I see that people have rated my comment above negatively. I hope it isn’t offensive or so, for that was not my intention; if there is a mistake in it I would like to know about it and learn from it!
Your argument mostly just strikes me as logically flawed. There are clear and easy ways of falsifying the hypothesis of “the process of natural physics will in short time explain all things you find mysterious”. Namely every second that passes without physics doing so, is evidence against that theory.
The argument that Eliezer makes is that Physics has a strong enough track record that it will take quite a few seconds to pass until you should really consider alternative hypotheses.
I definitely second this response, but want to add the following nitpick:
It’s not quite time passing that’s the metric here, I think, but rather effort invested into the attempt to explain a thing (with physics). (Suppose that tomorrow, all humanity suddenly lost all interest in explaining how consciousness works, and abandoned all work on the problem. A thousand years could pass thus, and yet we wouldn’t thereby learn anything too interesting about how explainable-by-physics consciousness is.)
So Eliezer basically says to me (as the reader) that Physics has solved so many problems in the past (“track record”) that I should really give it some time until I start to doubt and search for other explanations. Do I have this right?
So: How much time would you recommend as an appropriate waiting time; and why? How much is “quite a few seconds”?
Concerning the track record of physics (or “science” more generally)—my philosophy professor in college, Robert Lurz, had a wonderful analogy / intuition pump about this (which I will slightly extend here).
There is a sort of children’s puzzle, which consists of a set of flat plastic or wooden pieces, all of abstract geometric shapes, that fit together in various ways along the edges; and also a set of cards, which have, on the obverse side, an outline shape—that’s the puzzle—and on the reverse side, the solution to the puzzle—i.e., the same outline, but filled in to show how the pieces may be fitted together to form the desired outline.
So you take a puzzle card from the box, and you look at the obverse side, and you look at the pieces, and you say to yourself: gosh, I just can’t see how these pieces could possibly fit together to form this shape. You turn the pieces this way and that, but you can’t make it work; so you conclude that there’s got to be some mistake—perhaps a manufacturing defect, or maybe the wrong puzzle cards were mistakenly put into the box with the wrong pieces.
Then you turn the card over, to the side with the solution, and—Ohhh! So they go together like that! I wouldn’t have guessed… Yes, the solution works, and is obvious in retrospect.
Reassured, you take the next puzzle card from the box, and this time you give it a good deal of thought. You turn the pieces this way and that, you rotate the puzzle card, but… you just can’t make it work. You know, I bet this particular card was mis-printed, you think; the other one had a solution, but this one, well, I just don’t see how it possibly could…
And then you turn the card over, and—Ohhh…! Like that… and that one goes there… wow, yeah, that makes sense.
Reassured, you take the third puzzle card from the box…
…
…
… you take the fifteenth puzzle card from the box, and this one is a real stumper. You spend days on it. You call your friends for help. There just isn’t any possible way those darn pieces could fit together in the way they’d need to, to make this confounded shape! In fact, you think you can even prove that it’s impossible… well, you think you know what a proof would look like, anyway… you can see it, vaguely, in your mind. Yes, the last fourteen cards all turned out to have solutions, but this one has just got to be a misprint, or something…
Of course, in our case, we can’t turn the cards over to reveal the true solution; we’ve no recourse but to keep looking for it on our own. And yet—has there ever not been a solution? That is: have we ever encountered a problem which “science” (i.e. the physics-based, materialistic, reductionist [in the LW sense, not the ‘naive’ sense] view of the world) could definitely not solve—but that some other approach could?
A final point:
It’s not just that our current approach has a good track record. It has a perfect track record, and all other approaches have a perfect track record of failure.
Thanks again for the answer! I understand the analogy to my problem like this: in our case, we have the brain and consciousness as pieces of the puzzle, and the explanation of consciousness being based on the brain as solution. But we cannot just see the solution as easy as by flipping a card. For it has not yet been found
Now, I wonder at this: When I am solving this children’s puzzle, and I am, just as in your example, sure that it does not have a solution: It is well possible that the puzzle card really doesnot. For example the game designer could have made one card unsolvable, or there is, as I could assume, a mistake. And there are actually ways to prove such problems solvable or not, with proofs being not just vaguely in the mind. But in our consciousness-problem, we have only the vague intuition of proof. For the real proof is yet to be revealed. So we obviously need to trust in the resolvability of our problem (through physics) from the very beginning.
