In Which I Present The Opposing Side's Hypothesis and Falsify It

This post is in part in response to a New Scientist article/book review "Fighting back against neurosexism."  And the tagline is "Are differences between men and women hard-wired in the brain? Two new books argue that there's no solid scientific evidence for this popular notion."  

Full disclosure here: I haven't read the books, although I do have a B.S. in neurobiology. But you don't even need to understand anything about neurobiology to falslify their most basic hypothesis: that male and female brains have no hardwired behavioral differences.  

And it's easy to falsify: if male and female brains were the same, all humans would be completely bisexual.  If it's true that female brains, on average, prefer to fuck, date, and marry men, and male brains, on average, prefer to fuck, date, and marry women, then male and female brains are in fact different.

This post comprises one question and no answers.  You have been warned.

I was reading "How minds can be computational systems", by William Rapaport, and something caught my attention.  He wrote,

Computationalism is - or ought to be - the thesis that cognition is computable ... Note, first, that I have said that computationalism is the thesis that cognition is computable, not that it is computation (as Pylyshyn 1985 p. xiii characterizes it). ... To say that cognition is computable is to say that there is an algorithm - more likely, a collection of interrelated algorithms - that computes it.  So, what does it mean to say that something 'computes cognition'? ... cognition is computable if and only if there is an algorithm ... that computes this function (or functions).

Rapaport was talking about cognition, not consciousness.  The contention between these hypothesis is, however, only interesting if you are talking about consciousness; if you're talking about "cognition", it's just a choice between two different ways to define cognition.

When it comes to consciousness, I consider myself a computationalist.  But I hadn't realized before that my explanation of consciousness as computational "works" by jumping back and forth between those two incompatible positions.  Each one provides part of what I need; but each, on its own, seems impossible to me; and they are probably mutually exclusive.

Intro

The problem of Friendly AI is usually approached from a decision theoretic background that starts with the assumptions that the AI is an agent that has awareness of AI-self and goals, awareness of humans as potential collaborators and or obstacles, and general awareness of the greater outside world.  The task is then to create an AI that implements a human-friendly decision theory that remains human-friendly even after extensive self-modification.

That is a noble goal, but there is a whole different set of orthogonal compatible strategies for creating human-friendly AI that take a completely different route: remove the starting assumptions and create AI's that believe they are humans and are rational in thinking so.  

There has been a lot of discussion on LW about finding better decision theories. A lot of the reason for the various new decision theories proposed here seems to be an effort to get over the fact that classical CDT gives the wrong answer in 1-shot PD's, Newcomb-like problems and Parfit's Hitchhiker problem. While Gary Drescher has said that TDT is "more promising than any other decision theory I'm aware of ", Eliezer gives a list of problems in which his theory currently gives the wrong answer (or, at least, it did a year ago). Adam Bell's recent sequence has talked about problems for CDT, and is no doubt about to move onto problems with EDT (in one of the comments, it was suggested that EDT is "wronger" than CDT).

In the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, it is relatively trivial to prove that no strategy is "optimal" in the sense that it gets the best possible pay-out against all opponents. The reasoning goes roughly like this: any strategy which ever cooperates does worse than it could have against, say, Always Defect. Any strategy which doesn't start off with cooperate does worse than it could have against, say Grim. So, whatever strategy you choose, there is another strategy that would do better than you against some possible opponent. So no strategy is "optimal". Question: is it possible to prove similarly that there is no "optimal" Decision Theory? In other words - given a decision theory A, can you come up with some scenario in which it performs worse than at least one other decision theory? Than any other decision theory?

One initial try would be: Omega gives you two envelopes - the left envelope contains $1 billion iff you don't implement decision theory A in deciding which envelope to choose. The right envelope contains $1000 regardless.

Or, you might not like Omega being able to make decisions about you based entirely on your sourcecode (or "ritual of cognition"), then how about this:in order for two decision theories to sensibly be described as "different", there must be some scenario in which they perform a different action (let's call this Scenario 1). In Scenario 1, DT A makes decision A whereas DT B makes decision B. In Scenario 2, Omega offers you the following setup: here are two envelopes, you can pick exactly one of them. I've just simulated you in Scenario 1. If you chose decision B, there's $1,000,000 in the left envelope. Otherwise it's empty. There's $1000 in the right envelope regardless.

I'm not sure if there's some flaw in this reasoning (are there decision theories for which Omega offering such a deal is a logical impossibility? It seems unlikely: I don't see how your choice of algorithm could affect Omega's ability to talk about it). But I imagine that some version of this should work - in which case, it doesn't make sense to talk about one decision theory being "better" than another, we can only talk about decision theories being better than others for certain classes of problems.

I have no doubt that TDT is an improvement on CDT, but in order for this to even make sense, we'd have to have some way of thinking about what sort of problem we want our decision theory to solve. Presumably the answer is "the sort of problems which you're actually likely to face in the real world". Do we have a good formalism for what this means? I'm not suggesting that the people who discuss these questions haven't considered this issue, but I don't think I've ever seen it explicitly addressed. What exactly do we mean by a "better" decision theory?

