I think this is an uncharitable reading of the purpose of Gaiman's quote. His quote isn't really meant to be a factual claim but an inspirational one.
Now obviously some people will find more inspiration from quotes that express a truth as compared with those that don't. Perhaps you're such a person (I suspect that many people on LW are). At risk of irony, however, it's best not to assume that everyone else is the same as you in that regards.
Evaluating something with an emotional purpose in accordance with its epistemic accuracy (instead of its psychological or poetic force) is likely to lead to an uncharitable reading of many quotes (and rather reinforces the straw vulcan stereotype of rationality).
Yes, philosophers tend to be interested in the issue of conceptual analysis. Different philosophers will have a different understanding of what conceptual analysis is but one story goes something like the following. First, we start out with a rough, intuitive sense of the concepts that we use and this gives us a series of criteria for each concept (perhaps with free will one criteria would be that it relates to moral responsibility in some way and another would be it relates to the ability to do otherwise in some way). Then we try to find a more precise ac...
Exactly what information CDT allows you to update your beliefs on is a matter for some debate. You might be interested in a paper by James Joyce (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jjoyce/papers/rscdt.pdf) on the issue (which was written in response to Egan's paper).
Then if the uncompressed program running had consciousness and the compressed program running did not, you have either proved or defined consciousness as something which is not an output. If it is possible to do what you are suggesting then consciousness has no effect on behavior, which is the presumption one must make in order to conclude that p-zombies are possible.
I haven't thought about this stuff for a while and my memory is a bit hazy in relation to it so I could be getting things wrong here but this comment doesn't seem right to me.
First, my p-zo...
It depends on what you're looking for. If you're looking for Drescher style stuff then you're looking for a very specific type of contemporary, analytic philosophy. Straight off the top of my head: Daniel Dennett, Nick Bostrom and some stuff by David Chalmers as well as decision and game theory (good free introduction here).
If you're interested in contemporary, analytic philosophy generally then I can't really make suggestions because the list is too broad (what are your interests? Ethics? Aesthetics? Metaphysics? Epistemology? Logic?). Good general resour...
I don't think further conversation on this topic is going to be useful for either of us. I presume we both accept that we have some responsibilities for the welfare of others and that sometimes we can consider the welfare of others without being infantilising (for example, I presume we both presume that shooting someone for fun would be in violation of these responsibilities).
Clearly, you draw the line at a very different place to me but beyond that I'm not sure there's much productive to be said.
I will note, however, that my claim is not about doubting th...
If you are a car salesman and have a button you can legally press which makes your costumer buy a car, you'd press it. Instrumental rationality, no?
Instrumental rationality doesn't get you this far. It gets you this far only if you assume that you care only about selling cars and legality. If you also care about the welfare of others then instrumental rationality will not necessarily tell you to push the button (instrumental rationality isn't the same thing as not caring about others).
Of course, I don't expect anyone who doesn't care about the welfare o...
Thanks for a reply. I did take a look at your post but I don't think it really engages with the points that I make (it engages with arguments that are perhaps superficially similar but importantly distinct)
In general a PUA should always make a woman feel good, otherwise why should she choose to stay with him? Probably women suffer much more through awkward interactions, stalkers, etc...
I have no problems with certain things that one might describe as pick up artistry. My comments are reserved for the things that don't involve respect for a woman's welf...
Hi Roland,
I replied to you in the other thread and I'd be interested to know what you think about my comment (I'm not really making the sort of claim you dismiss in this post so I'm curious as to whether you agree with what I'm saying or whether my comments are problematic for other reasons). Comments quoted below for ease of access:
...If the sole determining factor of whether an interaction with a women is desirable is whether they end up attracted to you then, yes, even the most extreme sort of pick up artistry would be unproblematic.
However, if you think
That's the issue. Some people have an ideology that some women's tastes are distasteful.
It's a clever line but doesn't really interact with what I said (which may perhaps have been because I was unclear: I don't intend to suggest this fact is your fault).
We can think of it another way: what do we think constitutes the welfare of a woman? Presumably we don't think that it is just that she is attracted to the person she is currently conversing with.
However, if this is the case and if we care about how our interaction with people effect their welfare then ...
If the sole determining factor of whether an interaction with a women is desirable is whether they end up attracted to you then, yes, even the most extreme sort of pick up artistry would be unproblematic.
However, if you think that there are other factors that determine whether such an interaction is desirable (such as whether the woman is treated with respect, is not made to feel unpleasant etc) then certain sorts of pick up artistry are extremely distasteful.
For example, let's hypothetically imagine that women are more attracted to people who make them fe...