It seems to me that one argument against that trust might be the analogy between 1.) the differences between the problems on the cards, and 2.) the differences between physical problems and our problem. The cards are all of the same kind, they present the same form of problem. Whereas Physics usually take care of the natural laws affecting the world around us. Not the structures of consciousness “in ourselves”. So one might say that the track record is set on a different track than the track currently in question. Also, even solving hundreds of cards does not lead to knowledge about the resolvability of the next one unless one finds mathematical ways of proving. And it is such proof that my trust relies on, not what was found in the past.
But you state that there has not been a single problem that “science” in the mentioned meaning did not solve (except our problem obviously). Even more fascinating: Every other approach to solutions ever made has failed. I am really impressed by your knowledge capacity. But I must admit that I’m not entirely persuaded here. I mean: anyone can state that; but can you prove it, too?
Well, how should I interpret this? One week without an answer to my questions. Is there no answer? And—if that is so—is the theory proposed by Eliezer Yudkowski here not right?
As for your questions… to be honest, they are rather repetitive, and cover well-trod ground—both in that you’re going over things that have already been addressed in this very thread, and also recapitulating arguments about, e.g., the “problem of induction”, of which so much has been said, over so many years (and decades, and indeed centuries), that to bring it up as if it’s a fresh concern is… not, shall we say, a productive use of anyone’s time.
To inspire further interest, among the commentariat here, in discussing this with you, you would have to, at least, show that you’re already well-familiar with existing commentary on relevant philosophical topics.
Thanks for answering again! And thanks for correcting my misspelling.
Okay. So, I read the whole thread. And I did not find the answers I asked from you. If these questions have been solved, they are not fresh (obviously), but they are fresh to me. Of course, you can say that explaining anything to me is not worth your – or anyone’s – time (for whatever reason). But you did answer once again. So why did you tell me all that, instead of answering my questions that are – to you – already solved (or telling me where to find the solutions)?
To just try to state what I understood so far (and hopefully therefore inspire further interest) : In the comments section to the post on “a priori”, Eliezer Yudkowky claims to be a “material monist”. That would mean that he thinks that there is only matter, and that anything that could be described as “non-material” must therefore actually be material. Which fits the section of this “Zombies”-post that I commented on in the first place. The argumentation seems to be as follows: The world can be described using physical laws, and one does not need any “mind” or “consciousness” to formulate why – for example – the lips of a human move. There is causality, from the processes in the brain to the muscles in the lips, that explains why the lip has to move as it does. And since this causal chain starts with something we might call “thought” in our “normal” language, and that starting chain link needs to influence the next link, it must be material and within the laws of physics as well. That means that – although we do not yet know the exact form of that physical “thought”-property – we are allowed to take it as given. What we have to presuppose is that the only influence on a physical object is possible through a physical object. Of course, some sort of “dualist” would never let that pass. If “thought” had no influence on the physical world, then that would go against our experience that for example we think and our body follows those “orders”. So thought must have an influence on the material world. That’s exactly the section of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “Zombies”-post that I commented on above: He presents “substance dualism” where we have a not-yet-understood “thought”affecting our world. And he presents “Not-quite-faith-based reductionism”, similar to “material monism”, where we have a not-yet-understood “material substance”. One relies on the intuition that no material substance can possibly add up to consciousness, the other one on the intuition that material substance can possibly add up to consciousness. So: Which intuition is more reliable? Both admit that there is some kind of difference between “thought” and “material substance” at first. Then, dualism says that this difference is unbridgeable, while monism states the opposite (material monism stating that bridge would be built from “material substance” to “thought”). What kind of difference do we encounter here? Why is “thought” not the same as “material substance” right away? Because we can not see, touch, generally sense “thought” with our sense perception, whereas we can sense “material substance”. We can say that “material substance” must follow laws, whereas “thought”has a degree of freedom. “Material substance” is three-dimensional, whereas “thought” is not. Of course, the answer of the material monists to that could state that all these properties of “thought” are not what they seem to be. But, as I have seen here, the material monists Eliezer Yudkowsky, habryka and Said Achmiz’ argument is that they do not know how “thought” is actually “material substance”, but trust in physics to solve that question in the future because of a “track record”. And that besides that there did not arise another reason. In the comments section here, mitchell_porter2 pointed at Bertrand Russell’s “the Problems of Philosophy”, chapter IX (10 years ago). There, Russell points at Plato’s theory of forms, stating that not only “material substance” has being. So, when I adopt a neutral position, I still have both sides standing there in front of me. Even in this quite material monistic commentariat. This is about the very foundation of the mindset of material monism. If this repetitive questions by me really do cover well-trod ground, as I was told above, and there was so much said already – did all that solve the questions, or am I repeating them because they’re still valid?
