kilobug

Karma: 3,398

kilobug Jul 5, 2016, 12:01 PM
2 points
in reply to: turchin’s comment on: Zombies Redacted

I would like to suggest zombies of second kind. This is a person with inverted spectrum. It even could be my copy, which speaks all the same philosophical nonsense as me, but any time I see green, he sees red, but names it green. Is he possible? I could imagine such atom-exact copy of me, but with inverted spectrum.

I can’t.

As a reductionist and materialist, it doesn’t make sense—the feeling of “red” and “green” is a consequence of the way your brain is wired and structured, an atom-exact copy would have the same feelings.

But letting aside the reductionist/materialist view (which after all is part of the debate), it still wouldn’t make sense. The special quality that “red” has in my consciousness, the emotions it call upon, the analogies it triggers, has consequences on how I would invoke the “red” color in poetry, or use the “red” color in a drawing. And on how I would feel about a poetry or drawing using “red”.

If seeing #ff0000 triggers exactly all the same emotions, feelings, analogies in the consciousness of your clone, then he’s getting the same experience than you do, and he’s seeing “red”, not “green”.

kilobug Jul 5, 2016, 11:50 AM
5 points
in reply to: MockTurtle’s comment on: Zombies Redacted
Another more directly worrying question, is why or if the p-zombie philosopher postulate that other persons have consciousness.

After all, if you can speak about consciousness exactly like we do and yet be a p-zombie, why doesn’t Chalmer assume he’s the only not being a zombie, and therefore letting go of all forms of caring for others and all morality ?

The fact that Chalmer and people like him still behave like they consider other people to be as conscious as they are probably points to the fact they have belief-in-belief, more than actual belief, in the possibility of zombieness.

kilobug Jul 5, 2016, 11:47 AM
3 points
in reply to: Piecewise’s comment on: Zombies Redacted
I agree with your point in general, and it does speak against an immaterial soul surviving death, but I don’t think it necessarily apply to p-zombies. The p-zombie hypothesis is that the consciousness “property” has no causality over the physical world, but it doesn’t say that there is no causality the other way around: that the state of the physical brain can’t affect the consciousness. So a traumatic brain injury would (under some unexplained mysterious mechanism) reflect into that immaterial consciousness.

But sure, it’s yet more epicycles.

kilobug Mar 31, 2016, 7:06 AM
0 points
in reply to: algekalipso’s comment on: State your physical account of experienced color
No, it is much more simple than that—“green” is a wavelength of light, and “the feeling of green” is how the information “green” is encoded in your information processing system, that’s it. No special ontology for qualia or whatever. Qualia isn’t a fundamental component of the universe like quarks and photons are, it’s only encoding of information in your brain.

But yes, how reality is encoded in an information system sometimes doesn’t match the external world, the information system can be wrong. That’s a natural, direct consequence of that ontology, not a new postulate, and definitely not any other ontology. The fact that “the feeling of green” is how “green wavelength” is encoded in an information processing system automatically implies that if you perturbate the information processing system by giving it LSD, it may very well encode “green wavelength” without “green wavelength” being actually present.

In short, ontology is not the right level to look at qualia—qualia is information in a (very) complex information processing system, it has no fundamental existence. Trying to explain it at an ontological level just make you ask invalid questions.

kilobug Mar 30, 2016, 3:49 PM
6 points
on: “3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism”
First, “Social justice” is a broad and very diverse movement of people wanting to reduce the amount of (real or perceived) injustice people face for a variety of reasons (skin color, gender, sexual orientation, place of birth, economical position, disability, …). Like in any such broad political movement, subparts of the movement are less rational than others.

Overall, “social justice” is still mostly a force of reason and rationality against the most frequent and pervasive forms of irrationality in society, which are mostly religion-based, but yes it varies from subparts of the movement. It is, historically, a byproduct of the Enlightenment after all.

That said, there are several levels of “rationality” and “rationalism”, and it might be very rational to make irrational demands.

When you make demands in social and political context, you know your demands will usually not be completely fulfilled. Asking for something “impossible” may be the best way, from a game theoretical point of view, to end up with having something not too far from what you really want—the same way that when you’re bargaining the price of an item in an informal market (like in latam or maghreb).

