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I only see three options. Deny that anything is actually green; become a dualist; or (supervillain voice) join me, and together, we can make a new ontology.
Sure I'll join you; what color is the supervillain sidekick's uniform?
In response to
State your physical account of experienced color
Upvoted for being a completely reasonable comment given that you haven't read through the entirety of a thread that's gotten totally monstrous.
However, I predict in advance that 1) this evidence is based on words that a man wrote in an ancient book,
Only partly right.
2) I will find this evidence dubious.
Of course you will. If I told you that God himself appeared to me personally and told me everything in the Bible was true, you'd find that dubious, too. Perhaps even more dubious.
Where, then, is the chain of entangled events leading from the state of the universe to the state of your mind?
Already partly in other posts on this thread (actually largely in other posts on this thread), buried somewhere, among something. You'll forgive me for not wanting to retype multiple pages, I hope.
Upvoted for being a completely reasonable comment given that you haven't read through the entirety of a thread that's gotten totally monstrous.
Ah, apologies if I've completely missed the point (which is entirely possible).
When I search for keyword: rationality, I get HPMoR for #2, yudkowsky.net for #5, and What Do We Mean By "Rationality"? for #7. Not sure how much my search history is affecting this.
I get exactly the same result.
For the same reason that if I had a see-an-image-of-Grandpa button, and pushed it, I wouldn't count the fact that I saw him as evidence that he's somehow still alive, but if I saw him right now spontaneously, I would.
For the same reason that if I had a see-an-image-of-Grandpa button, and pushed it, I wouldn't count the fact that I saw him as evidence that he's somehow still alive, but if I saw him right now spontaneously, I would.
Imagine that you have a switch in your home which responds to your touch by turning on a lamp (this probably won't take much imagination). One day this lamp, which was off, suddenly and for no apparent reason turns on. Would you assign supernatural or mundane causes to this event?
Now this isn't absolute proof that the switch wasn't turned on by something otherworldly; perhaps it responds to both mundane and supernatural causes. But, well, if I may be blunt, Occam's Razor. If your best explanations are "the Hand of Zeus" and "Mittens, my cat," then ...
I tried typing those queries (and related ones) into google, to see if someone could easily find some sort of starting point for rationality. "How to think better" yields many lists of tips that are mediocre at best (things like: exercise, become more curious, etc). About halfway down the page, interestingly, is a post on CSA, but it's not a great one. It seems to mostly say that to get better at thinking you first have to realize that you are not naturally a fantastic thinker. This is true, but it's not something that points the way forward towards bayesian rationality. (by the way, "how to figure out what's true" provides essentially nothing of value, at least on the first page).
In order for someone to go down the path you've identified on their own, as a curious individual, they would have to have a substantial amount of luck to get started. Either they would have to have somehow stumbled upon enough of an explanation of heuristics and biases that they realized the importance of them (which is a combination of two fairly unlikely events), or they would have to be studying those subjects for some reason other than their instrumental value. Someone who started off curiously studying AI would have a much better chance at finding this path, for this reason. AI researchers in this instance, have a tremendous advantage when it comes to rationality over researchers in the hard sciences, engineers, etc.
I'm not an expert, but with this in mind it should be a rather simple matter to apply a few strategies so that LW shows up near the top of relevant search results. At the very least we could create wiki pages with titles like "How to Think Better" and "How to Figure Out What's True" with links to relevant articles or sequences. The fact that rationality has little obvious commercial value should work in our favor by keeping competing content rather sparse.
Every time you applying the Litany of Gendlin to an unsubstantiated assertion, a fairie drops dead.
I think this is a joke, ish, right? Because it's quite witty. /tangent
You're doing it wrong.
I mentioned some evidence elsewhere in the thread.
"Ish," yes. I have to admit I've had a hard time navigating this enormous thread, and haven't read all of it, including the evidence of demonic influence you're referring to. However, I predict in advance that 1) this evidence is based on words that a man wrote in an ancient book, and that 2) I will find this evidence dubious.
Two equally unlikely propositions should require equally strong evidence to be believed. Neither dragons nor demons exist, yet you assert that demons are real. Where, then, is the chain of entangled events leading from the state of the universe to the state of your mind? Honest truth-seeking is about dispassionately scrutinizing that chain, as an outsider would, and allowing others to scrutinize, evaluate, and verify it.
