Thanks! Very interesting!
BiasedBayes
Karma: 45
Morality binds and blinds. People derive moral claims from emotional and intuitive notions. It can feel good and moral to do amoral things. Objective morality has to be tied to evidence what really is human wellbeing; not to moral intuitions that are adaptions to the benefit of ones ingroup; or post hoc thought experiments about knowledge.
Thanks for the post, I really liked the article overall. Nice general summary of the ideas. I agree with torekp. I also think that the term consciousness is too broad. Wanting to have a theory of consciousness is like wanting to have a “theory of disease”. The overall term is too general and “consciousness” can mean many different things. This dilutes the conversation. We need to sharpen our semantic markers and not to rely on intuitive or prescientific ideas.Terms that do not “carve nature well at its joints” will lead our inquiry astray from the beginning.
When talking about consciousness one can mean for example:
-vigilance/wakefulness
-attention: focusing mental resources on specific information
-primary consciousness: having any form of subjective experience
-conscious access: how the attended information reaches awareness and becomes reportable to others
-phenomenal awareness/qualia
-sense of self/I
Neuroscience is needed to determine if our concepts are accurate (enough) in the first place. It can be that the “easy problem” is hard and the “hard problem” seems hard only because it engages ill posed intuitions.
I have been reading Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science will Transform Neuroscience by Gallistel and King.After that I will read Olaf Sporns book you recommended.
Just actually listened Brainscience podcast where Olaf spoke about his work.Thanks a lot!
Thanks for the info :) Yes, thats true. I ordered Theoretical Neuroscience couple of days ago together with Mathematics for Neuroscientists by Gabbiani and Cox. No one teaches computational neuroscience in our university, so i have to try to learn this field by myself.
Found this free online course if someone else is interested: https://www.coursera.org/course/compneuro
Awesome! Judging by the first 30 pages this is gold. Very nice, thanks a lot!
I love that book too! I have read it once and listened it once.
Suggest best book as an introduction to computational neuroscience
Thinking “probability exists only in the territory” is exactly taking the idea that probabilities exists as “things itself” to the extreme as i wrote. This view is not a strawman of dogmatic frequentists position, as you can see from the John Venn quote.
I feel the need to point that i have tried to describe the context of the debate where the heuristic: “uncertainty exists in the map, not in the territory” was given in the first place. This whole historical debate started from the idea that probability as a degree of belief does not mean anything. This was the start. “Fallacious rubbish”, as Fisher puts it.
I have tried to show that one can have this very extreme position even if there exists only epistemic uncertainty. One can answer to this position by describing how in some situations the uncertainty exists in the map, not in the territory. This is the context where that general heuristic is used and the background that it should be judged against.
“A rational decision maker genuinely needs both the concept of frequency and the concept of belief.” Amen!
Generally if you approach probability as an extension of logic, probability is always relative to some evidence. Hardcore frequency dogmatists like John Venn for example thought that this is completely wrong: “the probability of an event is no more relative to something else than the area of a field is relative to something else.”
So thinking probabilities existing as “things itself” taken to the extreme could lead one to the conclusion that one cant say much for example about single-case probabilities. Lets say I take HIV-test and it comes back positive. You dont find it weird to say that it is not OK to judge probabilities of me having the HIV based on that evidence?
If you mean me and you...well we dont. I agree. But maybe one should ask that having Ronald Aylmer Fishers ideas about Bayesian statistics in mind: “the theory of inverse probabilities must be fully rejected”
Let me reprhase my quote: The heuristic “uncertainty exists in the map, not in the territory” is in the first place meant to be an heuristic against dismissing Bayesian concept of probability.”
Upvoted. The heuristic “uncertainty exists in the map, not in the territory” is in the first place meant to be an heuristic against frequentist statistics. One can argue that probabilities are properties of the things itself also in situations of purely epistemic randomness. The argument “uncertainty exist in the map, not in the territory” is used in this context to show that thinking probablilities existing as “thing itself” can lead to weird conclusions.
If someone is interested about the book, i highly recommend the audiobook version. You can find it from: http://castify.co/channels/53
It took me 5 days to listen the whole book (volume 1-3).
Ok, lets say you are right that there does not exist perfect theoretical rationality in your hypothetical game context with all the assumptions that helps to keep the whole game standing. Nice. So what?
“Speaking as someone who finds that placebos cure my headaches as well as painkillers do, I dispute that that is the question..”
You should consider regression to the mean and illusion of correlation.
Sorry the misleading title and thanks for downvoting :D.The author goes much further than just ”utilizing the placebo effect”. The article is basically about endorsing alternative medicine. You can easily see this from the following quotes .
There are many shady arguments in the article:
”Conventional medicine, with its squeezed appointment times and overworked staff, often struggles to provide such human aspects of care. One answer is to hire alternative therapists.”
--> Just because there are challenges in medicine like overworked stuff does not mean alternative medicine practicioners should be hired.
”Critics say that this is dangerous quackery. Endorsing therapies that incorporate unscientific principles such as auras and energy fields encourages magical thinking, they argue, and undermines faith in conventional drugs and vaccines. That is a legitimate concern, but dismissing alternative approaches is not evidence-based either, and leaves patients in need.”
-->Dismissing alternative approach does not mean that the patient is leaved ”in need.” If the patient is in need the answer is not necessarily alternative medicine.
I have problems seeing the problem of utilizing placebo using evidence based medicine and at the same time NOT “hiring alternative therapists”.… While acknowledging the limits of placebo.
Thanks for the link, the title is a bit misleading though (“most empirical questions..”).