All of Alex_Arendar's Comments + Replies

Thanks for this explanation. I've tried to read it some time ago but have not really coped with it. Now after reading again it was interesting for me to check if this is explained on some other internet sources and how exactly. So I checked one of the first top search results and here is what I saw: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/91695/double-slit-expirement-fundamentals-half-silvered-mirror-version

There some guy asked for an explanation of this experiment and answers are all about optical refraction and phase shifting, which honestly speaking ... (read more)

I said that with a humor. But as there are a lot of people who believe in dragons, who are on the supernatural end of the scale, there are rational people who are on the opposite end of the scale AND there are a lot of people in the middle. They are partially rational and partially they can believe that e.g. by practicing meditation or some other practices they may achieve SUPERNATURAL abilities. So Eliezer's post may convince some of them to abandone their "dreams" of supernatural. Sayint this I don't mean that meditation or other practices are irrational and bad, things are not black and white :)

1ChristianKl
I don't think the talk about ontologically basic mental entities has much bearing on the expected amount of abilities you get through meditation. It has much more to do with whether you believe that certain people who meditate a lot of gained extraordinary abilities. Whether or not those are due to ontologically basic mental entities is not that important.

The conclusion is rather strong one, Eliezer destroys the dreams of millions of people who are reading books about meditation, mind-control and other stuff. But this conclusion is stated at the end of the sequence which was preparing us all the way through - so it is good and gives a good chance to reflect over it.

1ChristianKl
That seems naive. Why do you think ths argument would convince someone who meditates and has his spiritual experiences?

Personally I enjoyed the movie :) Just because I am consciousness ))

One more thing. Suppose there is a GLUT and I can talk to it. So I can ask a question: "GLUT, is there a question which you cannot answer?" What do you guys think the GLUT will tell me?

1gjm
Something an ordinary human being might tell you when asked the same question. Maybe "Depends on what you mean by 'cannot answer', but certainly there are plenty of questions I can't answer well."

Probably I am not right, but it looks to me that consciousness can go on without any "inputs" and "outputs". If I sit in the dark room alone and think about some sort of problem then I neither taking any inputs at that moment and nor generating any output uless I decide to think aloud :) So if you believe I am not a zombie then I am consciousness regardless if there are any inputs/outputs.

And if the tiny gravitational pull of the littlw 1 gram switch can turn off the consciousness then imagine what would happen in the crowded city when a large lorry loaded with 20 tons of lead moved accross that city :) People will go zombiiiiiies and that would be a total chaos.

3gjm
Nope, because the notion of "zombie" here is a weird one cooked up by philosophers with the property that whether someone is a zombie has no effect at all on how they behave. So there would be exactly the same amount of chaos as before the switch or lorry had its effect.

Now I know who is Scott Aaronson, so your comment was useful.

Honestly I don't know who Scott Aaronson is, so hard to say for me. And regarding that science cannot explain consciousness - it probably cannot explain it exhaustively YET. But this was the same with a lot of other things in the past, which were not explainable at some moment in time but were explained completely clear after some work has been done. So be patient, science will explain consciousness some day as well (at least I want to believe in this).

Eliezer, I am wondering why to bother yourself with going into dispute with people who profess a zombie argument :) Do you hope that some of them will change their way of thinking? I hardly believe they visit this site often. In general, have you personally seen a transformation of such type of person who operates seriously by things like zombie argument to a more rational type of person?

5entirelyuseless
Scott Aaronson says here that the zombie argument that science cannot explain consciousness is completely convincing to him. Do you find Aaronson especially lacking in rationality?

For me this article is really actual since I've caught myself few times already thinking about pretty this relation between heat and motion. I am literate and educated person, I've even been learning math BUT nowadays I am trying to rethink all these stuff which is just packed in my head under labels similar to "heat vs motion". So actually it is not that hard for me in 2015 to think that heat and motion are probably different concepts :) I just know that I need to really think a lot and re-learn the basics in a proper way, not just re-reading bo... (read more)

In short I measure this the similar way as you measure which restaurant for you is good and which is bad. Probably there exist postmans whos command of knowledge about black holes is very strong, but I believe an average postman knows quite little on topics like that.

0[anonymous]
How do you measure the quality of internet and newspapers? How do you compare their impacts? What do you know about the postman's knowledge of black holes?

the country just above the Black sea on the map ;)

Do all zebras have the same (withing some accuracy range) ratio of black to white, btw?

We should not also neglect the material side of the scientists status. For example, a junior in a family may be told by his father: "look our neighbor Bob, he spent 30 years of his life on science and look what a junkie car he has and what a small house he lives in. Better have a simple but reliable job, like buying t-shirts in China and selling them here or alike, that will give you a reasonable living." I have seen quite a lot of such justifications in real life and this has to be taken into account because it reflects the factual state of thin... (read more)

I'm not in USA but people here in my country really don't read newspapers a lot anymore. 90% of newspapers are quite low-quality, so called "yellow press". So really internet is a media of a greater quality. Most of newspapers are covering stuff like politics, economics, other stuff which seems more "clear" for the people reading them. But in fact, e.g. a seller of apples trying to argue with a postman about situation in Syria is quite much the same if they would discuss collision of black holes.

0[anonymous]
How do you know that?
0ChristianKl
Which country are you from?

This post is different. For it is poetic. And I liked to read it in a different way than I liked to read other posts. Thanks for putting simple words into a beautiful form, Eliezer.

The rainbow is still there, I saw one recently )))

For a person who already escaped from religion a thought about "What general strategy would a religious person have to follow in order to escape their religion?" is like a thought about how to make all people on Earth stop eating meat for a vegetarian person. Not a very constructive thought. If one starts thinking about such general strategy then one implicitly sets a goal to somehow assist all religious persons to escape from their religion. But that kind of goal is not necessarily a good one :) Instead, a person who already (or from the start) escaped the religion, can spend that time to look for more people with similar minds.

I am reading this series and suddenly realized that Mercy, Justice and Fair are citizens of this 2nd-order-logic. As well as the "6" number. This is why they are imaginary and non-existing in the physical world. To most of you this comment would seem trivial but it just shows I am really enjoying my reading and thinking :)

Guys, I am not a physicist but I have problems with understanding this:

There would be no hypothesis in your hypothesis-space to describe the standard model of physics, where space is continuous, indefinitely divisible, and has complex amplitude assignments over uncountable cardinalities of points.

Is that a proven known thing that space is really continuous and indefinitely divisible?

1TheAncientGeek
It's empirically unproveable, but it is an assumption of standard QM and standard relativity.

claiming that most people don't have the concept of an argument, and that it's pointless to try and teach them anything else until you can convey an intuitive sense for what it means to argue

This is something I can observe everyday in my life. Probably I am less lucky then other guys and in my surrounding there are not that much "respected partners" who are able to listen and not rudely immediately disagree. So yes, it seems like most people don't have the concept of a proper argument. But that way I also did not have thsi concept for a long t... (read more)

Hi, my name is Alex. I'm not that smart as ppl posting articles here. My ability to properly challenge the captcha only from 2nd attempt while registering here in LW proves this :) So I was learning math when being student, now working in IT. While typing this comment I've been thinking what is my purpose of spending time here and reading different info... and suddenly realized that i'm 29 already and life is too short to afford thinking wrong and thinking slow. So hope to improve myself to be able learn and understand more and more things. Cheers to everyone :)