There have been attempts to create derivatives of CDT that work like that. That replace the "C" from conventional CDT with a type of causality that runs about in time as you mention. Such decision theories do seem to handle most of the problems that CDT fails at. Unfortunately I cannot recall the reference.
You may be thinking of Huw Price's paper available here
Some quotes might help.
Peterson defines an act "as a function from a set of states to a set of outcomes"
The rest of the details are contained in this quote: "The key idea in von Neumann and Morgenstern's theory is to ask the decision maker to state a set of preferences over risky acts. These acts are called lotteries, because the outcome of each act is assumed to be randomly determined by events (with known probabilities) that cannot be controlled by the decision maker".
The terminology of risky acts is more widespread than Peterson: htt...
From memory, Nozick explicitly disclaims the idea that his view might be a response to normative uncertainty. Rather, he claims that EDT and CDT both have normative force and so should both be taken into account. While this may appear to be window dressing, this will have fairly substantial impacts. In particular, no regress threatens Nozick but the regress issue is going to need to be responded to in the normative uncertainty case.
Okay, so I've been reading over Peterson's book An Introduction to Decision Theory and he uses much the same language as that used in the FAQ with one difference: he's careful to talk about risky acts rather than just acts (when he talks about VNM, I mean, he does simply talk about acts at some other point). This seems to be a pretty common way of talking about it (people other than Peterson use this language).
Anyway, Peterson explicitly defines a "lottery" as an act (which he defines as a function from world states to outcomes) whose outcome is ...
Thanks for the clarification.
Perhaps worth noting that earlier in the document we defined acts as functions from world states to outcomes so this seems to resolve the second concern somewhat (if the context is different then presumably this is represented by the world states being different and so there will be different functions in play and hence different acts).
In terms of the first concern, while VNM may define preferences over all lotteries, there's a sense where in any specific decision scenario, VNM is only appealed to in order to rank the achievab...
My understanding is that in the VNM system, utility is defined over lotteries. Is this the point you're contesting or are you happy with that but unhappy with the use of the word "acts" to describe these lotteries. In other words, do you think the portrayal of the VNM system as involving preferences over lotteries is wrong or do you think that this is right but the way we describe it conflates two notions that should remain distinct.
My understanding is that in the VNM system, utility is defined over lotteries. Is this the point you're contesting or are you happy with that but unhappy with the use of the word "acts" to describe these lotteries. In other words, do you think the portrayal of the VNM system as involving preferences over lotteries is wrong or do you think that this is right but the way we describe it conflates two notions that should remain distinct.
I think I'm missing the point of what you're saying here so I was hoping that if I explained why I don't understand, perhaps you could clarify.
VNM-utility is unique up to a positive linear transformation. When a utility function is unique up to a positive linear transformation, it is an interval (/cardinal scale). So VNM-utility is an interval scale.
This is the standard story about VNM-utility (which is to say, I'm not claiming this because it seems right to me but rather because this is the accepted mainstream view of VNM-utility). Given that this is a si...
Does the horizontal axis of the decision tree in section 3 represent time?
Yes and no. Yes, because presumably the agent's end result re: house and money occurs after the fire and the fire will happen after the decision to take out insurance (otherwise, there's not much point taking out insurance). No, because the diagram isn't really about time, even if there is an accidental temporal component to it. Instead, the levels of the diagram correspond to different factors of the decision scenario: the first level is about the agent's choice, the second leve...
Okay, perhaps I can have another go at this.
First thing to note, possible worlds can't be specified at different levels of detail. When doing so we are either specifying partial possible worlds or sets of possible worlds. As rigid designation is a claim about worlds, it can't be relative to the level of detail utilised as it only applies to things specified at one level of detail.
Second, you still seem to be treating possible worlds as concrete things rather than something in the head (or, at least, making substantive assumptions about possible worlds and ...
I think this is getting past the point that I can useful contribute further though I will note that the vast literature on the topic has dealt with this sort of issue in detail (though I don't know it well enough to comment in detail).
Saying that, I'll make one final contribution and then leave it at that: I suspect that you've misunderstood the idea of a rigid designator if you think it depends on the resolution at which you examine possible worlds. To say that something is a rigid designator is to say that it refers to the same thing in all possible worl...
I can't cite sources off-hand but this suggestion is reasonably standard but taken to be a bit of a cheat (it dodges the difficult question). For this reason it is often stipulated that no objective chance device is available to the agent or that the predictor does something truly terrible if the agent decides by such a device (perhaps takes back all the money in the boxes and the money in the agent's bank account).
