That's a Yudkowskian concept that might be applied for example to the question "why do I have free-will?" - instead we can ask "why do I think I have free will?".

But if both parties to a debate were to accept that we do in fact have free will, and proceed to argue from that, then I would not be at fault for assuming the existence of free will (standing in for qualia) as a real thing - and proceeding to discuss unique problems surrounding the concept of free will.

If the existence of qualia were not a shared premise in the Yudkowsky-Chalmers debate, then it would be an entirely different debate about eliminative materialism.

Since we almost all agree that qualia are real, we can have arguments about the nature of qualia. It is then legitimate to use the fact that although we agree upon the existence of qualia, we can't define qualia, as an argument for the special irreducible status of qualia.

If we could define qualia reductively, that would disprove my point. But I believe that even if you were to use the technique of "righting a wrong question", it still wouldn't enable you to achieve this. This is strange, because the technique does indeed help in defining other confusing concepts. In other words, it would delight me if you managed to use this technique to demonstrate that qualia are reducible, but I don't expect you to be able to do so and that is part of my argument.

There are, as I see it, three solutions to the apparent problem of defining qualia:

1. You continue to believe that qualia are both real and reducible. When we investigate the brain further, we will obtain a reduction of qualia.
2. You deny the existence of qualia.
3. You suspect that qualia are both real and irreducible.

I lean towards 3 instead of 1, and reject 2 as ludicrous. You seem to prefer either 1 or 2.

I don't think the attribution is right. I am always surprised by what does and doesn't get upvoted, which means I'm poorly calibrated. Something useful I post to discussion after spending 20 hours on it gets 5 upvotes, and then something useless like this discussion post that took me 60 seconds to post gets 25+ upvotes. :)

All the information you need is already out there, and I have this suspicion you have probably read a good deal of it. You probably know more about being happy than everybody else you know and yet you're not happy. You realize that if you're a smart rational agent you should just be able to figure out what you want to do and then just do it, right?

1. figure out what makes you happy
2. do more of those things
3. ???
4. happiness manifests itself

There is no step (3). So why does it feel more complex than it really is?

What is the kind of response you're really looking for when you start this topic? Do you (subconsciously) want people to just tell you to buck up and deal with it? Do you (subconsciously) want people to tell you not to worry and that it's all going to be alright? Or are you just in some kind of quarter-life crisis because you don't really see clearly where you're going with your life and the problems you have are just side-effects of that?

• Maybe you need to be held accountable for your actions?

• Maybe you need additional responsibility?

• Maybe you need a vacation?

• Maybe you need to grow as a person in another manner?

We can't answer these questions for you and you know we can't answer these questions for you. Yet you ask us anyway. It doesn't make sense.

Now, I can make a complete shot-in-the-dark guess about your situation and make the following assumptions:

1. you're in social isolation
2. you spend much time on intellectual issues
3. you're not producing, you're almost exclusively consuming intellectual stuff
4. you're not eating as well as you should
5. you're letting lazy habits chip away at your life on the edges
6. you tell yourself that there's nothing wrong with you and that you should just man up
7. you hate the fact that you procrastinate and yet you keep procrastinating
8. every time when you feel you're making progress it doesn't last and you regress every time to square one.
9. you have trouble making lasting changes in every single aspect of your life

Psychological help doesn't work because you don't need people to explain this stuff to you, you've done your homework already and you know all this.

I'd be happy to talk to you over skype if you want, we can talk about whatever you want to talk about. For some people talking about their problems really helps, especially if they otherwise bottle it all up.

What is the opposite of happiness? Sadness? No. Just as love and hate are two sides of the same coin, so are happiness and sadness. Crying out of happiness is a perfect illustration of this. The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is - here's the clincher - boredom...

The question you should be asking isn't 'What do I want?' or 'What are my goals?' but 'What would excite me?'

