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The interactions of three people is more complex than the interactions of one person with himself. But the theory that my house contains three different residents still explains observations of my house much more simply than if you start with the assumption there's only one resident. You accordingly cannot actually use Occam's Razor to disfavor the theory that my house has three residents simply because the interactions of three people with each other are more complex than the interactions of one person with himself. Similarly, adding a cat to the three...
Why do you attach any value whatsoever to a "consciousness" that cannot think, feel, remember, or respond? Your "consciousness", so defined, is as inanimate as a grain of sand. I don't care about grains of sand as ends-in-themselves, why would you?
Be clear that when you say you are conscious, it cannot be this "consciousness" that motivates the statement, because this "consciousness" cannot respond, so the non-conscious parts of your mind cannot query it for a status check. A simple neural spike would be a response, we could watch it on an fMRI.
Well, I expect you're failing, yes. It is going to be futile to try to understand the Islamic State without understanding the philosophy of Al-Ghazali, the most influential Muslim scholar since Mohamed, the man accorded the honorific Hujjat al-Islam (Proof of Islam), and his doctrine of occasionalism.
This is going to be particularly hard on this site because the local "rationality" is rooted in the Aristotle-Averroes-Aquinas tradition, where we believe in things like natural laws that can be deduced by observation. And Averroes (Ibn Rushd) was ...
Sure they are - given that the placental clade contains most of the extant mammal diversity.
The very issue is that "mammal diversity" is vastly insufficient to make any conclusions about general independent evolutionary trends. The number of potential explanations of the advantages of intelligence derived from features from the recent common evolutionary origin completely overwhelms any evidence for general factors.
For one example, if someone were to demonstrate that intelligence is usually useful for a species of animals where the adults, by...
Er, a few species of placental mammal are hardly "widely separated lineages". Trying to draw conclusions for completely alien biologies by looking at convergent evolution inside a clade with a single common ancestor in the last 2-or-3% of the history of life on Earth is absurd. And the fact that the Placentalia start with an unusually high EQ among vertebrates-as-a-whole make it a particularly unsuitable lineage for estimating the possibilities of independent evolution of high animal intelligence.
His explanation on Reddit is that his style is too distinctive to go undetected.
She got a Dreadful for dying . . . then Professor Quirrell revived her and re-graded her Troll.
Sshall ssacrifice my fallback weapon, and girl-child sshall gain troll'ss power of regeneration.
Quantities and locations matter. Atomic-diameter filaments linking nanogram-level concentrations in the brains of Voldemort and the Death Eaters could discorporate them without killing Harry (at least, not killing him before he could reach the Stone of Transfiguration).
The available dates were Monday, March 2nd, or Tuesday, March 3rd; the "12:01 am" did not distinguish which of those dates was meant by "Tuesday, March 2nd" in the slightest, since both possible dates had their own 12:01 am.
This has been subsequently corrected by EY to "Tuesday, March 3rd" (which was the correct day for the 60 hours promised).
Regardless of the probability of Voldemort making a stupid mistake, Voldemort was apparently casting the Killing Curse on Hermione, which would be an independent reason to shoot him.
The source of the Harry-Voldemort resonance is that Harry was made into a Horcrux of Voldemort. Chapter 108:
...The prophecy seemed to hint that if I destroyed all but a remnant of Harry Potter, then our spirits would not be so different, and we could exist in the same world."
"Something went wrong," Harry said. "Something that blew off the top of the Potters' home in Godric's Hollow, gave me the scar on my forehead, and left your burnt body behind."
Professor Quirrell nodded. His hands had slowed in their Potions work. "The reso
Note that this poll only samples people who care about these threads enough to read them. People who avoid these threads and don't like them cluttering /discussion will not see it.
Well, there are definitely forms that are irrational, but there's also the perfectly rational factor of having to account for feedback loops.
We don't have to consider that shifting resources from lightning death prevention to terrorism prevention will increase the base rate of lightning strikes; we do have to consider that a shift in the other direction can increase (or perhaps decrease) the base rate of terrorist activity. It is thus inherently hard to compare the expected effect of a dollar of lightning strike prevention against a dollar of terrorism ...
Further, of course, we know that lightning strikes are not controlled by intelligent beings, while terrorist strikes are.
If there's a major multi-fatality lightning strike, it's unlikely to encourage weather phenomena to engage in copycat attacks. Nor will all sorts of counter-lightning measures dissuade clouds from generating static electricity and instead dumping more rain or something.
Some people (including me) have made comments along these lines before. There's nothing theoretically wrong with the view that evolutionary history may have created multiple less-than-coordnated utility functions that happen to share one brain.
The consequences have some serious implications, though. If a single human has multiple utility functions, it is highly unlikely (for reasons similar to Arrow's Paradox) that these work out compatibly enough that you can have an organism-wide utility expressed as a real number (as opposed to a hypercomplex number o...
The contention that "'computer games', as defined by Wikipedia" is "PC games" is, of course, true.
However, did you deliberately intend that people who knew with high confidence Tetris was (by far) the best-selling game played on computers (as computers are defined by Wikipedia) would get caught by not knowing that Wikipedia redirects "computer game" to "PC game" rather than to "video game"?
1) Conscious beings reasonably often try to predict their own future state or the state of other minds.
2) In order to successfully mimic a conscious being, a p-zombie would have to also engage in this behavior, predicting its own future states and the future states of other minds.
3) In order to predict such future states, it would seem necessary that a p-zombie would have to have at least some ability to model the states of minds, including its own.
Now, before we go any further, how does consciousness differ from having a model of the internal states of one's own mind?
Constructing an ethics that demands that a chicken act as a moral agent is obviously nonsense; chickens can't and won't act that way. Similarly, constructing an ethics that demands humans value chickens as much as they value their own children is nonsense; humans can't and won't act that way. If you're constructing an ethics for humans follow, you have to start by figuring out humans.
It's not until after you've figured out how much humans should value the interests of chickens that you can determine how much to weigh the interests of chickens in how humans should act. And how much humans should weigh the value of chickens is by necessity determined by what humans are.
All humans as they currently exist, no. But is there a system of ethics as a whole that humans, even currently disagreeing with some parts of it, would recognize as superior at doing what they really want from an ethical system that they would switch to it? Even in the main? Maybe, indeed, human ethics are so dependent on alleles that vary within the population and chance environmental factors that CEV is impossible. But there's no solid evidence to require assuming that a priori, either.
By analogy, consider the person who in 1900 wanted to put togethe...
Of course simplicity is not the same thing as fitting the evidence. You only even start comparing simplicity after you have multiple hypotheses that actually fit the evidence. Then, and only then, can you properly apply Occam's Razor. The hypotheses "Always comes up heads" and "always comes up tails" and "always lands on the edge" are all already on the reject pile when you're trying to figure out the best theory for the existence of the "HTTHHT" sequence, and thus none of them get any points at all for being sim... (read more)