How many axioms do you have? Language has thousands of words in it, and logical inference will never result in a statement using words that were not in the axioms.
Notice that this doesn't prevent us from knowing thousands of true things and employing a vocabulary of thousands of words.
Sorry, but I'm not sure what your comment has to do with mine. Please expand.
There is no need to link to Eliezer's posts; I have read all of them, and the ones I disagree with, I will continue to disagree with even after reading them again.
My point about "please stop commenting" is that if something is not a lower level thing, then you cannot describe it lower level terms. That is not because of confusion, but because of what you are talking about.
There is no need to link to Eliezer's posts; I have read all of them, and the ones I disagree with, I will continue to disagree with even after reading them again.
The links are for the benefit of others who may be reading my comments. That being said, what exactly do you disagree with about dissolving the question?
if something is not a lower level thing
Assuming this "something" you're talking about is consciousness, I disagree. Strongly.
That is not because of confusion, but because of what you are talking about.
If you're claiming that you're not confused about consciousness and that you know what you're talking about, then you should be able to transmit that understanding to others through words. If you can't, I submit that you are in fact confused.
The question is whether the GLUT is conscious. I don't believe that it is.
Perhaps it was created by a conscious process. But that process is gone now. I don't believe that torturing the GLUT is wrong, for example, because the conscious entity has already been tortured. Nothing I do to the GLUT can causally interact with the conscious process that created it.
This is why I say the origin of the GLUT doesn't matter. I'm not saying that I believe GLUTs are actually likely to exist, let alone appear from randomness. But the origin of a thing shouldn't matter to the question of whether or not it is conscious.
If we can observe every part of the GLUT, but know nothing about it's origin, we should still be able to determine if it's conscious or not. The question shouldn't depend on its past history, but only it's current state.
I believe it might be possible for a non conscious entity to create a GLUT, or at least fake consciousness. Like a simple machine learning algorithm that imitates human speech or text. Or AIXI with it's unlimited computing power, that doesn't do anything other than brute force. I wouldn't feel bad about deleting an artificial neural network, or destroying an AIXI.
The question that bothers me is what about a bigger, more human like neural network? Or a more approximate, less brute force version of AIXI? When does an intelligence algorithm gain moral weight? This question bothers me a lot, and I think it's what people are trying to get at when they talk about GLUTs.
So, the question being asked here appears to be, "Can a GLUT be considered conscious?" I claim that this question is actually a stand-in for multiple different questions, each of which I will address individually.
1) Do the processes that underlie the GLUT's behavior (input/output) cause it to possess subjective awareness?
Without a good understanding of what exactly "subjective awareness" is and how it arises, this question is extremely difficult to answer. At a glance, however, it seems intuitively plausible (indeed, probable) that whatever processes underlie "subjective awareness", they need to be more complex than simply looking things up in an (admittedly enormous) database. So, I'm going to answer this one with a tentative "no".
2) Does the GLUT's existence imply the presence of consciousness (subjective awareness) elsewhere in the universe?
To answer this question, let's consider the size of a GLUT that contains all possible inputs and outputs for a conscious being. Now consider the set of all possible GLUTs of that size. Of those possible GLUTs, only a vanishingly minuscule fraction encode anything even remotely resembling the behavior of a conscious being. The probability of such a GLUT being produced by accident is virtually 0. (I think the actual probability should be on the order of 1 / K, where K is the Kolmogorov complexity of the brain of the being in question, but I could be wrong.)
As such, it's more or less impossible for the GLUT to have been produced by chance; it's indescribably more likely that there exists some other conscious process in the universe from which the GLUT's specifications were taken. In other words, if you ever encounter a GLUT that seems to behave like a conscious being, you can deduce with probability ~1 that consciousness exists somewhere in that universe. Thus, the answer to this question is "yes" with probability ~1.
3) Assuming that the GLUT was produced by chance and that the conscious being whose behavior it emulates does not and will not ever physically exist, can it still be claimed that the GLUT's existence implies the presence of consciousness somewhere?
This is the most ill-defined question of the lot, but hopefully I at least managed to render it into something comprehensible (if not easily answered!). To answer it, first we have to understand that while a GLUT may not be conscious itself, it certainly encodes a conscious process, i.e. you could theoretically specify a conscious process embedded in a physical medium (say, a brain, or maybe a computer) that, when run with a certain input, will produce the exact output that the GLUT produces given that input. (This is not a trivial statement, by the way; the set of GLUTs that fulfill this condition is tiny relative to the space of possible GLUTs.)
However, suppose we don't have that process available to us, only the GLUT itself. Then the question above is simply asking, "In what sense can the process encoded by the GLUT be said to 'exist'?" This is still a hard question, but it has one major advantage over the old phrasing: we can draw a direct parallel between this question and the debate over mathematical realism. In other words: if you accept mathematical realism, you should also be fine with accepting that the conscious process encoded by the GLUT exists in a Platonic sense, and if you reject it, you should likewise reject the existence of said process. Now, like most debates in philosophy, this one is unsettled--but at least now you know that your answer to the original question regarding GLUTs concretely depends on your answer to another question--namely, "Do you accept mathematical realism?", rather than nebulously floating out there in the void. (Note that since I consider myself a mathematical realist, I would answer "yes" to both questions. Your answer may differ.)
