“I took hashish once and started seriously questioning the nature of mind and experience.”
That’s wonderful… but is there any particular reason why you couldn’t have done the same with a cup of coffee?
Was it something special about the hashish experience, or merely that it was so novel that it caused you to pay a lot of attention to it? What if you paid that much attention to the things you consider mundane and banal?
There’s a risk here of using “mundane experience” as an applause light.
Consider the equivalent query—doctors have learned a lot about the brain by studying stroke victims. For example, one reason we know that the frontal cortex is responsible for inhibition is because people who get frontal cortex injuries lose their inhibition.
You can go up to a neurologist and say “That’s wonderful...but couldn’t you have learned the same thing if you really closely observed the brain of a normal person?” But why should the neurologist deny himself a useful tool just because it’s not mundane enough?
You can learn arbitrarily much by contemplating everyday life. Eliezer theorizes that a superintelligence could deduce General Relativity just by watching an apple fall. But that doesn’t mean you should turn your nose up at Einstein for using the perihelion of Mercury. There’s no such thing as cheating in rationalism.
If you can derive the same knowledge from studying normal people intensely, you probably should. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to figure out precisely what changed in the brain of a stroke patient and connect that to changed behavior? Much less confirm that by finding another victim with precisely the right kind of damage...
If you can turn out a light either by walking across the room and flipping a switch, or building an intricate Rube Goldberg, you should just walk. If simple, cheap, and fast works, there’s no need for complicated, expensive, and slow.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to figure out precisely what changed in the brain of a stroke patient and connect that to changed behavior?
People have been doing it successfully since Broca and Wernicke in the mid 1800s. It’s the way everyone does it in neurology, and it’s produced a vastly greater amount of knowledge (in its specific area) than the way you’re suggesting.
Likewise, helium was discovered in the sun before it was found on Earth. It’s a standard method—study extremely weird conditions, seeing how they differ from normality, asking what could have created those differences, and discovering the general principles involved.
Eliezer condemns those who ignore zebras to dream of dragons. But it’s not especially virtuous to refuse to look at zebras and stare only at the ground, since the ground is even more mundane than zebras are.
Good point. I would go so far as say most problems people get into, especially cognitive, seem to be caused by their not paying attention to reality, as opposed to the inside of their heads. I suspect that even most cognitive biases could be worked around much more effectively if people would just pay attention to what is really happening.
“I took hashish once and started seriously questioning the nature of mind and experience.”
That’s wonderful… but is there any particular reason why you couldn’t have done the same with a cup of coffee?
Was it something special about the hashish experience, or merely that it was so novel that it caused you to pay a lot of attention to it? What if you paid that much attention to the things you consider mundane and banal?
There’s a risk here of using “mundane experience” as an applause light.
Consider the equivalent query—doctors have learned a lot about the brain by studying stroke victims. For example, one reason we know that the frontal cortex is responsible for inhibition is because people who get frontal cortex injuries lose their inhibition.
You can go up to a neurologist and say “That’s wonderful...but couldn’t you have learned the same thing if you really closely observed the brain of a normal person?” But why should the neurologist deny himself a useful tool just because it’s not mundane enough?
You can learn arbitrarily much by contemplating everyday life. Eliezer theorizes that a superintelligence could deduce General Relativity just by watching an apple fall. But that doesn’t mean you should turn your nose up at Einstein for using the perihelion of Mercury. There’s no such thing as cheating in rationalism.
If you can derive the same knowledge from studying normal people intensely, you probably should. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to figure out precisely what changed in the brain of a stroke patient and connect that to changed behavior? Much less confirm that by finding another victim with precisely the right kind of damage...
If you can turn out a light either by walking across the room and flipping a switch, or building an intricate Rube Goldberg, you should just walk. If simple, cheap, and fast works, there’s no need for complicated, expensive, and slow.
People have been doing it successfully since Broca and Wernicke in the mid 1800s. It’s the way everyone does it in neurology, and it’s produced a vastly greater amount of knowledge (in its specific area) than the way you’re suggesting.
Likewise, helium was discovered in the sun before it was found on Earth. It’s a standard method—study extremely weird conditions, seeing how they differ from normality, asking what could have created those differences, and discovering the general principles involved.
Eliezer condemns those who ignore zebras to dream of dragons. But it’s not especially virtuous to refuse to look at zebras and stare only at the ground, since the ground is even more mundane than zebras are.
Good point. I would go so far as say most problems people get into, especially cognitive, seem to be caused by their not paying attention to reality, as opposed to the inside of their heads. I suspect that even most cognitive biases could be worked around much more effectively if people would just pay attention to what is really happening.