I'm like a third of the way through that Tegmark paper and I agree with it so far as I understand it but I don't see how it contradicts my view here. He claims that consciousness is a state of matter, i.e. a pattern of information. You can make a table out of a variety of materials, what matters is how the materials are arranged (and obviously brains are a lot more complicated than tables but it's what they can do by virtue of their arrangement in terms of the computations they can perform etc. that matters). To Tegmark (and I think to me, as well) conscio...
I'm not conflating them, I'm distinguishing between them. It's because they're already conflated that we're having this problem. I'm explicitly saying that the substrate is not what it's important here.
But this works both ways: what is the non-question begging argument that observer slices can only be regarded as older versions of previous slices in the case that the latter and the former are both running on meat-based substrates? As far as I can see, you have to just presuppose that view to say that an upload's observer slice doesn't count as a legitimate...
It does if the the underlying issue is not actually an issue unless you choose certain, in my opinion inadequate, definitions of the key terms. I can't force you not to do that. I can point out that it has implications for things like going to sleep that you probably wouldn't like, I can try my best to help resolve the confusions that I believe have generated those definitions in the first place and I can try to flesh out, with tools like analogy, what I consider to be a more useful way of thinking about identity. Unfortunately, all of these things could p...
It's not the book, it's the story.
Moby Dick is not a single physical manuscript somewhere. If I buy Moby Dick I'm buying one of millions of copies of it that have been printed out over the years. It's still Moby Dick because Moby Dick is the words, characters, events etc. of the story and that is all preserved via copying.
A slight difference with this analogy is that Moby Dick isn't constantly changing as it ages, gaining new memories and whatnot. So imagine that Melville got half way through his epic and then ran out of space in the notebook that I want y...
I had noticed it and mistakenly attributed it to the sunk cost fallacy but on reflection it's quite different from sunk costs. However, it was discovering and (as it turns out, incorrectly) generalising the sunk cost fallacy that alerted me to the effect and that genuinely helped me improve myself, so it's a happy mistake.
One thing that helped me was learning to fear the words 'might as well,' as in, 'I've already wasted most of the day so I might as well waste the rest of it,' or 'she'll never go out with me so I might as well not bother asking her,' and ...
I agree with your first paragraph, though in the interests of authorial intent, I'd like to stress that I don't think that Dawkins subscribes to Bayesianism and I don't think that The God Delusion has anything to do with Bayes. I was saying, 'this is about as close as he gets to Bayesianism and he's not quite there, which is a pity because he would have made for a good advocate. The best you could say is that he's tacitly using similar logic in certain places, one example being the seven point scale.'
I don't think that Dawkins or Tyson explicitly think of themselves as Bayesians. I would guess that they know the theorem and consider it useful in certain contexts without fully grasping its broader implications for science and epistemology. Or possibly they disagree that it has those implications, as many people do. Try introducing Tyson to some of Eliezer's views on MWI and see how he responds. My guess would be that he's missing a lot of the context necessary to appreciate that position even if he accepts that plausibility comes in degrees.
Dawkins is...
"I would let the five die and not feel guilty about it, because I am not the cause of their deaths."
A more charitable way of phrasing the consequentialist PoV here is that we care more about stopping the deaths than avoiding feelings of guilt. Yes, it's true that on certain accounts of morality you can't be held responsible for the deaths of five people in a Trolley Problem-esque scenario but the people will still be dead and consequentialism is the view that consequences trump all other considerations, like adherence to a deontological moral cod... (read more)