All of TAG's Comments + Replies

Again, those are theories of consciousness, not definitions of consciousness.

I would agree that people who use consciousness to denote the computational process vs. the fundamental aspect generally have different theories of consciousness, but they’re also using the term to denote two different things.

But that doesn't imply that they disagree about (all of) the meaning of the term "qualia"..since denotation (extension, reference)doesn't exhaust meaning. The other thing is connotation, AKA intension, AKA sense.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_a... (read more)

If it was that easy to understand, we wouldn’t be here arguing about it.

Definitions are not theories

Even if there is agreement about the meaning of the word, there can also be disagreement about the correct theory of qualia. Definitions always precede theories -- we could define "Sun" for thousands of years before we understood its nature as a fusion reactor. Shared definitions are a prerequisite of disagreement , rather than just talking past each other.

The problem of defining qualia -- itself, the first stage in specifying the problem --can be much ea... (read more)

Free will in the general context means that you are in complete control of the decisions you make, that is farthest from the truth. Sure you can hack your body and brain ...

Why "complete" control? You can disprove anything , in a fake sort of way, by setting then bar high -- if you define memory as Total Recall, it turns out no-one has a memory.

Who's this "you" who's separate from both brain and body? Shouldn't you be asking how the machine works? A machine doesn't have to be deterministic , and can be self-modifying.

When Robert Sapolsky says there is

Possibly we are just in one of the mathematical universes that happens to have an arrow of time—the arrow seems to arise from fairly simple assumptions, mainly an initial condition and coarse graining

You are misunderstanding the objection. It's not just an arrow of time in the sense of order, such as increasing entropy, it's the passingness of the time. An arrow can exist statically, but that's not how we experience time. We don't experience it as a simultaneous group of moments that happen to be ordered , we experience one moment at a time. A row of ho... (read more)

(Extensively reviesed and edited).

Reductionism

Reductionism is not a positive belief, but rather, a disbelief that the higher levels of simplified multilevel models are out there in the territory.

Things like airplane wings actually are, at least as approximations. I don't see why you are.approvingly quoting this: it conflates reduction and elimination.

But the way physics really works, as far as we can tell, is that there is only the most basic level—the elementary particle fields and fundamental forces.

If that's a scientific claim ,it needs to be... (read more)

This Cartesian dualism in various disguises is at the heart of most “paradoxes” of consciousness. P-zombies are beings materially identical to humans but lacking this special res cogitans sauce, and their conceivability requires accepting substance dualism.

Only their physical possibility requires some kind of nonphysicality. Physically impossible things can be conceivable if you don't know why they are physically impossible, if you can't see the contradiction between their existence and the laws of physics. The conceivability of zombies is therefore evi... (read more)

First, computationalism doesn’t automatically imply that, without other assumptions, and indeed there are situations where you can’t clone data perfectly,

Thats a rather small nit. The vast majority of computationalists are talking about classical computation.

Indeed, I was basically trying to say that computationalism is so general that it cannot predict any result that doesn’t follow from pure logic/tautologies,

That's not much of a boast: pure logic can't solve metaphysical problems about consciousness, time, space, identity, and so on. That's why t... (read more)

We’re talking about “physical processes”

We are talking about functionalism -- it's in the title. I am contrasting physical processes with abstract functions.

In ordinary parlance, the function of a physical thing is itself a physical effect...toasters toast, kettles boil, planes fly.

In the philosophy of mind, a function is an abstraction, more like the mathematical sense of a function. In maths, a function takes some inputs and or produces some outputs. Well known examples are familiar arithmetic operations like addition, multiplication , squaring, and s... (read more)

I don’t find this position compelling for several reasons:

First, if consciousness really required extremely precise physical conditions—so precise that we’d need atom-by-atom level duplication to preserve it, we’d expect it to be very fragile.

Don't assume that then. Minimally, non computation physicalism only requires that the physical substrate makes some sort of difference. Maybe approximate physical resemblance results in approximate qualia.

