Comment author: quen_tin 13 August 2012 08:41:40PM *  4 points [-]

I wonder if the same mechanisms could be invovled in conspiracy theorists. Their way of thinking seems very similar. I also suspect a reinforcement mechanism: it becomes more and more difficult for the subject to deny his own beliefs, as it would require abandonning large parts of his present (and coherent) belief system, leaving him with almost nothing left.

This could explain why patients are reluctant to accept alternative versions afterwards (such as "you have a brain damage").

Comment author: RichardChappell 30 March 2011 04:41:16PM 1 point [-]

When you think you're imagining a p-zombie, all that's happening is that you're imagining an ordinary person and neglecting to imagine their experiences, rather than (impossibly) imagining the absence of any experience. (You can tell yourself "this person has no experiences" and then it will be true in your model that HasNoExperiences(ThisPerson) but there's no necessary reason why a predicate called "HasNoExperiences" must track whether or not people have experiences.)

This is an interesting proposal, but we might ask why, if consciousness is not really distinct from the physical properties, is it so easy to imagine the physical properties without imagining consciousness? It's not like we can imagine a microphysical duplicate of our world that's lacking chairs. Once we've imagined the atoms-arranged-chairwise, that's all it is to be a chair. It's analytic. But there's no such conceptual connection between neurons-instantiating-computations and consciousness, which arguably precludes identifying the two.

Comment author: quen_tin 30 March 2011 08:07:14PM 2 points [-]

Once we've imagined the atoms-arranged-chairwise, that's all it is to be a chair. It's analytic. But there's no such conceptual connection between neurons-instantiating-computations and consciousness, which arguably precludes identifying the two.

That's true. The difference between chairs and consciousness is that chair is a 3rd person concept, whereas consciousness is a 1st person concept. Imagining a world without consciousness is easy, because we never know if there are consciousnesses or not in the world - consciousness is not an empirical data, it's something we speculate other have by analogy with ourselves.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 March 2011 05:19:23AM 9 points [-]

The philosophers I study under criticise the sciences for not being rigorous enough.

Acid test 1: Are they complaining about experimenters using arbitrary subjective "statistical significance" measures instead of Bayesian likelihood functions?

Acid test 2: Are they chiding physicists for not decisively discarding single-world interpretations of quantum mechanics?

Acid test 3: Are all of their own journals open-access?

It may be ad hominem tu quoque, but any discipline that doesn't pass the three acid tests has not impressed me with its superiority to our modern, massively flawed academic science.

Comment author: quen_tin 30 March 2011 04:17:00PM 2 points [-]

Acid test (1) and (2): this is where dogma starts.

Comment author: Jack 29 March 2011 11:52:21PM *  0 points [-]

Intepreting is giving a meaning to something. Stating that the "code interprets something" is a misuse of language for saying that the code "processes something". You don't know if the code gives meaning to anything since you are not the code, only you give the meaning. "Interpretation" is a first-person concept.

Okay... well what does it mean to give meaning to something? My claim is that I am a (really complex) code of sorts and that I interpret things in basically the same way code does. Now it often feels like this description is missing something and that's the problem of consciousness/qualia for which I, like everyone else, have no solution. But "interpretation is a first-person concept" doesn't let us represent humans.

"if you dispute this metaphysics you need to explain what the disadvantage" -> It would require more than a few comments.

You were disputing someone's claim that 'the universe is an algorithm'... why isn't that reason enough to identify one possible disadvantage. Otherwise you're just saying "Na -ahhhh!"

I just found your self-confidence a bit arrogant, as far as scientific realism is far from being a consensus among philosophers and has many flaws. Personnaly, the main disavantage I see is that its an "objectual" conception, a conception of things as objects, which does not account for any subject, and does not acknowledge that an object merely exist as representations for subjects. It does not address first-person phenomenology (time, ...). It does not seem to consider our cognitive situation seriously by uncritically claiming that our representation is reality, that's all, which I find a bit naive.

I'm really bewildered by this and imagine you must have read someone else and took their position to be mine. I'm a straight forward Quinean ontological relativist which is why I paraphrased the original claim in terms of ideal representation and dropped the 'is'. I was just trying to explain the claim since it didn't seem like you were understanding it- I didn't even make the statement in question (though I do happen to think the algorithm approach is the best thing going, I'm not confident that thats the end of the story).

But I think we're bumping up against competing conceptions of what philosophy should be. I think philosophy is a kind of meta-science which expands and clarifies the job of understanding the world. As such, it needs to find a way of describing the subject in the language of scientific representation. This is what the cognitive science end of philosophy is all about. But you want to insist on the subject as fundamental- as far as I'm concerned thats just refusing to let philosophy/science do it's thing.

