Given the wording of the story, both women were in the practice of sleeping directly next to their babies. The other woman didn’t roll over her baby because she was wicked, she rolled over her baby because it was next to her while she slept. They left out the part where the “good mother” rolled over her own baby two weeks later and everyone just threw up their hands and declared “What can we do, these things just happen, ya’ know?”
MaoShan
Karma: 421
Well-said. Thank you.
As I read the “Anthropic Trilemma”, my response could be summed up thus: “There is no spoon.”
So many of the basic arguments contained in it were defined by undefined concepts, if you dig deep enough. We talk about the continuation of consciousness in the same way that we talk about a rock or an apple. The only way that a sense of self doesn’t exist is the same way that a rock or apple don’t exist, in the strictest technical sense. To accept a human being as a classical object in the first place disqualifies a person from taking a quantum-mechanical cop-out when it comes to defining subjective experience. People here aren’t saying to themselves, “Huh? Where do you get this idea that a person exists for more than the present moment?? That’s crazy talk!” It’s just an attempt to deny the existence of a subjective experience that people actually do, um, subjectively experience.
You are correct. I was interpreting “saving the world” in this article to mean “saving the world [from supervillains]”. (fixed in comment now)
The most limiting thing that you have not pointed out is that as a Superhero, you want to save the world. Saving the world [from supervillains] is by definition reactive. A Supervillain’s goals have much more room for variation, and one could argue that Supervillains actually are optimizing the world, it just happens to be sub-optimal for everyone else.
t=59 minutes...
AI: Hmm, I have produced in this past hour one paperclip, and the only other thing I did was come up with the solutions for all of humanity’s problems, I guess I’ll just take the next minute to etch them into the paperclip...
t=2 hours...
Experimenters: Phew, at least we’re safe from that AI.
It was determined to be human error on my side. Fixed.
I think it actually may have been an add-on that was intentionally (or just carelessly) installed into Firefox by another family member. I can shut it off myself. Seriously, who would download a program that explicitly promises more popups? (facepalm)
Refer to the nested comment above for the details. So nobody else here has links on those words?
The word “pay” in paragraph 1, the word “details” in paragraph 5, and the word “money” in paragraph 7. It’s possible that either my computer or the LW site has some very creative adware.
Why are some of your links triggering scammish popups? Is it supposed to be some sort of humor?
I was mostly curious to see if someone else would independently arrive at my conclusions if asked the same questions, as a way to test the strength of my conclusions.
I’m not offended, that’s one of my favorite games. My thought process is so different than my peers that I constantly need to validate it through “coerced replication”. I know I’m on the right track when people clearly refuse to follow my train of thought because they squirm from self-reflection. Yesterday I got a person to vehemently deny that he dislikes his mother, while simultaneously giving “safer” evidence of that very conclusion, because, you know, you’re supposed to love your parents.
Regarding the hard problem of consciousness, I am not even sure that it’s a valid problem. The mechanics of sensory input are straightforward enough; The effects of association and learning and memory are at least conceptually understood, even if the exact mechanics might still be fuzzy; I don’t see what more is necessary. All normal-functioning humans pretty much run on the exact same OS, so naturally the experience will be nearly identical. I have a (probably untestable) theory that due to different nutritional requirements, a cat for example would experience the flavor of tuna almost identically to what we taste sugar as. And a cat eating sugar would taste something like eating plain flour, and catnip would be like smoking crack for humans. The experience itself between different creatures can be one of several stock experiences, brought on by different stimuli, just because we all share a similar biological plan (all animals with brains, for instance).
An experience like an orgasm could be classified to be something like, having a Level 455⁄293 release of relative seratonin and oxytocin levels, whereas eating chocolate causes a Level 231⁄118 in a specific person. If by some chance you measured the next person to have a Level 455⁄293 from eating chocolate, then you know that what they are experiencing is basically equivalent to an orgasm, without the mess. One human’s baseline experience of blue is likely to be very similar to another’s, but their individual experiences would modify it from that point. You know that they experience blue in much the same way that you know they have an anus. It’s a function of the hardware. In some rare cases you might be wrong, but there’s nothing mysterious about it to me.
