You’ve missed a major position: that the entire idea of “substrate independence” is a red herring. Detecting the similarity of two patterns is something that happens in your brain, not something that’s part of reality.
This whole thing, AFAICT, is an attempt to have an argument war, rather than an attempt to understand/find truth. It is possible that no position on this subject makes any sense whatsoever, for example.
Or, to put it another way, failure to offer a coherent refutation of an incoherent hypothesis doesn’t represent evidence for the incoherent hypothesis.
Detecting the similarity of two patterns is something that happens in your brain, not something that’s part of reality.
If I’m correctly understanding what you mean by “part of reality” here, then I agree. This kind of “similarity” is another unnatural category. When I made reference in my original post to the level of granularity “sufficient in order model all the essential features of human consciousness”, I didn’t mean this as a binary proposition; just for it to be sufficient that if while you slept somebody made changes to your brain at any smaller level, you wouldn’t wake up thinking “I feel weird”.
if while you slept somebody made changes to your brain at any smaller level, you wouldn’t wake up thinking “I feel weird”.
I have no reason to assume that you couldn’t replace me entirely, piece by piece. After all, I have different cells now than I did previously, and will have different cells later, and all the while still perceive myself the same.
The only thing weird here, is the idea that I would somehow notice. I mean, if I could notice, it wouldn’t be a very good replacement, would it?
(Actually, given my experience with mind hacking, my observation is that it’s very difficult to notice certain background characteristics of one’s thought processes, such that even if a machine translation did introduce a systematic distortion, it seems unlikely to me that anyone would notice it in themselves, at least easily or at first!)
“Or, to put it another way, failure to offer a coherent refutation of an incoherent hypothesis doesn’t represent evidence for the incoherent hypothesis.”
Although perhaps a tangent, the point is important: the above is quite wrong. If A believes h is incoherent, but B is unable to demonstrate h’s incoherence, A should regard B’s inability to coherently explain h’s incoherence as evidence that h is not , in fact, incoherent. (I think that’s what you mean to deny.). This is because (at least in ordinary circumstances) A should regard h as more probably true if B can explain why; less probable if B can’t.
The denial that B’s failure to coherently explain h’s incoherence increases the probability that h is coherent expresses the common failure to regard others’ beliefs as evidence of what’s true. This fallacy is why Aumann’s agreement theorem seems so counter-intuitive to many people. (See my fishbowl analogy at http://tinyurl.com/3lxp2eh)
If A believes h is incoherent, but B is unable to demonstrate h’s incoherence, A should regard B’s inability to coherently explain h’s incoherence as evidence that h is not , in fact, incoherent.
Er, ‘A’ believes ‘h’ is coherent in this case.
I have realized, though that my statement was profoundly unclear, even after the edit.
Let me attempt to rephrase yet again, more precisely:
“If a bunch of people on LW tell you your hypothesis is incoherent and you need to dissolve your question, this should not be considered evidence that your hypothesis is sound, merely because nobody directly refuted your incoherence, in terms currently comprehensible by you.”
Or, by analogy, if you go to a biology forum and ask about missing links or why there are still apes, and then when you get explanations that dissolve the wrong questions involved, you say, “aha, but you still haven’t answered my [wrong] question, so therefore I’m right”, this is not sound argument.
The denial that B’s failure to coherently explain h’s incoherence increases the probability that h is coherent expresses the common failure to regard others’ beliefs as evidence of what’s true.
In this case, though, the incoherence has actually been quite clearly counterargued by many, and is already thoroughly refuted by the sequences.
Or, to put it another way, failure to offer a coherent refutation of an incoherent hypothesis doesn’t represent evidence for incoherence hypothesis.
Could you edit this? I can’t decipher it.
[eta: Cyan and Pavitra have come up with nice obviously-true statements that are textually similar to the original bungled sentence and similar in meaning, but I can’t be sure of what you meant.]
Sorry, that was a messed up edit—I was at first writing “doesn’t represent evidence for incoherence” and then messed up the edit to “doesn’t represent evidence for the incoherent hypothesis”.
