Previous articles: Personal research update, Does functionalism imply dualism?, State your physical account of experienced color.

 

In phenomenology, there is a name for the world of experience, the "lifeworld". The lifeworld is the place where you exist, where time flows, and where things are actually green. One of the themes of the later work of Edmund Husserl is that a scientific image of the real world has been constructed, on the basis of which it is denied that various phenomena of the lifeworld exist anywhere, at any level of reality.

When I asked, in the previous post, for a few opinions about what color is and how it relates to the world according to current science, I was trying to gauge just how bad the eclipse of the lifeworld by theoretical conceptions is, among the readers of this site. I'd say there is a problem, but it's a problem that might be solved by patient discussion.

Someone called Automaton has given us a clear statement of the extreme position: nothing is actually green at any level of reality; even green experiences don't involve the existence of anything that is actually green; there is no green in reality, there is only "experience of green" which is not itself green. I see other responses which are just a step or two away from this extreme, but they don't deny the existence of actual color with that degree of unambiguity.

A few people talk about wavelengths of light, but I doubt that they want to assert that the light in question, as it traverses space, is actually colored green. Which returns us to the dilemma: either "experiences" exist and part of them is actually green, or you have to say that nothing exists, in any sense, at any level of reality, that is actually green. Either the lifeworld exists somewhere in reality, or you must assert, as does the philosopher quoted by Automaton, that all that exists are brain processes and words. Your color sensations aren't really there, you're "having a sensation" without there being a sensation in reality.

What about the other responses? kilobug seems to think that pi actually exists inside a computer calculating the digits of pi, and that this isn't dualist. Manfred thinks that "keeping definitions and referents distinct" would somehow answer the question of where in reality the actual shades of green are. drethelin says "The universe does not work how it feels to us it works" without explaining in physical terms what these feelings about reality are, and whether any of them is actually green. pedanterrific asks why wrangle about color rather than some other property (the answer is that the case of color makes this sort of problem as obvious as it ever gets). RomeoStevens suggests I look into Jeff Hawkins. Hawkins mentions qualia once in his book "On Intelligence", where he speculates about what sort of neural encoding might be the physical correlate of a color experience; but he doesn't say how or whether anything manages to be actually colored.

amcknight asks which of 9 theories of color listed in the SEP article on that subject I'm talking about. If you go a few paragraphs back from the list of 9 theories, you will see references to "color as it is in experience" or "color as a subjective quality". That's the type of color I'm talking about. The 9 theories are all ways of talking about "color as in physical objects", and focus on the properties of the external stimuli which cause a color sensation. The article gets around to talking about actual color, subjective or "phenomenal" color, only at the end.

Richard Kennaway comes closest to my position; he calls it an apparently impossible situation which we are actually living. I wouldn't put it quite like that; the only reason to call it impossible is if you are completely invested in an ontology lacking the so-called secondary qualities; if you aren't, it's just a problem to solve, not a paradox. But Richard comes closest (though who knows what Will Newsome is thinking). LW user "scientism" bites a different bullet to the eliminativists, and says colors are real and are properties of the external objects. That gets a point for realism, but it doesn't explain color in a dream or a hallucination.

Changing people's minds on this subject is an uphill battle, but people here are willing to talk, and most of these subjects have already been discussed for decades. There's ample opportunity to dissolve, not the problem, but the false solutions which only obscure the real problem, by drawing on the work of others; preferably before the future Rationality Institute starts mass-producing people who have the vice of quale-blindness as well as the virtues of rationality. Some of those people will go on to work on Friendly AI. So it's highly desirable that someone should do this. However, that would require time that I no longer have.

 

In this series of posts, I certainly didn't set out to focus on the issue of color. The first post is all about Friendly AI, the ontology of consciousness, and a hypothetical future discipline of quantum neurobiology. It may still be unclear why I think evidence for quantum computing in the brain could help with the ontological problems of consciousness. I feel that the brief discussion this week has produced some minor progress in explaining myself, which needs to be consolidated into something better. But see my remarks here about being able to collapse the dualistic distinction between mental and physical ontology in a tensor network ontology; also earlier remarks here about about mathematically representing the phenomenological ontology of consciousness. I don't consider myself dogmatic about what the answer is, just about the inadequacy of all existing solutions, though I respect my own ideas enough to want to pursue them, and to believe that doing so will be usefully instructive, even if they are wrong.

However, my time is up. In real life, my ability to continue even at this inadequate level hangs by a thread. I don't mean that I'm suicidal, I mean that I can't eat air. I spent a year getting to this level in physics, so I could perform this task. I have considerable momentum now, but it will go to waste unless I can keep going for a little longer - a few weeks, maybe a few months. That should be enough time to write something up that contains a result of genuine substance, and/or enough time to secure an economic basis for my existence in real life that permits me to keep going. I won't go into detail here about how slim my resources really are, or how adverse my conditions, but it has been the effort that you would want from someone who has important contributions to make, and nowhere to turn for direct assistance.[*] I've done what I can, these posts are the end of it, and the next few days will decide whether I can keep going, or whether I have to shut down my brain once again.

So, one final remark. Asking for donations doesn't seem to work yet. So what if I promise to pay you back? Then the only cost you bear is the opportunity cost and the slight risk of default. Ten years ago, Eliezer lent me the airfare to Atlanta for a few days of brainstorming. It took a while, but he did get that money back. I honor my commitments and this one is highly public. This really is the biggest bargain in existential risk mitigation and conceptual boundary-breaking that you'll ever get: not even a gift, just a loan is required. If you want to discuss a deal, don't do it here, but mail me at mitchtemporarily@hotmail.com. One person might be enough to make the difference.

