Surely neurological processes are “arrangements of particles” too, though.
I think your question gets to the heart of the matter- is there a general principle to be found with regard to which patterns within conscious systems innately feel good, or isn’t there? It would seem very surprising to me if there wasn’t.
Right. It might be a little bit more correct to speak of ‘temporal arrangements of arrangements of particles’, for which ‘processes’ is a much less awkward shorthand.
But saying “pleasure is a neurological process” seems consistent with saying “it all boils down to physical stuff- e.g., particles, eventually”, and doesn’t seem to necessarily imply that “you can’t find a ‘pleasure pattern’ that’s fully generalized. The information is always contextual.”
Good is a complex concept, not an irreducible basic constituent of the universe. It’s deeply rooted in our human stuff like metabolism (food is good), reproduction (sex is good), social environment (having allies is good) etc. We can generalize from this and say that the general pattern of “good” things is that they tend to reinforce themselves. If you feel good, you’ll strive to achive the same later. If you feel bad, you’ll strive to avoid feeling that in the future. So if an experience makes more of it then it’s good, otherwise it’s bad.
Note that we could also ask: “Is there a general principle to be found with regard to which patterns within conscious systems innately feel like smelling a rose, or isn’t there?” We could build rose smell detecting machines in various ways. How can you say that one is really having the experience of smelling it while another isn’t?
Good is a complex concept, not an irreducible basic constituent of the universe. It’s deeply rooted in our human stuff like metabolism (food is good), reproduction (sex is good), social environment (having allies is good) etc
It seems like you’re making two very distinct assertions here: first, that valence is not a ‘natural kind’, that it doesn’t ‘carve reality at the joints’, and is impossible to form a crisp, physical definition of; and second, that valence is highly connected to drives that have been evolutionarily advantageous to have. The second is clearly correct; the first just seems to be an assertion (one that I understand, and I think reasonable people can hold at this point, but that I disagree with).
I don’t like the expression “carve reality at the joints”, I think it’s very vague and hard to verify if a concept carves it there or not. The best way I can imagine this is that you have lots of events or ‘things’ in some description space and you can notice some clusterings, and you pick those clusters as concepts. But a lot depends on which subspace you choose and on what scale you’re working… ‘Good’ may form a cluster or may not, I just don’t even know how you could give evidence either way. It’s unclear how you could formalize this in practice.
My thoughts on pleasure and the concept of good is that your problem is that you’re trying to discover the sharp edges of these categories, whereas concepts don’t work like that. Take a look at this LW post and this one from Slatestarcodex. From the second one, the concept of a behemah/dag exists because fishing and hunting exist.
Try to make it clearer what you’re trying to ask. “What is pleasure really?” is a useless question. You may ask “what is going on in my body when I feel pleasure?” or “how could I induce that state again?”
You seem to be looking for some mathematical description of the pattern of pleasure that would unify pleasure in humans and aliens with totally unknown properties (that may be based on fundamentally different chemistry or maybe instead of electomagnetism-based chemistry their processes work over the strong nuclear force or whatever). What do you really have in mind here? A formula, like a part of space giving off pulses at the rate of X and another part of space at 1 cm distance pulsating with rate Y?
You may just as well ask how we would detect alien life at all. And then I’d say “life” is a human concept, not a divine platonic object out there that you can go to and see what it really is. We even have edge cases here on Earth, like viruses or prions. But the importance of these sorts of questions disappears if you think about what you’d do with the answer. If it’s “I just want to know how it really is, I can’t imagine doing anything practical with the answer” then it’s too vague to be answered.
I think we’re still not seeing eye-to-eye on the possibility that valence, i.e., whatever pattern within conscious systems innately feels good, can be described crisply.
If it’s clear a priori that it can’t, then yes, this whole question is necessarily confused. But I see no argument to that effect, just an assertion. From your perspective, my question takes the form: “what’s the thing that all dogs have in common?”- and you’re trying to tell me it’s misguided to look for some platonic ‘essence of dogness’. Concepts don’t work like that. I do get that, and I agree that most concepts are like that. But from my perspective, your assertion sounds like, “all concepts pertaining to this topic are necessarily vague, so it’s no use trying to even hypothesize that a crisp mathematical relationship could exist.” I.e., you’re assuming your conclusion. Now, we can point to other contexts where rather crisp mathematical models do exist: electromagnetism, for instance. How do you know the concept of valence is more like ‘dogness’ than electromagnetism?
