E.g., we discover that physics tells us that for every particle, there is a cooresponding shadow particle that has no effect on regular ones.
And how, exactly, would we discover that?
If we discovered this meaningfully, then it means that at least one bit in the entire universe is different than it would be if there were no shadow particles. In this case, the existence of shadow particles is inevitably causally linked to that one bit. As such, they are no longer epiphenomenal, because they do have an effect on that one bit of data, which has its own effect on the rest of the universe.
If we discover this without any such things, then AFAICT it’s a meaningless discovery, because we can make a discovery of absolutely anything if there is no information.
If you send data somewhere and it disappears once it affects the lower level, then that is an interaction from the lower level to the upper level, since the upper level would have been different if the lower level wasn’t there (the data would not have disappeared). Then again, I’m not entirely sure about this. Maybe this is how you’d build a p-zombie detector: Find the ones that don’t have random bits of data randomly blink out of existence.
It turns out that what you’ve thought of as consciousness or self-awareness is a process in the shadow-particle world. The reason you find yourself talking about your experiences is that the real world contains particles that duplicate the interactions of your shadow particles. They do not actually interact with your thoughts, but because of the parallel structure maintained in the real world and the shadow-particle world, you don’t notice this. Think of the shadow particles as your soul, which corresponds exactly to the real-world particles in your brain, with the only difference being that the shadow particle interactions are the only once you actually experience.
You conduct a particularly clever physics experiment that somehow manages to affect the shadow-particle world but not the real-particle world. Suddenly the shadow particles that make up your soul diverge from the real-world particles that make up your brain! This is a novel experience, but you find yourself unable to report it. It is the brain that determines your body’s actions, and for the first time in your life, this actually matters. The brain acts as though the experiment had done nothing.
Once your brain and soul diverge, the change never cancels out and you find yourself living a horrific existence. Because real-world particles do affect shadow particles, you still receive sensory input from your body. However, your brain is now thinking subtly different thoughts from your soul. To you, this feels as though something has hijacked your body, leaving you unable to cry out for help.
Of course, you never have, and never could have, found out about shadow particles. But you are a brilliant physicist, so your soul eventually figures out what happened. Your brain never does, of course; it lives in the real world, where your clever experiment had absolutely no effect, and was written off as a failure.
After concluding that it had no harmfully results, your brain incorporates the effect into a consumer device in which it was mildly usefully and becomes near ubiquitous, and spreads all over the world.
this’d have the makings of a great SCP if not for the obvious problem.
I’d say it would make a better creepypasta than an SCP. Still, if you’re fixed on the SCP genre, I’d try inverting it.
Say the Foundation discovers an SCP which appears to have mind-reading abilities. Nothing too outlandish so far; they deal with this sort of thing all the time. The only slightly odd part is that it’s not totally accurate. Sometimes the thoughts it reads seem to come from an alternate universe, or perhaps the subject’s deep subconscious. It’s only after a considerable amount of testing that they determine the process by which the divergence is caused—and it’s something almost totally innocuous, like going to sleep at an altitude of more than 40,000 feet.
I figured it was impossible for anyone to make any “discoveries” like this in the sense of the concept and knowledge being spread out, but this was outside of my expectations.
We could discover that the characteristics of real particles are such that they are best (read: most simply) explained by some process that starts with simple particles and splits them into multiple levels with different properties, some of which epiphenomenal with respect to others.
Spot on! Every decoherent branch is epiphenomenal with respect to any other. And “bits of information” are pretty irrelevant, because its all about the best explanation of the data, not the data itself.
There’s no epiphenomenal type of stuff in QM. There’s just a causal type of stuff, some of which got far enough away that under the standard and observed rules we can’t see it anymore. It’s no more epiphenomenal than a photon transmitted into space or a ship that went over the horizon.
Deducing an epiphenomenal type of stuff would be more difficult, and AFAICT would basically have to rely on there being structure in the observed laws and types of your world’s physics. For example, let’s say you’re in the seventh layer of a universe with at least seven causal layers. The first layer has seven laws connecting it to the layer below, the second layer has six laws connecting it to a layer below, and then you’re in the seventh layer, connected by two laws to the layer above. You might suspect that there’s an eighth layer below you, and that the single remaining law is the one required to match the pattern of the seven layers you know about.
Of course, what you’re actually doing this case is almost exactly akin to knowing about a ship that went over the horizon—you observed the Laws of Physics Factory, or the code-factory for your Matrix, generalized, and deduced an effect of the previously observed Factory which the generalization says you shouldn’t be able to see. You can navigate to the law-data by following a causal reference to the link down from a law-Factory you’ve previously observed.