More colloquially, if somebody can’t coherently answer your incoherent question, it doesn’t mean that the viewpoint which created the question is therefore sensible or true.
How about, “If I offer a not-even-wrong refutation of your not-even-wrong hypothesis, you can’t take the not-even-wrongness of the refutation as evidence for the hypothesis.”
One can only detect, as opposed to invent, what is already there. Being a NAND gate is not a physical property that is already there, nonetheless not everything is a NAND gate. There are constraints on what substrate can do what, but they are not fully determinate facts, for all that they are not imaginary.
One can only detect, as opposed to invent, what is already there. Being a NAND gate is not a physical property that is already there,
Actually, “NAND Gate” is a term that we use to label something that is there—a tag we assign to patterns in the physical world that follow similar patterns of behavior to a representation we hold in our minds.
This is a bit like trees falling in the forest. If there is nobody there to label it a NAND gate, then it will still do the exact same thing… but there’s no “NAND gate” there.
And, when the person does show up and label it, there’s still no “NAND gate” there… there’s just a label in that person’s mind, saying, “that thing there is a NAND gate”.
Not understanding this basic concept (that reality does not contain any labels, and has no “is-ness”) leads to all sorts of confusion.
(Sadly, this kind of confusion is also the natural human state.)
If it’s doing what a NAND gate does, it’s a NAND gate. Reality does not come pre-labelled,but things also do not spring into existence just because someone has labelled them.
If it’s doing what a NAND gate does, it’s a NAND gate.
Only if you think that “X is Y” means something other than, “My brain has associated the label Y with the cluster of sensory experiences denoted by X”.
I do: I think it means “X is a mind-independent object that would and should be labelled Y by an onlooker speaking my language”. I believe there are stars and planets no one
has ever seen, or had a chance to label as such, Don’t you?
I think it means “X is a mind-independent object that would and should be labelled Y by an onlooker speaking my language”
I think you’ve missed the part where that is still a label in your mind, being attached to a cluster of sensory experiences.
I believe there are stars and planets no one has ever seen, or had a chance to label as such, Don’t you?
In such cases, the sensory experience clusters you’re labeling are memories associated with the labels “star” and “planet”.
However, this has little to do with an X-is-Y identity. In order to say “X is Y”, there has to be an X and a Y, and you are speaking only here of the hypothesized existence of various X’s that you would then label Y.
In any event, this and this are relevant here, in case you’ve missed them.
You’ve missed a major position: that the entire idea of “substrate independence” is a red herring. Detecting the similarity of two patterns is something that happens in your brain, not something that’s part of reality.
This whole thing, AFAICT, is an attempt to have an argument war, rather than an attempt to understand/find truth. It is possible that no position on this subject makes any sense whatsoever, for example.
Or, to put it another way, failure to offer a coherent refutation of an incoherent hypothesis doesn’t represent evidence for the incoherent hypothesis.
If I’m correctly understanding what you mean by “part of reality” here, then I agree. This kind of “similarity” is another unnatural category. When I made reference in my original post to the level of granularity “sufficient in order model all the essential features of human consciousness”, I didn’t mean this as a binary proposition; just for it to be sufficient that if while you slept somebody made changes to your brain at any smaller level, you wouldn’t wake up thinking “I feel weird”.
I have no reason to assume that you couldn’t replace me entirely, piece by piece. After all, I have different cells now than I did previously, and will have different cells later, and all the while still perceive myself the same.
The only thing weird here, is the idea that I would somehow notice. I mean, if I could notice, it wouldn’t be a very good replacement, would it?
(Actually, given my experience with mind hacking, my observation is that it’s very difficult to notice certain background characteristics of one’s thought processes, such that even if a machine translation did introduce a systematic distortion, it seems unlikely to me that anyone would notice it in themselves, at least easily or at first!)
“Or, to put it another way, failure to offer a coherent refutation of an incoherent hypothesis doesn’t represent evidence for the incoherent hypothesis.”
