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: Jonathan_Graehl 30 March 2011 07:25:23PM 0 points [-]

So you're not a person?

Comment author: quen_tin 30 March 2011 07:51:25PM 0 points [-]

Inside your representation, I might be a person, and I do represent myself as a person sometimes.

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: Tyrrell_McAllister 30 March 2011 12:13:08AM 2 points [-]

You argued that "I believe P with probability 0.53" might be as meaningless as "I am 53% happy". It is a valid response to say, "Setting happiness aside, there actually is a rigorous foundation for quantifying belief—namely, Cox's theorem."

Comment author: quen_tin 30 March 2011 10:10:52AM 0 points [-]

The pb here is that "I believe P" supposes a representation / a model of P. There must be a pre-existing model prior to using Cox's theorem on something. My question is semantic: what does this model lie on? The probabilities you will get will depend on the model you will adopt, and I am pretty sure that there is no definitive model/conception of anything (see the problem of translation analysed by Quine for example).

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 30 March 2011 12:07:22AM *  1 point [-]

Strictly speaking, Kant does not say we have no information about reality, he says we cannot know if we have or not.

I don't think that Kant makes the distinction between "knowing" and "having information about" that you and I would make. If he doesn't outright deny that we have any information about the world beyond our senses, he certainly comes awfully close.

On A380, Kant writes,

If, therefore, as the present critique obviously requires of us, we remain true to the rule established earlier not to press our questions be­yond that with which possible experience and its objects can supply us, then it will not occur to us to seek information about what the objects of our senses may be in themselves, i.e., apart from any relation to the senses.

And, on A703/B731, he writes,

[I]f charming and plau­sible prospects did not lure us to reject the compulsion of these doc­trines [i.e., doctrines for which Kant has argued], then of course we might have been able to dispense with our painstaking examination of the dialectical witnesses which a transcen­dent reason brings forward on behalf of its pretensions; for we already knew beforehand with complete certainty that all their allegations, while perhaps honestly meant, had to be absolutely null and void, be­cause they dealt with information which no human being can ever get.

(Emphasis added. These are from the Guyer–Wood translation.)

Comment author: quen_tin 30 March 2011 09:54:34AM 0 points [-]

Ok, it depends what you mean by "information about". My understanding is that we have no information on the nature of reality, which does not mean that we have no information from reality.

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: twanvl 29 March 2011 11:04:50PM 0 points [-]

qualia are not represented but directly experienced. Can you give a definition of these qualia?

That sounds obvious. Sounding obvious and being true are two very different things.

Comment author: quen_tin 29 March 2011 11:27:54PM 0 points [-]

I define qualia as the elements of my subjective experience. "That sounds obvious" was an euphemism. It's more than obvious that qualia are real, it's given, it is the only truth that does not need to be proven.

Comment author: Jack 29 March 2011 10:41:25PM 1 point [-]

It may not suggest this to your satisfaction but it certainly suggests it remotely (and the mathematical model involves counterfactual dependencies of qualia, not just correlations). What does it mean to say that the universe is composed of qualia? That sounds like an obvious confusion between representation and reality.

Comment author: quen_tin 29 March 2011 10:58:56PM -1 points [-]

Well my opinion is that the confusion between representation and reality is on your side.

Indeed, a scientific model is a representation of reality - not reality. It can be found inside books or learned at school, it is interpreted. On the contrary, qualia are not represented but directly experienced. They are real.

That sounds obvious. No?

Comment author: Jack 29 March 2011 10:19:21PM 1 point [-]

Pretty sure I can write code that makes these same interpretations.

Comment author: quen_tin 29 March 2011 10:46:17PM -1 points [-]

Your code is a list of characters in a text file, or a list of bytes in your computer's memory. Only you interpret it as a code that interprets something.

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