I have a solution to the problems of other minds, actually. But it requires you to recognize that you are conscious yourself, which is not necessarily possible for all people.
Check: physicalism.com And: qualiacomputing.com/2015/03/31/a-solution-to-the-problem-of-other-minds/
Yeah, I did not expect 15-20 min, with no indication of the progress thus far. Maybe if it showed "page 10 of 25" or something...
I think there are 3 pages.
Warning: the survey is very long, I gave up after a few pages.
Also, fix the links, half of them point to lesswrong.
The average time people take to complete the survey is 20 minutes, with most people taking 15 and a long tail of people taking up to several hours, presumably because they went on to do something else for a while and returned to complete it later.
Thanks for mentioning the problem with the links. Fixed.
This is an awesome, awesome, awesome post! I think you have nailed a few important axis of variance that we usually neglect.
Now, precisely because you are still part of the community and can accept rationalist memes, you are an important sample to learn what the rationalist community is not. At least what it is not necessarily.
Would you, and any other self-identified rationalist sidekick, please fill out this survey?
I am analyzing how personality is related to beliefs about consciousness and memetic affiliations. If only heroes fill out the questionnaire, I may associate traits that are not actually relevant for rationality with rationality.
Personally, I think that the difference you are pointing out ultimately comes down to testosterone, and relatedly, Aspergers.
[Update]: I received 720+ responses to the survey. Thanks everyone who helped! I have also concluded the statistical analysis (factor analysis, mediation analysis, clustering and prediction). I have not, however, done the writeup. This may take some time since I just started working. It will be done :) I just wanted to let people know this is the current stage.
Hello everyone!
My name is Andrés Gómez Emilsson, and I'm the former president of the Stanford Transhumanist Association. I just graduated from Stanford with a masters in computational psychology (my undergraduate degree was in Symbolic Systems, the major with the highest LessWronger density at Stanford and possibly of all universities).
I have a request for the LessWrong community: I would like as many of you as possible to fill out this questionnaire I created to help us understand what causes the diversity of values in transhumanism. The purpose of this questionnaire is twofold:
The first part is not specific to transhumanism, and it will be useful whether or not the second is fruitful. What do I mean by the state-space of background assumptions? The best way to get a sense of what this would look like is to see the results of a previous study I conducted: State-space of drug effects. There I asked participants to "rate the effects of a drug they have taken" by selecting the degree to which certain phrases describe the effects of the drug. I then conducted factor analysis on the dataset and extracted 6 meaningful factors accounting for more than 50% of the variance. Finally, I mapped the centroid of the responses of each drug in the state-space defined, so that people could visually compare the relative position of all of the substances in a normalized 6-dimensional space.
I don't know what the state-space of background assumptions about consciousness looks like, but hopefully the analysis of the responses to this survey will reveal them.
The second part is specific to transhumanism, and I think it should concerns us all. To the extent that we are participating in the historical debate about how the future of humanity should be, it is important for us to know what makes people prefer certain views over others. To give you a fictitious example of a possible effect I might discover: It may turn out that being very extraverted predisposes you to be uninterested in Artificial Intelligence and its implications. If this is the case, we could pin-point possible sources of bias in certain communities and ideological movements, thereby increasing the chances of making more rational decisions.
The survey is scheduled to be closed in 2 days, on July 30th 2015. That said, I am willing to extend the deadline until August 2nd if I see that the number of LessWrongers answering the questionnaire is not slowing down by the 30th. [July 31st edit: I extend the deadline until midnight (California time) of August 2nd of 2015.]
Thank you all!
Andrés :)
Here are some links about my work in case you are interested and want to know more:
Psychophysics for Psychedelic Research
Psychedelic Perception of Visual Textures
I'm currently running a study on personality and consciousness in the transhumanist community. The questionnaire also inquires into the possible effects of Aspergers in memetic affiliations.
Of course, LessWrongers are an important piece of the puzzle. Please help me by answering this survey:
qualiacomputing.com/2015/07/18/state-space-of-background-assumptions/
My guess is that there are several variables that are indeed positively correlated throughout the entire range, but are particularly highly correlated at the very top. Why not? I'm pretty sure we can come up with a list.
Did you know that we already have instances of things that pass the Turing test?
And more surprisingly, that we don't generally consider them conscious?
And the most amazing of all: That they have existed for probably at the very least a hundred thousand years (but possibly much more)?
I am talking about the characters in our dreams
They fool us into thinking that they are conscious! That they are the subjects of their own worlds just as people presumably are when awake.
You can have a very eloquent conversation with a dream character without ever noticing there is any apparent lack of consciousness. You can even ask them about their own consciousness (I have done so).
The riddle to why this is possible involves a very deep state of affairs that we are scarcely aware of in daily life. Namely, that your phenomenal self is, just as well, a dream character.
sorry
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Took the survey, but I was very unsure of what a lot of the options meant. "Consciousness is different than the subject?" That doesn't make much sense to me as a sentence, much less a concept.
I also didn't know a lot of the divisions between the groups to identify with - there were 5 or 6 subcategories of 'transhumanist', and I didn't want to take 10 minutes to look up which ones I am. I would have left those blank or hit a 'I don't know what this is' button, but the survey didn't allow it.
"Consciousness is different than the subject?" This and many other ones are tricky. But I know people who harbor strong opinions about them. In the end, it does not matter vey much that people from all over the place disagree a lot about those questions... that only means they are not really measuring any important latent trait. On the other hand, there are quite a few questions that people disagree on predictably. In other words, they can be used to determine the memetic cluster to which you belong.
Thanks for the heads up. I know of a statistical method to reduce the bias provided by lazy users :)