All of PDH's Comments + Replies

"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)

2[anonymous]
The problem here is that what you need to justify is why you call some consequences better than others, because I might beg to differ. If you say "I just do" I would have to pull out my gun and say "well, I don't". In this scenario morality is reduced to might makes right, but then why call it morality? I think the purpose of morality is to give me a guideline to decide even when I consider some consequences to be much more preferable than others to not act on this preference because it would negate our ability to peacefully coexist. In which case you might respond that our inability to peacefully coexist is a consequence that I am taking into account, which I think means we either talk about different things and don't actually disagree, or your reasoning is circular. If it is the case that we merely talk about different things, I still think it is a good thing to make what I call agency ethics explicit so that we don't forget to take its consequences into account.

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

0randallsquared
Hm. Does "internally-forward-flowing" mean that stateA is a (primary? major? efficient? not sure if there's a technical term, here) cause of stateB, or does it mean only that internally, stateB remembers "being" stateA? If the former, then I think you and I actually agree.
-1[anonymous]
Details please. Quantum physics? Max Tengmark does this subject better than I have the time to. And btw, he's on our side. Aging? Don't see the connection. You seem to argue that information patterns are identity, but information patterns change greatly as you age. Mark at age 12, the troubled teenager, is very different than Mark at age 29, the responsible father of two. But I think most people would argue they are the same person, just at two separate points in time. Why? Comatose patients? Connection please? I am not aware what objective data you are pointing to on this.

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... (read more)

-2[anonymous]
Just because the machine version remembers what the meat version did, doesn't mean the conscious meat version didn't die in the uploading process. Nothing you have said negates the death + birth interpretation. Your definitions are still missing the point.

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... (read more)

3randallsquared
"Moby Dick" can refer either to a specific object, or to a set. Your argument is that people are like a set, and Error's argument is that they are like an object (or a process, possibly; that's my own view). Conflating sets and objects assumes the conclusion.
-1[anonymous]
Changing the definition doesn't resolve the underling issue...

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 ... (read more)

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.'

0David_Gerard
He does mention Bayes elsewhere in the book, so he knows what it is. But there's certainly little positive evidence for him having adopted Bayesian epistemology as a personal philosophy, which is rather more than knowing an equation.

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... (read more)

2David_Gerard
The seven-point scale was originally presented in The God Delusion as an enumerated list of positions on the question, not as a continuous scale to be mapped to probability. Though of course you can bend it into one, as Dawkins implicitly does by saying "6.9". More generally, your comment reads a bit like Lukeprog's review of Carrier's Proving History: Lukeprog considers it failed advocacy for Bayes because of its topic (the historical Jesus), whereas Carrier considers it a book on historical methodology using the historical Jesus as his example, because that was the precise topic he was being paid to write on. I think authorial intent does count.