4) Under standard human values (e.g. the murder of a conscious being is generally considered immoral, etc.), should the destruction of a GLUT be considered immoral?
In my opinion, this question is actually fairly simple to answer. Recall that a GLUT, while not being conscious itself, encodes a conscious process. This means (among other things) that we could theoretically use the information contained in the look-up table to construct that conscious being, even if that being never existed before hand. Since destroying the GLUT would remove our ability to construct said being, we can clearly classify it as an immoral act (though whether it should be considered as immoral as the murder of a preexisting conscious being is still up for debate).
It seems to me that the four questions listed above suffice to describe all of the disguised queries the original question ("Can a GLUT be considered conscious?") stood for. Assuming I answered each of them in a sufficiently thorough manner, the original question should be resolved as well--and ideally, there shouldn't even be the feeling that there's a question left. Of course, that's if I did this thing correctly.
So, did I miss anything?
The idea of a Tablet that simply states moral truths without explanation (without even the backing of an authority, as in divine command theory) is a form of ethical objectivism that is hard to defend, but without generalising to all ethical objectivism. For instance, if objectivism works in a more math-like way, the a counterintuitive moral truth would be backed by a step-by-step argument leading the reader to the surprising conclusion in the way the reader of maths is led to surprising conclusions such as the Banach Tarski paradox. The Tablet argument shows, if anything, that truth without justification is a problem, but that is not unique to ethical objectivism.
For instance, consider a mathematical Tablet that lists a series of surprising theorems without justification. That reproduces the problem without bringing in ethics at all.
How do you get a statement with "shoulds" in it using pure logical inference if none of your axioms (the laws of physics) have "shoulds" in them? And if the laws of physics have "shoulds" in them, how is that different from having a tablet?
Please stop commenting. Now try to present your argument.
But more importantly, VAuroch defined clear definition as describing how experience would be different. Experience cannot be tabooed if that is what clear definition means.
As my username might imply, I am not VAuroch.
But more importantly, the point of Taboo is to describe the thing you're talking about in lower level terms, terms that don't generate the same confusion that the original concept does. It is in this manner that confusions are dissolved. If you can't do this with a certain topic, that's evidence you don't fully understand the topic yet--and as far as I'm aware, no one can do this with consciousness/qualia, which is what I was trying to get at.
No one can prove you wrong. But your pretended belief is unreasonable, in the same way that it is unreasonable to believe that the sun will not rise tomorrow, even though no one can prove that it will.
It is also for the same reasons; the argument that the sun will rise tomorrow is inductive, and similarly the argument that others are conscious.
It may even be the case that infants originally believe your argument, and then come to the opposite conclusion through induction. I know someone who says that he clearly remembers that when he was three years old, he believed that he alone was conscious, because the behavior of others was too dissimilar to his own, e.g. his parents did not go and eat the ice cream in the freezer, even though there was no one to stop them.
No one can prove you wrong. But your pretended belief is unreasonable, in the same way that it is unreasonable to believe that the sun will not rise tomorrow, even though no one can prove that it will.
In that case, the Zombie World argument is just as unreasonable--which is what I was getting at in the first place.
That's easy to describe. If I have any experience in the future, I have qualia. If I have no experience in the future, I have no qualia. That's the difference.
Chalmers does believe that consciousness is a direct product of physical states. The dispute is about whether consciousness is identical to physical states.
Chalmers does not believe that p-zombies are possible in the sense that you could make one in the universe. He only believes it's possible that under a different set of psychophysical laws, they could exist.
I claim that it is "conceivable" for there to be a universe whose psychophysical laws are such that only the collection of physical states comprising my brainstates are conscious, and the rest of you are all p-zombies. Note that this argument is exactly as plausible as the standard Zombie World argument (which is to say, not very) since it relies on the exact same logic; as such, if you accept the standard Zombie World argument, you must accept mine as well. Now then: I claim that by sheer miraculous coincidence, this universe that we are living in possesses the exact psychophysical laws described above (even though there is no way for my body typing this right now to know that), and hence I am the only one in the universe who actually experiences qualia. Also, I would say this even if we didn't live in such a universe.
Prove me wrong.
If you believe that I am trolling you, the correct response is not to reply, not keep "feeding the trolls".
An observation: Every conversation between us that has ended, has ended because I chose not to reply. The same is true of every other conversation I see you involved in. You're incapable of not replying.
...Well, that's one way to get someone to stop replying.
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I don't know what you mean by the "Zombie World argument." No thinks that the real world is a zombie world.
Okay, here's the Zombie World argument, paraphrased:
And now here's my argument, paraphrased:
If you accept the Zombie World argument, you have to accept my argument; the two are exactly analogous. Of course, the contrapositive of the above statement is also true: if you reject my argument, you must reject the Zombie World argument. In effect, my argument is a reductio ad absurdum of the Zombie World argument; it shows that given the right motivation, you can twist the Zombie World argument to include/exclude anything you want as conscious. Just say [insert-universe-here] is "conceivable" (whatever that means), and the rest of the logic plays out identically.
P. S. One last thing--this part of your comment here?
If the Zombie World exists (which I don't believe it does--but if it did), all of the people in that universe (who don't think their world is a zombie world) are dead wrong.