komponisto2

Karma: 174

komponisto2 Aug 15, 2008, 2:24 AM
0 points
on: The Bedrock of Morality: Arbitrary?
Clarification: in the first paragraph of the above comment, when I wrote “The whole point of ‘morality’ is...” what I meant was “The whole point of non-relativist ‘morality’ is...”.

komponisto2 Aug 15, 2008, 2:13 AM
11 points
0
on: The Bedrock of Morality: Arbitrary?
I’m really having trouble understanding how this isn’t tantamount to moral relativism—or indeed moral nihilism. The whole point of “morality” is that it’s supposed to provide a way of arbitrating between beings, or groups, with different interests—such as ourselves and Pebblesorters. Once you give up on that idea, you’re reduced, as in this post, to the tribalist position of arguing that we humans should pursue our own interests, and the Pebblesorters be damned. When a conflict arises (as it inevitably will), the winner will then be whoever has the bigger guns, or builds AI first.

Mind you, I don’t disagree that this is the situation in which we in fact find ourselves. But we should be honest about the implications. The concept of “morality” is entirely population-specific: when groups of individuals with common interests come into contact, “morality” is the label they give to their common interests. So for us humans, “morality” is art, music, science, compassion, etc. in short, all the things that we humans (as opposed to Pebblesorters) like. This is what I understand Eliezer to be arguing. But if this is your position, you may as well come out and admit that you’re a moral relativist, because this is the position that the people who are scared of moral relativism are in fact scared of. What they dread is a world in which Dennis could go on saying that Dennis-morality is what really matters, the rest of us disagree, war breaks out, Dennis kills us all, eats the whole pie, and is not spanked by any cosmic force. But this is indeed the world we live in.

komponisto2 Aug 7, 2008, 5:35 AM
−1 points
on: Hiroshima Day
The Second World War, as a whole, was probably the most catastrophic event in humanity’s recorded history. The world was pretty much screwed as soon as it started—indeed, probably as soon as Hitler acquired control of Germany.

For the purpose of saving humanity in the future, it may not be most effective to focus our attention on particular decisions (even apparently large ones) made during the course of the war (indeed, near the end of it); we risk missing the forest for the trees.

komponisto2 Aug 4, 2008, 6:58 AM
15 points
on: No Logical Positivist I
Eliezer, you’re definitely setting up a straw man here. Of course it’s not just you—pretty much everybody suffers from this particular misunderstanding of logical positivism.

“Untestable” does not mean “untestable by humans using current technology”. What it means is untestable, period—even by (say) a hypothetical being with godlike powers. This is what distinguishes a chocolate cake in the sun from “post-colonial alienation”. If a chocolate cake spontaneously formed in the Sun, there would be physical consequences. These consequences would necessarily be detectable to sufficiently advanced beings. We need only imagine a Laplacian calculator, for example.

The feasibility of performing the verification is utterly beside the point, because we’re only interested in the meaning of the statement.

Contrast this with “post-colonial alienation”. The problem there is not that we lack some technological gadget. Rather, the problem is that no being, not even a god or a Laplacian demon, could verify the statement. In the case of a chocolate cake, you simply present God with a list of ingredients, and tell him/her to look for them in the Sun; but what do you tell God to look for in the works of Shakespeare in order to determine whether there is “post-colonial alienation”?

So this is not a counterexample to logical positivism at all. In fact, you yourself already gave the positivist’s reply to this criticism in “Belief in the Implied Invsible”. The point is, you’re allowed in logical positivism to use the full apparatus of mathematics and logic (and that includes probability theory!) in formulating theories (hence the name logical positivism); verificationism is not a constraint on mathematics.

komponisto2 Aug 3, 2008, 9:00 PM
1 point
on: The Comedy of Behaviorism
(Correction: “Tom Tyler” above is a typo for “Tim Tyler”)

komponisto2 Aug 3, 2008, 8:56 PM
0 points
on: The Comedy of Behaviorism
Tom Tyler: The point [Watson] was making was that that stuff isn’t real, it’s all actually down to physiology

Eliezer: Tim, that wouldn’t argue against Freud.

