Mercurial

Karma: 530

Mercurial Nov 5, 2011, 6:32 AM
0 points
in reply to: Bugmaster’s comment on: Human consciousness as a tractable scientific problem

This, to me, sounds like a circular argument at worst, and a circular analogy (if there is such a thing) at best.

Mmm. Yes, I think you’re right. As I’ve chewed on this, I’ve come to wonder if that’s part of where I’ve been getting the impression that there’s a hard problem in the first place. As I’ve tried to reduce the question enough to notice where reduction seems to fail or at least get a bit lost, my confusion confuses me. I don’t know if that’s progress, but at least it’s different!

I guess the categorical difference is that when asking about blood flow, there’s someone who experiences the question and the data and the subsequent answer; but when asking about consciousness, it’s the very process of being able to understand the question in the first place that we’re asking about.

I think that, if you go this route, you arrive at a kind of solipsism.

I’m afraid I’m a bit slow on the uptake here. Why does this require solipsism? I agree that you can go there with a discussion of consciousness, but I’m not sure how it’s necessarily tied into the fact that consciousness is how you know there’s a question in the first place. Could you explain that a bit more?

Anyway, let’s assume that your main criterion for judging whether anyone else besides yourself is conscious is their behavior (if that’s not the case, I can offer some arguments for why it should be), and that you reject the solipsistic proposition that you are the only conscious being around (ditto).

Well… Yes, I think I agree in spirit. The term “behavior” is a bit fuzzy in an important way, because a lot of the impression I have that others are conscious comes from a perception that, as far as I can tell, is every bit as basic as my ability to identify a chair by sight. I don’t see a crying person and consciously deduce sadness; the sadness seems self-evident to me. Similarly, I sometimes just get a “feel” for what someone’s emotional state is without really being able to pinpoint why I get that impression. But as long as we’re talking about a generalized sense of “behavior” that includes cues that go unnoticed by the conscious mind, then sure!

In this case, a perfect sleepwalker or a qualia-less computer that perfectly simulates having qualia, etc., is actually less parsimonious than the alternative, and therefore the concept of qualia buys you nothing

It’s not a matter of what qualia buy you. The oddity is that they’re there at all, in anything. I think you’re pointing out that it’d be very odd to have a quale-free but otherwise perfect simulation of a human mind. I agree, that would be odd. But what’s even more odd is that even though we can be extremely confident that there’s some mechanism that goes from firing neurons to qualia, we have no clue what it could be. Not just that we don’t yet know what it is, but as far as I know we don’t know what could possibly play the role of such a mechanism.

It’s almost as though we’re in the position of early 19th century natural philosophers who are trying to make sense of magnetism: “Surely, objects can’t act at a distance without a medium, so there must be some kind of stuff going on between the magnets to pull them toward one another.” Sure, that’s close enough, but if you focus on building more and more powerful microscopes to try to find that medium, you’ll be SOL. The problem in this context is that there are some hidden assumptions that are being brought to bear on the question of what magnetism is that keep us from asking the right questions.

Mind you, I don’t know if understanding consciousness will actually turn out to yield that much of a shift in our understanding of the human mind. But it does seem to be slippery in much the same way that magnetism from a billiard-balls-colliding perspective was, as I understand it. I suspect in the end consciousness will turn out to be no more mysterious than magnetism, and we’ll be quite capable of building conscious machines someday.

In case this adds some clarity: My personal best proto-guess is that consciousness is a fuzzy term that applies to both (a) the coordination of various parts of the mind, including sensory input and our sense of social relationships; and (b) the internal narrative that accompanies (a). If this fuzzily stated guess is in the right ballpark, then the reason consciousness seems like such a hard problem is that we can’t ever pin down a part of the brain that is the “seat of consciousness”, nor can we ever say exactly when a signal from the optic nerve turns into vision. Similarly, we can’t just “remove consciousness”, although we can remove parts of it (e.g., cutting out the narrator or messing with the coordination, as in meditation or alcohol).

