All of Wiseman's Comments + Replies

@J Thomas: "Why would anybody think that there is a single perfect morality, and if everybody could only see it then we'd all live in peace and harmony?"

Because they have a specific argument which leads them to believe that?

You know, there's no reason why one couldn't consider one language more efficient at communication than others, at least by human benchmarks, all else being equal (how well people know the language, etc.). Ditto for morality.

Thomas, you are running in to the same problem Eliezer is: you can't have a convincing argument about w... (read more)

"Giving N people each 1/Nth is nonetheless a fair sort of thing to do"

How can we know this unless we actually define what "fair" is, or what its bedrock is? Or are we just assuming that roughly, "fair" means "equal proportions"?

@Eliezer: "As this is what I identify with the meaning of the term, 'good'..."

I'm still a little cloudy about one thing though Eliezer, and this seems to be the point Roko is making as well. Once you have determined what physically has happened in a situation, and what has caused it, how do inarguably decide that it is "good" or "bad"? Based on what system of prefering one physical state over another?

Obviously, saving a child from death is good, but how do you decide in trickier situations where intuition can't do the work for you, and where people just can't agree on anything, like say, abortion?

Are we really still beating up on group selectionism here, Eliezer?

I think this fallacy needs to be corrected. Yes, group selection is real. Maybe not in the anthropomorphic way of organisms "voluntarily" restraining their breeding, but in terms of adaptation, yes, individual genomes will adapt to survive better as per the requirements of the group. They have no choice BUT to do this, else they go extinct.

The example Eliezer gave of insect populations being selected for low population, actually proves group selectionism. Why? Because it doesn't m... (read more)

This post is called the "The Meaning of Right", but it doesn't spend much time actually defining what situations should be considered as right instead of wrong, other than a bit at the end which seems to define "right" as simply "happiness". Rather its a lesson in describing how to take your preferred world state, and causally link that to what you'd have to do to get to that state. But that world state is still ambiguously right/wrong, according to any absolute sense, as of this post.

So does this post say what "right" means, other than simply "happiness" (which sounds like generic utilitarianism), am I simply missing something?

Eliezer: Wiseman, if everyone were blissed-out by direct stimulation of their pleasure center all the time, would that by definition be moral progress?

Compared to todays state of affairs in the world? Yes, I think that would be enormous moral progress compared to right now (so long as the bliss was not short term and would not burn out eventually and leave everyone dead. So long as the bliss was of an individual's choice. So long as it really was everyone in bliss, and others didn't have to suffer for it. Etc. etc.)

I don't get this side debate between Eliezer and Caledonian.

Caledonian's original comment was "Deeper goals and preferences can result in the creation and destruction of shallower ones", which cites a common and accepted belief in cognitive science that there is such a thing as hierarchical goal systems, which might explain human behavior. Nothing controversial there.

Eliezer responds by saying that emotions, not goals, have to be flat, and further, that "each facet of ourselves that we judge, is judged by the whole", which is only ambig... (read more)

In that case I don't think MWI says anything we didn't already know: specifically that 'stuff happens' outside of our control, which is something which we have to deal with even in non-quantum lines of thought. Trying to make choices different when acknowledging that MWI is true probably will result in no utility gain at all, since saying that x number of future worlds out of the total will result in some undesirable state, is the same as saying, under copenhagen, the chances it will happen to you is x out-of total. And that lack of meaningfull difference should be a clue as to MWI's falshood.

In the end the only way to guide our actions is to abide by rational ethics, and seek to improve those.

Kaj - there is a more cheerful answer. And this is it: Many-Worlds isn't true. Although Eliezer may be confident, the final word on the issue is still a long way off. Eliezer has been illogical on enough of his reasoning that there is reason to question that confidence.

Err, how can two copies of a person be exactly the same when the gravitational forces on each will both be different? Isn't the very idea that you can transfer actual atoms in the universe to a new location while somehow ensuring that this transfer doesn't deterministically guarantee being able to determining which person "caused" the copy to exist (I.E. the original), physical nonsense?

While molecules may not have invisible "unique ID" numbers attached to them, they are unique in the sense of quantum evolution, preserving the "importance" of one atom distinguished from another.

I am interested in the answer to John Maxwell's question as well.

In that vein, let me re-ask a question I had in a previous post but was not answered:

How does MWI not violate no-faster-than-light-travel itself?

That is, if a decoherence happens with a particle/amplitude, requiring at that point a split universe in order to process everything so both possibilities actually happen, how do all particles across the entire universe know that at that point they must duplicate/superposition/whatever, in order to maintain the entegrity of two worlds where both posibilities happen?

Question: how does MWI not violate SR/no-faster-than-light-travel itself?

That is, if a decoherence happens with a particle/amplitude, requiring at that point a split universe in order to process everything so both possibilities actually happen, how do all particles across the entire universe know that at that point they must duplicate/superposition/whatever, in order to maintain the entegrity of two worlds where both posibilities happen?

Dustin: "Good God, he's even making up his own contradictions now."