Go ahead and tell me what your theories are, I’m sure that I’m not the only one listening. Even if we aren’t enlightening anybody, I’m sure we are amusing them.
I did not comment on 3 and 4 because I thought you wanted to judge first whether I understood the first two.
But does it explain why we assign souls to ourselves? How do you justify to yourself the fact that you can personally feel your thoughts, emotions, and sensory input?
To me, yes. I think that a theory of mind is ascribed to oneself first, then extends to other people. On a beginner level, developing a theory of mind toward yourself is easy because you get nearly instant feedback. Your proprioception as a child is defined by instant and (mostly) accurate feedback for everything within your local skin-border. After realizing that you have these experiences, and seeing other humans behave just as if they also have them, and being nearly compelled by our wetware to generalize it to other animals and objects, our “grouping objects” programs group these bundles of driving behaviors into an abstract object (which is visualized subconsciously as a concrete object) which we call a soul.
You didn’t define free will like I asked, but that’s okay—it indicates that you are implicitly using a definition of free will which is impossible in any logical universe, and thus cannot be coherently defined without contradiction...
That’s a much more coherent summary of what I meant, yes.
If it is intuitive to you that axioms can construct people, elaborate a little on the very basics outline of how this might be done.
You just said it—”A universe of made axioms makes sense, right?” My existence in a universe shows that it in fact has been done, saving me the trouble of proving how.
I enjoy your conversation, but I’m not particularly on the brink of an existential crisis here. In reference to my article I am simply admitting that I am aware that it is a limitation of the human brain to be guarded against, much like not sticking my hand on a hot stove prevents tissue damage. I don’t expect people to be immune from it, but we’d be better off if we were more conscious of it. Instead I brought on a flurry of angry retorts that amount to “Hey, I’m not subject to fallibility, just who do you think you are accusing me of being human?”
I’d like that, but let’s stay on topic here.
What it means is that I’d be indifferent between a normal day with a 1⁄400 chance of being a whale, and a normal day with guaranteed extra orgasm.
“Not tonight honey, I’ve determined that I have a 1⁄399 chance of being a whale!”
I would very much like to see things way too clearly...
1) Universe—deterministic, random or some third thing? Is there even a third option? What is a universe anyway? Is it governed by logic? Can anything not be governed by logic?
Dealing with the local, classical physics universe that my body’s senses are adapted to perceive, I’d have to go with “third option” in the “time-loaf” sense. I suspect that MWI is true, so yes to random which one this is, but deterministic in its worldline. To me, logic is shorthand for what is actually permissible in nature. We just are not so good at defining the rules yet. Something can only appear to not be governed by logic through lack of proper resolution of the measurements.
2) Free will—Make a coherent definition. What does your answer to the previous question mean for free will? If you prefer to say that there is no free will, explain why (or whether) it feels like you have free will
I think that any sufficiently detailed understanding of physics renders the existence of person-level free will meaningless. Our savanna-dwelling ancestors had no need for such an understanding. We animals ascribe agency to all kinds of wacky shit, including these bodies. Hence, the ego. I don’t feel like I’m being controlled, because in the macro sense, I’m not. The universe just runs, it doesn’t have feelings or a way of doing anything but what it actually does; and what it actually does determines what I am able to do.
Oh good, you did understand what I was getting at.
Foma, in other words. The concepts you mentioned are useful because they represent established behavior sets, they are what we make them. A soul is an actual false claim, and only useful when you don’t realize that it is false. I don’t endorse self-deception such as that, it’s a slippery slope from there.
I used quotes because not only is it not a solid concept, it’s not even a valid one. The point was that to think that way betrays an a priori belief in a soul.
*carbuncle