It’s hard to see how any philosophy of mind (whether physicalist, dualist, or idealist) could directly argue against Freud, whose important claims were about psychology itself, not what psychology reduces to.

komponisto2 Aug 3, 2008, 6:39 AM
2 points
on: The Comedy of Behaviorism
Eliezer, it’s particularly important to make a distinction, as the SEP and Wikipedia articles do to an extent, between “behaviorism” as a methodological stance in the field of psychology (of which Skinner was an advocate), and “(logical) behaviorism” as a position in the philosophy of mind associated with the logical positivists such as Carnap.

Carnap’s thesis, as expressed in his ¹⁹³²⁄₃₃ article “Psychology in Physical Language”, was simply that psychology could (ultimately) be reduced to physics—a proposition I presume you accept, but which used to be controversial, and still is in some quarters. Because neuroscience was not as advanced in the 1930s as it is now, the examples that Carnap gave of “translations” (e.g. “Mr. A is excited” translates into various propositions about his physical behavior, such as jumping up and down yelling, high blood pressure, etc.) have mislead some later readers (such as Hilary Putnam) into thinking that Carnap was saying mental states just consist of observed macroscopic behavior. In truth, however, there is nothing in Carnap’s article to suggest that the “behavior” of which mental states are alleged to consist excludes the microscopic behavior of neurons.

komponisto2 Aug 1, 2008, 6:55 AM
2 points
on: Detached Lever Fallacy
Growing human brains are wired to learn syntactic language—even when syntax doesn’t exist in the original language, the conditional response to the words in the environment is a syntactic language with those words.

This, under the name “universal grammar”, is the insight that Noam Chomsky is famous for.

At the risk of revealing my identity, I recall getting into an argument about this with Michael Vassar at the NYC meetup back in March (I think it was). If memory serves, we were talking at cross-purposes: I was trying to make the case that the discipline of theoretical (“Chomskian”) linguistics, whose aim is to describe the cognitive input-response system that goes by the name of the “human language faculty”, teaches us not to regard individual languages such as English or French as Platonic entities, but rather merely as ad-hoc labels for certain classes of utterances. Vassar, it seemed (and he’s of course welcome to correct me if I’m misremembering), took me to be arguing for the Platonicity of some more abstract notion of “human language”.

komponisto2 Jul 23, 2008, 6:45 AM
3 points
on: Fake Norms, or “Truth” vs. Truth
A felony conviction within 10 years is usually admissible on the question of credibility if the perpetrator takes the stand.

Does this apply only when the perpetrator lied about the felony conviction (which would be directly relevant to credibility), or just in general (on the theory that people with felony convictions are Bad and thus likely to be dishonest)?

komponisto2 Jul 18, 2008, 6:02 AM
1 point
on: The Gift We Give To Tomorrow
The book How Music Really Works has some decent ideas about the evolution of music.

On the contrary. That is exactly the sort of rubbish that gives evolutionary psychology such a bad name.

The idea that something like music—an extremely high-level byproduct of human cognition—could be explained directly as an evolutionary adaptation is absurd enough. (Imagine trying to give a Darwinian account of why chess pieces move in the way they do.) The invocation of sexual selection—the process that explains the peacock’s fancy tail—borders on the ludicrous. Sexual selection is only a candidate explanation in cases of marked sexual dimorphism—a significant phenotypic difference between males and females, as in the peacock. The fact (if true) that professional musicians statistically tend to be males doesn’t come anywhere close to cutting it.

komponisto2 Jul 18, 2008, 2:36 AM
2 points
on: The Gift We Give To Tomorrow
Douglas Knight:

I’ve heard that isn’t true in tonal languages

Where did you hear that?