Thanks for the comment. I guessed that when someone argues that physics will reveal something after a period of time, of course physicists must put effort into their work for that to happen. But it is better to actually formulate it.
Do you think that, when we exchange “time passed” by “effort invested”, there is any way to tell “now enough effort was invested without any outcome, so we have to look for another solution!”?
It’s a matter of judgment, I should think; and whether we ought to look for a solution elsewhere seems to me to depend on three variables:
How much effort has been invested already, in the existing direction of research (i.e., physics, materialism, science—which is, of course, a very broad category of effort).
How important it is, that the problem be solved. We’ve gone several thousand years without “solving” the “Hard Problem of consciousness” (though we’ve made what seems to me like quite a bit of progress); is it terribly urgent that we solve it ASAP?
How likely it seems that whatever alternate approach is available, will make any real progress (and how much it costs us to engage in such an approach). (Of course, this consideration suggests that it might be profitable to look for heretofore-unknown approaches—but then again, it might not be. Unknown unknowns, and all that.)
From an epistemic perspective—what we should think about whether the problem will be solved at some point if we continue on our current course—only point #1 really matters. From an instrumental perspective—what, if anything, should we do, or what should we change about what and how we do things—points #2 and #3 seem to me to be at least as important.
Thanks for the answer! So my judgement should go along these questions you propose. Now I ask myself the question: “There seems to be much effort invested in the explanation of the hard problem of consciousness through physics. Does that make sense?”. But I need to find out (1.) HOW much effort was ACTUALLY invested already, (2.) HOW important it is to find a solution there, and (3.) WHICH alternate approaches are available. Right?
But how do you measure effort? And why is it important to know how much was already invested? I don’t understand that yet…
I see that people have rated my comment above negatively. I hope it isn’t offensive or so, for that was not my intention; if there is a mistake in it I would like to know about it and learn from it!
Your argument mostly just strikes me as logically flawed. There are clear and easy ways of falsifying the hypothesis of “the process of natural physics will in short time explain all things you find mysterious”. Namely every second that passes without physics doing so, is evidence against that theory.
The argument that Eliezer makes is that Physics has a strong enough track record that it will take quite a few seconds to pass until you should really consider alternative hypotheses.
I definitely second this response, but want to add the following nitpick:
It’s not quite time passing that’s the metric here, I think, but rather effort invested into the attempt to explain a thing (with physics). (Suppose that tomorrow, all humanity suddenly lost all interest in explaining how consciousness works, and abandoned all work on the problem. A thousand years could pass thus, and yet we wouldn’t thereby learn anything too interesting about how explainable-by-physics consciousness is.)
Ah, yes. I agree. Effort invested is more accurate.
Thanks for the replies!
So Eliezer basically says to me (as the reader) that Physics has solved so many problems in the past (“track record”) that I should really give it some time until I start to doubt and search for other explanations. Do I have this right?
So: How much time would you recommend as an appropriate waiting time; and why? How much is “quite a few seconds”?
Concerning the track record of physics (or “science” more generally)—my philosophy professor in college, Robert Lurz, had a wonderful analogy / intuition pump about this (which I will slightly extend here).
There is a sort of children’s puzzle, which consists of a set of flat plastic or wooden pieces, all of abstract geometric shapes, that fit together in various ways along the edges; and also a set of cards, which have, on the obverse side, an outline shape—that’s the puzzle—and on the reverse side, the solution to the puzzle—i.e., the same outline, but filled in to show how the pieces may be fitted together to form the desired outline.
So you take a puzzle card from the box, and you look at the obverse side, and you look at the pieces, and you say to yourself: gosh, I just can’t see how these pieces could possibly fit together to form this shape. You turn the pieces this way and that, but you can’t make it work; so you conclude that there’s got to be some mistake—perhaps a manufacturing defect, or maybe the wrong puzzle cards were mistakenly put into the box with the wrong pieces.
