Depends on how you think about and define a 1% advantage. You are using the biological definition, which is that having the gene gives you 1% more offspring on average. If however my genes make me 1% faster than everyone else that is a 100% advantage in winning the race, which can lead to large advantage in reproductive success. In this way a gene that generates a minor performance advantage can spread rather quickly.

"Brian, the question is not why the senses feel the way they do, but why they feel like anything at all."

Do you have any personal experience with beings with consciousnesses that don't feel their own senses? Seems to me you should have some basis of comparison for assuming that senses shouldn't feel like anything at all.

Your senses don't feel like anything to me. Think that has anything to do with the fact that we don't share a brain?

Besides, you are in part wrong, the question has been precisely why the senses feel the way they do. Why is red "red" and blue "blue". Unfortunately, Robin removed my discussion of qualia and the indication to why the answer to "why" is more about engineering than philosophy.

Besides your question is now existential to the point where it can be asked of the material directly. Suppose we discover precisely "why we feel anything at all" and the answer is precisely because of properties of material things. Well then the question would not be considered closed by a philosopher. He'd just was why there are things at all.

That's four points.

Mtraven,

"There is nothing physical in common with these two activities, but surely they have something in common."

Having something in common is an easy hurdle. Pen and pencil is vastly more prone to error. You have to remember that when you conceptualize the similarities that doesn't mean the reality matches your conception. You might thing the counting of apples maps nicely onto the integers but it doesn't. Not for very large numbers. A pile of three apples maps nicely to the number three, but a pile of 1x10^34 apples would collapse into a black hole.

"You don't have to consider this mysterious if you don't want to. But it suggests to me that the reductionist way of looking at the world is, if not wrong, not that useful." Reductionism properly understood is but one tool in a toolkit, and one that has an extremely successful track record.

My position on this is very close to Dawkins.

"Reductionism is one of those words that makes me want to reach for my revolver. It means nothing. Or rather it means a whole lot of different things, but the only thing anybody knows about it is that it's bad, you're supposed to disapprove of it. (Dawkins)"

Remember we are talking here about your sentence: "Nonetheless, it is mysterious how physical systems with nothing physical in common can realize the same algorithm."

Why classify as "reductionist" my ability to directly understand what you find mysterious. I've got a degree in Computer Science so I damn well better understand why the same algorithms can run on different physical systems. In fact part of my job is designing such algorithms so they can run on physically different systems. An IBM mainframe, a Mac, and an Intel box are completely different physical systems even if you don't recognize that fact.

I also fully understand how pen and paper calculations and those done by a calculator or computer map onto each other. Thirty years ago computer time was far more valuable and access to time on computers was much less available. I had to actually write machine code with actual ones and zeros, and then hand simulate the running of those particular bytes on a computer. I did a respectable enough job to find bugs before I got shared time on the computer to actually run it. I understand precisely the mapping and why it works. Hell, I understand the electronics behind it.

The mystery evaporates with understanding.

Robin,

You make it seem like my point was singular. There were lots of points. I'll carry on the discussion with Scott over at Distributed Republic blog.

You have an unusual comment policy that I wasn't aware of. Deleting comments merely on length is quite unusually with 50 megabytes of storage costing about a penny. I'd have had to repost that same long comment somewhere around 500 times before it would cost a cent.

Now that I have read your policy I will try to color inside the lines. So, no problem, email me the contents of the post and I'll copy it to Distributed Republic. If you've lost it, as is likely, no problem either as I'm a prolific writer.

Poke,

You made an important point in that scientists don't prove things in a foundationalist way. They aren't even attempting to do that and they have solved the problem of human fallibility, and the lack of any foundation to knowledge, by just accepting them as givens. Accepted as givens then the issue is how to deal with those facts. The answer is to come up with methodologies to reduce error.

Some philosophers get this, and some don't. Popper understood. My philosophy teacher didn't. I've noticed a correlation in my experience that the philosophers who don't get it tend to be in the camp of dualists and theologians. They use philosophy to try to discredit science.

I do however thing that the philosopher who do "get it" can come up with valuable tools. Tools for recognizing flaws in our deductions and arguments. So I don't think the disciple is completely void of value.

Scott,

In Michaels post he says: "philosophers *do* make arguments assuming confusions Exactly analogous to that in Eliezer's example, for instance, by positing a world exactly like ours except that water on this world is not H2O."

This is exactly the kind of arguments that philosophers get into that annoy me. I read some Lycan we're he was discussing this H20 vs. xyz world "problem". To my thinking there was no issue, or the issue was dependent on actual facts not presented.

Several counterexamples immediately came to mind. Like why would the same word be assumed to mean the same thing just because it sounded the same? The example in fact posits three coincidences. 1) That somehow the languages are the same on both planets. 2) They just happened to use the same word for two different substances. 3) The two different substances just happened to play the same role in both worlds.

To which I would say respectively: 1) We Americans and the Brits have the same language and yet the meanings of identical words like rubber are different here and there. 2) That just because "we" and "qui" sound the same doesn't mean they are the same word or meaning. 3) We can make mistakes and think things are the same when they are not. If I have a glass of urine a kid might call it lemonade but that doesn't mean the words have the same meaning or that the urine is lemonade just because the kid is unaware of the difference, yet.