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this guess were totally bollocks. But hopefully that gives you some idea of what I’m guessing the end result of solving the consciousness riddle might look like.

Mercurial Nov 4, 2011, 10:42 PM
2 points
on: What does your accuracy tell you about your confidence interval?
That calibration question actually raised a question for me. I haven’t seen this question raised, although I suspect it has and I just haven’t found the discussion as yet; if so, please point me in the right direction.

The point, in short, is that my gut reaction to honing my subjective probability estimations is “I’m not interested in trying to be a computer.” As far as I know, all the value I’ve gotten out of rationalist practice has been much more qualitative than probability calculations, such as becoming aware of and learning to notice the subjective feeling of protecting a treasured belief from facts. (Insert the standard caveats, please.) I’m not sure what I would gain by taking the time to train myself to be better at generating numerical estimates of my likelihood of being correct about my guesses.

In this particular case, I guessed 1650 based on my knowledge that Newton was doing his thing in the mid to late seventeenth century. I put a 65% confidence on the 15-year interval, figuring that it might be a decent bit later than 1650 but not terribly much. It turns out that I was wrong about that interval, so I know now that based on that situation and the amount of confidence I felt, I should probably try a smaller confidence estimate. How much smaller I really don’t know; I suspect that’s what this “HonoreDB’s rule” others are talking about addresses.

But the thing is, I’m not sure what I would gain if it turned out that 65% was really the right guess to make. If my confidence estimates turn out to be really, really well-honed, so what?

On the flipside, if it turned out that 60% was the right guess to make and I spend some time calibrating my own probability estimates, what do I gain by doing that? That might be valuable for building an AI, but I’m a social scientist, not an AI researcher. I find it valuable to notice the planning fallacy in action, but I don’t find it terribly helpful to be skilled at, say, knowing that my guess of being 85% likely to arrive with a 5-minute margin of when I say is very likely to be accurate. What’s helpful is knowing that a given trip tends to take about 25 minutes and that somewhat regularly but seemingly randomly traffic will make it take 40 minutes, so if I need to be on time I leave 40 minutes before I need to be there but with things I can do for 15 minutes once I’m there in case traffic is smooth. No explicit probabilities needed.

But I see this business about learning to make better conscious probability estimates coming up fairly often on Less Wrong. It was even a theme in the Boot Camps if I understand correctly. So either quite a number of very smart people who spend their time thinking about rationality all managed to converge on valuing something that doesn’t actually matter that much to rationality, or I’m missing something.

Would someone do me the courtesy of helping me see what I’m apparently blind to here?

ETA: I just realized that the rule everyone is talking about must be what HonoreDB outlined in the lead post of this discussion. Sorry for not noticing that. But my core question remains!

Mercurial Sep 27, 2011, 1:15 AM
1 point
in reply to: Bugmaster’s comment on: Human consciousness as a tractable scientific problem

Anyway, oddly enough, I understand the details of your argument, but I don’t see the big picture that you’re presenting.

Ah, then perhaps I’m more confused than I thought! I still haven’t identified the source of my confusion, though.

So, would you agree that the question “how does consciousness work” is no different from “how does blood flow work” ? If not (as I suspect is the case), then what’s the difference ?

Er… Yes and no. I agree that eventually we should be able to find an answer that sounds as reduced as an answer to “How does blood flow work?” does. But from where we currently stand, they seem to be really, incredibly fundamentally different questions—as long as you understand the question “How does consciousness work?” to be in the hard sense rather than in the easy one.

I think you get near to the crux of the matter in this statement:

Presumably, a sleepwalker’s brain, or a robot’s circuitry, or a zombie’s… er… goo or whatever it is zombies have, would implement this functionality in different ways than normal human brains do; and we could tell whether the sleepwalker/robot/zombie implements this functionality or not by talking to them [...]