[*]Really, I can't say that, that's an emotional statement. There has been lots of assistance, large and small, from people in my life. But it's been a struggle conducted at subsistence level the whole way.

 

ETA 6 Feb: I get to keep going.

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What would it take to convince you that this entire line of inquiry is confused? Not just the quantum stuff, but the general idea that qualia are ontologically basic? Not just arguments, necessarily, experiments would be good, too.

If Mitchell is unable or unwilling to answer this question, no one should give him any amount of money no matter the terms.

[-]Nisan110

Is this a reasonable request? What would convince you that this line of inquiry is not confused?

If we discover laws of physics that only seem to be active in the brain, that would convince me. If we discover that the brain sometimes violates the laws of physics as we know them, that would convince me. If we build a complete classical simulation of the brain and it doesn't work, that would convince me. If we build a complete classical simulation of the brain and it works differently from organic brains, that would convince me. Ditto for quantum versions, even, I guess.

And there are loads of other things that would be strong evidence on this issue. Maybe we'll find the XML tags that encode greenness in objects. I don't expect any of these things to be true, because if I did then I would have updated already. But if any of these things did happen, of course I would change my mind. It probably wouldn't even take evidence that strong. Hell, any evidence stronger than intuition would be nice.

-17Mitchell_Porter

Something has gone horribly wrong here.

4David_Gerard
The Crackpot Offer.
4JenniferRM
Is the apparent reference to David Stove's "What is Wrong with Our Thoughts?" intentional?
2antigonus
No, never seen that before.

There are a lot of reasons that people aren't responding positively to your comments. One of which I think hasn't been addressed is that this to a large extent pattern matches to a bad set of metapatterns in history. In general, our understanding of the mind has been by having to reject our strong intuitions about how our minds are dualist and how aspects of our minds (or our minds as a whole) are fundamentally irreducible. So they look at this and think that it isn't a promising line of inquiry. Now, this may be unfair, but I don't think it really is very unfair. The notion that there are irreducible or even reducible but strongly dualist aspects of our universe seems to a class of hypotheses which has been repeatedly falsified. So it is fair for someone to by default to assign a low probability to similar hypotheses.

You have other bits that make worrying signals about your rationality or level intentions, like when you write things like:

I don't mean that I'm suicidal, I mean that I can't eat air. I spent a year getting to this level in physics, so I could perform this task.

This bit not only made me sit up in alarm, it substantially reduced how seriously I should take your id... (read more)

1Mitchell_Porter
Sometimes progress consists of doubling back to an older attitude, but at a higher level. Revolutions have excesses. The ghost in the machine haunts us, the more we take the machine apart. I see the holism of quantum states as the first historical sign of an ontological synthesis transcending the clash between reductionism and subjectivity, which has hitherto been resolved by rejecting one or the other, or by uneasy dualistic coexistence. Or it's like learning anatomy, physiology, and genetics, so you can cure a disease. Certainly my thinking about physics has a much higher level of concreteness now, because I have much more to work with, and I have new ideas about details - maybe it's complexes of twistor polytopes, rather than evolving tensor networks. But I've found no reason to question the original impetus. I believe most of the downvotes are coming because of the claims I make (about what might be true and what can't be true) - I get downvotes whenever I say this stuff. Also because it's written informally rather than like a scholarly argumentative article (that's due to writing it all in a rush), and it contains statements to the effect that "too many of you just don't get it". Talking about money is just the final straw, I think. But actually I think it's going OK. There's communication happening, issues are being aired and resolved, and there will have been progress, one way or another, by the time the smoke clears. However, I do want to say that this comment of yours was not bad as an exercise in dispassionate analysis of what causes might be at work in the situation.

One other bit of (hopefully) constructive criticism: you do seem to have a bit of a case of philosophical jargon-itis. I mean sentences like this:

I see the holism of quantum states as the first historical sign of an ontological synthesis transcending the clash between reductionism and subjectivity, which has hitherto been resolved by rejecting one or the other, or by uneasy dualistic coexistence.

As a philosopher myself, I appreciate the usefulness of jargon from time to time, but you sometimes have the air of throwing it around for the sheer joy of it. Furthermore, I (at least) find that that sort of style can sometimes feel like you're deliberately trying to obscure your point, or that it's camoflage to conceal any dubious parts.