Yet consciousness is actually remarkably robust: it persists through significant brain damage, chemical al

Imagine that we could successfully implement a functional isomorph of the human brain in silicon. A proponent of 2) would need to explain why this functional isomorph of the human brain which has all the same functional properties as an actual brain does not, in fact, have consciousness.

Physicalism can do that easily,.because it implies that there can be something special about running running unsimulated , on bare metal.

Computationalism, even very fine grained computationalism, isn't a direct consequence of physicalism. Physicalism has it that an exact... (read more)

Whether computationalism functionalism is true or not depends on the nature of consciousness as well as the nature of computation.

While embracing computational functionalism and rejecting supernatural or dualist views of mind

As before, they also reject non -computationalist physicalism, eg. biological essentialism whether they realise it or not.

It seems to privilege biology without clear justification. If a silicon system can implement the same information processing as a biological system, what principled reason is there to deny it could be conscio

We de-empahsized QM in the post

You did a bit more than de-emphasize it in the title!

Also:

Like latitude and longitude, chances are helpful coordinates on our mental map, not fundamental properties of reality.

"Are"?

**Insofar as we assign positive probability to such theories, we should not rule out chance as being part of the world in a fundamental way. **Indeed, we tried to point out in the post that the de Finetti theorem doesn’t rule out chances, it just shows we don’t need them in order to apply our standard statistical reasoning. In many contex

Computationalism is a bad theory of synchronic non-identity (in the sense of "why am I a unique individual, even though I have an identical twin"), because computations are so easy to clone -- computational states are more cloneable than physical states.

Computationalism might be a better theory of diachronic identity (in the sense of "why am I still the same person, even though I have physically changed"), since it's abstract, and so avoids the "one atom has changed" problem of naive physicalism. Other abstractions are available, though. "Having the same ... (read more)

Others say chance is a physical property – a “propensity” of systems to produce certain outcomes. But this feels suspiciously like adding a mysterious force to our physics.[4] When we look closely at physical systems (leaving quantum mechanics aside for now), they often seem deterministic: if you could flip a coin exactly the same way twice, it would land the same way both times.

Don't sideline QM: it's highly relevant. If there are propensities, real probabilities, then they are not mysterious, they are just the way reality works. They might be unnecess... (read more)

ethical, political and religious differences (which i’d mostly not place in the category of ‘priors’, e.g. at least ‘ethics’ is totally separate from priors aka beliefs about what is)

That's rather what I am saying. Although I would include "what is" as opposed to "what appears to be". There may well be fact/value gap, but there's also an appearance/reality gap. The epistemology you get from evolutionary argument only goes as far as the apparent. You are not going to die if you have interpreted the underlying nature or reality of a dangerous thing incorr... (read more)

A) If priors are formed by an evolutionary process common to all humans, why do they differ so much? Why are there deep ethical, political and religious divides?

B) how can a process tuned to achieving directly observable practical results allow different agents to converge on non-obvious theoretical truth?

These questions answer each other, to a large extent. B -- they cant, A -- that's where the divides come from. Values aren't dictated by facts, and neither are interpretations-of-facts.

@quila

The already-in-motion argument is even weaker than the evolution... (read more)

you can only care about what you fully understand

I think I need an operational definition of “care about” to process this

If you define "care about" as "put resources into trying to achieve" , there's plenty of evidence that people care about things that can't fully define, and don't fully understand, not least the truth-seeking that happens here.

You can only get from the premise "we can only know our own maps" to the conclusion "we can only care about our own maps" via the minor premise "you can only care about what you fully understand ". That premise is clearly wrong: one can care about unknown reality, just as one can care about the result of a football match that hasn't happened yet. A lot of people do care about reality directionally.

@Dagon

Embedded agents are in the territory. How helpful that is depends on the territory

@Noosphere89

you can model the territory under consideration well enough

To specify the Universe, you only have to specify enough information to pick it out from the landscape of all possible Universes

Of course not. You have to specify the landscape itself, otherwise it's like saying "page 273 of [unspecified book]" .

