I’m not going to be able to adequately answer comments this long in the future, especially because I disagree with the bulk of their content. You’re making a huge number of underlying assumptions you don’t seem to be explicitly stating, and it seems you’re not aware of those assumptions either.
However, if you really are one who doesn’t experience hot empathy, then you aren’t really allowed to be offended by the fact that I feel reduced hot empathy towards you, because that’s just tit for tat. ;)
I think you’re committing the typical mind fallacy here. It seems you have a lot of hot empathy, so because that is the most visible part of your altruistic cognition, you easily think it’s the only one. Some of your thinking seems to be motivated by this.
See my comments in this thread if you’re confused by what I say so that I don’t have to reiterate myself. You said in a later paragraph you care about my preferences and I bet our preferences are pretty similar, despite our emotional life probably being quite different.
(self-diagnoses of sociopathy are insufficient evidence that someone actually doesn’t care about other people).
Psychopathy and sociopathy are much wider concepts than nonempathy. Even these wider concepts don’t imply sadism either. Be careful not confuse them, as that has potential to insult a lot of people.
It seems like humans typically only extend altruism towards things which reciprocate altruism in return.
Could be. Do you find this principle morally sound? Do you propose being altruistic only towards people who can reciprocate it to you? Can that be called altruism?
I have a dream, that one day agents will be judged not by the substrate of their code, but by the behavioral output of whatever algorithm they run.
That’s fine if we have no methods that are more direct. If you knew what kind of computation suffering is, and you can directly find out if someone suffers by scanning their brain, why on earth would you not rather use that?
First of all, not doing so violates the anti-zombie principle
Insisting on visible behavioural output means you don’t care about paralyzed people. I think insisting on visible output is the part that confuses your thinking the most.
So...if you want to define “suffering” to be referring to specific algorithms, I’m comfortable with that...but this discussion really isn’t about suffering, is it? It’s about morality.
You need to have terminal values to talk about morality, and as far as I’m concerned terminal values in human beings are in many situations, not all, determined by their affects, like suffering.
Bleh...yeah. It is bizarre. How about we don’t call it “suffering” , and just focus on “bad thing that we want to avoid.” for now.
Because the bad thing most people want to avoid is suffering, and you’re butchering the concept.
I’m more trying to get at what is morally relevant about suffering, not defining suffering itself. Language is filled with fuzzy categories that dissolve under the application of rigor.
I’ve got no problem with your goal, but I’m sorry, you don’t seem to be applying the rigor. From my POV you’re taking suffering, taking everything that’s important about it, throwing it in the trash can and inventing your own concept that has nothing to do with what people mean when they use the word. Why should I care about this concept you produced from thin air?
“I care about the preferences of all agents X who have this statement embedded in their algorithm”.
All I can say about this is that whether some computation is a person doesn’t affect my altruism towards them whatsoever.
I do care about whether a snake or a bee has the computational equivalent of suffering happening in their brains, because I know from personal experience that suffering sucks, and I want less of it in this universe. I might care about what a paper clipper feels, but that would be dwarfed in importance by everything else that it does.
Affects like suffering are not the only factor when I’m deciding where to extend my altruism either, since my resources are limited.
I think you’re committing the typical mind fallacy here. It seems you have a lot of hot empathy, so because that is the most visible part of your altruistic cognition, you easily think it’s the only one. Some of your thinking seems to be motivated by this.
Mind projection fallacy is when you confuse map with territory and preferences with facts. What I’m doing is assuming other humans are like me—a heuristic which does in fact generally work.
But even so, I did mention:
I don’t actually care about Hot Empathy either . What I care about are your preferences—do you care about others as a (non-instrumental) value? Hot Empathy is where most humans derive their altruistic preferences from, but if you derive altruistic preferences via some other route then that works for me.
Does that amelieorate the criticism?
Even these wider concepts don’t imply sadism either. Be careful not confuse them, as that has potential to insult a lot of people.