4David_Gerard
When someone's spent years on a personal esoteric search for meaning, word salad is a really bad sign.
0CronoDAS
What he said. I have difficulty understand what Mitchell Porter is trying to say when he talks about this topic. When I run into something that is difficult to understand in this manner, I usually find that, upon closer examination, it usually turns out that I didn't understand it because it doesn't make any sense in the first place. And, as far as I can tell, this is also true of what Mitchell Porter, too.
0Mitchell_Porter
I claim that colors obviously exist, because they are all around us, and I also claim that they do not exist in standard physical ontology. Is that much clear?
1CronoDAS
Now it is. I disagree that colors do not exist in standard physical ontology, and find the claim rather absurd on its face. (I'm not entirely sure what ontology is, but I think I've picked up the meaning from context.) See: Brain Breakthrough! It's Made of Neurons! Hand vs. Fingers Angry Atoms I don't know every last detail of how the experience of color is created by the interaction of of light waves, eyes, and neurons, but I know that that's where it comes from.
2Mitchell_Porter
An ontology is a theory about what it is that exists. I have to speak of "physical ontology" and not just of physics, because so many physicists take an anti-ontological or positivistic attitude, and say that physical theory just has to produce numbers which match the numbers coming from experiment; it doesn't have to be a theory about what it is that exists. And by standard physical ontology I mean one which is based on what Galileo called primary properties, possibly with some admixture of new concepts from contemporary mathematics, but definitely excluding the so-called secondary properties. So a standard physical ontology may include time, space, and objects in space, and the objects will have size, shape, and location, and then they may have a variety of abstract quantitative properties on top of that, but they don't have color, sound, or any of those "feels" which get filed under qualia. Asking "where is the experienced color in the physical brain?" shows the hidden problem here . We know from experience that reality includes things that are actually green, namely certain parts of experiences. If we insist that everything is physical, then that means that experiences and their parts are also physical entities of some kind. If the actually green part of an experience is a physical entity, then there must be a physical entity which is actually green. For the sake of further discussion, let us assume a physical ontology based on point-particles. These particles have the property of location - the property of always being at some point in space - and maybe they have a few other properties, like velocity, spin, and charge. An individual particle isn't actually green. What about two of them? The properties possessed by two of them are quantitative and logical conjunctions of the properties of individual particles - e.g. "location of center of mass" or "having a part at location x0 and another part at x1". We can even extend to counterfactual properties, e.g. "the
2CronoDAS
Well, it sounds quite reasonable to me to say that if you arrange elementary particles in a certain, complicated way, you get an instance of something that experiences greenness. To me, this is no different than saying that that if you arrange particles in a certain, complicated way, you get a diamond. We just happen to know a lot more about what particle configurations create "diamondness" than "experience of green"ness. (As a matter of fact, we know exactly how to define "diamondness" as a function of particle type and arrangement.) So, at this point I apply the Socratic method... Are we in agreement that a "diamond" is a thing that exists? (My answer: Yes - we can recognize diamonds when we see them.) Is the property "is a diamond" one that can be defined in terms of "quantitative and logical conjunctions of the properties of individual particles"? (My answer: Yes, because we know that diamonds are made of carbon atoms arranged in a specific pattern.) Hopefully we agree on these answers! And if we do, can you tell me what the difference is between the predicate "is experiencing greenness" and "is a diamond" such that we can tell, in the real world, if something is a diamond by looking at the particles that make it up, and that it is impossible, in principle, to do the same for "is experiencing greenness"? What I think your mistake is, is that you underestimate the scope of just what "quantitative and logical conjunctions of the properties of individual particles" can actually describe. Which is, literally, anything at all that can be described with mathematics, assuming you're allowing all the standard operators of predicate logic and of arithmetic. And that would include the function that maps "arrangements of particles" as an input and returns "true" if the arrangement of particles included a brain that was experiencing green and "false" otherwise - even though we humans don't actually know what that function is! To sum up, I assert that you are mistaken
0whowhowho
And if you don't know how to create greenness, it is an act of faith on your part that it is done by phsyics as you understand it at all.
0CronoDAS
Perhaps, but physics has had a pretty good run so far...
0whowhowho
The key phrase is "as you understand it". 19th century physics doesn't explain whatever device you wrote that on.
0Mitchell_Porter
By talking about "experience of green", "experiencing greenness", etc, you get to dodge the question of whether greenness itself is there or not. Do you agree that there is something in reality that is actually green, namely, certain parts of experiences? Do you agree that if these parts of experiences can be identified with particular physical entities, then those physical entities must be actually green?
0metaphysicist
No. Why do you believe there is? Because you seem to experience green? Since greenness is ontologically anomalous, what reason is there to think the experience isn't illusion?
0CronoDAS
Well, I'm used to using the word "green" to describe objects that reflect certain wavelengths of light (which are interpreted in a certain way by the human visual system) and not experiences. As in, "This apple is green" or "I see something that looks green." Which is why I used the expression "experience of greenness", because that's the best translation I can think of for what you're saying into CronoDAS-English. So the question seems like a fallacy of equivocation to me, or possibly a fallacy of composition. It feels odd to me to say that a brain is green - after all, they don't look green when you're cutting open a skull to see what's inside of it. If "green" in Mitchell-Porter-English means the same thing as "experiences the sensation of greenness" does in CronoDAS-English, then yes, I'll definitely say that the set of particular physical entities in question possesses the property "green", even though the same can't be said of the individual point-particles which make up that collection. (This kind of word-wrangling is another reason why I tried to stay out of this discussion in the past... trying to make sure we mean the same thing when we talk to each other can take a lot of effort.)
2Mitchell_Porter
But you would have been using the word "green" before you knew about wavelengths of light, or had the idea that your experiences were somehow the product of your brain. Green originally denotes a very basic phenomenon, a type of color. As a child you may have been a "naive realist", thinking that what you see is the world itself. Now you think of your experience as something in your brain, with causes outside the brain. But the experience itself has not changed. In particular, green things are still actually green, even if they are now understood as "part of an experience that is inside one's brain" rather than "part of the world outside one's body". "Interpretation" is too abstract a word to describe something as concrete as color. It provides yet another way to dodge the reality of color itself. You don't say that the act of falling over is an "interpretation" of being in the Earth's gravitation field. The green experiences are green, they're not just "interpreted as green". Since we are assuming that our experiences are parts of our brains, this would be the wrong way to think about it anyway. Your experience of anything, including cutting open someone else's skull, is supposed to be an object inside your own brain, and any properties of that experience are properties of part of your own brain. You won't see the color in another brain by looking at it. But somehow, you see the color in your own brain by being it. The latter expression again pushes away the real issue - is there such a thing as actual greenness or not. We earlier had some quotes from an Australian philosopher, JJC Smart, who would say there are "experiences of green", but there's no actual green. He says this because he's a materialist, so he believes that all there is in reality is just neurons doing their thing, and he knows that standard physical ontology doesn't contain anything like actual green. He has to deny the reality of one of the most obviously real things there is, but, at least he
0CronoDAS
Lot of words there... I hope I'm understanding better. This is what I've been trying to say: "Green" exists, and "green" is also present (indirectly) in physics. (I think.)
1Mitchell_Porter
What does "present indirectly" mean?
3CronoDAS
Not one of the fundamental properties, but definable in terms of them. In other words, present in the same way "diamond" is - there's no property "green" in the fundamental equations of physics, but it "emerges" from them, or can (in principle) be defined in terms of them. (I'm embarrassed to use the word "emergent", but, well...) To use an analogy, there's no mention of "even numbers" in the axioms of Peano Arithmetic or in first order logic, but S(S(0)) is still even; evenness is present indirectly within Peano Arithmetic. You can talk about even numbers within Peano Arithmetic by writing a formula fragment that is true of all even numbers and false for all other numbers, and using that as your "definition" of even. (It would be something like "Ǝy(S(S(0))y) = x)".) If I understand correctly, "standard physical ontology" is also a formal system, so the exact same trick should work for talking about concepts such as "diamond" or "green" - we just don't happen to know (yet) how to define "green" the same way we can define "diamond" or "even", but I'm pretty sure that, in principle, there is a way to do it. (I hope that made sense...)
0Mitchell_Porter
Here I fall back on my earlier statement that this Let's compare the plausibility of getting colors out of combinations of the elementary properties in standard physical ontology, and the plausibility of getting colors out of Peano Arithmetic. I think the two cases are quite similar. In both cases you have an infinite tower of increasingly complex conjunctive (etc) properties that can be defined in terms of an ontological base, but getting to color just from arithmetic or just from points arranged in space is asking for magic. (Whereas getting a diamond from points arranged in space is not problematic.) There are quantifiable things you can say about subjective color, for example its three-dimensionality (hue, saturation, brightness). The color state of a visual region can be represented by a mapping from the region (as a two-dimensional set of points) into three-dimensional color space. So there ought to be a sense in which the actually colored parts of experience are instances of certain maps which are roughly of the form R^2 -> R^3. (To be more precise, the range and domain will be certain subsets of R^2 and R^3.) But this doesn't mean that a color experience can be identified with this mathematical object, or with a structurally isomorphic computational state. You could say that my "methodology", in attempting to construct a physical ontology that contains consciousness, is to discover as much as I can about the structure and constituent relations of a conscious experience, and then to insist that these are realized in the states of a physically elementary "state machine" rather than a virtual machine, because that allows me to be a realist about the "parts" of consciousness, and their properties.
2CronoDAS
In one sense, there already is a demonstration that you can get colors from the combinations of the elementary properties in standard physical ontology: you can specify a brain in standard physical ontology. And, heck, maybe you can get colors out of Peano Arithmetic, too! ;) At this point we have at least identified what we disagree on. I suspect that there is nothing more we can say about the topic that will affect each other's opinion, so I'm going to withdraw from the discussion.
4David_Gerard
Dualism is a confused notion. If, in a long journey through gathering a tremendous degree of knowledge, you arrive at dualism, you've made a mistake somewhere and need to go back and see where you divided by zero. If your logical chain is in fact sound to a mathematical degree of certainty, then arriving at dualism is a reductio ad absurdum of your starting point.
1Mitchell_Porter
Perhaps you missed that I have argued against functionalism because it implies dualism.
3David_Gerard
Then you need to do the same for ontologically basic qualia.
-2Mitchell_Porter
I fail to see what your actual position is. Mine is, first, that colors exist, and second, that they don't exist in standard physical ontology. Please make a comparably clear statement about what you believe the truth to be.