It can also be a powerful way to make people think about a question in novel ways and try to find alternative solutions which aren’t part of the hypothesis space they usually wander. “Abolish prisons” may seem an irrational demand, and it’s very likely that something “like prison” will be required for a few very dangerous individuals, but it can make people think about possible alternatives to prison, something they don’t usually do, and which could very well be used for 90% or even perhaps 99% of people currently in prison.

Of course, making “irrational” demands can also be counterproductive, it can discredit the movement, may you appear to be a lunatic, … but it’s a powerful tool to have in your toolbox when you rationally pursue some deep changes in society.

kilobug Mar 30, 2016, 8:11 AM
0 points
on: Genetic “Nature” is cultural too
One issue I have with statements like “~50% of the variation is heritable and ~50% is due to non-shared environment” is that they assume the two kind of factors are unrelated, and you can do an arithmetic average between the two.

But very often, the effects are not unrelated, and it works more like a geometric average. In many ways it’s more than genetic gives you a potential, an ease to learn/train yourself, but then it depends of your environment if you actually develop that potential or not. Someone with a very high “genetic IQ” but who is underfed and kept isolated and not even taught to read will likely not be a very bright adult, it’ll not be “(genes + environment)/2″ pour more “(genes * environment)”.

Other times, it’s more like the environment can help compensate for the genes, offsetting a disability, in a way that you end with “min(genes, environment)” rather than average.

The truth is that the interaction between genes and environment is much more complicated than a mere pondered arithmetic average, and this is rarely considered extensively when people speak of “how much is it genetic, how is it environmental”.

kilobug Mar 23, 2016, 4:21 PM
−1 points
in reply to: algekalipso’s comment on: State your physical account of experienced color

The experience of green has nothing to with wavelengths of light. Wavelengths of light are completely incidental to the experience.

Not at all. The experience of green is the way our information processing system internally represent “light of green wavelength”, nothing else. That if you voluntarily mess up with your cognitive hardware by taking drugs, or that during background maintenance tasks, or that “bugs” in the processing system can lead to “experience of green” when there is no real green to be perceived doesn’t change anything about it—the experience of green is the way “green wavelenngth” is encoded in our information processing system, nothing less, nothing more.

kilobug Feb 22, 2016, 3:39 PM
1 point
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: The ethics of eating meat

Do you think there’s something wrong about all that? Because it seems obviously reasonable to me.

Well, perhaps it is a reason of “cognitive simplicity” but it really feels a very artificial line when someone refuses to eat meat in every situation, with all associated consequences, like they are invited to relatives for christmas eve dinner and they won’t eat meat, putting extra burden on the person inviting him so they cook a secondary vegetarian meal for him, and yet not caring much about the rats that are killed regularly in the basement of his apartment by the pest control.

It feels more like a religious interdiction than an utilitarian decision. There are people who avoid eating meat, but do occasionally (“flexitarian” they are called I think). Those appear as much more reasonable than a strict “no meat” policy, if you admit that killing animals is something society has to do anyway, so you try to avoid it, but not in a strict manner.

I do myself have lots of “ethical behavior”, like I try to buy fair trade products when I can for stuff like tea, coffee, chocolate, …, because I want third world producers to be treated decently. But I know that my computer was probably assembled by workers in sweet shops, and if I’m offered a non-fair trade tea at a relative I won’t refuse it.

kilobug Feb 22, 2016, 1:57 PM
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: The ethics of eating meat

I guess the average driver kills at most one animal ever by bumping into them, whereas the average meat-eater may consume thousands of animals.

There we touch another problem with the “no meat eating” thing : where do you draw the line ? Would people who refuse to eat chicken and beef be ok with eating shrimps or insects ? What with fish, is it “meat” and unethical ? Because, whenever you drive, you kill hundred of flies and butterflies and the like, which are animals.

So where to draw the line, vertebrates ? Eating shrimps and insects would be fine ? But it’s not like a chicken or a cow have lots of cognitive abilities, so feels quite arbitrary to me.

kilobug Feb 22, 2016, 11:10 AM
0 points
on: The ethics of eating meat
I always felt that argument 1 is a bit hypocritical and not very rational. We kill animals constantly for many reasons—farming even for vegetables requires killing rodents and birds to prevent them eating the crops, we kill rats and other pests in our buildings to keep them from transmitting disease and damaging cables, we regularly kill animals by bumping into them when we drive a car or take a train or a plane, … And of course, we massively take living space away from animals, leading them to die.