Does that mean you are offended? My apologies if so, I should have been more precise with langauge. However, I’m not sure why you think i confused sociopathy (lack of guilt, sympathetic pain) with sadism (pleasure via pain of others). Those two are almost opposites.
Insisting on visible behavioural output means you don’t care about paralyzed people.
Of course not. You still have to use the computation, but morally speaking your interested in the outputs of the computation. In the case of the paralized person, you look at their brain, see what their outputs would be if they were in a different situation, and act accordingly.
The reason we can’t just define suffering as a specific computation present in the brain is because when we are faced with other minds who use different computations to arrive at a roughly same output per input, we won’t recognize them as suffering...unless we define suffering in relation to intput-output in the first place.
For example, most humans compute altruism via interactions between the amygdala and the vmPFC. Now, if someone doesn’t compute altruism that way, but still exhibits altruistic behavior...then isn’t it exactly the same thing? Weren’t you disturbed when you thought that I was presuming to judge a person based on their internal states rather than their behavior previously in this conversation?
We obviously still look at the computation, but the reason we are looking is to figure out what it wishes to output in response to various inputs. That’s what a computation is...a bridge between inputs into outputs.
I’m not sure if I’m explaining this correctly...a computation can’t be intrinsically suffering or intrinsically pleasure, and claiming that it is commits some sort of essentialism which doesn’t have a name yet...computational essentialism? You could take the exact same computation that represents suffering in one creature and re-purpose it into a different purpose entirely by changing the other computations with which it interacts. You can’t just point to some computation and say, “this is Suffering, no matter what the surrounding context is”.
I’m sorry, you don’t seem to be applying the rigor. From my POV you’re taking suffering, taking everything that’s important about it, throwing it in the trash can and inventing your own concept that has nothing to do with what people mean when they use the word. Why should I care about this concept you produced from thin air?
Acknowledged. Like I said:
Part of the problem is that, in order to explain my idea, I took certain words and re-defined them away from their common usage to suite my purposes. I don’t know how to say this using the words we have now though. And the other problem is that it’s sloppy. I haven’t thought through this nearly enough.
But your experiential definition of suffering is, by definition, inaccessable. If you define suffering that way, then the word will dissolve later on, much like words like “free will” tend to either dissolve or change definition so drastically that it scarcely seems like the same thing. The definition needs to change because the original definiton doesn’t make sense. Qualia only applies to you, not to others.
I know from personal experience that suffering sucks, and I want less of it in this universe.
(by the way, this is pretty much the definition of the amygdala-vmPFC brand of “empathy” so I’m not sure why you refer to yourself as “low empathy”. Or did you think that by “empathy” I was referring to mere mirroring the affective states of those around you, like how people cry at movies or something?)
comments this long
Can’t be helped I’m afraid—this is one of those situations where brevity would take more effort. Not to worry, I don’t feel offended if people don’t reply to my comments, if that’s why you felt the need to mention that you might not be able to reply!
I’m not sure why you think i confused sociopathy (lack of guilt, sympathetic pain) with sadism (pleasure via pain of others).
I was more concerned about the nonempathy-psychopathy confusion. I’m not offended, but other people will be.
most humans compute altruism via interactions between the amygdala and the vmPFC
You don’t know that, but more importantly naming brain regions doesn’t explain anything. It’s not necessary to bring real brains to the discussion.
referring to mere mirroring the affective states
Perhaps not mere, but that’s how people use the word.
Qualia only applies to you, not to others.
Only if you’re a solipsist. When people claim to have qualia, this is evidence they have qualia, because I have qualia, and they have brains similar to mine.
If we can make a high resolution record of what happens in their brain when they report qualia, we can look at what kind of computation those qualia are, and therefore determine if other agents have them too.
If we can make a high resolution record of what happens in their brain when they report qualia, we can look at what kind of computation those qualia are, and therefore determine if other agents have them too.