Yes, presumably that’s the case, and eventually we’ll nail that down. But from what we can currently tell, there doesn’t seem to be even an in-principle plausible mechanism for adding qualia to a computer’s way of processing things. A computer receives input, does some well-defined manipulations, and offers output. Where do qualia come into play? How is it we get the subjective impression of there being a “someone” who is “watching” what’s going on in the Cartesian theater? The very concept is internally inconsistent (e.g., how does the homunculus experience?), but the point is the same: there doesn’t seem to be any plausible way that we have currently thought of to get from neurons firing to qualia.

I guess the categorical difference is that when asking about blood flow, there’s someone who experiences the question and the data and the subsequent answer; but when asking about consciousness, it’s the very process of being able to understand the question in the first place that we’re asking about. I’m not sure that’s entirely equivalent to the hard problem, though.

You might find it helpful to read the Wikipedia page on the hard problem. That might help to explain some of the nuances better than I’ve been able to thus far. (In particular, it helps to point out that by “hard problem” I don’t mean “a challenging problem” but rather “a problem whose potential to be answered even in theory seems in question.”)

[...] (as you have pointed out in your thought experiment).

Again, I think that was Yvain.

Mercurial Sep 26, 2011, 1:35 AM
1 point
in reply to: Bugmaster’s comment on: Human consciousness as a tractable scientific problem

But according to the though experiment you’d set up [...]

I think you’re confusing me and Yvain. I’ll take that as a complement, though!

I agree with pretty much everything you’ve said here—but it’s posed as though to stand as an argument against what I think, so I’m a little bit concerned that we’re not talking about the same thing. For instance, you say:

Thus, again, I see no need for dualistic assumptions of any kind, which includes qualia.

I agree, dualism is unnecessary as far as we know. It’s hard for me to conceive of a type of evidence that would ever suggest that we need dualism.

However, the existence of qualia does not immediately require dualism. The term “qualia” just points to the experiences we have that currently seem to sit on the “other side” of the hard problem of consciousness with respect to our current empirical knowledge. Presumably, we will eventually find a reductionist answer to the hard problem of consciousness. In the meantime, though, we still need a way of talking about the phenomenon in question. Qualia don’t play the same role in this question that vis vitalis did with vitalism; it isn’t that we’re trying to answer the hard problem by saying “subjective experience is made up of qualia”, but instead we’re trying to describe how subjective experience presents itself to us. We see red, and this experience of redness seems to have a certain character to it, so we tag it with the descriptor of being the quale of red. The question is, how is it that there is a conscious experience induced by neurons firing in response to stimulation of the optic nerve? We know how visual perception works, but as far as I know we don’t very well know how the quale of red appears from that. It’s a statement of the question, not a phlogiston-class proclamation masquerading as an answer.

Does that clarify where I’m coming from on this? It’s not dualism (or at least I’m pretty darn sure it’s not!); it’s just naming a confusion in as much detail as possible.

Mercurial Sep 24, 2011, 10:20 PM
0 points
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: Particles break light-speed limit?

You need to provide links because I read a fair bit on the subject and don’t recall this.

That’s a fair request. I don’t really have the time to go digging for those details, though. If you feel so inspired, again I’d point to the work done at the Stanford Research Institute (or at least I think it was that) where they did a ridiculous number of trials of all kinds and did get several standard deviations away from the expected mean predicted based on the null hypothesis. I honestly don’t remember the numbers at all, so you could be right that there has never been anything like a six-s.d. deviation in parapsychological experiments. I seem to recall that they got somewhere around ten—but it has been something like six years since I read anything on this topic.