So why stop eating meat, and yet disregard all the other multiple cases in which our technological civilization massively kill animals ? I personally don’t think most animals matter from an utilitarian point of view (they have no consciousness), but if they did, “not eating meat” wouldn’t be enough, and eating meat from “dump” fish or chicken would be less a violation of ethics than killing “smart” rats for pest control.

Reason 2. would prevent eating factory-farmed meat, but it wouldn’t prevent eating meat from less intensive forms of meat producing (or from wild game) which are usually available in supermarkets here in France, but a slightly higher price.

Reason 4. is just false taken in its absolute form—there are several studies showing that eating too much meat (especially processed meat) is harmful, but so far it seems some kind of meat (like chicken) is pretty harmless, and that eating a bit of meat is better health-wise than not eating any.

Reason 3. and 5. could justify eating less meat, but not no meat at all.

So with the available data, I would recommend eating perhaps less meat (for reasons 3., 4., 5.), less of the high-fat processed meat (like bacon) and try to buy food from more “humane” farms (for reasons 2), but not to stop eating meat completely.

kilobug Jan 8, 2016, 2:18 PM
1 point
on: Consciousness and Sleep
Regular sleep may not suspend consciousness (although it can very well be argued in some phases of sleep it does), but anesthesia, deep hypothermia, coma, … definitely do, and are very valid examples to bring forward in the “teleport” debate.

I’ve yet to see a definition of consciousness that doesn’t have problems with all those states of “deep sleep” (which most people don’t have any trouble with), while saying it’s not “the same person” for the teleporter.

kilobug Dec 24, 2015, 8:49 AM
2 points
0
on: Voiceofra is banned
+1 for something like “no more than 5 downvotes/week for content which is more than a month old”, but be careful that new comment on an old article is not old content.

kilobug Dec 23, 2015, 8:39 AM
4 points
in reply to: UmamiSalami’s comment on: In favour of total utilitarianism over average
There is no objective absolute morality that exists in a vacuum. Our morality is a byproduct of evolution and culture. Of course we should use rationality to streamline and improve it, not limit ourselves to the intuitive version that our genes and education gave us. But that doesn’t mean we can streamline it to the point of simple average or sum, and yet have it remain even roughly compatible with our intuitive morality.

Utility theory, prisoner’s dilemma, Occam’s razor, and many other mathematical structures put constraints on what a self-consistent, formalized morality has to be like. But they can’t and won’t pinpoint a single formula in the huge hypothesis space of morality, but we’ll always have to rely heavily on our intuitive morality at the end. And this one isn’t simple, and can’t be made that simple.

That’s the whole point of the CEV, finding a “better morality”, that we would follow if we knew more, were more what we wished we were, but that remains rooted in intuitive morality.

kilobug Dec 22, 2015, 10:12 AM
10 points
on: In favour of total utilitarianism over average
The same way that human values are complicated and can’t be summarized as “seek happiness !”, the way we should aggregate utility is complicated and can’t be summarized with just a sum or an average. Trying to use a too simple metric will lead to ridiculous cases (utility monster, …). The formula we should use to aggregate individual utilities is likely to be involve total, median, average, Ginny, and probably other statistical tools, and finding it is a significant part of finding our CEV.

kilobug Dec 7, 2015, 8:46 AM
3 points
on: timeless quantum immortality
The MWI doesn’t necessarily mean that every possible event, however unlikely, “exists”. As long as we don’t know where the Born rule comes from, we just don’t know.

Worlds in MWI aren’t discrete and completely isolated from each others, they are more inkstains on paper, not clearly delimited blobs, where “counting the blobs” can’t be defined in non ambiguous way. There are hytpothesis (sometimes called “mangled world”) that would make worlds of too small probability (inkstains not thick enough) unstable and “contaged” from “nearby” high probability world.

But the main issue is that as long as we don’t have a formal derivation of the Born rule inside MWI, we can’t make any formal analysis of stuff like QI. We are left with at best semi-intuitive analysis of what “MWI” does mean, but QI being highly counter-intuitive, a semi-intuitive analysis breaks down there.

kilobug Dec 3, 2015, 12:32 PM
55 points
0
on: LessWrong 2.0
Personally, I liked LW for being an integrated place with all that : the Sequences, interesting posts and discussions between rationalists/transhumanists (be it original thoughts/viewpoints/analysis, news related to those topics, links to related fanfiction, book suggestion, …), and the meetup organization (I went to several meetup in Paris).

