my delusion away," "

The problem, I fear, is that the vast majority of people are simply not that strong of mind, or, to put it another way, they have little regard for intellectual honesty. This isn't really surprising, because by lying to yourself about certain facts of life, you can make yourself feel better. And feeling happy... (read more)

Standard disclaimer: Eliezer does great work and writing here.

Useful criticism: Elizier, less foil seeking (strawmen or not here) and more attempts to understand reality and our perceptual/analytical skews from reality. I think foil-seeking is a weakness on your end which to a degree diminishes your utility to us (or at least to me). There are enough polemicists out there that are either providing entertainment or countering less useful models to understanding reality. We don't need you to counter "anti-reductionists", or fundamentalists or any o... (read more)

Doug S., we get the point, nothing that Ian could say would pry you away from your version of reductionism, there's no need to make any more posts with Fully General Counterarguments. "I defy the data" is a position, but does not serve as an explanation of why you hold that position, or why other people should hold that position as well.

I would agree with reductionism, if phrased as follows:

1. When entity A can be explained in terms of another entity B, but not vice-versa, it makes sense to say that entity A "has less existence" compared

Eliezer,

I agree that what you attack is a common anti-reductionist argument, but--as you admit--not a particularly mysterian one (except so far as the part of belief being addressed is the conscious aspect of belief). So changing your terms in the original post fixes the problem.

My complaint about you being off-topic was premature, and I apologize for it.

Eliezer: Not be a troll that gets banned from O/B or anything, but ... you still didn't explain how you believe that you're wearing socks, because you didn't explain how you recognized socks in the image in your visual cortex (or wherever that step takes place). That is an extremely difficult object recognition problem, and if you really know how you are able to recognize, in images, all the objects that you personally are capable of recognizing (and in your example, that would be not just socks, but your leg, the underlying foot, the floor, the table, et... (read more)

It's not the fact that you can't predict other people's actions that proves the existence of free will, it's that you observe your own self making choices. So, you're saying you don't assign any of the proposed answers to the homework exercise in Dissolving the Question even a half-decent probability of being correct? That's interesting. Please explain your reasoning.

Mysterious, inexplicable phenomenon doesn't fit within any current models. Mysterious answer (cosmological constant, elan vital, phlogiston) is concocted. Mysterious phenomenon is studied and modelled, and eventually pretty soundly understood. Everyone has a good laugh/inquisition and moves on.

Talk about free will till you're blue in the face if you wish; consciousness happens in the mind, the mind is made of stuff, there is no Easter Bunny

Silas, you seem to have an exaggerated idea of how mysterious visual recognition is to modern neuroscience. (An idea that was probably exaggerated by someone posting Jeff Hawkins's work in reply, as if Jeff Hawkins were anything more than one guy with a semi-interesting opinion about the general cerebral cortex, and a much larger marketing budget than is usual in science. Nothing to compare to the vast edifice of known visual neuroscience.)

Around a third of the 471 articles in the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences seem to be about vision, although t... (read more)

Silas,

You reveal your agreement when you use CAPTCHAs to keep out spammers and those CAPTCHAs work.

I'd appreciate if you explained what you mean here (starting with defining CAPTCHAs, a term I don't know).

Oops, I missed something in my several previews:

"And why did I claim you did that the distinction was necessary?" should be "And why did I claim you said that the distinction was necessary?"

Quick guys, post so I can get down to 2 in the "recent comments" :-/

Since a comment appeared while I was correcting, I can add a substantive comment to this post:

@Scott Scheule: A CAPTCHA is a test to see that you're not a computer. On this site, it's the image containing letters where you have to identify them before your post is accepte... (read more)

I don't think it is reasonable to say the laws of physics are part of the territory. The territory, or at least the closest we can get to it, is our direct experience. Any physical model is a map of the territory that we have created from our experience, some may be more accurate then others, but all are still maps. Scientists didn't get rid of the haunts and gnomes any more then relativity got rid of Newtonian physics. It just described them more accurately. There is a real difference, though, between these models beyond accuracy, and that is weather... (read more)

FWIW, it took a long time between aquiring an understanding of how the moon orbits the earth and Sputnik.

Silas,

Thank you. That's a weak argument though. Eliezer could assert that the technology to beat the CAPTCHAs exists and is understood--it's just too expensive for spammers to afford.

Because you did not break the "belief that you are wearing socks" into understandable steps, you are holding the claims to different standards, a subtle but correctible kind of confirmation bias.

In matters such as these, I consider a cognitive process to be "understood" when you know how to duplicate the relevant features given an unboundedly large but finite amount of computing power.

Yes, there are points to be argued about how you know you "understand" something's "relevant features", given that you can't actually ... (read more)

Many CAPTCHAs have already been broken, so it's not exactly a theoretical scenario.

As to free will, the first paper that comes to mind is David Hodgson's A Plain Person's Free Will.

I have not researched the issue in any great depth, but I'm sure there's plenty out there worth reading--and a true libertarian account of free will hardly seems impossible, though it may be implausible.

Here's a list from David Chalmers's online collection of mind papers.

There have been several articles on Bruce Schneier's blog in the past year about breaking CAPTCHAs.

Doug S., we get the point, nothing that Ian could say would pry you away from your version of reductionism, there's no need to make any more posts with Fully General Counterarguments. "I defy the data" is a position, but does not serve as an explanation of why you hold that position, or why other people should hold that position as well.

Sorry. :(

Anyway, my own introspection seems to tell me that, although I can "choose the choice that I want", my ability to choose the preferences that provide the underlying reasons for the choice are fa... (read more)

Doug,

It seems to me the introspective evidence is greater for choices spurred on by our desires, than our desires themselves. That is to say, I can't choose which ice cream flavors I like either--but I can choose when I eat ice cream.