I’m confused...you seem to be suggesting that we use behavioral output to determine which parts of the brain are responsible for qualia, which you say should define morality… didn’t you just tell me that I shouldn’t use behavioral output to define my morality?
If we did it the way you said, and looked at the brain to see what happened when people reported perceiving things, we’d find out some cool things about human perception. However, there’s no guarantee that other minds will use the computation. That’s why I’m emphasizing that it’s important to focus on the input-output functions of the algorithm, rather than the content of the algorithm itself. (Again, this does not mean we ignore the algorithm altogether—it means that we look at the algorithm with respect to what it would output for a given input—so we still care about paralyzed people, brains in vats, etc...since we can make guesses as to what they would output given minor changes to the situation.).
(Not to mention, there is a cascade of things happening from the moment your eyes perceive red to the moment your mouth outputs “Yeah, that’s red” and looking at an actual brain will tell you nothing about which part of the computation gets the “qualia” designation. At best, you’ll find some central hubs which handle information from many parts. Qualia, like free will, is a philosophical question—all the neuroscience knowledge in the world won’t help answer it. Neuroscience might help eliminate some obviously wrong hypotheses, as it did with free will, but fundamentally this is a question that can and should be settled without neuroscience. )
didn’t you just tell me that I shouldn’t use behavioral output to define my morality?
There’s probably a lot of misunderstanding going on between us. I thought you meant you always need the output. In my interpretation you only need the output once for a particular qualia in the optimal situation. After that, you can just start scanning brains or programs for similar computations. How much output we need, if any, depends on at what stage of understanding we are.
However, there’s no guarantee that other minds will use the computation.
True. However, if the reporting of qualia corresponds to certain patterns of brain activity, and that brain activity can be expressed mathematically, then we have a computation and we can think about other ways the computation could be performed. We might even be able to test different forms of the computation on EMs, and see what they report.
“Yeah, that’s red” and looking at an actual brain will tell you nothing about which part of the computation gets the “qualia” designation.
This is incorrect, because there are temporal differences in brain activity. Light on your retina doesn’t instantly transfer information to all parts of your brain responsible for visual processing. Also, there’s no theoretical limitation on temporarily disabling certain brain areas or even single neurons, and examining how that corresponds to reporting of qualia.
Qualia, like free will, is a philosophical question—all the neuroscience knowledge in the world won’t help answer it.
You should think about this further. How much would you be willing to bet that unconscious people experience qualia? How about rocks?
Also, there’s no theoretical limitation on temporarily disabling certain brain areas or even single neurons, and examining how that corresponds to reporting of qualia.
Sure, but disable one part and the person won’t be able to verbally report information about the input, but can still use information from the input non-verbally. Which part is the “qualia” part?
You should think about this further. How much would you be willing to bet that unconscious people experience qualia? How about rocks?
I can’t bet on that until we agree upon a definition of qualia. Personally, as per the definition that makes coherent sense to me, qualia is the section of reality that I’ve got access to (and epistemology is an attempt to understand the most parsimonious system that explains my qualia). I don’t think it makes sense for anyone to talk about qualia, except in reference to themselves in the current moment. I suppose I’m a “soft” solopsist.
On the other hand, I like to define “consciousness” as “self-aware + environment-aware”. So to answer the spirit of the question, I’ll take qualia to mean “awareness”, and then we can at least say that interacting with something is a necessary condition for being “aware” of it. So rocks can’t be very aware, since they aren’t really interacting much with anything....whereas the various brain sections of unconscious people are sometimes interacting with themselves, so they might sometimes be self aware.
misunderstanding
I think the crux of that disagreement is as follows:
You think the algorithm matters morally, and the input-output function is relevant insofar as it gives us information about what the various algorithms mean.
I think the input-output function is what matters morally, and the algorithm is relevant insofar as gives us information about what the input- outputs function is.
-- Stop reading here if brevity is important, otherwise...
To turn this into a more concrete problem: Suppose algorithm X made people cry and verbally report that they feel sad. You conclude that X is sadness. I conclude that X implements sadness.