If that were to be replaced by many different things (one for news, one or more for discussion, one for meetups, …) I probably wouldn’t bother.

Also, I’m not on Facebook and would not consider going there. I think replacing the open ecosystem of Internet by a proprietary platform is a very dangerous trend for future of innovation, and I oppose the global surveillance that Facebook is part of. I know we are entering politics which is considered “dirty” by many here, but politics is part of the Many Causes, and I don’t think we should alienate people for political reasons. The current LW is politically neutral, and allows “socialists” to discuss without much friction with “libertarians”, which is part of its merits, and we should keep that.

kilobug Aug 10, 2015, 1:41 PM
2 points
on: Gatekeeper variation
This wont work, like with all other similar schemes, because you can’t “prove” the gatekeeper down to the quark level of what makes its hardware (so you’re vulnerable to some kind of side-attack, like the memory bit flipping attack that was spoken about recently), nor shield the AI from being able to communicate through side channels (like, varying the temperature of its internal processing unit which it turns will influence the air conditioning system, …).

And that’s not even considering that the AI could actually discover new physics (new particles, …) and have some ability to manipulate them with its own hardware.

This whole class of approach can’t work, because there are just too many ways for side-attacks and side-channels of communication, and you can’t formally prove none of them are available, without going down to making proof over the whole (AI + gatekeeper + power generator + air conditioner + …) down at Schrödinger equation level.

kilobug Aug 2, 2015, 7:22 AM
1 point
on: How to escape from your sandbox and from your hardware host
To be fair, the DRAM bit flipping thing doesn’t work on ECC RAM, and any half-decent server (especially if you run an AI on it) should have ECC RAM.

But the main idea remains yes : even a program proven to be secure can be defeated by attacking one of the assumptions made (such as the hardware being 100% reliable, which it rarely is) in the proof. Proving a program to be secure down from applying Schrödinger’s equation on the quarks and electrons the computer is made of is way beyond our current abilities, and will remain so for a very long time.

kilobug Jun 8, 2015, 2:31 PM
4 points
on: Agency is bugs and uncertainty
I see your point, but I think you’re confusing a partial overlapping with an identity.

There are many bugs/uncertainty that appear as agency, but there are also many bugs/uncertainty which doesn’t appear as agency (as you said about true randomness), and there are also behavior that are actually smart and that appear as agency because of smartness (like the way I was delighted with Emacs the first time I realized that if I asked it to replace “blue” with “red”, it would replace “Blue” with “Red” and “BLUE” with “RED”), I got the same “feeling of agency” there that I could have on bugs.

So I wouldn’t say that agency is bugs, but that we have evolved to mis-attribute attribute agency to things that are dangerous/unpleasant (because it’s safest to mis-attribute agency to nothing that doesn’t have it, than to not attribute it to something that does have it), the same way our ancestors used to see the sun, storms, volcanoes, … as having agency.

Agency is something different, hard to exactly pinpoint (philosophers have been going at it for centuries), but that involves ability to have a representation of reality, to plan ahead for a goal, a complexity of representation and ability to explore solution-space in a way that will end up surprising us, not because of bugs, but because of its inherent complexity. And we have been evolved to mis-attribute agency to things which behave in unexpected ways. But that’s a bug of our own ability to detect agency, not a feature of agency itself.

kilobug Jun 8, 2015, 1:22 PM
1 point
in reply to: gurugeorge’s comment on: The lymphatic system is found to connect to the Central Nervous System
I’m really skeptical of claims like « the “thinking unit” is really the whole body », they tend to discard quantitative considerations for purely qualitative ones.

Yes, the brain is influenced, and influences, the whole body. But that doesn’t mean the whole body has the same importance in the thinking. The brain is also influenced by lots of external factors (such as ambient light or sounds, …) if as soon as there is a “connection” between two parts you say “it’s the whole system that does the processing”, you’ll just end up considering the solar system as a whole, or even the entire event horizon sphere.

There is countless evidence that, while your body and your environment have significant influence on your thinking, it’s just influence, not fundamentally being part of the cognition. For example, people who have graft or amputations rarely change personality, memory or cognitive abilities in any way comparable to what brain damage can do.