As I said, these are complex issues.
possible worlds are things that live inside the minds of agents (e.g. humans).
Yes, but almost everyone agrees with this (or at least, almost all views on possible worlds can be interpreted this way even if they can also be interpreted as claims about the existence of abstract - non-concrete - objects). There are a variety of different things that possible worlds can be even given the assumption that they exist in people's heads (almost all the disagreement about what possible worlds are is disagreement within this ca...
Okay, so three things are worth clarifying up front. First, this isn't my area of expertise so anything I have to say about the matter should be taken with a pinch of salt. Second, this is a complex issue and really would require 2 or 3 sequences of material to properly outline so I wouldn't read too much into the fact that my brief comment doesn't present a substantive outline of the issue. Third, I have no settled views on the issues of rigid designators, nor am I trying to argue for a substantive position on the matter so I'm not deliberately sweeping a...
You may have resolved this now by talking to Richard (who knows more about this than me) but, in case you haven't, I'll have a shot at it.
First, the distinction: Richard is using rigid designation to talk about how a single person evaluates counterfactual scenarios, whereas you seem to be taking it as a comment about how different people use the same word.
Second, relevance: Richard's usage allow you to respond to an objection. The objection asks you to consider the counterfactual situation where you desire to murder people and says murder must now be right...
Multiple philosophers have suggested that this stance seems similar to "rigid designation", i.e., when I say 'fair' it intrinsically, rigidly refers to something-to-do-with-equal-division. I confess I don't see it that way myself - if somebody thinks of Euclidean geometry when you utter the sound "num-berz" they're not doing anything false, they're associating the sound to a different logical thingy. It's not about words with intrinsically rigid referential power, it's that the words are window dressing on the underlying entities.
I j...
It still may be hard to resolve when something is as simple as possible.
So modal realism (the idea that possible worlds exist concretely) has been highlighted a few times in this thread as an unparsimonious theory but Lewis has two responses to this:
1.) This is (at least mostly) quantitative unparsimony not qualitative (lots of stuff, not lots of types of stuff). It's unclear how bad quantitative unparsimony is. Specifically, Lewis argues that there is no difference between possible worlds and actual worlds (actuality is indexical) so he argues that he doe...
In terms of Lewis, I don't know of someone criticising him for this off-hand but it's worth noting that Lewis himself (in his book On the Plurality of Worlds) recognises the parsimony objection and feels the need to defend himself against it. In other words, even those who introduce unparsimonious theories in philosophy are expected to at least defend the fact that they do so (of course, many people may fail to meet these standards but the expectation is there and theories regularly get dismissed and ignored if they don't give a good accounting of why we s...
Obviously and unfortunately, the idea that you are not supposed to end up with more and more ontologically fundamental stuff inside your philosophy is not mainstream.
I think I must be misunderstanding what you're saying here because something very similar to this is probably the principle accusation relied upon in metaphysical debates (if not the very top, certainly top 3). So let me outline what is standard in metaphysical discussions so that I can get clear on whether you're meaning something different.
In metaphysics, people distinguish between quanti...
Sometimes, they are even divided on psychological questions that psychologists have already answered: Philosophers are split evenly on the question of whether it's possible to make a moral judgment without being motivated to abide by that judgment, even though we already know that this is possible for some people with damage to their brain's reward system, for example many Parkinson's patients, and patients with damage to the ventromedial frontal cortex (Schroeder et al. 2012).1
This isn't an area about which I know very much about but my understanding i...
I'm not convinced that Briggs' argument succeeds but I take it that the argument is meant to apply as long as the theory ranks decisions ordinally (rather than applying only if they do so and not if they utilise more information). See my response to manfred for a few more minor details.
Whoa, no. That's a bad mantra. Wireheading, quantum immortality, doing meth - these are bad things.
Briggs is here primarily considering cases where your preferences don't change as a result of your decision (but where your credences might). If we're interested in criticising the argument precisely as stated then perhaps this is a reasonable criticism but it's not an interesting criticism of Briggs' view which is to do with how we reason in cases where our decision gives us new information about the state of the world (ie. about changing credences not ch...
Egan's point is often taken to be similar to some earlier points including that made by Bostrom's meta-newcomb's problem (http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/newcomb.html)
It's worth noting that not everyone agrees that these are problems for CDT:
See James Joyce (the philosopher): http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jjoyce/papers/rscdt.pdf
See Bob Stalnaker's comment here: http://tar.weatherson.org/2004/11/29/newcomb-and-mixed-strategies/ (the whole thread is pretty good)
I hardly think it answers the question, but this might be of interest: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history.html