It’s false. “Tone” as a lexical property of words (as in “tonal languages”) is a specific technical concept that is not to be confused with “intonation”, which is an essentially universal phenomenon of human speech.

komponisto2 Jul 4, 2008, 5:52 AM
0 points
on: 2 of 10, not 3 total
I second Davis: current commenting system fine except for pagination limit and link problems (using both Firefox and IE in my case).

komponisto2 Jun 28, 2008, 5:52 PM
17 points
on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
In an ideal world, this would be a reasonable comment. In the real world, with the history of male oppression of women that comes with it, there is an asymmetry that means these things are not equivalent.

Shouldn’t we be trying to move our “real world” in the direction of an “ideal world”?

I sometimes get the impression that contemporary sex/race-oppression consciousness is analogous to the Jewish Yom Kippur ritual as Eliezer described it, in which the point is confessing sins, not trying to avoid them and keeping track of how well one has done. Just as it would be a violation for a participant in the ceremony to say e.g. “Actually, I’m happy to report that I didn’t steal anything this year, so I’m going to leave that part out, thank you”, so too is it something of a faux pas for a member of contemporary Western polite society to fail to treat the historical oppression of women and minorities as if it were a currently potent social force in his/her own culture.

komponisto2 Jun 25, 2008, 6:54 PM
4 points
on: The Design Space of Minds-In-General
Caledonian, Sapir-Whorf becomes trivial to abolish once you regard language in the correct way: as an evolved tool for inducing thoughts in others’ minds, rather than a sort of Platonic structure in terms of which thought is necessarily organized.

Phil, I don’t see how the argument is obviously incorrect. Why can’t two works of literature from different cultures be as different from each other as Hamlet is from a restaurant menu?

komponisto2 Jun 9, 2008, 6:27 PM
0 points
on: Against Devil’s Advocacy
Don’t you mean Michael Ruse?

komponisto2 Jun 4, 2008, 8:24 PM
2 points
on: Why Quantum?
Why does the area under a curve equal the antiderivative?

The rate of area-accumulation is given by the height of the curve, i.e. the value of the function. You can see this easily with constant functions: a horizontal line 2 units above the horizontal axis accumulates area underneath at a rate of 2 square units per unit of length.

At least that’s how I like to think about it.

komponisto2 Jun 4, 2008, 8:02 PM
2 points
on: Why Quantum?
As one who understood linear operators (as mathematics) for years without having a clue what they might have to do with atoms and quarks (and never seeing this spelled out in writing anywhere), I can relate to Eliezer’s sentiments.

Out of curiosity, Eliezer, what should the calculus textbooks have said?

komponisto2 Jun 2, 2008, 12:11 AM
2 points
on: The Rhythm of Disagreement
Whoa, said I to myself, Steven Pinker is a mysterian?

Well, he had already said as much in How the Mind Works. And also in this conversation with Robert Wright.

komponisto2 May 24, 2008, 8:44 AM
8 points
1
on: Mach’s Principle: Anti-Epiphenomenal Physics
Sure, what I just said is logically impossible

Really?

Here’s an analogy: Suppose you thought you lived on the unit interval [0,1] in the real line. Then experiments showed that whenever you got to 1, you were magically whisked away back to 0. So a clever mathematical physicist, well versed in topology, comes along and says, “Hey! Why don’t we just identify 0 and 1 as the same point? That way, we can say that we’re living on a circle, instead of a line segment”.

Suddenly, a whole new research program emerges. If we’re living on a circle, what’s its radius? Is it even a circle at all, or mightn’t it be an ellipse? Or something even more exotic? Is there an “extra dimension”, i.e. an underlying 2-dimensional plane in which the circle (or whatever) is embedded? And so forth.

(Technically, you could have asked some of these questions under the old paradigm. E.g.: is our line segment really a line, or is it curved? But you wouldn’t necessarily have thought to do so! )

komponisto2 Apr 17, 2008, 6:01 PM
1 point
on: Feynman Paths
Since Scott Aaronson has chimed in, it is worth pointing to this discussion on his blog in which Greg Kuperberg explains the Hilbert space issues from the previous thread.