Colours "exist" as a fact of perception. If you're looking for colours without perception, you've missed what normative usage of "colour" means. You've also committed a ton of compression fallacy, assuming that all possible definitions of "colour" do or should refer to the same ontological entity.

You've then covered your views in word salad; I would not attempt to write with such an appalling lack of clarity as you've wrapped your views in in this sequence, except for strictly literary purposes; certainly not if my intent were to inform.

You need to seriously consider the possibility that this sequence is getting such an overwhelmingly negative reaction because you're talking rubbish.

0Mitchell_Porter
Why do you put "exist" in quotation marks? What does that accomplish? If I chopped off your hand, would you say that the pain does not exist, it only "exists"? I'm not looking for colors without perception; I'm looking for the colors of perception somewhere in physical reality; since colors are real, and physical reality is supposed to be the only sort of reality there is. It's not so easy to describe conscious states accurately, and a serious alternative to dualism isn't so easy to invent or convey either. I'm improvising a lot. If you make an effort to understand it, it may make more sense. But let us return to your views. Colors only exist as part of perceptions; fine. Presumably you believe that a perception is a type of physical process, a brain process. Do you believe that some part of these brain processes is colored? If someone is seeing green, is there a flicker of actual greenness somewhere in or around the relevant brain process? I doubt that you think this. But then, at this point, nothing in your model of reality is actually green, neither the world outside the brain, nor the world inside the brain. Yet greenness is manifestly there in reality: perceptions contain actual greenness. Therefore your model is incomplete. Therefore, if you wish to include actual conscious experiences in your model, they'll have to go in alongside but distinct from the physical processes. Therefore, you will have to be a dualist. I am not advocating dualism, I'm just telling you that if you don't want to deny the phenomenology of color, and you want to retain your physical ontology, you will have to be a dualist.
-1HoverHell
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2JoshuaZ
I don't know. Probably very low, certainly less than 1%.
1HoverHell
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1David_Gerard
Asserting that qualia are ontologically basic appears to be assuming that an aspect of mind is ontologically basic, i.e. dualism. So it's only not having done the logical chain myself that would let me set a a probability (a statement of my uncertainty) on it at all, rather than just saying "contradiction".
0HoverHell
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Some questions:

