Ask LW: ω-self-aware systems
I was having a conversation with a religious friend of mine who argued that even if materialism was true, we would never be able to fully understand or replicate human intelligence because a physical system cannot understand itself--it would need to use the resources contained within it to perform that understanding, excluding the possibility of full understanding.
I countered with the following argument. Assume you are what your neurons are doing, and suppose you wish to extend your consciousness to fully grasp yourself (be aware of the larger systems functioning of your neuronal circuits, as well as possibly the smaller biochemical details, and the larger conceptual maps). Since consciousness offers us gestalt parallel information processing, and we will assume it can be extended to arbitrarily large concurrent information flow, one could create a (much larger) co-brain which consciously perceives all the functioning of your original brain. Now you can identify with your old consciousness and the newly added (much more expansive) co-consciousness.
The problem is that now you do not understand the full brain & co-brain system. But you can perform the process again, adding a co-co-brain which gives a realtime gestalt understanding of the co-brain consciousness. Since this process may be performed to arbitrarily large nesting levels, we can say that any physical system that is like the brain is ω-self-aware, with n-self-aware referring to the nesting level n. Since we do not expect the neural structures required to encode an n-self-aware system in an n+1-self-aware system to be any functionally different, we can say we've satisfactorily produced a physical system with full understanding of itself. Denying this would be equivalent to claiming we do not understand the natural numbers because we have not written every one of them down.
Does anyone see any trouble with this argument?
The rationalist's checklist
Doctor Peter Pronovost has managed to single-handedly reduce the infection rates in ICU facilities nationwide from numbers like fourteen percent or twenty percent to zero. His solution is idiotically simple: a checklist. In a process as complex as ICU treatment, doctors perform chained simple steps very many times, and it can be easy to forget a step. These things add up. Read the article before continuing.
In their phenomenal book, The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz discuss a pattern they have discovered among all top performers, ranging from sports to music and business. Beyond a certain level, all top performers had established positive rituals for relaxation and deliberate practice. These positive rituals were daily ingrained habits and allowed them to surpass the merely excellent performers.
It is difficult to make use of most Less Wrong posts in terms of changing one's behavior. Even if you integrate a lesson fully, you will still miss steps on occasion. I propose we suggest checklists for various recurring activities that will offload these responsibilities from conscious thought to its much more reliable brother, ingrained habit. Fortunately, we should not need many checklists.
An example of a checklist is a morning routine:
- Short exercise (40 pushups, 50 situps)
- Shower
- Daily cosmetics (brush teeth, shave, skin moisturizer, hair forming cream, male scented lotion, deodorant)
- Make breakfast, which can be depending on what day it is mod 3: Black mango tea as well as
- Omelette with cheese and tomatoes
- Cereal with a side of oatmeal
- A piece of fruit and yoghurt
- Brief non-work and non-study related reading, for example, a novel
Another example of a checklist is during a conversation with a non-rationalist on the 5-second level: If you feel strong affect (anger or annoyance) at someone's point in a debate,
- Say "Let me think about this for a second."
- Are you two on the same inferential level? If not, backtrack by trying to bridge it first.
- Have either of you committed a cognitive bias? (This may not be so helpful, given this is a potential fifty-item checklist!) If so, inform them about them about it in a friendly manner. ("Ah, I see! You have to be careful here because..." or "Oh, oops, I had forgotten here about...")
Think of this as a re-run of the 5-second level post, with an outreach towards more than just specific rationality skills. The checklists that are not required to be performed extemporaneously (i.e., not in conversation) should be like a physical checklist, that one can write down and should go through every time.
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)