Nubulous

Slight variant: Humour is a form of teaching, in which interesting errors are pointed out. It doesn't need to involve an outsider, and there's no particular class of error, other than that the participants should find the error important.
If the guy sitting behind you starts moaning and grunting, if it's a mistake (e.g. he's watching porn on his screen and has forgotten he's not alone) then it's funny, whereas if it's not a mistake, and there's something wrong with him, then it isn't.
Humour as teaching may explain why a joke isn't funny twice - you can only learn a thing once. Evolutionarily, it may have started as some kind of warning, that a person was making a dangerous mistake, and then getting generalised.

Why would anyone choose the map rather than the territory as their foundation?

I couldn't agree more, which is why I was attempting to discourage people from doing so.

Why engage in science if you are not willing to accept the inferences that it makes about reality? Am I not going to believe in atoms because it doesn't match what I see with my eyes?

But the justification for any physical theory is precisely that it predicts what you see with your own eyes. Indeed, that's what a physical theory is - a means of predicting what you will experience. Atom... (read more)

Evidence implies observation. Observation implies conscious experience. So your evidence for a world independent of conscious experience turns out to be ... conscious experience. I expect you can see why that isn't going to work.

The only proposed explanation of consciousness I've seen on Less Wrong is "maybe if we arrange stuff in the right way, consciousness will happen". Even if true, it's not enough of an explanation to enable argument about it.

Dennet

Dennett presents a resolutely functionalist description of experience, then tells us that nothing resembling qualia can be found within it, to the great surprise of no-one at all.

think that qualia are real things

To believe that the phenomenal world, the world you actually live in, is a fiction, while an invented &... (read more)

When alleged rationalists experience an "irk", because someone has reminded them that their theories describe a world utterly unlike the one that actually exists, we call this "cognitive dissonance". When they vote it down we call it "denial".

Since we can presumably generate the appropriate signals in the optic nerve from scratch if we choose, light and its wavelength have nothing whatsoever to do with color.

This site is full of people interested in implementing intelligence (and even themselves) on a new substrate .... but they're not going to be interested in the relationship between physics and thought ?

Indeed. (I thought it would be a bit of a spoiler to be more specific)

I found this interesting pdf of a discussion involving Jaynes (and Dennett) and it makes clear what he believed, which was that the change was mostly cultural, and that uncontacted tribes might be bicameral, but there were none left. ( I'm not sure this is true - anyone reading this have an anthropologist handy ? )
Also contains a very odd fact (?) about children.

EDIT: Oops, didn't notice it was on Jaynes' own website. So presumably quite a lot more stuff there.

How does Jaynes explain the lack of this kind of thinking among peoples who have culture and genes unchanged in the last 3000 years ?

It wasn't intended to be a refutation. The technical claims of the papers may be correct, they just aren't, as the linked article claims, about consciousness.

If you want to integrate the phenomenal into your ontology, is there any reason you've stopped short of phenomenalism ?

EDIT: Not sarcasm - quite serious.

I came up with the following while pondering the various probability puzzles of recent weeks, and I found it clarified some of my confusion about the issues, so I thought I'd post it here to see if anyone else liked it:

Consider an experiment in which we toss a coin, to chose whether a person is placed into a one room hotel or duplicated and placed into a two room hotel. For each resulting instance of the person, we repeat the procedure. And so forth, repeatedly. The graph of this would be a tree in which the persons were edges and the hotels nodes. Ea... (read more)

Because if you agree that the correct way to measure the probability is as the occurrence ratio along the path, the degree of splitting is only significant to the extent that it affects the occurrence ratio, which in this case it doesn't. The coin toss chooses equiprobably which hotel comes next, then it's on to the next coin toss to equiprobably choose which hotel comes next, and so forth. So each path has on average equal numbers of each hotel, going forwards.

I came up with the following while pondering the various probability puzzles of recent weeks, and I found it clarified some of my confusion about the issues, so I thought I'd post it here to see if anyone else liked it:

Consider an experiment in which we toss a coin, to chose whether a person is placed into a one room hotel or duplicated and placed into a two room hotel. For each resulting instance of the person, we repeat the procedure. And so forth, repeatedly. The graph of this would be a tree in which the persons were edges and the hotels nodes. Eac... (read more)

When we speak of a subjective probability in a person-multiplying experiment such as this, we (or at least, I) mean "The outcome ratio experienced by a person who was randomly chosen from the resulting population of the experiment, then was used as the seed for an identical experiment, then was randomly chosen from the resulting population, then was used as the seed.... and so forth, ad infinitum".

I'm not confident that we can speak of having probabilities in problems which can't in theory be cast in this form.

In other words, the probabilit... (read more)

I don't know what I meant either. I remember it making perfect sense at the time, but that was after 35 hours without sleep, so.....

The answer to the second part is no, I would expect a 50:50 chance in that case.
In case you were thinking of this as a counterexample, I also expect a 50:50 chance in all the cases there from B onwards. The claim that the probabilities are unchanged by the coin toss is wrong, since the coin toss changes the number of participants, and we already accepted that the number of participants was a factor in the probability when we assigned the 99% probability in the first place.

You're reading a little more into what I said than was actually there. I was just remarking on the change of dependence between the parts of the problem, without having thought through what the consequences would be.

Now that I have thought it through, I agree with the presumptuous philosopher in this case. However I don't agree with him about the size of the universe. The difference being that in the hotel case we want a subjective probability, whereas in the universe case we want an objective one. Subjectively, there's a very high probability of findin... (read more)

The most obvious difference is that the original problem involved the smaller or the larger set of people whereas this one uses the smaller and the larger.