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John_Maxwell_IV comments on A Basic Problem of Ethics: Panpsychism? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (16)
What's the best argument you've seen for it? I don't find it plausible myself.
What do you think of the reductionism sequence? E.g. this post might be relevant.
My interpretation of the "expanding circle" might be something like: it'd be a good thing if things with preferences increasingly found themselves preferring that the preferences of other things with preferences were also achieved. If something doesn't have preferences, I'm not that concerned about it.
If some things are concious and some aren't, then there has to be some rule differentiating the two, which give a complexity penalty. The ideas that everything is concious or nothing is concious are strictly simpler and thus preferable by the info-theoretic version of occam's razor, and I can rule out the second possibility because I know that I am concious.
Suppose a taoist claims not to have any preferences. Should you be concerned about them?
If some things are computers and some aren't, then there has to be some rule differentiating the two, which gives a complexity penalty. Thus by occam's razor everything is likely a computer. Does this argument work?
My position: consciousness is in the map, not the territory.
Maybe, because humans often lie or have inaccurate self-knowledge.
Well, you can turn some unusual things into computers - billiard tables, model trains and the game of life are all turning-complete.
But I do have a good understanding of what a computer is. Perhaps my occam's razor based prior is that everything is a computer, but then I observe that I can't use most objects to compute anything, so I update and conclude that most things aren't computers.
Similarly, I can observe that most things do not have emotions, or preferences, or agency, or self-awareness. I can put a mirror in front of an animal and conclude that most animals aren't self-aware.
But is there any test I can perform to determine whether something experiences qualia?
Ok, suppose neuroscientists find a person who has not preferences for solid scientific reasons - perhaps the prefrontal cortex has been lesioned, or maybe they have no dopamine in their brain. Should you care about this person?
see skeptical lurker's comment, below.
While I don't have too much experience to back this up, I think it is probably a lot of things I'm familiar with, elaborated at length, with perhaps a few insights sprinkled in. Can you please give brief summaries of the things you link to, and how they are relevant? I skimmed that article, and it doesn't seem relevant.
My point is: how do you evaluate if something has preferences? How do you disambiguate preferences from statements like "I prefer __"? Clearly we DO distinguish between these. If I write and run the following computer program, I don't think you will be upset if I stop it :
Yes, I don't particularly like the way the sequences are written either :/ But I think the kind of thing you're talking about in this post is the sort of topic they address. LW Wiki pages are often better, e.g. see this one:
I see this as compatible with my reply to skeptical_lurker above.
Agreed. I don't have any easy answer to this question. It's kind of like asking the question "if someone is ill or injured, how do you fix them?" It's an important question worthy of extensive study (at least insofar as it's relevant to whatever ethical question you're currently being presented with).
And it's possible that you and I would disagree on how to carve reality in to that which has preferences we consider meaningful vs that which doesn't. Occam's Razor only applies to the territory, not the map, so there's no penalty for us drawing our boundaries in as complicated & intricate a way as we like (kind of like the human-drawn country boundaries on real maps).
I know all about philosophical zombies.
Do you have any answer at all? Or anything to say on the matter? Would you at least agree that it is of critical ethical importance, and hence worthy of discussion?
Of course, but I assume you agree with me about the program I wrote?
In any case, I think it would be nice to try and forge some agreement and/or understanding on this matter (as opposed to ignoring it on the basis of our disagreement).
Regarding modern video game NPCs, I don't think they matter in most cases--I'm moderately less concerned about them than Brian Tomasik is, although I'm also pretty uncertain (and would want to study the way NPCs are typically programmed before making any kind of final judgement).
Yes, that was what I meant to communicate by "Agreed". :)
Having thought about this further, I think I'm more concerned with things that look like qualia than apparent revealed preferences. I don't currently guess it'd be unethical to smash a Roomba or otherwise prevent it from achieving its revealed preferences of cleaning someone's house. I find it more plausible that a reinforcement-learning NPC has quasi-qualia that are worth nonzero moral concern. (BTW, in practice I might act as though things where my modal estimate of their level of value is 0 have some value in order to hedge my bets.)