That said, I get the feeling there’s a bit of goalpost-moving going on in this discussion. In Eliezer’s original reference to parapsychology as the control group for science, his point was that there are some amazingly subjective effects that come into play with frequentist statistics that could account for even the good (by frequentist standards) positive-result studies from parapsychology. I agree, there’s a lot of problem with things like publication bias and the like, and that does offer an explanation for a decent chunk of parapsychology’s material. But to quote Eliezer:

Parapsychology, the control group for science, would seem to be a thriving field with “statistically significant” results aplenty. Oh, sure, the effect sizes are minor. Sure, the effect sizes get even smaller (though still “statistically significant”) as they collect more data. Sure, if you find that people can telekinetically influence the future, a similar experimental protocol is likely to produce equally good results for telekinetically influencing the past. Of which I am less tempted to say, “How amazing! The power of the mind is not bound by time or causality!” and more inclined to say, “Bad statistics are time-symmetrical.” But here’s the thing: Parapsychologists are constantly protesting that they are playing by all the standard scientific rules, and yet their results are being ignored—that they are unfairly being held to higher standards than everyone else. I’m willing to believe that. It just means that the standard statistical methods of science are so weak and flawed as to permit a field of study to sustain itself in the complete absence of any subject matter.

I haven’t looked at the CERN group’s methods in enough detail to know if they’re making the same kind of error. I’m just trying to point out that we can’t assign an abysmally low probability to their making a common kind of statistical error that finds a small-but-low-p-value effect without simultaneously assigning a lower probability to parapsychologists making this same mistake than Eliezer seems to.

And to be clear, I am not saying “Either the CERN group made statistical errors or telepathy exists.” Nor am I trying to defend parapsychology. I’m simply pointing out that we have to be even-handed in our dismissal of low-p-value thinking.

Mercurial Sep 23, 2011, 10:09 PM
3 points
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: Particles break light-speed limit?

The comparison to parapsychology is a really poor one in this case—for what should be pretty obvious reasons.

Well, whatever this might say about me, the reasons aren’t obvious to me.

For example, we know there is no file drawer effect.

Right, but as I understand it, you don’t need a file drawer effect to see that some of the experiments done in parapsychology still have devastatingly tiny p-values on their own, such as through the Stanford Research Institute.. So the file drawer effect isn’t really the right way to challenge the analogy.

But more importantly this was a six sigma deviation from theoretical prediction. As far as I know, that is unheard of in parapsychology.

I actually don’t know what that means. Is sigma being used to indicate standard deviation? If so, then yes, there have been a number of parapsychology experiments that went in that range of accuracy—some moreso if I recall correctly. (It has been many years since I read into that stuff, so I could be misremembering.)

We cannot treat physics the way we treat psychology.

My point is actually more about statistics than science, so any system that uses frequentist statistics to extract truth is going to suffer from this kind of comparison. As I understand it, the statistical methods that are used to verify measurements like this FTL neutrino phenomenon are the same kinds of techniques used to demonstrate that people can psychokinetically affect random-number generators. So either parapsychology is ridiculous because it uses bad statistical methods (in which case there’s a significant chance that this FTL finding is a statistical error), or we can trust the statistical methods that CERN used (which seems to force us to trust the statistical methods that parapsychologists use.)

(Disclaimer: I’m not trying to argue anything about parapsychology here. I’m only attempting to point out that, best as I can tell, the argument for parapsychology as the control group for science seems to suggest that the CERN results stand a fair chance of being bad statistics in action. If A implies B and we’re asserting probably-not-B, then we have to accept probably-not-A.)

Mercurial Sep 23, 2011, 9:53 PM
0 points
in reply to: Hyena’s comment on: Particles break light-speed limit?
Ah. Thank you for clarifying!

Mercurial Sep 23, 2011, 4:40 PM
0 points
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: Particles break light-speed limit?
Bear in mind that many parapsychological experiments have been repeated vastly more than that. My impression is that anyone who wants to argue that this is extremely unlikely to be a statistical fluke is going to have a much harder time viewing parapsychology as the control group for science.

Mercurial Sep 23, 2011, 4:30 PM
2 points
in reply to: Hyena’s comment on: Particles break light-speed limit?
Forgive me for being a bit slow, but I honestly don’t understand what you mean. I don’t know why their publishing the results needs explanation; they already said it was because they couldn’t find an error and are hoping that someone else will find one if it’s there. Is your point that the fact that CERN published this rather than someone else is to be taken as evidence of its veracity? Or do you mean something else?