If we then take X and modified all the things to which X was connected to, such that it now makes people smile and verbally report that they feel happy, I say that X now implement happiness.
I’m guessing you’d say that X was never “happiness” in the first place, and “happiness” is actually in the interaction between X and the surrounding regions.
My argument is that there are infinite configurations of X and its surroundings. Since our judgement of what X+surroundings signifies finally depends on the output, it’s the output that really matters. If someone came to us saying they were in pain, we’d immediately care because of the output—it wouldn’t matter what the circuitry creating the pain looked like.
If a shallow mechanism for generating the output breaks (say, spinal cord injury) then we know what the output would be in a mildly counter-factual scenario, and that’s what matters morally.
The degree to which we need to make counter-factual assumptions before getting to output is important as well—on one extreme, if we are looking at a blank slate and we have to counter factually assume the entire brain, the object has no moral significance. If we just have to counter-factually assume someone’s spinal cord is repaired, there is high moral significance. Something like a coma states would be an intermediate scenario...the question is basically, how much information do we have to add to this algorithm before it generates meaningful output.
(Note: the above paragraph’s reasoning is re-purposed—was originally made for settling abortion and person-hood debates)
Another edge-case: Suppose you had a conscious being which was happy, but contained intact, suffering human brains in its algorithm. Because it would only take a very slight counter-factual modification to get those suffering human brains to generate suffering behavioral output, we still care about them morally.
Mind projection fallacy is when you confuse map with territory and preferences with facts. What I’m doing is assuming other humans are like me—a heuristic which does in fact generally work.
I’m not going to be able to adequately answer comments this long in the future, especially because I disagree with the bulk of their content. You’re making a huge number of underlying assumptions you don’t seem to be explicitly stating, and it seems you’re not aware of those assumptions either.
I think you’re committing the typical mind fallacy here. It seems you have a lot of hot empathy, so because that is the most visible part of your altruistic cognition, you easily think it’s the only one. Some of your thinking seems to be motivated by this.
See my comments in this thread if you’re confused by what I say so that I don’t have to reiterate myself. You said in a later paragraph you care about my preferences and I bet our preferences are pretty similar, despite our emotional life probably being quite different.
Psychopathy and sociopathy are much wider concepts than nonempathy. Even these wider concepts don’t imply sadism either. Be careful not confuse them, as that has potential to insult a lot of people.
Could be. Do you find this principle morally sound? Do you propose being altruistic only towards people who can reciprocate it to you? Can that be called altruism?
That’s fine if we have no methods that are more direct. If you knew what kind of computation suffering is, and you can directly find out if someone suffers by scanning their brain, why on earth would you not rather use that?
Insisting on visible behavioural output means you don’t care about paralyzed people. I think insisting on visible output is the part that confuses your thinking the most.
You need to have terminal values to talk about morality, and as far as I’m concerned terminal values in human beings are in many situations, not all, determined by their affects, like suffering.
Because the bad thing most people want to avoid is suffering, and you’re butchering the concept.
I’ve got no problem with your goal, but I’m sorry, you don’t seem to be applying the rigor. From my POV you’re taking suffering, taking everything that’s important about it, throwing it in the trash can and inventing your own concept that has nothing to do with what people mean when they use the word. Why should I care about this concept you produced from thin air?
All I can say about this is that whether some computation is a person doesn’t affect my altruism towards them whatsoever.
I do care about whether a snake or a bee has the computational equivalent of suffering happening in their brains, because I know from personal experience that suffering sucks, and I want less of it in this universe. I might care about what a paper clipper feels, but that would be dwarfed in importance by everything else that it does.
Affects like suffering are not the only factor when I’m deciding where to extend my altruism either, since my resources are limited.
Mind projection fallacy is when you confuse map with territory and preferences with facts. What I’m doing is assuming other humans are like me—a heuristic which does in fact generally work.
But even so, I did mention:
Does that amelieorate the criticism?