Comment author: quen_tin 30 March 2011 09:25:43AM *  -2 points [-]

I also view philosophy as a meta-science. I think language is relational by nature (e.g. red refer to the strong correlation between our respective experiences of red) and is blind to singularity (I cannot explain by mean of language what it is like for me to see red, I can only give it a name, which you can understand only if my red is correlated to yours - my singular red cannot be expressed).

Since science is a product of language, its horizon is describing the relational framework of existing things, which are unspeakable. That's exactly what science converge toward (Quantum physics is a relational description of measurables - with special relativity, space/time referentials are relative to an observer, etc.). Being a subject is unspeakable (my experience of existing is a succession of singularities) and is beyond the horizon of science, science can only define its contour - the relational framework.

I don't think that we can describe the subject in the language of scientific representation, because I think that the scientific representation is always relative to a subject (therefore the subject is already in the representation, in a sense...). That is why I always insist on the subject. Not that I refuse to let philosophy do its thing, I just want to clarify what its thing exactly is, so that we are not deluded by a mythical scientific description of everything that would be totally independend of our existence (which would make of us an epiphenomenon).

I hope this clarify my position.

Comment author: wnewman 29 March 2011 02:33:13PM 2 points [-]

lukeprog wrote "philosophers are 'spectacularly bad' at understanding that their intuitions are generated by cognitive algorithms." I am pretty confident that minds are physical/chemical systems, and that intuitions are generated by cognitive algorithms. (Furthermore, many of the alternatives I know of are so bizarre that given that such an alternative is the true reality of my universe, the conditional probability that rationality or philosophy is going to do me any good seems to be low.) But philosophy as often practiced values questioning everything, and so I don't think it's quite fair to expect philosophers to "understand" this (which I read in this context as synonymous as "take this for granted"). I'd prefer a formulation like "spectacularly bad at seriously addressing [or, perhaps, even properly understanding] the obvious hypothesis that their intuitions are generated by cognitive algorithms." It seems to me that the criticism rewritten in this form remains severe.

Comment author: quen_tin 29 March 2011 02:54:28PM 0 points [-]

I agree, and I really doubt philosophers fail to deeply question their own intuitions.

Comment author: prase 28 March 2011 10:56:41PM 14 points [-]

Unfortunately, many important problems are fundamentally philosophical problems. Philosophy itself is unavoidable.

Isn't this true just because the way philosophy is effectively defined? It's a catch-all category for poorly understood problems which have nothing in common except that they aren't properly investigated by some branch of science. Once a real question is answered, it no longer feels like a philosophical question; today philosophers don't investigate motion of celestial bodies or structure of matter any more.

In other words, I wonder what are the fundamentally philosophical questions. The adverb fundamentally creates the impression that those questions will be still regarded as philosophical after being uncontroversially answered, which I doubt will ever happen.

Comment author: quen_tin 29 March 2011 02:30:40PM -1 points [-]

In a sense, science is nothing but experimental philosophy (in a broad sense), and the job of non-experimental-philosophy (what we label philosophy) is to make any question become an experimental question... But I would say that philosophy remains important as the framework where science and scientific fundamental concepts (truth, reality, substance) are defined and discussed.

Comment author: wedrifid 24 September 2010 05:39:14PM 0 points [-]

Evidently.

Comment author: quen_tin 24 September 2010 06:46:46PM 0 points [-]

end loop;

Comment author: wedrifid 24 September 2010 08:49:15AM 1 point [-]

You confusing experience itself with your intuitions about experience. Your actual experience makes just as much sense if you perceive yourself to be part of a great tree of branches.

Comment author: quen_tin 24 September 2010 09:28:04AM 0 points [-]

Then I followed a path on this tree.

Comment author: wedrifid 23 September 2010 09:57:43PM 1 point [-]

It does not explain why we followed that path in the many world, not another one.

It doesn't explain that because that isn't what happened.

Comment author: quen_tin 24 September 2010 08:44:23AM -1 points [-]

That is my experience. As far as I can know if something happened, that happened.

Comment author: wedrifid 23 September 2010 08:50:10PM 1 point [-]

You're right, there is no certainty, but my jumps are not totally ungrounded. We all experience a flow of time in a single world, and the many-worlds interpretion does not really explains it.

It really does. At the level of everyday life branching explains our experiences exactly as well as a non-quantum explanation. When we happen to be using scientific apparatus our experience is better explained by MW.

Comment author: quen_tin 23 September 2010 09:54:08PM 0 points [-]

It does not explain why we followed that path in the many world, not another one. Our experience is "better explain" > it is a good heuristic interpretation.

View more: Next