We are surprisingly high in forebrain neuron count:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons
Arturo Macias
Karma: −15
Agree on this criticism for the difference between humans and pigs, but there too many orders of magnitude of difference between shrimp and human to consider detailed measures of computing power very necesary.
Quantifying empathy is intrinsically hard, because everything begins by postulating (not observing) consciousness in a group of beings, and that is only well grounded for humans. So, at the end, even if you are totally successful in developing a theory of human sentience, for other beings you are extrapolating. Anything beyond solipsism is a leap of faith (unlike you find St. Anselm ontological proof credible).
Illusionism is not a competitor, because consciousness is obviously an illusion. That is immediate since Descartes. That is why you cannot distinguish between “the true reality” and “matrix”: both produce a legitimate stream of illusory experience (“you”).
Epiphenomenalism is physicalist in the sense that it respects the autonomy and closeness of the physical world. Given that we are not p-zombis (because there is an “illusory” but immediate difference between real humans and p-zombies), that difference is precisely what we call “consciousness”.
Descartes+Laplace=Chalmers.
In fact, there is only one scape: consciousness could play an active role in the fundamental Laws of Physics. That would break the Descartes/Laplace orthogonality, making philosophy interesting again.
This is the kind of criticism I kindly welcome. I used the cockroach data (forebrain) here as a Proxy:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons#:~:text=The human brain contains 86,neurons in the cerebral cortex.
Thank you very much for the reference, because I am searching for co-authors for further develpments on SV-PAYW.
That is the whole point of ethical systems, isn’t it? To derive all (etical) values from a few postulates. Of course, most of valuations are not ethical (they are preferences or tastes), but this is an excellent agument for rational (systematic) Ethics.
Well, “one feel you can have done otherwise” is the part of the qualia of free will my definition do not legitimize.
When you chose among several options, the options are real (other person could have done otherwise) but once it is “you” who choses, mechanism imply “all degrees of freedom have been used”.
I say: “you are free when you do as you want, not matter how determined are your desires”. This is how I define freedom in “Freedom under naturalistic dualism”(and I think that this position is original, so if this is not the case, I would be glad of being corrected).
You cannot know more than Laplace’s demon, and the demon cannot assess consciousness. It is analyzed in detail in “Freedom under Naturalistic dualism”.
Still is something that a conscient being superimpose over reality. It is not “there”. This as true for our moral as our mathematical constructions.
https://www.amazon.com/Morality-Mathematics-Justin-Clarke-Doane/dp/0198823665
This is also my intuition: the intensity of experience depends on the integrated information flow or the system and the nature of the experience depends on the software details.
Then iPhones have far more limited maximum intensity experience than ants, and ants maximum experience intensity is only a fraction of that of a mouse.
I mostly agree in the fact that while conscience intensity is the ontological basis of moral weights, there are other relevant layers. On the hand conscience looks to be some function of integrated information and computation in a network.
IIT for example suggests some entropic combinatorial measure, that very likely would explode.
In any case we are trapped in our own existence, so inter subjective comparison is both necessary and mostly depending on intuition.
What about an IPhone? It looks similar to a ant in terms of complexity; Less annoying too…
Because in the limit your intuition is that the experience of an electron is inexistent. The smaller the brain, the closer to inanimate matter.
Dear Jameson, as you say the theme is extremely important, but I miss more about Storable Votes: one period Arrovian results deeply change in dynamic voting scenarios. I have recently written two articles about this: one has been published in Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination, the other is still a pre-print:
I also suggest you to read the Casella and Mace review about “vote trading” (there a is Journal version, here you have the pre-print):
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3680422
What I claim, is that with enough agenda setting manipulation you can nullify the properties of any voting system.
In my opinion, SV-PAYW is the best “voting system” available, but the mechanism has been analyzed under explicit hypoteses on the randomness of issues to be voted. The stream of political issues (represented by the valuation of the participants of an electoral victory) is supposed to be stochastic i.i.d.
If “deporting rationalists” is possible, and rationalists are not more than half of people, I don’t see what security can they receive under any electoral system. If you can vote “disefranchise group X”, then any minority group can be removed from the political system.
I was about to say that I explicitely deal with that issue on “the ideal political workflow”, but there is nothing to deal with.
Well, if rationalists are a minority, with no external limits on the agenda, they can be deported anyway.
I only have considered a case with external agenda setting (issues with variable relevance exogenously arrive), as is typical to turn voting into a mathematical problem.
The second paper is about the context of voting systems. What I argue there is that the structure of the voting space is more important than the voting system.
What shall people vote? They shall vote among feasible states of the world.
This is the QV and I find it wrong. With money, at the end pivotal votes are only those of the largest money owners. Who can give money for collective choices? Those that can recover it, because their wealth is so large than individual consequences of collective decision is individually profitable. Keeping the political system separated from general purpose currency is critical (the Casella and Mace review agrees). The system as described in the paper is totally parallel to currency, while it works like it in the sense that you only pay votes when you get your alternative.
In SV PAYW the fixed number of votes is redistributed among voters after any election (votes casted in the winning alternative are those “payed”) in a one-vote one-man way. Even with no new votes for new players (and the votes from the dead are available for redistribution), new voters receive votes from the winners of each election.
A final remark: SV PAYW is more spectacular, but “the ideal political workflow” is more important.
I miss something about evolutionary game theory, where some of the discrepancies can be rationalized.
I wrote this tour from game theory to cultural evolution:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xajeTjMtkGGEAwfbw/the-evolution-towards-the-blank-slate