Thanks for taking the time and effort to hash out this zombie argument. Often people don't seem get the extreme derangement of the argument that Chalmers actually makes, and imagine because it is discussed in respectable circles it must make sense.

Even the people who do "understand" the argument and still support it don't let themselves see the full consequences. Some of your quotes from Richard Chappell are very revealing in this respect. I think you don't engage with them as directly as you could.

At one point, you quote Chappell:

It's misleading to say it's "miraculous" (on the property dualist view) that our qualia line up so neatly with the physical world. There's a natural law which guarantees this, after all. So it's no more miraculous than any other logically contingent nomic necessity (e.g. the constants in our physical laws).

But since Chalmers' "inner light" is epiphenomenal, any sort of "inner light" could be associated with any sort of external expression. Perhaps Chalmers' inner experience is horrible embarrassment about the arguments he's making, a desperate desire to shut himself up, etc. That is just as valid a "logically contingent nomic necessity". There's no reason whatsoever to prefer the sort of alignment implied by our behavior when we "describe our awareness" (which by Chalmers' argument isn't actually describing anything, it is just causal chains running off).

Then you quote Chappell:

... Zombie (or 'Outer') Chalmers doesn't actually conclude anything, because his utterances are meaningless. A fortiori, he doesn't conclude anything unwarrantedly. He's just making noises; these are no more susceptible to epistemic assessment than the chirps of a bird.

But we can't know that Chalmers' internal experience is aligned with his expressions. Maybe the correct contingent nomic necessity is that everyone except people whose name begins with C have inner experience. So Chalmers doesn't. That would make all his arguments just tweets.

And because these dual properties are epiphenomenal, there is no possible test that would tell us if Chalmers is making an argument or just tweeting away. Or at least, so Chalmers himself apparently claims (or tweets). So to accept Chappell's position makes all epistemic assessment of other's contingent on unknowable facts about the world. Bit of a problem.

As an aside, I'll also mention that Chappell's disparaging comments about "the chirps of a bird" indicate rather a blind spot. Birds chirp precisely to generate epistemic assessment in other birds, and the effectiveness of their chirps and their epistemic assessments is critical to their inclusive fitness.

I'd like to see some speculation about why people argue like this. It certainly isn't because the arguments are intrinsically compelling.

Eliezer sayeth: "I want to be individually empowered by producing neato effects myself, without large capital investments and many specialists helping" ... [is] in principle doable - you can get this with, say, the right kind of nanotechnology, or (ahem) other sufficiently advanced tech, and bring it to a large user base..."

Agreed. But as you hint, Eliezer, this case is indistinguishable from magic. So arguably the class of fantasies I mention are equivalent to living in some interesting future. In any case they don't seem to match the schema you present in the post.

Eliezer continues: "...as long as they have the basic psychological ability to take joy in anything that is merely real." I think that even in a wonderful future, most people will take joy from unusually large bangs, crazy risks, etc. as they do today; fancy technology will make these easier to produce and survive. Most people still won't get much joy or wonder from the underlying phenomena unless we re-engineer human nature. Ian Banks' Culture novels and short stories have some pretty good ironic accounts of amazing Culture technology being used for thrills by idiots.

I don't disagree with the importance of "joy in things that are merely real." But there are multiple sources of joy, some higher quality than others.

And speaking of wishing for magical power, I wish I could copy a quote from this blog and paste it into the comment box with the text styles preserved. Shows how hard it is to come by magic.

There are a number of fantasy stories where the protagonist is very good at something, largely because they work hard at it, and then they enter a magical world and discover that their skills and work have a lot more impact. Often they have to work hard after they get there to apply their skills. Often the protagonist is a computer hacker and their skills, which in our world only work inside of computers, in a magical context can alter physical / consensual reality. (Examples: Broken Crescent, Web Mage. There are many others. Arguably this pattern goes back at least to The Incomplete Enchanter though success came way too easily for Harold Shea.)

So I think the appeal of this type of fantasy is partly that big effects in our world usually require big causes -- capital investment, megatons of steel, etc. -- even after you know the right "magic spell". In these fantasy worlds -- and in some cases in computer networks -- big, widely distributed effects can be produced just by uttering the magic spell in the right place, or by building a local, inexpensive magical workshop using the right blueprint -- e.g. YouTube.

MIT Press has just published Peter Gr端nwald's The Minimum Description Length Principle. His Preface, Chapter 1, and Chapter 17 are available at that link. Chapter 17 is a comparison of different conceptions of induction.

I don't know this area well enough to judge Peter's wok, but it is certainly informative. Many of his points echo Eliezer's. If you find this topic interesting, Peter's book is definitely worth checking out.

Thanks, Eliezer. Regarding your questions:

1. Is the property objective or subjective? The coarse grained property is objective -- e.g. the largest connected component in percolation. The meta-property that a coarse-grained property is emergent is as objective as the entropy of a configuration. It is model dependent, but in most cases we can't come up with a model that makes it go away.


2. To the extent "emergentness" is subjective, it is because it is relative to a model. So in some cases it could possibly be the result of ignorance of a better model. But we can't claim "emergentness" due to ignorance of any workable model, we can only say "I don't know".


