hypnosifl

Old thread, but I just wanted to note that one alternative is to view a "cucumber" as a particular algorithmic compression of an underlying fundamental physical state (one in which many different possible fundamental physical states could qualify, like a "macrostate" in statistical mechanics). This was the approach Daniel Dennett took in his paper "Real Patterns", see in particular the analogy starting on p. 37 with higher-level patterns in Conway's "Game of Life" cellular automaton, like the pattern we call a "glider". If one is a mathematical platonist or at least a truth-value realist about the input-output relations of mathematical functions, then if some such function corresponds to determining whether a fundamental... (read more)

I can't access the paper by Andersen that you discuss, do you know if schizotypy as Andersen understands it would include the "schizoid" personality type or if he'd consider that distinct? Nancy McWilliams, who wrote an interesting piece about her impressions of schizoid personalities as a psychotherapist, commented on p. 199 of her textbook Psychoanalytic Diagnosis that "Our taxonomic categories remain arbitrary and overlapping, and acting as if there are discrete present-versus-absent differences between labels is not usually wise clinically ... Perhaps schizoid psychology, especially in its high-functioning versions, can be reasonably viewed as at the healthy end of the autistic spectrum." There also seems to be some support for the idea... (read 698 more words →)

I don't think it's quite right to say the idea of the universe being in some sense mathematical is purely a carry-over of Judeo-Christian heritage--what about the Greek atomists like Leucippus and Democritus for example? Most of their writings have been lost but we do know that Democritus made a distinction similar to the later notion of primary (quantitative) vs. secondary (qualitative) properties discussed at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualities-prim-sec/ with his comment about qualitative sensations being matters of human convention: "By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colours; but in reality atoms and void." CCW Taylor's book "The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus" gathers together all the known... (read 657 more words →)

I think it might be helpful to have a variant of 3a that likewise says the orthogonality thesis is false, but is not quite so optimistic as to say the alternative is that AI will be "benevolent by default". One way the orthogonality thesis could be false would be that an AI capable of human-like behavior (and which could be built using near-future computing power, say less than or equal to the computing power needed for mind uploading) would have to be significantly more similar to biological brains than current AI approaches, and in particular would have to go through an extended period of embodied social learning similar to children, with this... (read more)

Perhaps one can think of a sort of continuum where on one end you have a full understanding that it's a characteristic of language that "everything has a name" as in the Anne Sullivan quote, and on the other end, an individual knows certain gestures are associated with getting another person to exhibit certain behaviors like bringing desired objects to them, but no intuition that there's a whole system of gestures that they mostly haven't learned yet (as an example, a cat might know that rattling its food bowl will cause its owner to come over and refill it). Even if Hellen Keller was not all the way on the latter end... (read more)