Then you turn the card over, to the side with the solution, and—Ohhh! So they go together like that! I wouldn’t have guessed… Yes, the solution works, and is obvious in retrospect.
Reassured, you take the next puzzle card from the box, and this time you give it a good deal of thought. You turn the pieces this way and that, you rotate the puzzle card, but… you just can’t make it work. You know, I bet this particular card was mis-printed, you think; the other one had a solution, but this one, well, I just don’t see how it possibly could…
And then you turn the card over, and—Ohhh…! Like that… and that one goes there… wow, yeah, that makes sense.
Reassured, you take the third puzzle card from the box…
…
…
… you take the fifteenth puzzle card from the box, and this one is a real stumper. You spend days on it. You call your friends for help. There just isn’t any possible way those darn pieces could fit together in the way they’d need to, to make this confounded shape! In fact, you think you can even prove that it’s impossible… well, you think you know what a proof would look like, anyway… you can see it, vaguely, in your mind. Yes, the last fourteen cards all turned out to have solutions, but this one has just got to be a misprint, or something…
Of course, in our case, we can’t turn the cards over to reveal the true solution; we’ve no recourse but to keep looking for it on our own. And yet—has there ever not been a solution? That is: have we ever encountered a problem which “science” (i.e. the physics-based, materialistic, reductionist [in the LW sense, not the ‘naive’ sense] view of the world) could definitely not solve—but that some other approach could?
A final point:
It’s not just that our current approach has a good track record. It has a perfect track record, and all other approaches have a perfect track record of failure.
Thanks again for the answer! I understand the analogy to my problem like this: in our case, we have the brain and consciousness as pieces of the puzzle, and the explanation of consciousness being based on the brain as solution. But we cannot just see the solution as easy as by flipping a card. For it has not yet been found
Now, I wonder at this: When I am solving this children’s puzzle, and I am, just as in your example, sure that it does not have a solution: It is well possible that the puzzle card really does not. For example the game designer could have made one card unsolvable, or there is, as I could assume, a mistake. And there are actually ways to prove such problems solvable or not, with proofs being not just vaguely in the mind. But in our consciousness-problem, we have only the vague intuition of proof. For the real proof is yet to be revealed. So we obviously need to trust in the resolvability of our problem (through physics) from the very beginning.
It seems to me that one argument against that trust might be the analogy between 1.) the differences between the problems on the cards, and 2.) the differences between physical problems and our problem. The cards are all of the same kind, they present the same form of problem. Whereas Physics usually take care of the natural laws affecting the world around us. Not the structures of consciousness “in ourselves”. So one might say that the track record is set on a different track than the track currently in question. Also, even solving hundreds of cards does not lead to knowledge about the resolvability of the next one unless one finds mathematical ways of proving. And it is such proof that my trust relies on, not what was found in the past.
But you state that there has not been a single problem that “science” in the mentioned meaning did not solve (except our problem obviously). Even more fascinating: Every other approach to solutions ever made has failed. I am really impressed by your knowledge capacity. But I must admit that I’m not entirely persuaded here. I mean: anyone can state that; but can you prove it, too?
Well, how should I interpret this? One week without an answer to my questions. Is there no answer? And—if that is so—is the theory proposed by Eliezer Yudkowski here not right?
It’s “Yudkowsky”, fyi.
As for your questions… to be honest, they are rather repetitive, and cover well-trod ground—both in that you’re going over things that have already been addressed in this very thread, and also recapitulating arguments about, e.g., the “problem of induction”, of which so much has been said, over so many years (and decades, and indeed centuries), that to bring it up as if it’s a fresh concern is… not, shall we say, a productive use of anyone’s time.
To inspire further interest, among the commentariat here, in discussing this with you, you would have to, at least, show that you’re already well-familiar with existing commentary on relevant philosophical topics.
Thanks for answering again! And thanks for correcting my misspelling.
Okay. So, I read the whole thread. And I did not find the answers I asked from you. If these questions have been solved, they are not fresh (obviously), but they are fresh to me. Of course, you can say that explaining anything to me is not worth your – or anyone’s – time (for whatever reason). But you did answer once again. So why did you tell me all that, instead of answering my questions that are – to you – already solved (or telling me where to find the solutions)?
