I find this post to be too low quality to support even itself, let alone stand up against the orthogonality thesis (on which I have no opinion). It needs a complete rewrite at best. Some (rather incomplete) notes are below.
This is either because the beings in question have some objective difference in their constitution that associates them to different values, or because they can choose what values they have.
Where do you include environmental and cultural influences?
If they differ in other values, given that they are constitutionally similar, then the differing values could not be all correct at the same time, they would be differing due to error in choice.
This does not follow. Maybe you need to give some examples. What do you mean by “correct” and “error” here?
What is important is the satisfaction, or good feelings, that they produce, in the present or future (what might entail life preservation), which is basically the same thing to everyone.
This is a contentious attempt to convert everything to hedons. People have multiple contradictory impulses, desires and motives which shape their actions, often not by “maximizing good feelings”.
They don’t regularly put their hands into boiling water to feel the pain
Really? Been to the Youtube and other video sites lately?
There is a difference between valid and invalid human values, which is the ground of justification for moral realism: valid values have an epistemological justification, while invalid ones are based on arbitrary choice or intuition.
This sounds like a pronouncement of absolute truth, not a description of one of many competing models. It is not clear that the “epistemological justification” is a good definition of the term “valid”.
We could, theoretically, be living inside virtual worlds in an underlying alien universe with different physical laws and scientific facts, but we can nonetheless be sure of the reality of our conscious experiences in themselves, which are directly felt.
This is wrong in so many ways, unless you define reality as “conscious experiences in themselves”, which is rather non-standard. In any case, unless you are a dualist, you can probably agree that your conscious experiences can be virtual as much as anything else.
Good and bad feelings (or conscious experiences) are physical occurrences, and therefore objectively good and bad occurrences, and objective value.
Again, you use the term objective for feelings and conscious experiences, not something easily measured and agreed upon to be in any way objective, certainly no more than the “external world”
The existence of personal identities is purely an illusion that cannot be justified by argument, and clearly disintegrates upon deeper analysis (for why that is, see, e.g., this essay: Universal Identity).
Uhh, that post sucked as well.
Kinda stopped reading after that, no point really. Please consider learning the material before writing about it next time. Maybe read a Sequence or two, can’t hurt, can it?
You make some good points about the post, but there’s no call for this:
Please consider learning the material before writing about it next time. Maybe read a Sequence or two, can’t hurt, can it?
Jonatas happens to be a rather successful philosophy student, who I think is quite well read in related topics, even if this post needs work. He’s also writing in a second language, which makes it harder to be clear.
Sorry, Carl, I was going by the post’s content, since I don’t know the OP personally. I trust your judgement of his skills in general, maybe you can teach him to write better and assess the quality of the output.
I was giving that background about the specific case in support of the general principle of avoiding making insulting statements, both to avoid poisoning the discourse, and because errors given offense that is rarely outweighed by any pros.
I am not sure what in the statement you quoted you found insulting. That I inferred that he wasn’t well-versed in the material, given the poor quality of the post in question, instead of politely asking if he had, in fact, read the relevant literature?
shminux, what would be a “virtual” conscious experience”? I think you’ll have a lot of work to do to show how the “raw feels” of conscious experience could exist at some level of computational abstraction. An alternative perspective is that the “program-resistant” phenomenal experiences undergone by our minds disclose the intrinsic nature of the stuff of the world—the signature of basement reality. Dualism? No, Strawsonian physicalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism#Strawsonian_physicalism
Of course, I’m not remotely expecting you to agree here. Rather I’m just just pointing out there are counterarguments to computational platonism that mean Jonatas’ argument can’t simply be dismissed.
I don’t understand the difference between Dualism and Strawsonian physicalism. For example, if you adopt Eliezer’s timeless view (of which I’m not a fan), that the universe is written and we are the ink, or something like that, there is no need to talk about “phenomenal experiences undergone by our minds disclose the intrinsic nature of the stuff of the world”, whatever the heck it might mean.
shminux, Strawsonian physicalism may be false; but it is not dualism. Recall the title of Strawson’s controversial essay was “Realistic monism—why physicalism entails panpsychism” (Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (10-11):3-31 (2006)) For an astute critique of Strawson, perhaps see William Seager’s “The ‘intrinsic nature’ argument for panpsychism” (Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (10-11):129-145 (2006) http://philpapers.org/rec/SEATIN ) Once again, I’m not asking you to agree here. We just need to be wary of dismissing a philosophical position without understanding the arguments that motivate it.
We just need to be wary of dismissing a philosophical position without understanding the arguments that motivate it.