Why is that important? The obervable difference between epiphenomenal type of stuff (= never interacts) and
quasi-epihenonemal causality (=rarely interacts) isn’t necessarily an observable differnce. If branches
of the multiverse only interact once every billion years, then multiversal theory predicts effectively nothing
about expected future experience. (I don’t personally have a problem with saying mutliversal epiphenomenaism is better
than substance epiphenomenalism, but that is because I am not commited to the prediction of exepcted observations [warmed-over LP] over and above Best Explanation and even good old fashioned metaphysics).
An why bring up substance anyway? Contemporary epiphenomenalism doens’t focus on substance, it focusses it on
properties (Jackson, at one time, Chalmers, maybe) or laws (Davidson).
There’s just a causal type of stuff, some of which got far enough away that under the standard and observed rules we can’t see it anymore. It’s no more epiphenomenal than a photon transmitted into space or a ship that went over the horizon.
OK. So, you are willing to countenance theories that don’t pay their way in expected observations so long as they
pay their way in other ways...
Deducing an epiphenomenal type of stuff would be more difficult, and AFAICT would basically have to rely on there being structure in the observed laws and types of your world’s physics. For example, let’s say you’re in the seventh layer of a universe with at least seven causal layers. The first layer has seven laws connecting it to the layer below, the second layer has six laws connecting it to a layer below, and then you’re in the seventh layer, connected by two laws to the layer above. You might suspect that there’s an eighth layer below you, and that the single remaining law is the one required to match the pattern of the seven layers you know about.
That was cast pretty much entirely in terms of laws, although the contemporary arguements lean much more heavily on types—on what things are, on what their natures are.
A typical argument would go:
*1. Physical brain states (or at least the physical properties of brain states) are sufficient to explain observable behaviour.
*2. Consciousness (or at least qualia) cannot be directly identified with the physcial properties of brain states… they are different types of thing, their natures are differnt...
*3. Therefore, qualia are not needed to generate behaviour...they are extraneous and idle.
I don’t see how causal diagrams help. If you feel that conscious states can be identified with brain
states, you would draw a causal diagram with nodes that are psychophyscial, and if you you feel that they
can’t, you would draw a diagram with a physcial network and a consicous network in parallel. I don’t
see how causal diagrams tell you how to identify and classify nodes—they ratherf assume that that has already been sorted out, somehow.
Every decoherent branch is epiphenomenal with respect to any other.
Not really true. The continuity of the schroedinger equation means eventually the existence of any branch should have some effect on the evolution of any other branch. However, it might be impossible to measure in any way as far as a human is concerned, for the simple reasons of complexity of the math and the tiny size of the effect.
(...) impossible (...) for the simple reason of (...) complexity of the math (...) tiny size.
While you might be right this time, empirically we’ve observed that whenever someone said something was impossible because it was too mathematically complex or involved sizes too small, someone came up with Radio Waves or a Theory of General Relativity.
And how, exactly, would we discover that?
If we discovered this meaningfully, then it means that at least one bit in the entire universe is different than it would be if there were no shadow particles. In this case, the existence of shadow particles is inevitably causally linked to that one bit. As such, they are no longer epiphenomenal, because they do have an effect on that one bit of data, which has its own effect on the rest of the universe.
If we discover this without any such things, then AFAICT it’s a meaningless discovery, because we can make a discovery of absolutely anything if there is no information.
If you send data somewhere and it disappears once it affects the lower level, then that is an interaction from the lower level to the upper level, since the upper level would have been different if the lower level wasn’t there (the data would not have disappeared). Then again, I’m not entirely sure about this. Maybe this is how you’d build a p-zombie detector: Find the ones that don’t have random bits of data randomly blink out of existence.
It turns out that what you’ve thought of as consciousness or self-awareness is a process in the shadow-particle world. The reason you find yourself talking about your experiences is that the real world contains particles that duplicate the interactions of your shadow particles. They do not actually interact with your thoughts, but because of the parallel structure maintained in the real world and the shadow-particle world, you don’t notice this. Think of the shadow particles as your soul, which corresponds exactly to the real-world particles in your brain, with the only difference being that the shadow particle interactions are the only once you actually experience.
You conduct a particularly clever physics experiment that somehow manages to affect the shadow-particle world but not the real-particle world. Suddenly the shadow particles that make up your soul diverge from the real-world particles that make up your brain! This is a novel experience, but you find yourself unable to report it. It is the brain that determines your body’s actions, and for the first time in your life, this actually matters. The brain acts as though the experiment had done nothing.
Once your brain and soul diverge, the change never cancels out and you find yourself living a horrific existence. Because real-world particles do affect shadow particles, you still receive sensory input from your body. However, your brain is now thinking subtly different thoughts from your soul. To you, this feels as though something has hijacked your body, leaving you unable to cry out for help.