  1. How will you make money in the future to pay back the loan?
  2. Why aren't you doing that now, even on a part-time basis?
  3. Is there one academic physicist who will endorse your specific research agenda as worthwhile?
  4. Likewise for an academic philosopher?
  5. Likewise for anyone other than yourself?
  6. Why won't physicists doing ordinary physics (who are more numerous, have higher ability, and have better track record of productivity) solve your problems in the course of making better predictive models?
  7. How would this particular piece of work help with your larger interests? Would it cause physicists to work on this topic? Provide a basis for assessing your productivity or lack thereof?
  8. Why not spend some time programming or tutoring math? If you work at Google for a year you can then live off the proceeds for several years in Bali or the like. A moderate amount of tutoring work could pay the rent.
2Mitchell_Porter
Because I'll have a job again? I have actually had paid employment before, and I don't anticipate that the need to earn money will vanish from my life. The question is whether I'll move a few steps up the economic food chain, either because I find a niche where I can do my thing, or because I can't stand poverty any more and decide to do something that pays well. If I move up, repayment will be faster, if I don't, it will be slower, but either way it will happen. This is the culmination of a period in which I stopped trying to find compromise work and just went for broke. I've crossed all sorts of boundaries in the past few weeks, as the end neared and I forced more from myself. That will have been worth it, no matter what happens now. Well, let's start with the opposite: go here for an ex-academic telling me that one part of my research agenda is not worthwhile. Against that, you might want to look at the reception of my "questions" on the Stack Exchange sites - most of those questions are actually statements of ideas, and they generally (though not always) get a positive reception. Now if you're talking about the big agenda I outlined in my first post in this series, there are clear resemblances between elements of it and work that is already out there. You don't have to look far to find physicists who are interested in physical ontology or in quantum brain theories - though I think most of them are on the wrong track, and the feeling might be mutual. But yes, I can think of various people whose work is similar enough to what I propose, that they might endorse that part of the picture. David Chalmers is best know for talking about dualism, but he's flagged a new monism as an option worth exploring. We have an exchange of views on his blog here. Let's see if anyone else has surfaced, by the time we're done here. Well, let's see what subproblems I have, which might be solved by a physicist. There's the search for the right quantum ontology, and then there's th

Chalmers' short comment in your link amounts to just Chalmers expressing enthusiasm for ontologically basic mental properties, not any kind of recommendation for your specific research program.

Of course you're right that some forms of work pay well. Part of what keeps me down is impatience and the attempt to do the most important thing right now.

To be frank, the Outside View says that most people who have achieved little over many years of work will achieve little in the next few months. Many of them have trouble with time horizons, lack of willpower, or other problems that sabotage their efforts systematically, or prefer to indulge other desires rather than work hard. These things would hinder both scientific research and paid work. Refusing to self-finance with a lucrative job, combined with the absence of any impressive work history (that you have made clear in the post I have seen) is a bad signal about your productivity, your reasons for asking us for money, and your ability to eventually pay it back.

the attempt to do the most important thing right now

No one else seems to buy your picture of what is most important (qualia+safe AI). Have you actually thought through an... (read more)

-2Mitchell_Porter
There is no existing recommendation for my specific research program because I haven't gone looking for one. I thought I would just work on it myself, finish a portion of it myself, and present that to the world, along with the outline of the rest of the program. "Lucrative" is a weakness in your critique. I'm having trouble thinking of anyone who decided they should have been a scientist, then went and made lots of money, then did something of consequence in science. People who really want to do something tend to have trouble doing something else in its place. Of course you're correct that if someone wants to achieve big things, but has failed to do so thus far, there are reasons. One of my favorite lines from Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix talks about the Superbrights, who were the product of an experiment in genetically engineering IQs above 200, as favoring "wild schemes, huge lunacies that in the end boiled down to nothing". I spent my 20s trying to create a global transhumanist utopia in completely ineffective ways (which is why I can now write about the perils of utopianism with some conviction), and my 30s catching up on a lot of facts about the world. I am surely a case study in something, some type of failed potential, though I don't know what exactly. I would even think about trying to extract the lessons from my own experience, and that of similar people like Celia Green and Marni Sheppeard, so that others don't repeat my mistakes. But throughout those years I also thought a great deal about the ontology of quantum mechanics and the ontology of consciousness. I could certainly have written philosophical monographs on those subjects. I could do so now, except that I now believe that the explanation of quantum mechanics will be found through the study of our most advanced theories, and not in reasoning about simple models, so the quick path to enlightenment turns out to lead up the slope of genuine particle physics. Anyway, perhaps the main reason I'm try

Perhaps the ultimate wrong turn would be a civilization which uploaded itself, thinking that it had thereby obtained immortality, when in fact they had just killed themselves, to be replaced by a society of unconscious simulations. That's an extreme, science-fictional example, but there are many lesser forms of the problem that could come to pass, which are merely pathologies rather than disasters.