A common background assumption on LW seems to be that it's rational to act in accordance with the dispositions one would wish to have. (Rationalists must WIN, and all that.)

E.g., Eliezer:

It is, I would say, a general principle of rationality - indeed, part of how I define rationality - that you never end up envying someone else's mere choices.  You might envy someone their genes, if Omega rewards genes, or if the genes give you a generally happier disposition.  But [two-boxing] Rachel, above, envies [one-boxing] Irene her choice, and only her choice, irrespective of what algorithm Irene used to make it.  Rachel wishes just that she had a disposition to choose differently.

And more recently, from AdamBell:

I [previously] saw Newcomb’s Problem as proof that it was sometimes beneficial to be irrational. I changed my mind when I realized that I’d been asking the wrong question. I had been asking which decision would give the best payoff at the time and saying it was rational to make that decision. Instead, I should have been asking which decision theory would lead to the greatest payoff.

Within academic philosophy, this is the position advocated by David Gauthier.  Derek Parfit has constructed some compelling counterarguments against Gauthier, so I thought I'd share them here to see what the rest of you think.

Major update here.

The state of affairs regarding the SIAI and its underlying rationale and rules of operation are insufficiently clear. 

Most of the arguments involve a few propositions and the use of probability and utility calculations to legitimate action. Here much is uncertain to an extent that I'm not able to judge any nested probability estimations. Even if you tell me, where is the data on which you base those estimations?

There seems to be an highly complicated framework of estimations to support and reinforce each other. I'm not sure how you call this in English, but in German I'd call that a castle in the air.

What must a sane person¹ think regarding religion? The naive first approximation is "religion is crap". But let's consider the following:

Humans are imperfectly rational creatures. Our faults include not being psychologically able to maximally operate according to our values. We can e.g. suffer from burn-out if we try to push ourselves too hard.

It is thus important for us to consider, what psychological habits and choices contribute to our being able to work as diligently for our values as we want to (while being mentally healthy). It is a theoretical possibility, a hypothesis that could be experimentally studied, that the optimal² psychological choices include embracing some form of Faith, i.e. beliefs not resting on logical proof or material evidence.

In other words, it could be that our values mean that Occam's Razor should be rejected (in some cases), since embracing Occam's Razor might mean that we miss out on opportunities to manipulate ourselves psychologically into being more what we want to be.

To a person aware of The Simulation Argument, the above suggests interesting corollaries:

1. Running ancestor simulations is the ultimate tool to find out, what (if any) form of Faith is most conducive to us being able to live according to our values.
2. If there is a Creator and we are in fact currently in a simulation being run by that Creator, it would have been rather humorous of them to create our world thus that the above method would yield "knowledge" of their existence.

¹: Actually, what I've written here assumes we are talking about humans. Persons-in-general may be psychologically different, and theoretically capable of perfect rationality.

²: At least for some individuals, not necessarily all.

For a very long time, philosophy has presented us with two straw men in combat with one another and we are expected to take sides. Both straw men appear to have been proved true and also proved false. The straw men are Determinism and Free Will. I believe that both, in any useful sense, are false. Let me tell a little story.

Mary's story

Mary is walking down the street, just for a walk, without a firm destination. She comes to a T where she must go left or right and she looks down each street finding them about the same. She decides to go left. She feels she has, like a free little birdie, exercised her will without constraint. As she crosses the next intersection she is struck by a car and suffers serious injury. Now she spends much time thinking about how she could have avoided being exactly where she was, when she was. She believes that things have causes and she tries to figure out where a different decision would have given a different outcome and how she could have known to make the alternative decision. 'If only..' ideas crowd into her thoughts. She believes simultaneously that her actions have causes and that there are valid alternatives to her actions. She is using both deterministic logic and free will logic, neither alone leads to 'If only..' scenarios – it takes both. If only she had noticed that the next intersection on the right had traffic lights but on the left didn't. If only she had not noticed the shoe store on the left. What is more she is doing this in order to change some aspect of her decision making so that it will be less likely to put her in hospital, again this is not in keeping with either logic. But really both forms of logic are deeply flawed. What Mary is actually attempting is to do maintenance on her decision making processes so that they can learn whatever is available to be learned from her unfortunate experience.

What is useless about determinism

There is a big difference between being 'in principle' determined and being determined in any useful way. If I accept that all is caused by the laws of physics (and we know these laws – a big if) this does not accomplish much. I still cannot predict events except trivially: in general but not in full detail, in simple not complex situations, extremely shortly into the future rather than longer term, etc. To predict anything really sizable, like for instance, how the earth came to be as it is, or even how little-old-me became what I am, or even why I did a particular thing a moment ago, would take more resources and time than can be found in the life of our universe. Being determined does not mean being predictable. It does not help us to know that our decisions are determined because we still have to actually make the decisions. We cannot just predict what the outcomes of our decisions will be, we really, really have to go through the whole process of making them. We cannot even pretend that decisions are determined until after we have finish making them.