To just try to state what I understood so far (and hopefully therefore inspire further interest) : In the comments section to the post on “a priori”, Eliezer Yudkowky claims to be a “material monist”. That would mean that he thinks that there is only matter, and that anything that could be described as “non-material” must therefore actually be material. Which fits the section of this “Zombies”-post that I commented on in the first place. The argumentation seems to be as follows: The world can be described using physical laws, and one does not need any “mind” or “consciousness” to formulate why – for example – the lips of a human move. There is causality, from the processes in the brain to the muscles in the lips, that explains why the lip has to move as it does. And since this causal chain starts with something we might call “thought” in our “normal” language, and that starting chain link needs to influence the next link, it must be material and within the laws of physics as well. That means that – although we do not yet know the exact form of that physical “thought”-property – we are allowed to take it as given.
What we have to presuppose is that the only influence on a physical object is possible through a physical object. Of course, some sort of “dualist” would never let that pass. If “thought” had no influence on the physical world, then that would go against our experience that for example we think and our body follows those “orders”. So thought must have an influence on the material world.
That’s exactly the section of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “Zombies”-post that I commented on above: He presents “substance dualism” where we have a not-yet-understood “thought”affecting our world. And he presents “Not-quite-faith-based reductionism”, similar to “material monism”, where we have a not-yet-understood “material substance”. One relies on the intuition that no material substance can possibly add up to consciousness, the other one on the intuition that material substance can possibly add up to consciousness.
So: Which intuition is more reliable? Both admit that there is some kind of difference between “thought” and “material substance” at first. Then, dualism says that this difference is unbridgeable, while monism states the opposite (material monism stating that bridge would be built from “material substance” to “thought”). What kind of difference do we encounter here? Why is “thought” not the same as “material substance” right away? Because we can not see, touch, generally sense “thought” with our sense perception, whereas we can sense “material substance”. We can say that “material substance” must follow laws, whereas “thought”has a degree of freedom. “Material substance” is three-dimensional, whereas “thought” is not.
Of course, the answer of the material monists to that could state that all these properties of “thought” are not what they seem to be. But, as I have seen here, the material monists Eliezer Yudkowsky, habryka and Said Achmiz’ argument is that they do not know how “thought” is actually “material substance”, but trust in physics to solve that question in the future because of a “track record”. And that besides that there did not arise another reason.
In the comments section here, mitchell_porter2 pointed at Bertrand Russell’s “the Problems of Philosophy”, chapter IX (10 years ago). There, Russell points at Plato’s theory of forms, stating that not only “material substance” has being. So, when I adopt a neutral position, I still have both sides standing there in front of me. Even in this quite material monistic commentariat.
This is about the very foundation of the mindset of material monism. If this repetitive questions by me really do cover well-trod ground, as I was told above, and there was so much said already – did all that solve the questions, or am I repeating them because they’re still valid?
Thanks for the comment. I guessed that when someone argues that physics will reveal something after a period of time, of course physicists must put effort into their work for that to happen. But it is better to actually formulate it.
Do you think that, when we exchange “time passed” by “effort invested”, there is any way to tell “now enough effort was invested without any outcome, so we have to look for another solution!”?
It’s a matter of judgment, I should think; and whether we ought to look for a solution elsewhere seems to me to depend on three variables:
How much effort has been invested already, in the existing direction of research (i.e., physics, materialism, science—which is, of course, a very broad category of effort).
How important it is, that the problem be solved. We’ve gone several thousand years without “solving” the “Hard Problem of consciousness” (though we’ve made what seems to me like quite a bit of progress); is it terribly urgent that we solve it ASAP?
How likely it seems that whatever alternate approach is available, will make any real progress (and how much it costs us to engage in such an approach). (Of course, this consideration suggests that it might be profitable to look for heretofore-unknown approaches—but then again, it might not be. Unknown unknowns, and all that.)
From an epistemic perspective—what we should think about whether the problem will be solved at some point if we continue on our current course—only point #1 really matters. From an instrumental perspective—what, if anything, should we do, or what should we change about what and how we do things—points #2 and #3 seem to me to be at least as important.
Thanks for the answer! So my judgement should go along these questions you propose. Now I ask myself the question: “There seems to be much effort invested in the explanation of the hard problem of consciousness through physics. Does that make sense?”. But I need to find out (1.) HOW much effort was ACTUALLY invested already, (2.) HOW important it is to find a solution there, and (3.) WHICH alternate approaches are available. Right?
But how do you measure effort? And why is it important to know how much was already invested? I don’t understand that yet…