According to string theory (which is a Universal theory in the sense that it is Turing-complete)

As far as I can see, that is only true in that ST allows Turing machines to exist physically. That's not the kind s of Turing completeness you want. You want to know that String Theory is itself Turing computable,... (read more)

They are not the same things though. Quantum mechanical measure isn’t actually a head count, like classical measure. The theory doesn’t say that—it’s an extraneous assumption. It might be convenient if it worked that way, but that would be assuming your conclusion.

QM measure isn’t probability—the probability of something occurring or not—because all possible branches occur in MWI.

Another part of the problem stems from the fact that what other people experience is relevant to them, whereas for a probability calculation, I only need to be able to statistica... (read more)

@Dagon

This comes down to a HUGE unknown - what features of reality need to be replicated in another medium in order to result in sufficiently-close results

That's at least two unknowns: what needs to be replicated in order to get the objective functioning; and what needs to be replicated to get the subjective awarness as well.

Which is all just to say -- isn't it much more likely that the problem has been solved, and there are people who are highly confident in the solution because they have verified all the steps that led them there, and they know wit

Physicalist epiphenomenalism is the only philosophy that is compatible with the autonomy of matter and my experience of consciousness, so it has not competitors as a cosmovision

No, identity theory and illusionism are competitors. And epiphenenomenalism is dualism, not physicalism. As I have pointed out before.

And one of Wallace’s axioms, which he calls ‘branching indifference’, essentially says that it doesn’t matter how many branches there are, since macroscopic differences are all that we care about for decisions..

The macroscopically different branches and their weights?

Focussing on the weight isn't obviously correct , ethically. You cant assume that the answer to "what do I expect to see" will work the same as the answer to "what should I do". Is-ought gap and all that.

Its tempting to think that you can apply a standard decision theory in terms of expecte... (read more)

According the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics, the universe is constantly splitting into a staggeringly large number of decoherent branches containing galaxies, civilizations, and people exactly like you and me

There is more than one many worlds interpretation. The version stated above is not known to be true.

There is an approach to MWI based on coherent superpositions, and a version based on decoherence. These are (for all practical purposes) incompatible. Coherent splitting gives you the very large numbers of "worlds"..except that... (read more)

Every quantum event splits the multiverse, so my measure should decline by 20 orders of magnitude every second.

There isn’t the slightest evidence that irrevocable splitting, splitting into decoherent branches occurs at every microscopic event -- that would be combining the frequency of coherentism style splitting with the finality of decoherent splitting. As well as the conceptual incoherence, there is In fact plenty of evidence—eg. the existence of quantum computing—that it doesnt work that way

"David Deutsch, one of the founders of quantum computing i... (read more)

It seems common for people trying to talk about AI extinction to get hung up on whether statements derived from abstract theories containing mentalistic atoms can have objective truth or falsity values. They can. And if we can first agree on such basic elements of our ontology/epistemology as that one agent can be objectively smarter than another, that we can know whether something that lives in a physical substrate that is unlike ours is conscious, and that there can be some degree of objective truth as to what is valuable [not that all beings that are m

Arguably, “basic logical principles” are those that are true in natural language.

That's where the problem starts, not where it stops. Natural language supports a bunch of assumptions that are hard to formally reconcile: if you want your strict PNC, you have to give up on something else. The whole 2500 yeah history of logic has been a history of trying to come up with formal systems that fulfil various desiderata. It is now formally proven that you can't have all of them at once, and it's not obvious what to keep and what to ditch. (Godelian problems can... (read more)

Yes, and Logan is claiming that arguments which cannot be communicated to him in no more than two sentences suffer from a conjunctive complexity burden that renders them “weak”.

@Logan Zoellner being wrong doesn't make anyone else right. If the actual argument is conjunctive and complex, then all the component claims need to be high probability. That is not the case. So Logan is right for not quite the right reasons -- it's not length alone.

