Folks seem to habitually misrepresent the nature of modern software by focusing on a narrow slice of it. Google Maps is so much more than the pictures and text we touch and read on a screen.

Google Maps is the software. It is also the infrastructure running and delivering the software. It is the traffic sensors and cameras feeding it real-world input. Google Maps is also the continually shifting organization of brilliant human beings within Google focusing their own minds and each other's minds on refining the software to better meet users' needs and designers' intentions. It is the click data collected and aggregated to inform changes based on usage patterns. It is the GIS data and the collective efforts and intentions of everybody who collects GIS data or plans the collection thereof. It is the user-generated locale content and the collective efforts of everyone contributing that data.

To think of modern distributed software as merely a tool is to compartmentalize in the extreme. It is more like a many-way continuously evolving conversation among those creating it, between those creating it and those using it, and among those using it - plus the "conversation" from all the sensors, cameras, robots, cars, drivers, planes, pilots, computers, programmers, and everything else feeding the system data, both real-time and slow-changing. Whether the total system is "an agent" seems like a meaningless distinction to me. The system is already a continually evolving sum of the collective, purposeful action of everybody and everything who creates and interacts with Google Maps.

And that's just one web service among thousands in a world where the web services interact with each other, the companies and individuals behind them interact with each other, and so on. Arguing about the nature of the thingy on the phone or the monitor does not make any sense to me in light of the 100,000' view of the whole system.

I trained myself to pretend that people exist. This is maybe the achievement I'm most proud of, besides this.

My training is pretty useless when someone stops earning the effort. They effectively stop existing.

This conclusion is a requirement of actual materialism, since if you're truly materialist, you know that knowledge can't exist apart from a representation. Our applying the same label to two different representations is our own confusion, not one that exists in reality.

It really doesn't have to be a confusion though. We apply the label 'fruit' to both apples and oranges - that doesn't mean we're confused just because apples are different from oranges.

Then he is quite simply wrong. Knowledge can never be fully separated from its representation, just as one can never quite untangle a mind from the body it wears. ;-)

I don't think either I or Dennett made that claim. You don't need it for the premise of the thought experiment. You just need to understand that any mental state is going to be represented using some configuration of brain-stuff...

According to the thought experiment, Mary "knows" everything physical about the color red, and that will include any relevant sense of the word "knows". And so if the only way to "know" what experiencing the color red feels like is to have the neurons fire that actually fire when seeing red, then she's had those neurons fire. It could be by surgery, or hallucination, or divine intervention - it doesn't matter, it was given as a premise in the thought experiment that she knows what that's like.

One way to make such a Mary would be to determine what the configuration of neurons in Mary's brain would be after experiencing red, then surgically alter her brain to have that configuration. The premise of the thought experiment is that she has this information, and so if that's the only way she could have gotten it, then that's what happened.

It's important to understand the intended context of these rules. They're mostly about how to rise within established hierarchies. At one time that would have meant the nobility of a country. In modern developed nations, that means a large corporation, or a governmental bureaucracy. Anyone who has spent time playing inside that kind of game will recognize most of these rules and understand what they're about.

The rules can't be gotten round, because anybody who comes in and plays by them will beat out anybody who doesn't. It's just game theory. It can't be circumvented, because in an environment like a large corporation, there are always real limits on how many people each person can know well enough to trust. Absent intimacy and trust, the dynamics revert to each person playing a hand that only they can see.

In such a hierarchy, the question of whether this behavior is optimal, or "good" or "evil" is, in practice, moot. If you don't figure out and follow the rules, you'll be trampled, and pushed either down or out. If you discover a different set of rules that work better, then you can write a book about it. And yes, it is zero-sum. It has to be zero-sum, because there is much less space in the top of a pyramid than there is in the pyramid. There's no outcome where everybody gets to be a boss.

Unfortunately, I don't think you're likely to get much informed insight on this topic on LW, given our apparent demographics. College students taking math and physics just won't have the experience. Internships aren't enough. I've only scratched the surface myself, just from studied observation during my 5 years at Microsoft. You need to talk to some 30-50 year old general managers / executives that have risen through the ranks of an organization like IBM, Lockheed, Microsoft, Citigroup, etc.

Bear in mind that, like many good works of pop science, the vast majority of what the Sequences present is other people's ideas; I'm much more confident of the value of those ideas than of the parts that are original to Eliezer.

Looks like LW briefly switched over to its backup server today, one with a database a week out of date. That, or a few of us suffered a collective hallucination. Or, for that matter, just me. ;)

Just in case you were wondering too.

"This is the first test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible value to him."

-- William Lyon Phelps

Interesting to say that having an unusual medical problem raises someone's status. It sounds intuitively right, but I don't think any theory of status discussed here so far quite covers it.

except in the sense that I have contempt for diets high in processed carbohydrates.

I'm totally stealing this as a reason to disapprove of pot.

Closest I know is "tu quoque".