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EvelynM comments on Modularity and Buzzy - LessWrong
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Comments (26)
"Although many people understand on one level that this is false, the intuition of a special observer keeps reasserting itself in various guises. As the philosopher Jerry Fodor writes: ”If... there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be me.” "
I have built a business. It has customers, employees, office space, tax returns, vendors.... It has a separate name and existence from me. It operates according to compatible, but distinct, purposes, opportunities and choices to mine. And, if I accomplish my goal, it will operate even more independently in the future than it does now, and may at some point, exist entirely separate from me. But, I'm not tempted to attribute an "I" to it.
When a system achieves sufficient complexity, we have a tendency to reify it. I don't know what that bias is called.
Thanks for the article.
I have produced an offspring. It has friends, teachers, its own room, allowance, personal tastes.... It has a separate name and existence from me. It operates according to compatible, but distinct, purposes, opportunities and choices to mine. And, if I accomplish my goal, it will operate even more independently in the future than it does now, and may at some point, exist entirely separate from me. But, I'm not tempted to attribute an "I" to it.
When a system achieves sufficient complexity, we have a tendency to reify it. That bias might be called "parenthood". But in the spirit of not giving preference to biological human people, why would you consider your business to be less alive than a turkey? I agree that there's a point where we start to call it a conscious agent, and if left to itself, your business would act irrationally, and possibly die, but it -would- act. This just means that you are not finished programming yet. If there's no possibility of ever calling your business conscious, given mind-bogglingly clever planning, then we can all give up and go back to bed now. My point is that I think we have a tendency to attribute agency to things because it is useful to treat as if they had agency, even if they really don't. If you can predict accurately using the wrong model, you may be wrong but at least you're predicting accurately.
Does your offspring know that you refer to it as "it"?
Du-dun, tsh! That was in reference to my general, hypothetical offspring. I usually use personal pronouns for my own three. Although they would probably get the humor if I did--the replication/improvement is going smoothly. They are already used to my speeches about psychology, artificial intelligence, and evolution, and quantum physics, even though they are eight, six, and two. They frequently accuse me of being (or possibly actually believe that I am) an alien, a robot, or both. I take that as a compliment, seeing as I am the one who planted that idea.
Me neither, but the fundamental attribution bias is (I think) related to it.
That is, I suspect that the same mechanisms that leave me predisposed to treat an observed event as evidence of a hypothesized attribute of an entity (even when it's much more strongly evidence of a distributed function of a system) also leave me predisposed to treat the event as evidence of a hypothesized entity.
Labels aside, it's not a surprising property: when it came to identifying entities in our ancestral environment, I suspect that false negatives exerted more negative selection pressure than false positives.
I think the tendency to treat events as evidence of entities more than is warranted is called "agency bias," or "delusions of agency" when it's unusuallly strong.
Sometimes called promiscuous teleology.
Thank you.
Thank you.