Imagine you have signed up to have your brain scanned by the most advanced equipment available in 2045. You set in a tube and close you eyes while the machine recreates all the details of your brain, its connectivity, electromagnetic fields and electrochemical gradients, and transient firing patterns.

The technician says, "Okay, you've been uploaded, the simulation is running."

"Excellent," you respond. "Now I can interact with he simulation and prove that it doesn't have qualia."

"Hold on, there," said the technician. "You can't interact with it yet. The nerve impulses from your sensory organs and non-cranial nerves are still being recorded and used as input for the simulation, so that we can make sure it's a stable duplicate. Observe the... (read more)

9Mitchell_Porter
Yes, I've read this in science fiction too. Do you want me to write my own science fiction in opposition to yours, about the monadic physics of the soul and the sinister society of the zombie uploads? It would be a stirring tale about the rise of a culture brainwashed to believe that simulations of mind are the same as the real thing, and the race against time to prevent it from implementing its deluded utopia by force. Telling a vivid little story about how things would be if so-and-so were true, is not actually an argument in favor of the proposition. The relevant LW buzzword is fictional evidence.
5moridinamael
Yes, I think your writing a "counter-fiction" would be a very useful exercise and might clarify to me how you can continue to hold the position that you do. I honestly do not fathom it. I admit this is a fact about my own state of knowledge, and I would like it if you could at least show me an example of a fictional universe where you were proven right, as I have shown an account of a fictional universe where you are proven wrong. I don't intend for the story to serve as any kind of evidence, but I did intend for it to serve as an argument. If you found yourself in the position described in the story, would you be forced to admit that there was not, in fact, any information that makes up a "mind" outside of the mechanistic brain? If it turns out that humans and their simulations both behave and think in exactly the same fashion? Again, it's not fictional evidence, it's me asking what your true rejection would need to be for you to accept that the universe is turtles all the way down.
1Mitchell_Porter
If it's a question of why I believe what I do, the starting point is described here, in the section on being wrong about one's phenomenology. Telling me that colors aren't there at any level is telling me that my color phenomenology doesn't exist. That's like telling you, not just that you're not having a conversation on lesswrong, but that you are not even hallucinating the occurrence of such a conversation. There are hard limits to the sort of doubt one can credibly engage in about what is happening to oneself at the level of appearance, and the abolition of color lies way beyond those limits, out in the land of "what if 2+2 actually equals 5?" The next step is the insistence that such colors are not contained in physical ontology, and so a standard materialism is really a dualism, which will associate colors (and other ingredients of experience) with some material entity or property, but which cannot legitimately identify them with it. I think that ultimately this is straightforward - the mathematical ontologies of standard physics are completely explicit, it's obvious what they're made of, and you just won't get color out of something like a big logical conjunction of positional properties - but the arguments are intricate because every conceivable attempt to avoid that conclusion is deployed. So if you want arguments for this step, I'm sure you can find them in Chalmers and other philosophers. Then there's my personal alternative to dualism. The existence of an alternative, as a palpable possibility if not a demonstrated reality, certainly helps me in my stubbornness. Otherwise I would just be left insisting that phenomenal ontology is definitely different to physical ontology, and historically that usually leads to advocacy of dualism, though starting in the late 19th century you had people talking about a monistic alternative - "panpsychism", later Russell's "neutral monism". There's surely an important issue buried here, something about the capacity of peo
8Risto_Saarelma
I'm more interested in the part in the fiction where the heroes realize that the people they've lived with their whole lives in their revealed-to-be-dystopian future, who've had an upload brain prosthesis after some traumatic injury or disease, are actually p-zombies. How do they find this out, exactly? And how do they deal with there being all these people, who might be their friends, parents or children, who are on all social and cognitive accounts exactly like them, who they are now convinced lack a subjective experience?
4Mitchell_Porter
Let's see what we need to assume for such a fictional scenario. First, we have (1) functionally successful brain emulation exists, at a level where the emulation includes memory and personality. Then I see a choice between (2a) the world is still run by human beings, and (2b) the world has powerful AI. Finally, we have a choice between (3a) there has been no discovery of a need for quantum neuroscience yet, and (3b) a quantum neuroscience exists, but a quantum implementation of the personal state machine is not thought necessary to preserve consciousness. In my opinion, (1) is in tension with (3a) and even with (2a). Given that we are assuming some form of quantum-mind theory to be correct, it seems unlikely that you could have functionally adequate uploads of whole human beings, without this having already been discovered. And having the hardware and the models and the brain data needed to run a whole human sim, should imply that you are well past the threshold of being able to create AI that is nonhuman but with human intellectual potential. So by my standards, the best chance to make the story work is the combination of (1) with (3b), and possibly with (2b) also. The (2b) scenario might be set after a "semi-friendly" singularity, in which an Iain M. Banks, Culture-like existence for humanity has been created, and the science and technology for brain prostheses has been developed by AIs. Since the existence of a world-ruling friendly super-AI (a "Sysop") raises so many other issues, it might be better to think in terms of an "Aristoi"-like world where there's a benevolent human ruling class who have used powerful narrow AI to produce brain emulation technology and other boons to humanity, and who keep a very tight control on its spread. The model here might be Vinge's Peace Authority, a dictatorship under which the masses have a medieval existence and the rulers have the advanced technology, which they monopolize for the sake of human survival. However it works
0Risto_Saarelma
There's quite a bit of the least convenient possible world intention in the thought experiment. Yes, assuming that things are run by humans and transhuman or nonhuman AIs are either successfully not pursued or not achievable with anything close to the effort of EMs and therefore still in the future. Assuming that the EMs are made using advanced brain scanning and extensive brute force reverse engineering with narrow AIs, with people in charge and not actually understanding the brain well enough to build one from scratch themselves. Assuming that strong social taboos of the least convenient possible world prevent running EMs in anything but biological or extremely lifelike artificial bodies at the same subjective speed as biological humans, and no rampant copying of them that would destabilize society and lead to a whole new set of thought-experimental problems. The wishful thinking not-really-there EMs are a good point, but again, the least convenient possible world would probably be really fixated on the idea that the brain is the self, so their culture just rejects stuff like lifeboxes as cute art projects, and goes straight for the whole brain emulation, with any helpful attempts to fudge broken output with a pattern matching chatbot AI being actively looked out for, quickly discovered and leading to swift disgrace for the shortcut-using researchers. It is possible that things would still lead to some kind of wishful thinking outcome, but getting to the stage where the brain emulation is producing actions recognizable as resulting from the personality and memories of the person it was taken from without using any cheating obvious to the researcher, such as a lifebox pattern matcher, sounds like it should be pretty far along being the real thing, given that the in-brain encoding of the personality and memories would be pretty much a complete black box. There's still a whole load of unknown unknowns with ways things could go wrong at this point, but it looks a lo
0Eugine_Nier
One possible counter fiction would have an ending similar to the bad ending of three worlds collide.
0katydee
Jeff Hawkins.

