Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that you actually hold that view. What I did mean to suggest is that dualist intuitions have snuck into your ideas without announcing themselves as such to you. (Hence the holy water joke—I was trying to say that I’m being religiously paranoid about avoiding implicit dualism despite how you don’t even support that view).
Here, I’ll try to be more explicit as to why I think you’re implicitly expressing dualism:
Why not just have the organism know the objective facts of survival and reproduction, and be done with it?
What does that even mean? How can any system “access objective facts” about anything? All systems containing representations of the outside world must do so via modifications and manipulations of, and interactions between, internal components (hopefully in a manner which interacts with and corresponds to things “external” to the system). Divining the so-called “objective facts” from these internal states is a complicated and always imperfect calculation.
You’ve framed the subjective/objective dichotomy as “The water may feel very cold, but I know it’s 20C”. As you said, an error correction is being performed: “Some of my indicators are giving signals ordinarily associated with cold, but given what my other indicators say, I’ve performed error correction processes and I know it’s actually not.”
All of which is fine. The “dualist” part is where you imply that it would be in any way possible to arrive at this 20C calculation without sensing internal states, to just know the objective facts of survival and reproduction and be done with it. It’s not possible to do that without getting a philosophical zombie.
Take a simple information process, such as a light-switch. Whether or not the circuit is connected “represents” the state of the switch, the behavioral output being the light bulb turning on. The circuit
never gets objective facts about the switch, all it gets is the internal state of whether or not it is connected—a “subjective” experience.
Your main point: “I value the fact that my indicators gave me signals ordinarily associated with cold and then I had to go through an error correction process, rather than just immediately know it’s 20C”, is interesting, good, and correct.
I agree, it can’t be irrational to value things—you may put your locus of valued self-identity in your information processes (the combustion), or in your biology itself (the metal), or in your behavioral output (the movement of the vehicle). I’m sympathetic to the view of valuing information processes in addition to behavioral output myself: after all, coma patients are still people if they have various types of brain activity despite comatose behavior.
She might reasonably doubt that the survivor of this process would be...human, in any sense meaningful to her.
But here again, my sense of un-ease with implicit dualism flairs up. It’s all well and good to say that the survivor of this process isn’t her (she may draw her locus of identity wherever she likes, it need not be her behavior), but if the result of an information process is behaviorally identical to a person, there’s something very off about saying that these information processes do not meaningfully contain a person.
I use “person” here in the sense as “one who’s stated thoughts and feelings and apparent preferences are morally relevant and should be considered the same way we would ideally consider a natural human.
Of course, it’s still not irrational to not value things, and you might actually say that to count as a person you need certain information processes or certain biology—I just think both of those values are wrong. I have a dream that beings are judged not by their algorithm, but by their behavior (additional terms and restrictions apply).
Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that you actually hold that view. What I did mean to suggest is that dualist intuitions have snuck into your ideas without announcing themselves as such to you. (Hence the holy water joke—I was trying to say that I’m being religiously paranoid about avoiding implicit dualism despite how you don’t even support that view).
Here, I’ll try to be more explicit as to why I think you’re implicitly expressing dualism:
What does that even mean? How can any system “access objective facts” about anything? All systems containing representations of the outside world must do so via modifications and manipulations of, and interactions between, internal components (hopefully in a manner which interacts with and corresponds to things “external” to the system). Divining the so-called “objective facts” from these internal states is a complicated and always imperfect calculation.
You’ve framed the subjective/objective dichotomy as “The water may feel very cold, but I know it’s 20C”. As you said, an error correction is being performed: “Some of my indicators are giving signals ordinarily associated with cold, but given what my other indicators say, I’ve performed error correction processes and I know it’s actually not.”
All of which is fine. The “dualist” part is where you imply that it would be in any way possible to arrive at this 20C calculation without sensing internal states, to just know the objective facts of survival and reproduction and be done with it. It’s not possible to do that without getting a philosophical zombie.
Take a simple information process, such as a light-switch. Whether or not the circuit is connected “represents” the state of the switch, the behavioral output being the light bulb turning on. The circuit never gets objective facts about the switch, all it gets is the internal state of whether or not it is connected—a “subjective” experience.
Your main point: “I value the fact that my indicators gave me signals ordinarily associated with cold and then I had to go through an error correction process, rather than just immediately know it’s 20C”, is interesting, good, and correct.
I agree, it can’t be irrational to value things—you may put your locus of valued self-identity in your information processes (the combustion), or in your biology itself (the metal), or in your behavioral output (the movement of the vehicle). I’m sympathetic to the view of valuing information processes in addition to behavioral output myself: after all, coma patients are still people if they have various types of brain activity despite comatose behavior.
But here again, my sense of un-ease with implicit dualism flairs up. It’s all well and good to say that the survivor of this process isn’t her (she may draw her locus of identity wherever she likes, it need not be her behavior), but if the result of an information process is behaviorally identical to a person, there’s something very off about saying that these information processes do not meaningfully contain a person.
I use “person” here in the sense as “one who’s stated thoughts and feelings and apparent preferences are morally relevant and should be considered the same way we would ideally consider a natural human.
Of course, it’s still not irrational to not value things, and you might actually say that to count as a person you need certain information processes or certain biology—I just think both of those values are wrong. I have a dream that beings are judged not by their algorithm, but by their behavior (additional terms and restrictions apply).
Is that better?