I take it as a good sign that this generated a response, even if that response is “what the heck” (at the very least, rest assured this is a non-smoking endeavor)
I’ll rewrite the post a bit within a few days to address your comments and kithpendragon’s—that was a big part of why I wanted to put it on lesswrong, to have some incentive to rectify loose language and loose thinking.
Some clarifications already:
Here is a person doing something. What would you need to observe, to decide whether you are or are not looking at an example of the category you name “ritual”? What would you be telling me about it, by telling me that it is or is not a “ritual”?
I tried to leave some space for readers to build their own sense of it, but to summarize, I would claim that an action can be both ritual and non-ritual:
non-ritual inasmuch as it is a tactical means to an end, trying to achieve a goal (everything that relates to decision theory)
ritual inasmuch as it serves to instill or maintain a goal (make it “real” and felt, not just verbally known) in the mind of the person performing it (everything that decision theory cannot really represent, i.e. changes of preferences)
Some actions are much more ritual than not, others are almost entirely non-ritual. Displays on social media have a non-ritual dimension in that they might allow to gain some practical benefits, along the classic decision theoretic arguments of social signalling and all that, but I want to claim, and that will be for another post, that they are primarily a ritual action.
I also want to claim that this definition of “ritual” is not just a weird repurposing of the word and that any set of actions that serves to instill a goal will have to have many of the peculiarities and quirks that we assign to e.g. religious rituals, while any religious ritual can be analyzed in this way and makes more sense than if analyzed some other way. The burden of proof is mine, of course.
What does it mean to “hold a goal as true”? A goal is not a proposition, that can be true or false. Neither is a desire.
I agree I could write this more carefully. The point is, in theories like” predictive processing (or my understanding of them), there is not much difference between perceiving/knowing and acting, both are part of the same predictive system, with the difference that goals are encoded as beliefs that cannot be challenged, at least for as long as the action is ongoing. As I mention, action is a particular form of suspension of disbelief.
To quote from the Slatestarcodex review of Surfing uncertainty:
It’s predicting action, which causes the action to happen.
This part is almost funny. Remember, the brain really hates prediction error and does its best to minimize it. With failed predictions about eg vision, there’s not much you can do except change your models and try to predict better next time. But with predictions about proprioceptive sense data (ie your sense of where your joints are), there’s an easy way to resolve prediction error: just move your joints so they match the prediction. So (and I’m asserting this, but see Chapters 4 and 5 of the book to hear the scientific case for this position) if you want to lift your arm, your brain just predicts really really strongly that your arm has been lifted, and then lets the lower levels’ drive to minimize prediction error do the rest.
Under this model, the “prediction” of a movement isn’t just the idle thought that a movement might occur, it’s the actual motor program.
These theories try to be all-encompassing, from simple motor behavior all the way to cognition according to the same principles, so a visceral desire or conscious goal are just extensions of the same idea.
I will try to incorporate a clearer presentation of this point as it is quite key.
I agree I could write this more carefully. The point is, in theories like” predictive processing (or my understanding of them), there is not much difference between perceiving/knowing and acting, both are part of the same predictive system, with the difference that goals are encoded as beliefs that cannot be challenged, at least for as long as the action is ongoing. As I mention, action is a particular form of suspension of disbelief.
Ah, well, I don’t take predictive processing seriously. It’s one of the more absurd ideas I’ve seen smart people come up with, and I’ve read a fair amount of the background from which the concept comes. Making a thing happen and predicting that it will happen are different things. But then, people here even try to salvage Evidential Decision Theory. There seems to be something strangely attractive about the idea that people are zombies, passive observers of the world who cannot actually do anything, merely observe what they seem to have done. Perhaps the ones who find it attractive are indeed the zombies that these theories describe.
I have the hardest time imagining a conceptual link between p-zombies and predictive processing, but if you don’t like it, you don’t like it, I guess!
Personally, the ambiguity between belief and action in this framework is the only half-reasonable explanation I have encountered so far for why the study of values and rituals is so hopelessly confused at a basic conceptual level (far more than even your typical social science question)
I take it as a good sign that this generated a response, even if that response is “what the heck” (at the very least, rest assured this is a non-smoking endeavor)
I’ll rewrite the post a bit within a few days to address your comments and kithpendragon’s—that was a big part of why I wanted to put it on lesswrong, to have some incentive to rectify loose language and loose thinking.
Some clarifications already:
I tried to leave some space for readers to build their own sense of it, but to summarize, I would claim that an action can be both ritual and non-ritual:
non-ritual inasmuch as it is a tactical means to an end, trying to achieve a goal (everything that relates to decision theory)
ritual inasmuch as it serves to instill or maintain a goal (make it “real” and felt, not just verbally known) in the mind of the person performing it (everything that decision theory cannot really represent, i.e. changes of preferences)
Some actions are much more ritual than not, others are almost entirely non-ritual. Displays on social media have a non-ritual dimension in that they might allow to gain some practical benefits, along the classic decision theoretic arguments of social signalling and all that, but I want to claim, and that will be for another post, that they are primarily a ritual action.
I also want to claim that this definition of “ritual” is not just a weird repurposing of the word and that any set of actions that serves to instill a goal will have to have many of the peculiarities and quirks that we assign to e.g. religious rituals, while any religious ritual can be analyzed in this way and makes more sense than if analyzed some other way. The burden of proof is mine, of course.
I agree I could write this more carefully. The point is, in theories like” predictive processing (or my understanding of them), there is not much difference between perceiving/knowing and acting, both are part of the same predictive system, with the difference that goals are encoded as beliefs that cannot be challenged, at least for as long as the action is ongoing. As I mention, action is a particular form of suspension of disbelief.
To quote from the Slatestarcodex review of Surfing uncertainty:
These theories try to be all-encompassing, from simple motor behavior all the way to cognition according to the same principles, so a visceral desire or conscious goal are just extensions of the same idea.
I will try to incorporate a clearer presentation of this point as it is quite key.
Ah, well, I don’t take predictive processing seriously. It’s one of the more absurd ideas I’ve seen smart people come up with, and I’ve read a fair amount of the background from which the concept comes. Making a thing happen and predicting that it will happen are different things. But then, people here even try to salvage Evidential Decision Theory. There seems to be something strangely attractive about the idea that people are zombies, passive observers of the world who cannot actually do anything, merely observe what they seem to have done. Perhaps the ones who find it attractive are indeed the zombies that these theories describe.
I have the hardest time imagining a conceptual link between p-zombies and predictive processing, but if you don’t like it, you don’t like it, I guess!
Personally, the ambiguity between belief and action in this framework is the only half-reasonable explanation I have encountered so far for why the study of values and rituals is so hopelessly confused at a basic conceptual level (far more than even your typical social science question)
I don’t think Richard had p-zombies in mind, but rather the regular sort of zombie.