Of course, that could be reducible to atoms--at least it's conceivable--the behavioral aspects at least, if not the qualia.

Frank Hirsch: "I don't think you can name any observations that strongly indicate (much less prove, which is essentially impossible anyway) that people have any kind of "free will" that contradicts causality-plus-randomness at the physical level."

Ian C.: More abstract ideas are proven by reference to more fundamental ones, which in turn are proven by direct observation. Seeing ourselves choose is a direct observation (albeit an introspective one). If an abstract theory (such as the whole universe being governed by billiard ball causatio... (read more)

Eliezer could assert that the technology to beat the CAPTCHAs exists and is understood

Id does. In fact, most of the commonly used CAPTCHAs can be more reliably decoded by a machine than by a human being.

-- hendrik

All: So far, people can solve individual CAPTCHA generation methods, but the problem I'm referring to is being able to solve any CAPTCHA that a human can. A captcha can be made arbitrarily much more difficult for a computer, while at the same time making it only slightly more difficult for a human. (And of course, there's the nagging issue of how O/B's captcha, er, works. "But it doesn't keep out Silas!") Moreover, arbitrary object recognition is much more general and difficult than character recognition. Actually achieving a solution to it ... (read more)

Frank Hirsch: "You are saying that because it seems to you inside your mind that you had freedom of choice, it must automagically be so?"

I believe the mind is not magical or holy, but a natural occurrence. Therefore, to me, introspection is not automatically an invalid way of gathering knowledge.

'How do you propose to lend credibility to your central tenet "If you seem to have free will, then you have free will"?'

I'm not deducing (potentially wrongly) from some internal observation that I have free will. The knowledge that I chose is no... (read more)

Frank Hirsch: How do you propose to lend credibility to your central tenet "If you seem to have free will, then you have free will"?

Ian C.: I'm not deducing (potentially wrongly) from some internal observation that I have free will. The knowledge that I chose is not a conclusion, it is a memory. If you introspect on yourself making a decision, the process is not (as you would expect): consideration (of pros and cons) -> decision -> option selected. It is in fact: consideration -> 'will' yourself to decide -> knowledge of option chose... (read more)

Ian C.,

I'm not deducing (potentially wrongly) from some internal observation that I have free will. The knowledge that I chose is not a conclusion, it is a memory.

To paraphrase/mangle Wittgenstein:

What would the memory have felt like if you only had the illusion of free will?

To be honest, I'm not convinced this is a useful argument. Does the existence (or otherwise) of 'free will' have any bearing on our ethics, our actions, or anything at all?

Frank Hirsch: "So much for evidence from introspective memory"

Those experiments are fascinating, but the fact that a damaged brain in a different situation makes up stories is not evidence that a healthy brain is doing so in this situation.

Ben Jones: "To be honest, I'm not convinced this is a useful argument."

I'm not convinced it's not a useful argument either. Argument is for when you have made a deductive chain that you want to explain to others. When all you are doing is pointing out something in their field of perception, all you ca... (read more)

• Sarah is hypnotized and told to take off her shoes when a book drops on the floor. Fifteen minutes later a book drops, and Sarah quietly slips out of her loafers. “Sarah,”, asks the hypnotist, “why did you take off your shoes?” “Well . . . my feet are hot and tired.”, Sarah replies. “It has been a long day”. • George has electrodes temporarily implanted in the brain region that controls his head movements. When neurosurgeon José Delgado (1973) stimulates the electrode by remote control, George always turns his head. Unaware of the remote stimulation, he ... (read more)

If I see our relationship as a status contest, and you are doing analysis and are better at it than I am, I might attempt to move the contest away from analysis and onto, say, aesthetics, or professions of faith, or rhetoric, or athleticism, or cooking, or some other area where I feel stronger.

I usually interpret objections like Keats' (and, more famously if more elliptically, Whitman's Learn'd Astronomer) as a status move along these lines.

I sometimes refer to this as "choosing to reign in Hell." If I can't win at a game worth playing, the temp... (read more)

KEATS: Explanations of gnomes and rainbows take away the sense of wonder they give me.

YUDKOWSKY: Gnomes aren't real.

KEATS: You don't say.

YUDKOWSKY: We should get a sense of wonder from accurate explanations.

KEATS: Speak for yourself.

As a general point about reductionism the essay may stand up well. As criticism of that poem, not so much. I for one enjoy both magical and "merely real" explanations, and see no contradiction in that. The sort of ideas people enjoy are a matter of taste.

"philosophy will clip an angels wings".... explain that part of the poem please

I would think that it is wise indeed to take joy in the merely real however I believe also that it is not a fault to enjoy things which aren't real such as stories like 'HPMOR' and 'Luminosity' as long as these don't color your perception of the world outside these stories. As long as it doesnt change the area it shouldn't affect the model but you shouldn't let its non-existance prevent you from enjoying it.

I should note it here too:

It occurs to me that verbal overshadowing of feelings may be some of what people are complaining of when they consider explaining to constitute explaining away: where a good verbal description pretty much screens off one's own memories. This is part of the dangerous magic the good art critic wields - and why it's possibly more dangerous to an artist's art to read their positive reviews than their negative ones. It's a mechanism by which the explanation does, in fact, overshadow the feelings. So I have more sympathy for Keats having learnt of verbal overshadowing than I did before.

The rainbow is still there, I saw one recently )))

So, hi, 8ish years late. I want to make sure I understand. Would this (reductionism) be somewhat like drawing a multi-leveled building of a map? I'm one of those 'don't yet fully understand the math articles' types.