I was a Mormon missionary at 19. I used to give people copies of the Book of Mormon, testify of my conviction that it was true, and invite them to read it and pray about it. A few did (Most people in Iowa and Illinois aren't particularly vulnerable to Mormonism). A few of those people eventually (usually after meeting with us several times) came to feel as I did, that the book was true. I told those people that the feeling they felt was the Holy Spirit, manifesting the truth to them. And if that book is true, I told them, then Joseph Smith must have been a true prophet. And as a true prophet, the church that he established must be the Only True Church, according to Joseph's revelations and teachings. I would then invite them to be baptized (which was the most important metric in the mission), and to become a member of the LDS church. One of the church's teachings is that a person can become as God after death (omniscience and omnipotence included). Did the chain of reasoning leading from "I have a feeling that this book is true" justify the belief that "I can become like God"?
You are intelligent and capable of making good rhetorical arguments (from what I have read of your posts in the last week or two). I see you wielding Gendlin, for example, in support of your views. At some level, you're getting it. But the point of Gendlin is to encourage truth-seekers desiring to cast off comforting false beliefs. It works properly only if you are also willing to invoke Tarski:
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
I should probably point out at this point that Wiccans (well, at least those whom I'd met), consider this point of view utterly misguided and incredibly offensive.
That's a bizarre thing to say. Is their offense evidence that I'm wrong? I don't think so; I'd expect it whether or not they worship demons. Or should I believe something falsely because the truth is offensive? That would go against my values-- and, dare I say it, the suggestion is offensive. ;) Or do you want me to lie so I'll sound less offensive? That risks harm to me (it's forbidden by the New Testament) and to them (if no one ever tells them the truth, they can't learn), as well as not being any fun.
No one likes to be called a "demon-worshiper",
What is true is already so, Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
especially when one is generally a nice person whose main tenet in life is a version of "do no harm".
Nice people like that deserve truth, not lies, especially when eternity is at stake.
flat-out calling a whole group of people "demon-worshipers" tends to inflame passions rather quickly,
So does calling people Cthulhu-worshipers. But when you read that article, you agreed that it was apt, right? Because you think it's true. You guys sure seem quick to tell me that my beliefs are offensive, but if I said the same to you, you'd understand why that's beside the point. If Wiccans worship demons, I desire to believe that Wiccans worship demons; if Wiccans don't worship demons, I desire to believe that Wiccans don't worship demons. Sure, it's offensive and un-PC. If you want me to stop believing it, tell me why you think it's wrong.
In response to
New Year's Prediction Thread (2012)
I'm standing by my 2011 prediction:
Wind power will provide more actual electricity than nuclear power by 2021, 80%
I could probably nudge probabilities one way or another if I checked extra year's worth of information, but since I didn't I have no idea which way it will go.
Is that a worldwide prediction?
It's not precisely a threshold because it's not binary. The quality is "personhood". Defining personhood is obviously an incredibly difficult thing to do, so I've been avoiding doing so in this thread. However, any reasonable definition I can come up with does not include very young infants. If you think that newborns are people, I'd be interested in hearing why - but I haven't come up with a sufficiently good wording for what I think personhood is to have a debate about it.
I won't argue that newborns are people, because I have the same problem defining person that you seem to have. But until I can come up with a cogent reduction distilling person to some quality or combination of qualities that actually exist -- some state of a region of the universe -- then it seems prudent to err on the side of caution.
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Thank you for producing a perfect example of what I called the "incomplete chain of thought"! What I called "subjective space" and "physical space", you have called "map" and "territory". This thing you call a "map", conscious experience, is part of the "territory" - part of reality - which itself is supposed to be coextensive with physics. So locating colors on the map doesn't get them off the territory. If everything real is made of physics, you still must either explain how certain patterns of neuronal excitations are actually green, or you must assert that nothing is actually green at any level of reality.
This is interesting, true, and really complicates any quest to maintain an accurate map.
Upvoted (the OP too). I think some of your interlocutors may be thinking past you here, in the sense that they have dismissed your central point as a triviality. But there are fundamental differences between interactions of particles in the open universe, the state changes that particle interactions cause in our sensory machinery, and what it feels like to be a brain having an experience. The suggestion that the experience of green might be illusory fails to consider that it is something occurring in a physical brain. In this sense, the most dismissive thing we might say about any quale is that it doesn't have the meaning we readily assign to it, but that's different from a claim of nonexistence.
I'm not philosophically sophisticated enough to judge whether this observation implies dualism. I think perhaps we'd find a lot more common ground if we discussed our expectations rather than our definitions (especially given the theological baggage that the term dualism carries).