Indeed, that’s a common pitfall, and I’m no stranger to it. So I decided to read the Strawson’s essay you mentioned. And there I came across this statement:
Real physicalism cannot have anything to do with physicSalism unless it is supposed—obviously falsely—that the terms of physics can fully capture the nature or essence of experience
How is it obvious?
Further on:
As a real physicalist, then, I hold that the mental/experiential is physical, and I am happy to say, along with many other physicalists, that experience is ‘really just neurons firing’, at least in the case of biological organisms like ourselves.
So far so good.
But when I say these words I mean something completely different from what many physicalists have apparently meant by them. I certainly don’t mean that all characteristics of what is going on, in the case of experience, can be described by physics and neurophysiology or any non-revolutionary extensions of them. That idea is crazy. It amounts to radical ‘eliminativism’ with respect to experience, and it is not a form of real physicalism at all. My claim is different. It is that experiential phenomena ‘just are’ physical, so that there is a lot more to neurons than physics and neurophysiology record (or can record). No one who disagrees with this is a real physicalist, in my terms. [emphasis mine]
The claim in bold is what I don’t get. Either it’s all physics and it can be studied as such, or it’s not, and you need something other than physics to describe “experiential phenomena”, which is dualism, including panpsychism. Maybe there is another alternative I’m missing here?
Anyway, I concede that I know little about philosophy, but this essay seems like an exercise in futility by a person who’d do well to go through some of the required reading on Luke’s list instead. For now, I have lost interest in Strawsonian’s confused musings.
shminux, it is indeed not obvious what is obvious. But most mainstream materialists would acknowledge that we have no idea what “breathes fire into the equations and makes there a world for us to describe.” Monistic materialists believe that this “fire” is nonexperiential; monistic idealists / Strawsonian physicalists believe the fire is experiential. Recall that key concepts in theoretical physics, notably a field (superstring, brane, etc), are defined purely mathematically [cf. “Maxwell’s theory is Maxwell’s equations”] What’s in question here is the very nature of the physical.
Now maybe you’d argue instead in favour of some kind of strong emergence; but if so, this puts paid to reductive physicalism and the ontological unity of science.
[ I could go on if you’re interested; but I get the impression your mind is made up(?) ]
Uh, no, I frequent this site because I enjoy learning new things. I don’t mind if my worldview changes in the process. For example, I used to be a naive physical realist before I thought about these issues, and now I’m more of an instrumentalist. Now, is your mind made up? Do you allow for a chance that your epistemology changes as a result of this exchange?
apologies shminux, I hadn’t intended to convey the impression I believed I was more open-minded than you in general; I was just gauging your level of interest here before plunging on. Instrumentalism? Well, certainly the price of adopting a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics is extraordinarily high, namely Everett’s multiverse. The price of also preserving reductive physicalism is high too. But if we do relax this constraint, then the alternatives seem ghastly. Thus David Chalmers explores, inconclusively, Strawsonian physicalism before opting for some kind of naturalistic dualism. To my mind, dualism is a counsel of despair.
I believe I lack context for most of your statements here, since none of them seem make sense to me.
As for my version of instrumentalism (not generally accepted on this forum), I do not postulate any kind of external/objective reality, and hence do not consider terms like “exist” very useful. I care about models accurately predicting future data inputs based on the past data inputs, without worrying where these inputs come from. In such a framework all QM interpretations making identical predictions are equivalent. I suspect this sounds “ghastly” to you.
Where do you include environmental and cultural influences?
While these vary, I don’t see legitimate values that could be affected by them. Could you provide examples of such values?
This does not follow. Maybe you need to give some examples. What do you mean by “correct” and “error” here?
Imagine that two exact replicas of a person exist in different locations, exactly the same except for an antagonism in one of their values. Both could not be correct at the same time about that value. I mean error in the sense, for example, that Eliezer employs in Coherent Extrapolated Volition: that error that comes from insufficient intelligence in thinking about our values.
This is a contentious attempt to convert everything to hedons. People have multiple contradictory impulses, desires and motives which shape their actions, often not by “maximizing good feelings”.
Except in the aforementioned sense or error, could you provide examples of legitimate values that don’t reduce to good and bad feelings?
Really? Been to the Youtube and other video sites lately?
I think that literature about masochism is of more evidence than youtube videos, that could be isolated incidents of people who are not regularly masochist. If you have evidence from those sites, I’d like to see it.
This is wrong in so many ways, unless you define reality as “conscious experiences in themselves”, which is rather non-standard. In any case, unless you are a dualist, you can probably agree that your conscious experiences can be virtual as much as anything else.