Does that mean you are offended? My apologies if so, I should have been more precise with langauge. However, I’m not sure why you think i confused sociopathy (lack of guilt, sympathetic pain) with sadism (pleasure via pain of others). Those two are almost opposites.
Of course not. You still have to use the computation, but morally speaking your interested in the outputs of the computation. In the case of the paralized person, you look at their brain, see what their outputs would be if they were in a different situation, and act accordingly.
The reason we can’t just define suffering as a specific computation present in the brain is because when we are faced with other minds who use different computations to arrive at a roughly same output per input, we won’t recognize them as suffering...unless we define suffering in relation to intput-output in the first place.
For example, most humans compute altruism via interactions between the amygdala and the vmPFC. Now, if someone doesn’t compute altruism that way, but still exhibits altruistic behavior...then isn’t it exactly the same thing? Weren’t you disturbed when you thought that I was presuming to judge a person based on their internal states rather than their behavior previously in this conversation?
We obviously still look at the computation, but the reason we are looking is to figure out what it wishes to output in response to various inputs. That’s what a computation is...a bridge between inputs into outputs.
I’m not sure if I’m explaining this correctly...a computation can’t be intrinsically suffering or intrinsically pleasure, and claiming that it is commits some sort of essentialism which doesn’t have a name yet...computational essentialism? You could take the exact same computation that represents suffering in one creature and re-purpose it into a different purpose entirely by changing the other computations with which it interacts. You can’t just point to some computation and say, “this is Suffering, no matter what the surrounding context is”.
Acknowledged. Like I said:
But your experiential definition of suffering is, by definition, inaccessable. If you define suffering that way, then the word will dissolve later on, much like words like “free will” tend to either dissolve or change definition so drastically that it scarcely seems like the same thing. The definition needs to change because the original definiton doesn’t make sense. Qualia only applies to you, not to others.
(by the way, this is pretty much the definition of the amygdala-vmPFC brand of “empathy” so I’m not sure why you refer to yourself as “low empathy”. Or did you think that by “empathy” I was referring to mere mirroring the affective states of those around you, like how people cry at movies or something?)
Can’t be helped I’m afraid—this is one of those situations where brevity would take more effort. Not to worry, I don’t feel offended if people don’t reply to my comments, if that’s why you felt the need to mention that you might not be able to reply!
I guess I’ll just be brief myself then.
Typical mind fallacy.
I was more concerned about the nonempathy-psychopathy confusion. I’m not offended, but other people will be.
You don’t know that, but more importantly naming brain regions doesn’t explain anything. It’s not necessary to bring real brains to the discussion.
Perhaps not mere, but that’s how people use the word.
Only if you’re a solipsist. When people claim to have qualia, this is evidence they have qualia, because I have qualia, and they have brains similar to mine.
If we can make a high resolution record of what happens in their brain when they report qualia, we can look at what kind of computation those qualia are, and therefore determine if other agents have them too.
I’m confused...you seem to be suggesting that we use behavioral output to determine which parts of the brain are responsible for qualia, which you say should define morality… didn’t you just tell me that I shouldn’t use behavioral output to define my morality?
If we did it the way you said, and looked at the brain to see what happened when people reported perceiving things, we’d find out some cool things about human perception. However, there’s no guarantee that other minds will use the computation. That’s why I’m emphasizing that it’s important to focus on the input-output functions of the algorithm, rather than the content of the algorithm itself. (Again, this does not mean we ignore the algorithm altogether—it means that we look at the algorithm with respect to what it would output for a given input—so we still care about paralyzed people, brains in vats, etc...since we can make guesses as to what they would output given minor changes to the situation.).