Why not spend some time programming or tutoring math? If you work at Google for a year you can then live off the proceeds for several years in Bali or the like. A moderate amount of tutoring work could pay the rent.

If I ever go to work at Google it won't be to live off the proceeds afterwards, it will be because it's relevant to artificial intelligence.

Supposing you can work at Google, why not? Beggaring yourself looks unlikely to maximize total productivity over the next few years, which seems like the timescale that counts.

6JoshuaZ
Oh. Lubos Motl. Considering he seems to spend his time doing things like telling Scott Aaronson that Scott doesn't understand quantum mechanics, I don't think Motl's opinion should actually have much weight in this sort of context. Quantum topological computers are more robust than old-fashioned quantum computers, but they aren't that more robust and they have their own host of issues. People likely aren't looking into this because a) it seems only marginally more reasonable than the more common version of microtubules doing quantum computation and b) it isn't clear how one would go about testing any such idea.
-3Mitchell_Porter
In the article I linked, Lubos is expressing a common opinion about the merit of such formulas. It's a deeper issue than just Lubos being opinionated. If I had bothered to write a paper, back when I was thinking about anyons in microtubules, we would know a lot more by now about the merits of that idea and how to test it. There would have been a response and a dialogue. But I let it go and no-one else took it up on the theoretical level.
4JoshuaZ
Do you have any suggested method for testing the microtubule claim?
-2Mitchell_Porter
From my perspective, first you should just try to find a biophysically plausible model which contains anyons. Then you can test it, e.g. by examining optical and electrical properties of the microtubule. People measure such properties already, so we may already have relevant data, even evidence. There is a guy in Japan (Anirban Bandyopadhyay) who claims to have measured all sorts of striking electrical properties of the microtubule. When he talks about theory, I just shake my head, but that doesn't tell us whether his data is good or bad.

Which returns us to the dilemma: either "experiences" exist and part of them is actually green, or you have to say that nothing exists, in any sense, at any level of reality, that is actually green.

The third option is my favourite:
Good news everyone! There are all kinds of different things that you can permissibly call green! Classes of wavelengths, dispositions in retnas, experiences in brains, all kinds of things! Now we have the fun choice of deciding which one is most interesting and what we want to talk about! Yay!

3David_Gerard
And Fallacies of Compression was just in the sequence reruns a couple of days ago, too ...
-1Mitchell_Porter
I'm talking about experiences in brains.
0Luke_A_Somers
Well, then, you've just told us where to find green. When neuroscientists find the spot to poke that makes their subjects say 'Wow, that is so GREEN', what do you say then? I haven't been following this closely, but unless you're taking the exact dualist stance you say below that you're denying, it really seems like that should be the answer.

"Green" refers to objects which disproportionately reflect or emit light of a wavelength between 520 and 570nm.

~(Solvent, from the previous thread.)

A few people talk about wavelengths of light, but I doubt that they want to assert that the light in question, as it traverses space, is actually colored green.

If your counterexample is already taken care of by the very second person in the previous thread, you should use a different counterexample. EDIT: I am not endorsing Solvent's definition in any "The Definition" sense - but ... (read more)

1JoshuaZ
This doesn't actually work. We speak of seeing green things. And we can say an object looks green even when it isn't emitting any such rays, due to various optical illusions and the like. If it turned out that there was some specific wavelength (say around 450 nm in the otherwise blue range) that also triggered the same visual reaction in our systems as waves in the 520-570 range I don't think we'd have trouble calling objects sending off that frequency as green. And we actually do something similar to colors from objects that emit combinations of wavelengths. People with synesthesia are similarly a problem. Dissolving this does have some subtle issues. The real issue is that the difficulty of dissolving what we mean when we say a given color is not good evidence that colors cannot be dissolved.
4Manfred
So, I think I can just say "mind projection fallacy" and you'll know what I mean about most of those things. But yes, I am not endorsing Solvent's definition (I'll edit in a disclaimer to that effect, and explaining why I still quoted). "Green," as a human word, is a lot more like "disease" from Yvain's post than it is like "a featherless biped."