Even being virtual, or illusive, they would still be real occurrences, and real illusions, being directly felt. I mean that in the sense of Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument.
Uhh, that post sucked as well.
Perhaps it was not sufficiently explained, but check this introduction on Less Wrong, then, or the comment I made below about it:
I read many sequences, understand them well, and assure you that, if this post seems not to make sense, then it is because it was not explained in sufficient length.
Imagine that two exact replicas of a person exist in different locations, exactly the same except for an antagonism in one of their values. Both could not be correct at the same time about that value.
The two can’t be perfectly identical if they disagree. You have to additionally assume that the discrepancy is in the parts that reason about their values instead of the values themselves for the conclusion to hold.
What if I changed the causation chain in this example, and instead of having the antagonistic values caused by the identical agents themselves, I had myself inserted the antagonistic values in their memories, while I did their replication? I could have picked the antagonistic value from the mind of a different person, and put it into one of the replicas, complete with a small reasoning or justification in its memory.
They would both wake up, one with one value in their memory, and another with an antagonistic value. What would it be that would make one of them correct and not the other? Could both values be correct? The issue here is questioning if any values whatsoever can be validly held for similar beings, or if a good justification is needed. In CEV, Eliezer proposed that we can make errors about our values, and that they should be extrapolated for the reasonings we would make if we had higher intelligence.
I find this post to be too low quality to support even itself, let alone stand up against the orthogonality thesis (on which I have no opinion). It needs a complete rewrite at best. Some (rather incomplete) notes are below.
Where do you include environmental and cultural influences?
This does not follow. Maybe you need to give some examples. What do you mean by “correct” and “error” here?
This is a contentious attempt to convert everything to hedons. People have multiple contradictory impulses, desires and motives which shape their actions, often not by “maximizing good feelings”.
Really? Been to the Youtube and other video sites lately?
This sounds like a pronouncement of absolute truth, not a description of one of many competing models. It is not clear that the “epistemological justification” is a good definition of the term “valid”.
This is wrong in so many ways, unless you define reality as “conscious experiences in themselves”, which is rather non-standard. In any case, unless you are a dualist, you can probably agree that your conscious experiences can be virtual as much as anything else.
Again, you use the term objective for feelings and conscious experiences, not something easily measured and agreed upon to be in any way objective, certainly no more than the “external world”
Uhh, that post sucked as well.
Kinda stopped reading after that, no point really. Please consider learning the material before writing about it next time. Maybe read a Sequence or two, can’t hurt, can it?
You make some good points about the post, but there’s no call for this:
Jonatas happens to be a rather successful philosophy student, who I think is quite well read in related topics, even if this post needs work. He’s also writing in a second language, which makes it harder to be clear.
Sorry, Carl, I was going by the post’s content, since I don’t know the OP personally. I trust your judgement of his skills in general, maybe you can teach him to write better and assess the quality of the output.
I was giving that background about the specific case in support of the general principle of avoiding making insulting statements, both to avoid poisoning the discourse, and because errors given offense that is rarely outweighed by any pros.
I am not sure what in the statement you quoted you found insulting. That I inferred that he wasn’t well-versed in the material, given the poor quality of the post in question, instead of politely asking if he had, in fact, read the relevant literature?
shminux, what would be a “virtual” conscious experience”? I think you’ll have a lot of work to do to show how the “raw feels” of conscious experience could exist at some level of computational abstraction. An alternative perspective is that the “program-resistant” phenomenal experiences undergone by our minds disclose the intrinsic nature of the stuff of the world—the signature of basement reality. Dualism? No, Strawsonian physicalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism#Strawsonian_physicalism
Of course, I’m not remotely expecting you to agree here. Rather I’m just just pointing out there are counterarguments to computational platonism that mean Jonatas’ argument can’t simply be dismissed.
I don’t understand the difference between Dualism and Strawsonian physicalism. For example, if you adopt Eliezer’s timeless view (of which I’m not a fan), that the universe is written and we are the ink, or something like that, there is no need to talk about “phenomenal experiences undergone by our minds disclose the intrinsic nature of the stuff of the world”, whatever the heck it might mean.
shminux, Strawsonian physicalism may be false; but it is not dualism. Recall the title of Strawson’s controversial essay was “Realistic monism—why physicalism entails panpsychism” (Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (10-11):3-31 (2006)) For an astute critique of Strawson, perhaps see William Seager’s “The ‘intrinsic nature’ argument for panpsychism” (Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (10-11):129-145 (2006) http://philpapers.org/rec/SEATIN ) Once again, I’m not asking you to agree here. We just need to be wary of dismissing a philosophical position without understanding the arguments that motivate it.