Ultimately, the details, or mathematics, behind any ‘universal’ or ‘rigorous’ theory of valence would depend on having a well-supported, formal theory of consciousness to start from. It’s no use talking about patterns within conscious systems when we don’t have a clear idea of what constitutes a conscious system. A quantitative approach to valence needs a clear ontology, which we don’t have yet (Tononi’s IIT is a good start, but hardly a final answer). But let’s not mistake the difficulty in answering these questions with them being inherently unanswerable.
We can imagine someone making similar critiques a few centuries ago regarding whether electromagnetism was a sharply-defined concept, or whether understanding it matters. It turned out electromagnetism was a relatively sharply-defined concept: there was something to get, and getting it did matter. I suspect a similar relationship holds with valence in conscious systems. I’m not sure it does, but I think it’s more reasonable to accept the possibility than not at this point.
Life, sin, disease, redness, maleness and indeed dogness “may” also be like electromagnetism. The English language may also be a fundamental part of the universe and maybe you could tell if “irregardless” or “wanna” are real English words by looking into a microscope or turning your telescope to certain parts of the sky, or maybe by looking at chicken intestines, who knows. I know some people think like this. Stuart Hameroff says that morality may be encoded into the universe at the Planck scale. So maybe that’s where you should look for “good”, maybe “pleasure” is there as well.
But anyway, research into electromagnetism was done using the scientific method, which means that the hypothesis had to produce predictions that were tested and replicated numerous times. What sort of experiment would you envision for testing something about “inherently pleasurable” arrangements of atoms? Would the atoms make you feel warm and fuzzy inside when you look at them? Or would you try to put that pattern into different living creatures and see if they react with their normal joyful reactions?
Although life, sin, disease, redness, maleness, and dogness are (I believe) inherently ‘leaky’ / ‘fuzzy’ abstractions that don’t belong with electromagnetism, this is a good comment. If a hypothesis is scientific, it will make falsifiable predictions. I hope to have something more to share on this soon.
Try to make it clearer what you’re trying to ask. “What is pleasure really?” is a useless question.
Asking “how do qualia systematically relate to physics” is not a useless question, since answering it would make physicalism knowledge with no element of commitment.
Note that we could also ask: “Is there a general principle to be found with regard to which patterns within conscious systems innately feel like smelling a rose, or isn’t there?” We could build rose smell detecting machines in various ways. How can you say that one is really having the experience of smelling it while another isn’t?
It seems to me that good and bad are actually easy to define indeed. Minusdash gives a definition: Good is a state an entity strives to obtain (again). This is a functional definition and that should be enough. How states are physically represented in other beings is unknown and is in my opinion irrelevant.
Pleasure is not a static “arrangement of particles”. Pleasure is a neurological process.
You can’t find a “pleasure pattern” that’s fully generalized. The information is always contextual.
This isn’t a perfect articulation of my objections, but this is a difficult subject.
Surely neurological processes are “arrangements of particles” too, though.
I think your question gets to the heart of the matter- is there a general principle to be found with regard to which patterns within conscious systems innately feel good, or isn’t there? It would seem very surprising to me if there wasn’t.
Processes are not “arrangements”, it’s a dynamic vs static difference.
Right. It might be a little bit more correct to speak of ‘temporal arrangements of arrangements of particles’, for which ‘processes’ is a much less awkward shorthand.
But saying “pleasure is a neurological process” seems consistent with saying “it all boils down to physical stuff- e.g., particles, eventually”, and doesn’t seem to necessarily imply that “you can’t find a ‘pleasure pattern’ that’s fully generalized. The information is always contextual.”
Good is a complex concept, not an irreducible basic constituent of the universe. It’s deeply rooted in our human stuff like metabolism (food is good), reproduction (sex is good), social environment (having allies is good) etc. We can generalize from this and say that the general pattern of “good” things is that they tend to reinforce themselves. If you feel good, you’ll strive to achive the same later. If you feel bad, you’ll strive to avoid feeling that in the future. So if an experience makes more of it then it’s good, otherwise it’s bad.
Note that we could also ask: “Is there a general principle to be found with regard to which patterns within conscious systems innately feel like smelling a rose, or isn’t there?” We could build rose smell detecting machines in various ways. How can you say that one is really having the experience of smelling it while another isn’t?
It seems like you’re making two very distinct assertions here: first, that valence is not a ‘natural kind’, that it doesn’t ‘carve reality at the joints’, and is impossible to form a crisp, physical definition of; and second, that valence is highly connected to drives that have been evolutionarily advantageous to have. The second is clearly correct; the first just seems to be an assertion (one that I understand, and I think reasonable people can hold at this point, but that I disagree with).
I don’t like the expression “carve reality at the joints”, I think it’s very vague and hard to verify if a concept carves it there or not. The best way I can imagine this is that you have lots of events or ‘things’ in some description space and you can notice some clusterings, and you pick those clusters as concepts. But a lot depends on which subspace you choose and on what scale you’re working… ‘Good’ may form a cluster or may not, I just don’t even know how you could give evidence either way. It’s unclear how you could formalize this in practice.