Things that my brain tells me are green, are green. Things that your brain tells you are green, are green. In cases where we disagree, split the label into my!green and your!green.

Now can we move on? This post is a waste of time.

4Eugine_Nier
To see the problem with the above statement, try replacing the word "green" with "true".
0FeepingCreature
You mean, "to see the problem with a wholly unrelated statement". Green is not the same kind of property as true.
0Eugine_Nier
Could you expand on that.
3FeepingCreature
Truth is an abstract, rationally defined property that has a meaning beyond my mind. To say that "things my brain tells me are true, are true" is a similar kind of claim would imply that green, like true, has a working definition beyond the perceptual. If this is the case, I'd like to know it. I'm fairly sure it's not actually possible to be wrong about a perceived color, excluding errors in memory. It's possible to consider a statement and be mistaken about its truthfulness, but is it possible to look at an object and be mistaken about the color one perceives it as? That seems nonsensical.
2Eugine_Nier
So can you provide a working definition of "true"?
0FeepingCreature
If there was definitely such a thing as an objective reality, my answer would be "a claim that is not in contradiction with objective reality". As it stands, I'll have to settle for "a claim that is never in contradiction with perceived reality. " Note that, for instance, ludicrous claims about the distant past do in fact stand in contradiction with perceived reality since "things like that seem to not happen now, and the behavior of the universe seems to be consistent over time" is a true claim which a ludicrous but unverifiable claim would contradict with. Note that the degree to which you believe truth can be objective is exactly proportional to the degree to which you believe reality is objective and modelled by our observations.
-5[anonymous]

The lifeworld is the place where you exist, where time flows, and where things are actually green.

What makes you think these all happen in the same place?

0Luke_A_Somers
... they're all the naive interpretations of our sensations, so it really seems they ought to overlap at least.

For what it's worth, I don't take dreams and hallucinations to involve seeing at all, so I don't believe I have anything to explain with regard to colour in dreams and hallucinations. I take the question "Do you dream in colour?" to be incoherent whereas the question "Have you dreamt of colour / coloured things?" is fine. The former question presupposes that perception involves seeing internal imagery rather than directly perceiving the world, which I deny, and that dreaming / hallucinating can therefore be said to be a form of perception also, something which obviously can't follow from my denial of mediating imagery.

[-][anonymous]20

I have a question and I think maybe your answer will make it easier for other people to understand what you are arguing.

What about people who are color blind? They see for instance red where in objective reality the objects wavelength is "green". What happens here in your view? In the persons experience he still see red, but it should be green... And eventhough we know approximately the processes that do that people are color blind, this seems to be a interesting question in your model.

As of a few minutes ago, my problems are solved for the next few months - which should be long enough for this situation never to recur. If I ever go fundraising again, I'll make sure I have something far more substantial ready to make my case.

5CarlShulman
By way of these posts, or due to some independent cause?
3Mitchell_Porter
Independent cause. I did also get $100 back from "ITakeBets" as a result of the posts, but that was all.

Just to clarify, I don't really consider my position to be eliminative towards green, only that what we are talking about when we talk about green 'qualia' is nothing more than a certain type of sentient experience. This may eliminate what you think you are talking about what you say green, but not what I think I am talking about when I say green. I am willing to say that the part of a functional pattern of neural activity that is experienced as green qualia is identical to green in the sense that people generally mean when they talk about seeing something... (read more)

The most apparent way to talk about such topics here is to completely overhaul the terminology and canonical examples.

And then do something with the resulting referential void.

Certainly not a task for group of less than four people, and likely not a task for group of less than 40.

Is your attempt to single-handedly contribute, with all the costs it imposes, likely enough to give a significant positive result?

Apparently there is no guarantee return. Suppose that your theoretical assumptions are correct, then why people don't get it? I mean, if the explanations have some power, other physics will accept.

Maybe future neurobiology help us with the consciosuness debate. FAI is another helm.

A few people talk about wavelengths of light, but I doubt that they want to assert that the light in question, as it traverses space, is actually colored green.

Why not? If anything has color, it's light.

5Manfred
Careful of getting sucked into a Standard Dispute :P "light is clearly colored." "No it's not - imagine looking at it from the side!" "By definition, looking at something means absorbing photons, so if we could look at a beam of light form the side it would look like the color it is." And so on.
2Nick_Tarleton
"[S]aying anything whatsoever about [light], in answer to the question Mitchell is asking, is blatantly running away from the scary and hence interesting part of the problem, which will concern itself solely with matters in the interior part of the skull."
3buybuydandavis
Maybe I needed to add a space in my comment. "If any thing has color, it is light." My point was that if you want to make color a property of things in themselves, and not the reaction of your nervous system to them, green light strikes me as about as green as a green thing can get. As for the supposed scary and interesting part of the problem, while the science of color perception is no doubt full of interesting facts and concepts, it's hardly scary, and I don't think the perception of color is scary or interesting in philosophical terms at all. I would call some subset of the possible states of your nervous system as you perceiving green. I can't enumerate those states, but I find nothing scary about the issue; it's completely unproblematic. What do you find scary about this?
0Emile
How green a ray of light appears can depend of what's around it.
3buybuydandavis
See the rest of my sentence. I was explicitly talking about things in themselves, and not how they appear to an observer. The original comment I responded to Anyone talking about light in the optical range as it traverses space is likely to talk about the color of that light, and assert "that's green light". More generally, outside the optical range, they're likely to talk about the type of light in terms of frequency bands.
1Morendil
I still don't get that.