Of course, you never have, and never could have, found out about shadow particles. But you are a brilliant physicist, so your soul eventually figures out what happened. Your brain never does, of course; it lives in the real world, where your clever experiment had absolutely no effect, and was written off as a failure.
That actually happened to me last Tuesday!
Cannot upvote this enough.
After concluding that it had no harmfully results, your brain incorporates the effect into a consumer device in which it was mildly usefully and becomes near ubiquitous, and spreads all over the world.
this’d have the makings of a great SCP if not for the obvious problem.
I’d say it would make a better creepypasta than an SCP. Still, if you’re fixed on the SCP genre, I’d try inverting it.
Say the Foundation discovers an SCP which appears to have mind-reading abilities. Nothing too outlandish so far; they deal with this sort of thing all the time. The only slightly odd part is that it’s not totally accurate. Sometimes the thoughts it reads seem to come from an alternate universe, or perhaps the subject’s deep subconscious. It’s only after a considerable amount of testing that they determine the process by which the divergence is caused—and it’s something almost totally innocuous, like going to sleep at an altitude of more than 40,000 feet.
That’s an awesome response.
I figured it was impossible for anyone to make any “discoveries” like this in the sense of the concept and knowledge being spread out, but this was outside of my expectations.
See also Daniel Dennett’s “Where Am I?”
We could discover that the characteristics of real particles are such that they are best (read: most simply) explained by some process that starts with simple particles and splits them into multiple levels with different properties, some of which epiphenomenal with respect to others.
Using reasoning similar to that Eliezer uses to argue for many worlds.
Spot on! Every decoherent branch is epiphenomenal with respect to any other. And “bits of information” are pretty irrelevant, because its all about the best explanation of the data, not the data itself.
There’s no epiphenomenal type of stuff in QM. There’s just a causal type of stuff, some of which got far enough away that under the standard and observed rules we can’t see it anymore. It’s no more epiphenomenal than a photon transmitted into space or a ship that went over the horizon.
Deducing an epiphenomenal type of stuff would be more difficult, and AFAICT would basically have to rely on there being structure in the observed laws and types of your world’s physics. For example, let’s say you’re in the seventh layer of a universe with at least seven causal layers. The first layer has seven laws connecting it to the layer below, the second layer has six laws connecting it to a layer below, and then you’re in the seventh layer, connected by two laws to the layer above. You might suspect that there’s an eighth layer below you, and that the single remaining law is the one required to match the pattern of the seven layers you know about.
Of course, what you’re actually doing this case is almost exactly akin to knowing about a ship that went over the horizon—you observed the Laws of Physics Factory, or the code-factory for your Matrix, generalized, and deduced an effect of the previously observed Factory which the generalization says you shouldn’t be able to see. You can navigate to the law-data by following a causal reference to the link down from a law-Factory you’ve previously observed.
Why is that important? The obervable difference between epiphenomenal type of stuff (= never interacts) and quasi-epihenonemal causality (=rarely interacts) isn’t necessarily an observable differnce. If branches of the multiverse only interact once every billion years, then multiversal theory predicts effectively nothing about expected future experience. (I don’t personally have a problem with saying mutliversal epiphenomenaism is better than substance epiphenomenalism, but that is because I am not commited to the prediction of exepcted observations [warmed-over LP] over and above Best Explanation and even good old fashioned metaphysics).
An why bring up substance anyway? Contemporary epiphenomenalism doens’t focus on substance, it focusses it on properties (Jackson, at one time, Chalmers, maybe) or laws (Davidson).
OK. So, you are willing to countenance theories that don’t pay their way in expected observations so long as they pay their way in other ways...
That was cast pretty much entirely in terms of laws, although the contemporary arguements lean much more heavily on types—on what things are, on what their natures are.
A typical argument would go:
*1. Physical brain states (or at least the physical properties of brain states) are sufficient to explain observable behaviour.
*2. Consciousness (or at least qualia) cannot be directly identified with the physcial properties of brain states… they are different types of thing, their natures are differnt...
*3. Therefore, qualia are not needed to generate behaviour...they are extraneous and idle.
I don’t see how causal diagrams help. If you feel that conscious states can be identified with brain states, you would draw a causal diagram with nodes that are psychophyscial, and if you you feel that they can’t, you would draw a diagram with a physcial network and a consicous network in parallel. I don’t see how causal diagrams tell you how to identify and classify nodes—they ratherf assume that that has already been sorted out, somehow.
Not really true. The continuity of the schroedinger equation means eventually the existence of any branch should have some effect on the evolution of any other branch. However, it might be impossible to measure in any way as far as a human is concerned, for the simple reasons of complexity of the math and the tiny size of the effect.
While you might be right this time, empirically we’ve observed that whenever someone said something was impossible because it was too mathematically complex or involved sizes too small, someone came up with Radio Waves or a Theory of General Relativity.
Just something that made me chuckle.