What is useless about freewill

There is a big difference between being free in the legal, political, human rights type of freedom. To be free from particular, named restraints is something we all understand. But the free in 'free will' is a freedom from the cause and effect of the material world. This sort of freedom has to be magical, supernatural, spiritual or the like. That in itself is not a problem for a belief system. It is the idea that something that is not material can act on the material world that is problematic. Unless you have everything spiritual or everything material, you have the problem of interaction. What is the 'lever' that the non-material uses to move the material, or vice versa. It is practically impossible to explain how free will can affect the brain and body. If you say God does it, you have raised a personal problem to a cosmic one but the problem remains – how can the non-physical interact with the physical? Free will is of little use in explaining our decision process. We make our decisions rather than having them dictated to us but it is physical processes in the brain that really do the decision making, not magic. And we want our decisions to be relevant, effective and in contact with the physical world, not ineffective. We actually want a 'lever' on the material world. Decisions taken in some sort of causal vacuum are of no use to us.

The question we want answered

Just because philosophers pose questions and argue various answers does not mean that they are finding answers. No, they are make clear the logical ramifications of questions and each answer. This is a useful function and not to be undervalued, but it is not a process that gives robust answers. As an example, we have Zeno's paradox about the arrow that can never landing because its distance to landing can always be divided in half, but on the other hand, the knowledge that it does actually land. Philosophers used to argue about how to treat this paradox, but they never solved it. It lost its power when mathematics developed the concept of the sum of a infinite series. When the distance is cut in half, so is the time. When the infinite series of remaining distance reaches zero so does the series of time remaining. We do not know how to end an infinite series but we know where it ends and when it ends – on the ground the moment the arrow hits it. The sum of an infinite series can still be considered somewhat paradoxical but as an obscure mathematical question. Generally, philosophers are no longer very interested in the Zeno paradox, certainly not its answer. Philosophy is useful but not because it supplies consensus answers. Mathematics, science and their cousins, like history, supply answers. Philosophy has set up a dichotomy between free will and determinism and explored each idea to exhaustion but not with any consensus about which is correct. That is not the point of philosophy. Science has to rephrase the problem as, 'how exactly are decisions made?' That is the question we need an answer to, a robust consensus answer.

But here is the rub

This move to a scientific answer is disturbing to very many people because the answer is assumed to have effects on our notions of morals, responsibility and identity. Civilization as we know it may fall apart. Exactly how we think we make decisions once we study the question without reference to determinism or freewill seems OK. But if the answer robs us of morals, responsibility or identity, than it is definitely not OK. Some people have the notion that what we should do is just pretend that we have free will, while knowing that our actions are determined. To me this is silly: believe two incompatible and flawed ideas at the same time rather than believe a better, single idea. It reminds me of the solution proposed to deal with Copernicus – use the new calculations while believing that the earth does not revolve. Of course, we do not yet have the scientific answer (far from it) although we think we can see the general gist of it. So we cannot say how it will affect society. I personally feel that it will not affect us negatively but that is just a personal opinion. Neuroscience will continue to grow and we will soon have a very good idea of how we actually make decisions, whether this knowledge is welcomed or not. It is time we stopped worrying about determinism and free will and started preparing ourselves to live with ourselves and others in a new framework.

Identity, Responsibility, Morals

We need to start thinking of ourselves as whole beings, one entity from head to toe: brain and body, past and future, from birth to death. Forgot the ancient religious idea of a mind imprisoned in a body. We have to stop the separation of me and my body, me and my brain. Me has to be all my parts together, working together. Me cannot equate to consciousness alone.

Of course I am responsible for absolutely everything I do including something I do while sleep walking. Further a rock that falls from a cliff is responsible for blocking the road. It is what we do about responsibility that differs. We remove the rock but we do not blame or punish it. We try to help the sleep walker overcome the dangers of sleep walking to himself and others. But if I as a normal person hit someone in the face, my responsibility is not greater than the rock or the sleep walker but my treatment will be much, much different. I am expected to maintain my decision-making apparatus in good working order. The way the legal system will work might be a little different from now, but not much. People will be expected to know and follow the rules of society.

I think of moral questions as those for which there is no good answer. All courses of action and of inaction are bad in a moral question. Often because the possible answers pit the good of the individual against the good of the group, but also pit different groups and their interests against each other. No matter what we believe about how decisions are made, we are still forced to make them and that includes moral ones. The more we know about decisions, the more likely we are to make moral decisions we are proud of (or least guilty or ashamed of), but there is no guarantee. There is still a likelihood that we will just muddle along trying to find the lesser of two evils with no more success than at present.

Why should we believe that being closer to the truth or having a more accurate understanding is going to make things worst rather than better? Shouldn't we welcome having a map that is closer to the territory? It is time to be open to ideas outside the artificial determinism/freewill dichotomy.