3. Conjecturing that a property is emergent is a guide to inquiry. It is saying "Let's look for a model of this property that's robust under perturbation of the elements of the ensemble, but where the value of the property changes dramatically due to small changes in the average value of some properties of the elements. The model will be based on some highly simplified view of how the elements interact."

Some observations about models of emergent properties:

• We don't have a very good "toolbox" for building them yet. We're getting better, but have a long way to go before we know how to proceed when we conjecture that a property is emergent.


• We are even weaker in the design of emergent systems. That is why even very simple designs with emergent properties, like flocking, seem so striking. This is a serious disability because we depend on systems with major emergent properties, such as markets, and we don't know how to manage them very effectively.


• Often when people claim properties are "mysterious", we could dispell these claims if we could respond with an intuitive account of how those properties emerge. Lacking such an account, we are often vulnerable to mystification.

I do think there is a good deal of commonality among the reasonable comments about what emergence is and also feel the force of Eliezer's request for negative examples.

I'll try to summarize (and of course over-simplify).

When we have a large collection of interacting elements, and we can measure a property of the collection as a whole, in some cases we'd like to call that property emergent, and in some cases we wouldn't.

I can think of three important cases:

• If we can compute the property as a simple sum or average of properties of the individual elements, then it is not emergent. So e.g. mass or temperature are not emergent properties.


• If we need to analyze long chains of structurally specific causal interactions to explain the coarser grained property, then it is not emergent. So e.g. the time telling properties of a mechanical clock, or the arithmetic computing properties of a calculator are not emergent.


• If we can compute the property as a function of the properties of the elements, and it depends sensitively on specific characteristics of their behavior and interaction, but is robust under local perturbations (i.e. doesn't depend on structurally specific causal chains), then the property is emergent. So e.g. percolation is emergent. Also we have some warrant to say that flocking, thinking (as brains do it), social interaction, etc. are emergent.

I'm not claiming these three cases cover all the legitimate positive and negative examples of emergence -- I don't think the concept has crystallized that completely yet. But I do think they answer Eliezer's challenge.

Another, less crisply defined question is whether we should be using "emergence" so defined, and relatedly, whether people are mostly trying to use it in this sense, or whether they are, as Eliezer fears, just using it as a synonym for "magic".

My own feeling is that many users of the term are groping for a clear definition of this general sort, and that they are doing so precisely to avoid having to explain a large class of phenomena by "magic".

The discussion about the "dissipation" of knowledge from generation to generation (or of piety and trust in God, as ZH says) reminds me of Elizabeth Eisenstein's history of the transition to printing. Manual copying (on average) reduces the accuracy of manuscripts. Printing (on average) increases the accuracy, because printers can keep the type made up into pages, and can fix errors as they are found. Thus a type-set manuscript becomes a (more or less reliable) nexus for the accumulation of increasingly reliable judgments.

Eisenstein's account has been questioned, but as far as I've seen, the issues that have been raised really don't undercut her basic point.

Of course digital reproduction pushes this a lot further. (Cue the usual story about self-correcting web processes.) But I don't know of any really thorough analysis of the dynamics of error in different communication media.

Great discussion! Regarding majoritarianism and markets, they are both specific judgment aggregation mechanisms with specific domains of application. We need a general theory of judgment aggregation but I don't know if there are any under development.

In a purely speculative market (i.e. no consumption, just looking to maximize return) prices reflect majoritarian averages, weighted by endowment. Of course endowments change over time based on how good or lucky an investor is, so there is some intrinsic reputation effect. Also, investors can go bankrupt, which is an extreme reputation effect. If investors reproduce you can get a pretty "smart" system, but I'm sure it has systematic limitations -- the need to understand those limitations is a good example of why we need a general theory of judgment aggregation.

I'd like to see an iterated jelly bean guessing game, with the individual guesses weighted by previous accuracy of each individual. I bet the results would quickly get better than just a flat average. Note that (unlike economies) there's no fixed quantity of "weight" here. Conserved exchanges are not a necessary part of this kind of aggregation.

On the other hand if you let individuals see each other's guesses, I bet accuracy would get worse. (This is more similar to markets.) The problem is that there's be herding effects, which are individually rational (for guessers trying to maximize their score) but which on average reduce the overall quality of judgment. This is an intrinsic problem with markets. Maybe we should see this as an example of Eliezer's point in another post about marginal zero-sum competition.

Nick Bostrom's point is important: We should regard the induced competition as a negative externality of the process that induces the competition -- grant writing, consideration for promotion, etc. The "correct" solution as Bostrom points out is to internalize the cost.

I think good companies do this quite carefully with the inducements they build into their culture -- they are looking to only generate competition that will produce net benefits to the company (not always the individuals).

Conversely, there are well known shop floor self-management processes (workers punishing each other for competing to win management favor) that form to prevent exactly this kind of zero-sum competition (zero sum from the worker's point of view since they don't get a share of the increased profits).

I would bet that in at least some granting processes, informal regulation like this arises to control the costs to applicants. It would be especially easy in the context of peer review.

This is a reasonable interpretation of behavior that produces "old boys clubs" -- the members of the club have formed a coalition to reduce their costs of marginal zero-sum behavior. Of course it imposes other costs...