Remember - boredom is the enemy, not some abstract 'failure.' (T. Ferris)

I'd like to quote one of the comments on lukeprog's post:

These sorts of statements are, unfortunately, generally the refuge of the intellectually lazy and dishonest: “If you just knew this stuff [usually related to math and science, though other things among certain continentally inclined segments of the population] you’d see that your religious beliefs were false! I don’t have to explain why this is the case, it just is.” I don’t think you’re intellectually lazy or dishonest, so I’m hoping this is a temporary lapse of judgment. In any case you know, as well as I do, that there are quite a lot of people who are familiar with the subjects you cite who do take religious hypotheses quite seriously. This statement, then, is simply and definitively disproved by widely available empirical evidence: “And if they have time to consume enough math and science, then The God Question just fades away as not even a question worth talking about.”

That seems right to me. I have been reading the sequences for a few months now, and I see how the God question could fade away, but where is the argument that shows it must fade away? If someone has a formal argument based on the Kolmogorov complexity of God or whatever, I could better decide if I agree with the priors.

Clarification: the outside world does interact with the inside, but not in any way that depends on whether the cat is alive or dead. (If the contents of the box are positively charged electrically, they can continue to exert a force on objects outside. But if the cat is positively charged†, then the box needs to shield its influence on the electromagnetic field so that you can't tell from outside if it's moving or not.)

† That is, if it's a cation.

My level of understanding is insufficient to debate QM on a serious level, but I'd be very interested in a high level exchange about QM here on LW. If you disagree with Eliezer's views on QM I think it is a good thing to say that explicitly, because when you study the different interpretations it's important to keep them apart (the subject is confusing[1] enough as is).

I agree that such an exchange would be useful. Unfortunately it would be hard to have with Mitchell_Porter because of the reputation he has gained for his evangelism of qualia and Quantum Monadology. People who have sufficient knowledge and interest in physics to be useful in such an exchange are less likely to become significantly involved if they think they are just arguing with a crackpot (again).

My understanding is that regardless of the interpretation you put behind the quantum measurements you have to calculate as if there are multiple worlds

You have to do this in any probabilistic calculation, especially when you have chains of dependent probabilities. The mere fact that, e.g., the behavior of a ball bouncing around on a roulette wheel can be understood in terms of branching possible worlds, is not usually interpreted as implying that those possible worlds actually exist, or that they interact with this one.

The peculiarity of quantum probability is that you can get cancellation of probability amplitudes (the complex numbers at the step just before probabilities are computed). Thus in the double slit experiment, if you try to analyze what happens in a way analogous to Galton's Quincunx, you end up saying that particles don't arrive in the dark areas, because the possible paths 'cancel' at the amplitude level. This certainly makes no sense for probabilities, which are always nonnegative and so their sum is monotonically increasing - adding a possible path to an outcome can never decrease the overall probability of that outcome occurring. Except in quantum mechanics; but that just means that we are using the wrong concepts to understand it, not that there is such a thing as a negative probability.

However, it is not as if we know that the only way to get quantum probabilities is by supposing the existence and interaction of parallel worlds in the multiverse, and in fact all the attempts to make that idea work in detail end up in a conceptual shambles (see: measure problem, relativity problem, preferred basis problem). We don't need a multiverse explanation; we just need a single-world explanation that gives rise to the same probability distributions that are presently obtained from wavefunctions. The Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft has some ideas in this direction which deserve to be much better known; they are at least as important as anything in the "famous" interpretations associated with Bohm, Everett, and Cramer.

For instance that the world splits and that in one world the cat is alive and in the other the cat is dead. In one world you'll observe the cat being alive and in the other world you observe the cat as dead. Both worlds are equally real and in both worlds you have the sensation of being in the only real world.

Don't take the "splitting" too literally either. Otherwise you've merely replaced the problem of when a wave function collapses, with the problem of when the worlds splits.

That makes reasonable sense, but I assume that the "box" can't just be a box, it has to be a completely sealed environment, where the cat particles can't even react with each other? Or at least with any adjaecent gas particles or passing neutrinos or whatever?

This would be probably be a good place for me to inquire what the hell Schrodinger's Cat actually means. I've never fully understood it.

Is the cat, according to the theorized (proven?) model supposed to be literally alive and dead, or is that just a metaphor for a deeper level physics thing that doesn't have an obvious analog in the typical human's model of the world? If it's a metaphor, or a partial metaphor, what exactly is it a metaphor for?