= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
wedrifid comments on Confused as to usefulness of 'consciousness' as a concept - LessWrong
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 (229)
With very high confidence I know what I want. And for the most part, I don't infer what I want by observing my own behavior, I observe what I want through introspection. With pretty high confidence, I know some of what other people want when they tell me what they want.
Believing that a chicken doesn't want to be killed is something for which there is less evidence than with humans. The chicken can't tell us what it wants, but some people are willing to infer that chickens don't want to be killed by observing their behavior, which they believe has a significant similarity to their own or other human's behavior when they or another human are not wanting to be killed. Me, I figure the chicken is just running on automatic pilot and isn't thinking about whether it will be killed or not, very possibly doesn't have a concept of being killed at all, and is really demonstrating that it doesn't want to be caught.
Do apples express a preference for gravity by falling from trees? Do rocks express a preference for lowlands by traveling to lowlands during floods? The answer is no, not everything that happens is because the things involved in it happening wanted it that way. Without too much fear of your coming up with a meaningful counterexample, among things currently known by humans on earth the only things that might even conceivably want things are things that have central nervous systems.
With weak to moderate confidence I can expect you to be drastically overconfident in your self-insight into what you want from introspection. (Simply because the probability that you are human is high, human introspection is biased in predictable ways and the evidence supplied by your descriptions of your introspection is insufficient to overcome the base rate.)
The evidence is that humans don't act in ways entirely consistent with their stated preferences. There is no evidence that their stated preferences are not their preferences. You have to assume that how humans acts says more about their preferences than what they say about their preferences. You go down that path and you conclude that apples want to fall from trees.
That's an incredibly strong claim ("no evidence"). You are giving rather a lot of privilege to the hypothesis that the public relations module of the brain is given unfiltered access to potentially politically compromising information like that and then chooses to divulge it publicly. This is in rather stark contrast to what I have read and what I have experienced.
I'd like to live in a world where what you said is true. It would have saved me years of frustration.
Both provide useful information, but not necessarily directly. fMRIs can be fun too, albeit just as tricky to map to the 'want' concept.