“The primary thing I want to save is the sensation of freedom”
“So you can see why I might want to rescue even “free will” and not just the sensation of freedom; what people fear, when they fear they do not have free will, is not the awful truth.”
Eliezer,
I think your desire to preserve the concept of “freedom” is conflicting [or at the least has the potential to conflict] with your desire to provide the best models of reality.
“Fear of being manipulated by an alien is common-sensically in a whole different class from fear of being deterministic within physics. You’ve got to worry about what else the alien might be planning for you; it’s a new player on the board, and a player who occupies an immensely superior position.
Natural selection is sort of an intermediate case between aliens and physics. Evolution manipulates you, creates impulses within you that were actually chosen by criteria at cross-purposes to your deliberate goals, i.e., you think you’re an altruist but evolution ensures that you’ll want to hold on to power. But evolution is stupid and can be understood using finite human effort; it is not a smarter alien.
The alien is part of what scares people, that’s why evolutionary psychology creates stronger fears than deterministic physics.”
How is that common sensical? It seems to me to be arbitrary to fear harm by deterministic physics less than harm by alien manipulation (not to mention that the latter would seem at worst to be a subset of the former, and at best good news that we don’t live in a fatally deterministic reality). The same applies to deterministic physics vs. evo psych.
I feel like your playing politics here, attempting to cobble together support for your narrative by being reciprocative for elements of other commenters narrative. I think this is a very different thing than attempting to overcome bias to provide more accurate models of reality.
“The primary thing I want to save is the sensation of freedom”
“So you can see why I might want to rescue even “free will” and not just the sensation of freedom; what people fear, when they fear they do not have free will, is not the awful truth.”
Eliezer, I think your desire to preserve the concept of “freedom” is conflicting [or at the least has the potential to conflict] with your desire to provide the best models of reality.
“Fear of being manipulated by an alien is common-sensically in a whole different class from fear of being deterministic within physics. You’ve got to worry about what else the alien might be planning for you; it’s a new player on the board, and a player who occupies an immensely superior position.
Natural selection is sort of an intermediate case between aliens and physics. Evolution manipulates you, creates impulses within you that were actually chosen by criteria at cross-purposes to your deliberate goals, i.e., you think you’re an altruist but evolution ensures that you’ll want to hold on to power. But evolution is stupid and can be understood using finite human effort; it is not a smarter alien.
The alien is part of what scares people, that’s why evolutionary psychology creates stronger fears than deterministic physics.”
How is that common sensical? It seems to me to be arbitrary to fear harm by deterministic physics less than harm by alien manipulation (not to mention that the latter would seem at worst to be a subset of the former, and at best good news that we don’t live in a fatally deterministic reality). The same applies to deterministic physics vs. evo psych.
I feel like your playing politics here, attempting to cobble together support for your narrative by being reciprocative for elements of other commenters narrative. I think this is a very different thing than attempting to overcome bias to provide more accurate models of reality.