That’s not trivial. There’s no proof that there is such a coherent entity as “human values”, there is no proof t

As other people have said, this is a known argument; specifically, it’s in The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle in the Physicalism 201 series. From the very early days of LessWrong

Albert: “Suppose I replaced all the neurons in your head with tiny robotic artificial neurons that had the same connections, the same local input-output behavior, and analogous internal state and learning rules.”

I think this proof relies on three assumptions. The first (which you address in the post) is that consciousness must happen within physics. (The opposing view wou

Argument length is substantially a function of shared premises

A stated argument could have a short length if it's communicated between two individuals who have common knowledge of each others premises..as opposed to the "Platonic" form, where every load bearing component is made explicit, and there is noting extraneous.

But that's a communication issue....not a truth issue. A conjunctive argument doesn't become likelier because you don't state some of the premises. The length of the stated argument has little to do with its likelihood.

How true an argume... (read more)

I mean that if turing machine is computing universe according to the laws of quantum mechanics,

I assume you mean the laws of QM except the collapse postulate.

observers in such universe would be distributed uniformly,

Not at all. The problem is that their observations would mostly not be in a classical basis.

not by Born probability.

Born probability relates to observations, not observers.

So you either need some modification to current physics, such as mangled worlds,

Or collapse. Mangled worlds is kind of a nothing burger--its a variation on the... (read more)

One might be determined to throw in the towel on cognitive effort if they were to take a particular interpretation of determinism, and they, and the rest of us, would be worse off for it.

Determinists are always telling each other to act like libertarians. That's a clue that libertarianism is worth wanting. @James Stephen Brown

Compatibilist free will has all the properties worth wanting: your values and beliefs determine the future, to the extent you exert the effort to make good decisions.

No it doesn't, because it doesn't have the property of being ... (read more)

I noticed the same thing -- even Scott Alexander dropped a reference to it without explaining it. Anyway, here what I came up with:-

https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/s/lVNnjhTurI

(That's me done for another two days)

You are a subject, and you determine your own future

Not so much , given deteminism.

Determinism allows you to cause the future in a limited sense. Under determinism, events still need to be caused,and your (determined) actions can be part of the cause of a future state that is itself determined, that has probability 1.0. Determinism allows you to cause the future ,but it doesn't allow you to control the future in any sense other than causing it. (and the sense in which you are causing the future is just the sense in which any future state depends on caus... (read more)

Your model of muon decay doesn't conserve charge -- you start with -1e , then have -2e and finally have zero. Also, the second electron is never observed.

What I have noticed is that while there are cogent overviews of AI safety that don't come to the extreme conclusion that we all going to be killed by AI with high probability....and there are articles that do come to that conclusion without being at all rigorous or cogent....there aren't any that do both. From that I conclude there aren't any good reasons to believe in extreme AI doom scenarios, and you should disbelieve them. Others use more complicated reasoning, like "Yudkowsky is too intelligent to communicate his ideas to lesser mortals, but household... (read more)

Large: economies of scale; need to coordinate many specialised skills. ( Factories were developed before automation)

Hierarchical: Needed because Large. It's how you co-ordinate a.much greater than Dunbar number of people. (Complex software is also hierarchical).

Bureaucratic: Hierarchical subdivision by itself is necessary but insufficient...it makes organisations manageable but not managed. Reports create legibility and Rules ensure that units are contributing to the whole, not pursuing their own ends.

I don't see what Wentworld is:

Are you giving up on s... (read more)

I really don’t understand what “best explanation”, “true”, or “exist” mean, as stand-alone words divorced from predictions about observations we might ultimately make about them.

Nobody is saying that anything has to be divorced from prediction , in the sense that emperical evidence is ignored: the realist claim is that empirical evidence should be supplemented by other epistemic considerations.

Best explanation:- I already pointed out that EY is not an instrumentalist. For instance, he supports the MWI over the CI, although they make identical prediction... (read more)

Is there anything different about the orld that I should expect to observe depending on whether Platonic math “exists” in some ideal realm? If not, why would I care about this topic once I have already dissolved my confusion about what beliefs are meant to refer to?