That is a meaningless comment, and adds nothing to this discussion. The whole point I believe, of Caledonian's argument is that the statement "MWI -is- collapse" is not a contradiction, so long as the differences in the theories/interpretations of QM can never be substantiated with experimental evidence, ever, because the theories themselves don't allow for it, rather than we just haven't seen those experiments yet.

That said, I don't think that's the case with MWI. If yo... (read more)

Bob: But multiple worlds are observed, in subatomic phenomena. That's what superposition is. There is experimental evidence for multiple worlds.

How does the experimental evidence favor MW over a possible collapse function with non-GR-violating non-locality?

Wiseman, there's only one amplitude distribution. One. Not two. Not three. One, in all the physics we know.

I do understand this Eliezer. But my point is even though it's just one distribution, there is still a description of differentation within that one distribution, otherwise the universe would be just one electron, or something like that. So since there is differentation within the distribution, and since those differentations are tracked and consistent due to the non-random laws of this universe, isn't that really the same as "identity", in that the "differentations" are always 100% unique?

Isn't each particle or amplitude configuration unique because only it has its exact relationship to every other amplitude configuration in the universe? Doesn't that sufficiently make each amplitude configuration at a specific spatial-temporal locality different from every other one, in that the universe can "tell" one from the other?

Ben Jones: Well that's just plain wrong.... QM is the most experimentally validated theory we have, but one of its implications is the relative identity of quanta.

The experiments show specific results, but it may be possible that some properties of the particles aren't interacting with any aspect of the experiment, thus QM would still be correct in the explanation for the original experiments, but not complete, as they don't explain the additional properties. So it is entirely possible.

The generality "invalidating one aspect of a theory can't invalida... (read more)

Scott, I'm not dismissing QM's accomplishment, because yes it's significant, the point is simply that it's still just a theory, and so long as that's what it is, dismissing the possibility that it is incomplete, or wrong, is not scientific.

Eliezer, I get that you are highly confident in QM. Obviously, QM has a lot going for it. But that still doesn't mean that QM can't be incomplete, or even wrong. Of course, reality is what it is, but our mental representation of it can be arbitrarily accurate or innacurate, and we can continue to fool our selfs into thin... (read more)

Eliezer: There can be properties of the particles we don't know about yet, but our existing experiments already show those new properties are also identical

According to a specific theory, the experiments do, yes. But again I beg to know why you have 100% confidence that right now you think our understanding of sub-atomic particles is totally complete, such that there can't possibly be anything about particles that we haven't taken into account in our experiments so far. More specifically, I really doubt that any experiment will show two particles are exact... (read more)

Well then, if philosophers must be more cautious about their philosophies, because observable evidence might prove them wrong, then this goes equally for the physicist's arguments as well: Observable evidence might prove him wrong in the future. Since it is always true that "You might be wrong", then it is never valid to say you can prove that two particles are exactly the same, since future theories or evidence may show there are properties of a particle we just don't know about yet, and how to test for them. Therefore Eliezer's argument against... (read more)

Eliezer, I may be missing something here, but it seems you did not really disprove the philosophers argument. Yes according to physics status-quo of understanding, there might be a way to prove absolutely that two particles are the same, but who says the status-quo is complete, and how can you ever know that it is? That is the philosphers point I believe.

Windy, according to my logic, yes, to a certain degree all adaptations contribute to some sort of group survival, thus negating the importance of drawing the distinction between group and individual/K selection as some sort of fundamental difference in the mechanics of evolution.

That doesn't mean I'm saying 'group selection' is not a valid area of study, it still needs to be resolved how some adaptations which seem detrimental to the individual end up being good for the individual by proxy of the being good for the group. This is not so much a redefinitio... (read more)

Wiseman's misunderstanding of group selection demonstrates why this would have been an important distinction to make.

Windy, the point you referred to from Caledonian is not different than my own, so clearly it is you who is misunderstanding something here.

I "get" what group selection is, as you know, at the high level it's not a difficult concept. But my point in an earlier argument is that the idea of group selection can logically only mean one thing, and it is not the idea that somehow the group can flourish while the individuals are slowly dyi... (read more)

Eliezer: "If the entire human genome of 3 billion DNA bases could be meaningful, it's not clear why it would contain <25,000 genes"

I wouldn't say we know enough about biological mechanics to say we necessarily need more protein coding-DNA that protein-regulating DNA. If you think about it, collagen the protein is used in everything from skin, tendons, ligaments, muscles, fascia, etc. But you can't code for all of those uses of collagen just by HAVING the collagen code in the DNA, you need regulating code to instruct when/where/how to use it.

Al... (read more)

"Once you are dealing with hominids, which may be the most important example, indeed "enforcement" may well be important. There is a growing lit on how reciprocal altruism ultimately depends on punishment of free riders, that is, enforcement."

That sounds to me like an example of an "Evolution Fairy".