Although perhaps a tangent, the point is important: the above is quite wrong. If A believes h is incoherent, but B is unable to demonstrate h’s incoherence, A should regard B’s inability to coherently explain h’s incoherence as evidence that h is not , in fact, incoherent. (I think that’s what you mean to deny.). This is because (at least in ordinary circumstances) A should regard h as more probably true if B can explain why; less probable if B can’t.
The denial that B’s failure to coherently explain h’s incoherence increases the probability that h is coherent expresses the common failure to regard others’ beliefs as evidence of what’s true. This fallacy is why Aumann’s agreement theorem seems so counter-intuitive to many people. (See my fishbowl analogy at http://tinyurl.com/3lxp2eh)
Er, ‘A’ believes ‘h’ is coherent in this case.
I have realized, though that my statement was profoundly unclear, even after the edit.
Let me attempt to rephrase yet again, more precisely:
“If a bunch of people on LW tell you your hypothesis is incoherent and you need to dissolve your question, this should not be considered evidence that your hypothesis is sound, merely because nobody directly refuted your incoherence, in terms currently comprehensible by you.”
Or, by analogy, if you go to a biology forum and ask about missing links or why there are still apes, and then when you get explanations that dissolve the wrong questions involved, you say, “aha, but you still haven’t answered my [wrong] question, so therefore I’m right”, this is not sound argument.
In this case, though, the incoherence has actually been quite clearly counterargued by many, and is already thoroughly refuted by the sequences.
Could you edit this? I can’t decipher it.
[eta: Cyan and Pavitra have come up with nice obviously-true statements that are textually similar to the original bungled sentence and similar in meaning, but I can’t be sure of what you meant.]
Sorry, that was a messed up edit—I was at first writing “doesn’t represent evidence for incoherence” and then messed up the edit to “doesn’t represent evidence for the incoherent hypothesis”.
More colloquially, if somebody can’t coherently answer your incoherent question, it doesn’t mean that the viewpoint which created the question is therefore sensible or true.
How about, “If I offer a not-even-wrong refutation of your not-even-wrong hypothesis, you can’t take the not-even-wrongness of the refutation as evidence for the hypothesis.”
I read it to mean that once one has demonstrated a hypothesis to be incoherent, one does not then also need to demonstrate it to be false.
One can only detect, as opposed to invent, what is already there. Being a NAND gate is not a physical property that is already there, nonetheless not everything is a NAND gate. There are constraints on what substrate can do what, but they are not fully determinate facts, for all that they are not imaginary.
Actually, “NAND Gate” is a term that we use to label something that is there—a tag we assign to patterns in the physical world that follow similar patterns of behavior to a representation we hold in our minds.
This is a bit like trees falling in the forest. If there is nobody there to label it a NAND gate, then it will still do the exact same thing… but there’s no “NAND gate” there.
And, when the person does show up and label it, there’s still no “NAND gate” there… there’s just a label in that person’s mind, saying, “that thing there is a NAND gate”.
Not understanding this basic concept (that reality does not contain any labels, and has no “is-ness”) leads to all sorts of confusion.
(Sadly, this kind of confusion is also the natural human state.)
If it’s doing what a NAND gate does, it’s a NAND gate. Reality does not come pre-labelled,but things also do not spring into existence just because someone has labelled them.
Only if you think that “X is Y” means something other than, “My brain has associated the label Y with the cluster of sensory experiences denoted by X”.
I do: I think it means “X is a mind-independent object that would and should be labelled Y by an onlooker speaking my language”. I believe there are stars and planets no one has ever seen, or had a chance to label as such, Don’t you?
I think you’ve missed the part where that is still a label in your mind, being attached to a cluster of sensory experiences.
In such cases, the sensory experience clusters you’re labeling are memories associated with the labels “star” and “planet”.
However, this has little to do with an X-is-Y identity. In order to say “X is Y”, there has to be an X and a Y, and you are speaking only here of the hypothesized existence of various X’s that you would then label Y.
In any event, this and this are relevant here, in case you’ve missed them.