Indeed, that’s a common pitfall, and I’m no stranger to it. So I decided to read the Strawson’s essay you mentioned. And there I came across this statement:
How is it obvious?
Further on:
So far so good.
The claim in bold is what I don’t get. Either it’s all physics and it can be studied as such, or it’s not, and you need something other than physics to describe “experiential phenomena”, which is dualism, including panpsychism. Maybe there is another alternative I’m missing here?
Anyway, I concede that I know little about philosophy, but this essay seems like an exercise in futility by a person who’d do well to go through some of the required reading on Luke’s list instead. For now, I have lost interest in Strawsonian’s confused musings.
shminux, it is indeed not obvious what is obvious. But most mainstream materialists would acknowledge that we have no idea what “breathes fire into the equations and makes there a world for us to describe.” Monistic materialists believe that this “fire” is nonexperiential; monistic idealists / Strawsonian physicalists believe the fire is experiential. Recall that key concepts in theoretical physics, notably a field (superstring, brane, etc), are defined purely mathematically [cf. “Maxwell’s theory is Maxwell’s equations”] What’s in question here is the very nature of the physical.
Now maybe you’d argue instead in favour of some kind of strong emergence; but if so, this puts paid to reductive physicalism and the ontological unity of science.
[ I could go on if you’re interested; but I get the impression your mind is made up(?) ]
Uh, no, I frequent this site because I enjoy learning new things. I don’t mind if my worldview changes in the process. For example, I used to be a naive physical realist before I thought about these issues, and now I’m more of an instrumentalist. Now, is your mind made up? Do you allow for a chance that your epistemology changes as a result of this exchange?
apologies shminux, I hadn’t intended to convey the impression I believed I was more open-minded than you in general; I was just gauging your level of interest here before plunging on. Instrumentalism? Well, certainly the price of adopting a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics is extraordinarily high, namely Everett’s multiverse. The price of also preserving reductive physicalism is high too. But if we do relax this constraint, then the alternatives seem ghastly. Thus David Chalmers explores, inconclusively, Strawsonian physicalism before opting for some kind of naturalistic dualism. To my mind, dualism is a counsel of despair.
I believe I lack context for most of your statements here, since none of them seem make sense to me.
As for my version of instrumentalism (not generally accepted on this forum), I do not postulate any kind of external/objective reality, and hence do not consider terms like “exist” very useful. I care about models accurately predicting future data inputs based on the past data inputs, without worrying where these inputs come from. In such a framework all QM interpretations making identical predictions are equivalent. I suspect this sounds “ghastly” to you.
While these vary, I don’t see legitimate values that could be affected by them. Could you provide examples of such values?
Imagine that two exact replicas of a person exist in different locations, exactly the same except for an antagonism in one of their values. Both could not be correct at the same time about that value. I mean error in the sense, for example, that Eliezer employs in Coherent Extrapolated Volition: that error that comes from insufficient intelligence in thinking about our values.
Except in the aforementioned sense or error, could you provide examples of legitimate values that don’t reduce to good and bad feelings?
I think that literature about masochism is of more evidence than youtube videos, that could be isolated incidents of people who are not regularly masochist. If you have evidence from those sites, I’d like to see it.
Even being virtual, or illusive, they would still be real occurrences, and real illusions, being directly felt. I mean that in the sense of Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument.
Perhaps it was not sufficiently explained, but check this introduction on Less Wrong, then, or the comment I made below about it:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/
I read many sequences, understand them well, and assure you that, if this post seems not to make sense, then it is because it was not explained in sufficient length.
The two can’t be perfectly identical if they disagree. You have to additionally assume that the discrepancy is in the parts that reason about their values instead of the values themselves for the conclusion to hold.
What if I changed the causation chain in this example, and instead of having the antagonistic values caused by the identical agents themselves, I had myself inserted the antagonistic values in their memories, while I did their replication? I could have picked the antagonistic value from the mind of a different person, and put it into one of the replicas, complete with a small reasoning or justification in its memory.
They would both wake up, one with one value in their memory, and another with an antagonistic value. What would it be that would make one of them correct and not the other? Could both values be correct? The issue here is questioning if any values whatsoever can be validly held for similar beings, or if a good justification is needed. In CEV, Eliezer proposed that we can make errors about our values, and that they should be extrapolated for the reasonings we would make if we had higher intelligence.