My thoughts on pleasure and the concept of good is that your problem is that you’re trying to discover the sharp edges of these categories, whereas concepts don’t work like that. Take a look at this LW post and this one from Slatestarcodex. From the second one, the concept of a behemah/dag exists because fishing and hunting exist.
Try to make it clearer what you’re trying to ask. “What is pleasure really?” is a useless question. You may ask “what is going on in my body when I feel pleasure?” or “how could I induce that state again?”
You seem to be looking for some mathematical description of the pattern of pleasure that would unify pleasure in humans and aliens with totally unknown properties (that may be based on fundamentally different chemistry or maybe instead of electomagnetism-based chemistry their processes work over the strong nuclear force or whatever). What do you really have in mind here? A formula, like a part of space giving off pulses at the rate of X and another part of space at 1 cm distance pulsating with rate Y?
You may just as well ask how we would detect alien life at all. And then I’d say “life” is a human concept, not a divine platonic object out there that you can go to and see what it really is. We even have edge cases here on Earth, like viruses or prions. But the importance of these sorts of questions disappears if you think about what you’d do with the answer. If it’s “I just want to know how it really is, I can’t imagine doing anything practical with the answer” then it’s too vague to be answered.
I think we’re still not seeing eye-to-eye on the possibility that valence, i.e., whatever pattern within conscious systems innately feels good, can be described crisply.
If it’s clear a priori that it can’t, then yes, this whole question is necessarily confused. But I see no argument to that effect, just an assertion. From your perspective, my question takes the form: “what’s the thing that all dogs have in common?”- and you’re trying to tell me it’s misguided to look for some platonic ‘essence of dogness’. Concepts don’t work like that. I do get that, and I agree that most concepts are like that. But from my perspective, your assertion sounds like, “all concepts pertaining to this topic are necessarily vague, so it’s no use trying to even hypothesize that a crisp mathematical relationship could exist.” I.e., you’re assuming your conclusion. Now, we can point to other contexts where rather crisp mathematical models do exist: electromagnetism, for instance. How do you know the concept of valence is more like ‘dogness’ than electromagnetism?
Ultimately, the details, or mathematics, behind any ‘universal’ or ‘rigorous’ theory of valence would depend on having a well-supported, formal theory of consciousness to start from. It’s no use talking about patterns within conscious systems when we don’t have a clear idea of what constitutes a conscious system. A quantitative approach to valence needs a clear ontology, which we don’t have yet (Tononi’s IIT is a good start, but hardly a final answer). But let’s not mistake the difficulty in answering these questions with them being inherently unanswerable.
We can imagine someone making similar critiques a few centuries ago regarding whether electromagnetism was a sharply-defined concept, or whether understanding it matters. It turned out electromagnetism was a relatively sharply-defined concept: there was something to get, and getting it did matter. I suspect a similar relationship holds with valence in conscious systems. I’m not sure it does, but I think it’s more reasonable to accept the possibility than not at this point.
Life, sin, disease, redness, maleness and indeed dogness “may” also be like electromagnetism. The English language may also be a fundamental part of the universe and maybe you could tell if “irregardless” or “wanna” are real English words by looking into a microscope or turning your telescope to certain parts of the sky, or maybe by looking at chicken intestines, who knows. I know some people think like this. Stuart Hameroff says that morality may be encoded into the universe at the Planck scale. So maybe that’s where you should look for “good”, maybe “pleasure” is there as well.
But anyway, research into electromagnetism was done using the scientific method, which means that the hypothesis had to produce predictions that were tested and replicated numerous times. What sort of experiment would you envision for testing something about “inherently pleasurable” arrangements of atoms? Would the atoms make you feel warm and fuzzy inside when you look at them? Or would you try to put that pattern into different living creatures and see if they react with their normal joyful reactions?
Although life, sin, disease, redness, maleness, and dogness are (I believe) inherently ‘leaky’ / ‘fuzzy’ abstractions that don’t belong with electromagnetism, this is a good comment. If a hypothesis is scientific, it will make falsifiable predictions. I hope to have something more to share on this soon.
Asking “how do qualia systematically relate to physics” is not a useless question, since answering it would make physicalism knowledge with no element of commitment.
Thanks, that’s exactly what I was trying to say!
It seems to me that good and bad are actually easy to define indeed. Minusdash gives a definition: Good is a state an entity strives to obtain (again). This is a functional definition and that should be enough. How states are physically represented in other beings is unknown and is in my opinion irrelevant.