One counterexample being what if the two worlds only had one kind of animal because all others died off. Suppose it was dogs on one world and goats on another. Now they might communicate via radio and describe these things to each other. It has four legs, fur, we keep them as pets, we eat them, etc. They may serve the same purpose in society even. Yet they may never get to the point where they have distinguished the two and may decided that dog means goat.

Now suppose they both had been calling their respective creatures dogs on both planets. Again that would just be a coincidence. That is unless there were an actual history behind it, like one being a colony and both referring to their respective animals as "animals". Having lost all other animals they might just have stopped referring to them as dogs and goats. Depending on how long it has been the meaning might have changed also. People may have forgotten that there were other animals.

So the problem isn't so much that there is a problem but that there is missing information from the puzzle that makes it unsolvable in the first place. So why waste our time with it.

That's why I don't respect some philosophers. They're experts and yet they can't see past this kind of mental masturbation. Then they bitch like Lycan did about us novices not understanding. Why should we take them seriously? I especially find it offensive when they pretend to have covered all the bases when in twenty minutes I can thing of several more. Like when I pointed out to you some of the other defenses of materialism that Lycan didn't mention.

Example: Burden of Proof. Dualists are positing a extra something, so they have the burden of proof to show it exists. All empirical evidence, including inner awareness points to a unity between the brain and consciousness. Whack my head and from an internal perspective I see stars, touch the surface of my brain and I smell, see, or remember things. Stimulate my pleasure center and I feel pleasure. Split my brain and I will verbally respond as if I have two separate conscious experiences.

Why do I need extra floaty ghosts to explain what's happening?

Sure I may not have an explaination for why I experience red as the "qualia" red yet as a materialist, but "Ooooo, ghosts in the machine!" isn't an explanation either. It's an expression of ignorance, like "God did it".

Seems to me from the inside that red is associated with various things like hot, and danger, excitability, and sex and a whole lot of other concepts, while blue with cool, and water, and other things, while green with plants. Now I know many of these associations are after the fact of qualia but perhaps the qualia itself is biased in such a way to favor certain associations.

Maybe blue looks blue because their is an evolutionarily wired in predisposition to expect that color to be cool is directly wired in our brains. That's how the predisposition appears from the inside.

I know with my consciousness that the sense of sight, touch, and sound have very different "feels" to them. Their all directional and spatial, yet touch has the qualia of being very local, sound the qualia of being very ephemeral and out there, and sight the qualia of being very precise an localized to my eyes. But doesn't that sort of match how the brain should have been evolved to make those senses feel. There's a match there.

Touch is local to the surface of my skin, sound waves are ephemeral in being hard to localize and having the ability to bend around objects, so ear placement is mostly not so important. Thus under most circumstances the ears feel much less connected to the sound coming it. I hear a fishtank behind me but am not really aware of the connection of my ears to the source. I just know it's back there and how far away. That matches the way the ears work. Likewise with my eyes. They do give more precise info than the ears and touch. They are far more directional.

If my brain is predisposed to be wired with these kinds of biases then why should n't they feel different from the inside? Hell, I could probably create a program and some hardware that would feed all the information extracted by the ears and convert it to colors displayed to both eyes on mini montiors.

Yet that info coming into the eyes would not have the right kind of wiring backing it up in my brain for me to processing into location anymore, let alone "feel" the qualia of sound. I wouldn't know where the fish tank was let alone feel the bubbly nature of the sounds via the vibrating colors.

That's true even though I could probably also build two sensors that could watch both those individual mini monitors and convert that back into sound via speakers to my ears, where I would then again have the proper qualia backing up the incoming information. That qualia being the direct result of how the info is being processed.

mtraven,

I'm trying to understand why you're finding mystery where I see none.

"Nonetheless, it is mysterious how physical systems with nothing physical in common can realize the same algorithm."

Would you feel the same mystery in a playground where there were side by side swings, one made with rope and the other with chain?

Chain is not only made of completely different material, but is also flexible by a completely different mechanism than rope. Yet both are flexible and both can serve the purpose of making a swing.

The flexibility is emergent in both cases but a different levels. The flexibility of the rope is emergent at the molecular level, whereas the chain is flexible at the mechanical level.

"That suggests that the algorithm itself is not a physical thing, but something else."

In the sense that the flexibility is something else. However algorithms (especially running ones) and flexibility do not "exist" unconnected to the physical objects that exhibit them. Just like the other guy pointed out the number four doesn't exist by itself but can be instantiated in objects. Like a four having four tines.

Note in the above paragraph I was assuming a very big difference between an algorithm running on a computer, written on a piece of paper, or memorized by a student. Only an actually running algorithm is instantiated in an important way to your example. On paper it's only representation being used for communication.

When you flipped to speaking of "the algorithm" you were talking about it as a attribute. It's then very easy in English to equivocate between the two meanings of attribute, the conceptual and the reified. Flexibility as a concept is easily confused with flexibility as instantiated in a particular object. The concept resides in your head as a general model, while the actually flexibility of the object is physical. Well actually the concept in your head is physical also but in a completely different way.

Not sure what you find mysterious in all this. Something does or does not fit the model the concept describes. If it fits than it's behavior will be predicted by the model and will match any other object that fits. Flexible things flex. Things running the algorithm for addition do addition.