TGGP, your description of what group selection is is not in contradiction with mine. I merely described one isolated group, but the concept can apply to more than one of course. Imagine two groups of foxes and rabbits, one in which restraint is developed and selected for because of the greater health of their youth in times of famine, and one in which restraint is not in any gene, in which case the health of that population is generally lower than the restrained group, but still alive because it is not competing with any internal restrained-breeding indivi... (read more)

Ok Kaj, I agree fast-breeders will at some points overwhelm slow/restrained breeders, at times where food is plentiful and greater than the amount needed to sustain the current fox population. But as long as that breeding goes unrestrained, the ecosystem enters a state which there exists less fox food than needed. As soon as that happens, restrained breeders have an inherint advantage because they waste less energy developing innevitably unviable fetuses. The important thing about this rule is it applies to any situation where they is less food than needed... (read more)

Kaj, fast breeding does not just incur a cost on the cubs, but on the mothers developing the cub fetuses. No matter the dearth of rabbits/food, as long as it's less than the amount needed to sustain the current fox population, the less energy and time spent by a fox mother developing unnecessary fetuses, the less likely she will die before child birth. You can't just calculate the raw probability of cubs surviving by saying "Each cub has X% chance of surviving, therefore the more cubs, the greater total chance that some will survive". A cub is ta... (read more)

Constant,

Believe me, I fully see the obvious, but false, contradiction that you point out. Please understand I considered that when I first wrote my example.

It is ONLY a benefit to the individual because it's also a benefit to the group. Under ANY OTHER circumstances, a fox would do better for itself, and only itself, to reproduce more. But because the other foxes, the group, are around, the individual fox has to evolve for selection pressure not just from the non-fox enviroment, but the fox-group enviroment.

The benefit to the group is not a side effect, i... (read more)

Constant, It's group selection because the individual is essentially making a sacrifice to reproduce less, to benefit the group. It happens blindly, through normal evolution of selecting the individual, but how else do you expect it to happen?

No group selection? I believe the math in Eliezer's post is wrong. Here is how a hypothetical fox/rabbit population could evolve restrained breeding through group selection.

Picture a geographically isolated fox/rabbit population. At some level, this is guaranteed, simply because there's not an infinite amount of land on this planet to inhabit. Even if the entire planet was one continent with just rabbits and foxes, then that's the isolation geography. So at some point there won't be other foxes getting to eat the un-eated rabbits from the restrained fox po... (read more)

Hi Erik,

It's not junk DNA, it merely has usefulness in many different configurations. Perhaps if the mutation would be to skip a base pair entirely, rather than just mis-copy it, it would be more likely to be detrimental.

OK, Let me make my point clearer, why we can't calculate the actual complexity limit of working DNA:

1.) Not all mutations are bad. Accepted knowledge: most are simply neutral, a few are bad, and even a fewer are good.
2.) If the mutations are good or neutral, they should effectivly be subtracted from the mutation rate, as they do not contribute to the "one mutation, one death" axiom because good/neutral mutations do not increase death probability.
3.) The mutations will not accumulate either, over many generations, if they are good/neutral. If a ... (read more)

Disagree. Any genome that has lower copy fidelity will only be removed from the gene pool if the errors in copy actually make the resultant organism unable to survive and reproduce, otherwise it's irrelevant how similar the copied genese are to the original. If the copy error rate produces detrimental genes at a rate that will not cause the species to go extinct, it will allow for any benificial mutations to arise and spread themselves throughout the gene pool at 'leisure'. As long as those positive genese are attached to a genome structure which produces ... (read more)

If a species can deal with detrimental mutations for several generations, then that simply means that the species has more time to weed out those really bad mutations, making the "one mutation, one death" equation inadequate to describe the die off rate based purely on the mutation rate. Yes, new mutations pop up all the time, but unless those mutations directly add on to the detrimental effects of previous mutations, the species still will survive another generation.

To add on to my other argument that we "know too little" to make hard ... (read more)

Scott A. I wasn't suggesting DNA would magically not mutate after it had evolved towards sophistication, only that the system of genes/DNA that govern a system would become robust enough so it would be immune to the effects of the mutations.

Anway, evolution does not have to "correct" these mutations, as long as the organism can survive with them, they have as much a chance of mutating to a neutral, positive, or other equally detremental state as it has of becoming worse. As a genome becomes larger and larger, it can cope with the same ratio of mu... (read more)

Actually, Scott Aaronson, something you said in your second to last post made me think of another reason why the axiom "one mutation, one death" may not be true. Actually, it's just an elaberation of the point I made earlier but I thought I'd flesh it out a bit more.

The idea is that the more physically and mentally complex, and physically larger, a species gets, the more capable is it is of coping with detrimental genes and still surviving to reproduce. When you're physically bigger, and smarter, there's more 'surplus' resources to draw upon to h... (read more)

Eliezer, I see two potential flaws in your argument, let me try and explain:

1.) The copy error rate can't directly translate mathematically into how often individuals in a species die out due to the copy error rate. We simply can't know how often a mutation is neutral, good, or detrimental, in part because that depends on the specific genome involved. I imagine some genomes are simply more robust than others. But I believe the prevailing wisdom is that most mutations are neutral, simply because proteins are too physically big to be effected by small change... (read more)