(Not to mention, there is a cascade of things happening from the moment your eyes perceive red to the moment your mouth outputs “Yeah, that’s red” and looking at an actual brain will tell you nothing about which part of the computation gets the “qualia” designation. At best, you’ll find some central hubs which handle information from many parts. Qualia, like free will, is a philosophical question—all the neuroscience knowledge in the world won’t help answer it. Neuroscience might help eliminate some obviously wrong hypotheses, as it did with free will, but fundamentally this is a question that can and should be settled without neuroscience. )
There’s probably a lot of misunderstanding going on between us. I thought you meant you always need the output. In my interpretation you only need the output once for a particular qualia in the optimal situation. After that, you can just start scanning brains or programs for similar computations. How much output we need, if any, depends on at what stage of understanding we are.
True. However, if the reporting of qualia corresponds to certain patterns of brain activity, and that brain activity can be expressed mathematically, then we have a computation and we can think about other ways the computation could be performed. We might even be able to test different forms of the computation on EMs, and see what they report.
This is incorrect, because there are temporal differences in brain activity. Light on your retina doesn’t instantly transfer information to all parts of your brain responsible for visual processing. Also, there’s no theoretical limitation on temporarily disabling certain brain areas or even single neurons, and examining how that corresponds to reporting of qualia.
You should think about this further. How much would you be willing to bet that unconscious people experience qualia? How about rocks?
Sure, but disable one part and the person won’t be able to verbally report information about the input, but can still use information from the input non-verbally. Which part is the “qualia” part?
I can’t bet on that until we agree upon a definition of qualia. Personally, as per the definition that makes coherent sense to me, qualia is the section of reality that I’ve got access to (and epistemology is an attempt to understand the most parsimonious system that explains my qualia). I don’t think it makes sense for anyone to talk about qualia, except in reference to themselves in the current moment. I suppose I’m a “soft” solopsist.
On the other hand, I like to define “consciousness” as “self-aware + environment-aware”. So to answer the spirit of the question, I’ll take qualia to mean “awareness”, and then we can at least say that interacting with something is a necessary condition for being “aware” of it. So rocks can’t be very aware, since they aren’t really interacting much with anything....whereas the various brain sections of unconscious people are sometimes interacting with themselves, so they might sometimes be self aware.
I think the crux of that disagreement is as follows:
You think the algorithm matters morally, and the input-output function is relevant insofar as it gives us information about what the various algorithms mean.
I think the input-output function is what matters morally, and the algorithm is relevant insofar as gives us information about what the input- outputs function is.
-- Stop reading here if brevity is important, otherwise...
To turn this into a more concrete problem: Suppose algorithm X made people cry and verbally report that they feel sad. You conclude that X is sadness. I conclude that X implements sadness.
If we then take X and modified all the things to which X was connected to, such that it now makes people smile and verbally report that they feel happy, I say that X now implement happiness.
I’m guessing you’d say that X was never “happiness” in the first place, and “happiness” is actually in the interaction between X and the surrounding regions.
My argument is that there are infinite configurations of X and its surroundings. Since our judgement of what X+surroundings signifies finally depends on the output, it’s the output that really matters. If someone came to us saying they were in pain, we’d immediately care because of the output—it wouldn’t matter what the circuitry creating the pain looked like.
If a shallow mechanism for generating the output breaks (say, spinal cord injury) then we know what the output would be in a mildly counter-factual scenario, and that’s what matters morally.
The degree to which we need to make counter-factual assumptions before getting to output is important as well—on one extreme, if we are looking at a blank slate and we have to counter factually assume the entire brain, the object has no moral significance. If we just have to counter-factually assume someone’s spinal cord is repaired, there is high moral significance. Something like a coma states would be an intermediate scenario...the question is basically, how much information do we have to add to this algorithm before it generates meaningful output.
(Note: the above paragraph’s reasoning is re-purposed—was originally made for settling abortion and person-hood debates)
Another edge-case: Suppose you had a conscious being which was happy, but contained intact, suffering human brains in its algorithm. Because it would only take a very slight counter-factual modification to get those suffering human brains to generate suffering behavioral output, we still care about them morally.
He said “typical mind fallacy”, not “mind projection fallacy”.
oops. thanks!