Word of Yud is that beliefs aren't just about predicting experience. While he wrote Beliefs Must Pay Rent, he also wrote No Logical Positivist I.

(Another thing that has been going on for years is people quoting VBeliefs Must Pay Rent as though it's the whole story).

Maybe you are a logical pos... (read more)

the ‘instantaneous’ mind (with its preferences etc., see post) is*—if we look closely and don’t forget to keep a healthy dose of skepticism about our intuitions about our own mind/self*—sufficient to make sense of what we actually observe

Huh? If you mean my future observations, then you are assuming a future self, and therefore temporally extended self. If you mean my present observations, then they include memories of past observations.

in fact I’ve defended some strong computationalist position in the past

But a computation is an series of steps over time, so it is temporarily extended

I think it’s fair to say that the most relevant objection to valid circular arguments is that they are not very good at convincing someone who does not already accept the conclusion.

I think the most relevant objection is quodlibet. Simple circular arguments be generated for any conclusion. Since they are formally equivalent, they must have equal justifcatory (probability raising) power, which must be zero. That doesn't quite mean they are invalid...it could mean there are valid arguments with no justificatory force.

@Seed Using something like empiricism... (read more)

Yes, but here the right belief is the realization that what connects you to what we traditionally called your future “self”, is nothing supernatural

As before merely rejecting the supernatural doesn't give you a single correct theory, mainly because it doesn't give you a single theory. There a many more than two non-soul theories of personal identity (and the one Bensinger was assuming isn't the one you are assuming).

e. no super-material unified continuous self of extra value:

That's a flurry of claims. One of the alternatives to the momentary theory... (read more)

Care however it occurs to you!

Good decisions need to be based on correct beliefs as well as values.

Well, what do you anticipate experiencing? Something or nothing? You anticipate whatever you do anticipate and that’s all there is to know—there’s no “should” here

Why not? If there is some discernable fact of the matter about how personal continuity works, that epistemically-should constrain your expectations. Aside from any ethically-should issues.

What we must not do, is insist on reaching a universal, ‘objective’ truth about it.

Why not?

The curr

.

The Olson twins are do not at all have qualitative identity.

Not 100% , but enough to illustrate the concept.

So I just don’t know what your position is.

I didn't have to have a solution to point out the flaws in other solutions. My main point is that a no to soul- theory isn't a yes to computationalism. Computationalism isn't the only alternative, or the best.

You claim that there doesn’t need to be an answer;

Some problems are insoluble.

that seems false, as you could have to make decisions informed by your belief.

My belief isn't necessarily t... (read more)

You’ve got a lot of questions to raise, but no apparent alternative.

Non computationalism physicalism is an alternative to either or both the computationalist theories. (That performing a certain class of computations is sufficient to be conscious in general, or that performing a specific one is sufficient to be a particular conscious individual. Computation as a theory of consciousness qua awareness isn't known to be true, and even if it is assumed, it doesn't directly give you a theory of personal identity).

The non existence, or incoherence, of persona... (read more)

Both determinism and free will are metaphysical assumptions. In other words, they are presuppositions of thought.

Neither is a presupposition of thought. You don't have to presume free will, beyond some general decision making ability, and you don't have to presume strict determinism beyond some good-enough causal reliability. Moreover, both are potentially discoverable as facts.

A choice must be determined by your mental processes, knowledge and desires. If choices arose out of nowhere, as uncaused causes, they would not be choices.

False dichotomy. ... (read more)

None of these are free will (as commonly understood

Some believe that free will must be a tertium datur, a third thing fundamentally different to both determinism and indeterminism. This argument has the advantage that it makes free will logically impossible,and the disadvantage that hardly any who believes in free will defined it that way. In particular, naturalistic libertarians are happy to base free will on a mere mixture of determinism and indeterminism.

Another concern about naturalistic libertarianism is that determinism is needed to put a decisio... (read more)

everything seems to collapse to tautology

Successful explanation makes things seem less arbitrary, more predictable, more obvious. A tautology is the ultimate in non arbitrary obviousness.