Mercurial Sep 11, 2011, 4:19 PM
1 point
in reply to: summerstay’s comment on: Human consciousness as a tractable scientific problem
That’s a really clear description! Thanks for summarizing it.

I suspect it’s highly relevant that if someone were to actually grow up in a grayscale environment, they wouldn’t be capable of experiencing blue. Even if the optic nerve had somehow retained the ability to transmit data from cones, the brain simply would not be wired for blue-processing. I’m pretty sure her brain would interpret a colored world the way a black-and-white television would. (This is my understanding of neuroscience, by the way, not my stab at philosophy.)

I haven’t taken the time to think carefully about the implications of this. It just seems suspicious to me that one of the clearest descriptions of qualia I’ve encountered involves a process that’s neurologically implausible to enact.

Mercurial Sep 11, 2011, 4:12 PM
1 point
in reply to: Bugmaster’s comment on: Human consciousness as a tractable scientific problem
It certainly matters to the subject! I sure wouldn’t want to lose my ability to experience regardless of whether others can ever notice (or whether it’s possible).

Your objection here strikes me a little bit like behaviorism. Yes, there are valuable things to be gotten most of the time from such an approach, but behaviorism suffered from an unwillingness to acknowledge that people had thoughts. After all, thoughts didn’t demonstrate themselves in behavior beyond being talked about, in which case it was the talk that was part of the scientific domain, not the thinking. The thing is, I know I think, and my strong impression is that others talk about “thoughts” for the same reason I do: they think. The fact that behaviorism didn’t have a clear empirical approach to exploring these subjective experiences tagged “thoughts” didn’t mean that they were uninteresting or irrelevant. This was the main reason why we switched away from behaviorism in the second half of the 20th century.

(Quick note: Yes, I know that not all behaviorism was like this. Some behaviorists simply said that they didn’t want to make claims about what thinking entailed because they didn’t know how to approach the matter empirically. However, it was common if not dominant among behaviorists to take the “If we can’t study it then it doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter” approach.)

In exactly the same way, quale-type experience seems to be present for me, and my own impression is that everything I talk about in terms of empiricism gets filtered through qualia. There are no data that transmit information to my mind that I am aware of without that awareness taking on qualia. I’m under the strong impression that others experience the world similarly. The fact that we don’t know what that means in reductionistic terms doesn’t mean that it’s irrelevant or that qualia don’t exist. It just means that we don’t know how to approach the question unambiguously as yet.

Mercurial Sep 9, 2011, 9:35 PM
1 point
in reply to: arundelo’s comment on: Human consciousness as a tractable scientific problem
Ah, I had been misinformed! I was informed it was the Latin neuter form, which uses “-um” for singular endings and “-a” for plural. Thanks for the correction!

Mercurial Sep 9, 2011, 6:31 PM
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Human consciousness as a tractable scientific problem
That is the hard problem, actually. If we could operationalize those terms, we would be able to study what they refer to with a reductionist lens. Until then, we’re kind of stuck using words to point at experience rather than at structural definitions.

In case you’re honestly not sure what everyone is talking about, though: There’s a difference between red as a certain frequency of light and red as experienced. Yes, we know there’s a strong connection between the two, and we can describe in some fair detail how a certain frequency of light stimulates optic nerves and is processed in the brain and so on. But it’s not at all clear how we get from those mechanical processes to the experience of red. We don’t experience red as a frequency; we experience it as red! That latter bit, the redness of red, is what people refer to as the qualium of red. (“Qualium” is the singular form of “qualia”.)

The reductionist thesis maintains that there must be a way to reduce the connection between physical mechanisms and qualia down to mechanisms. The hard problem of consciousness is that no one seems to be able to come up with even an in-principle plausible way of making that connection. In other words, everyone is confused but doesn’t have a clear way to even start dispelling the confusion. People like Daniel Dennett have made efforts, but many people question whether their efforts even count as progress.

So in short: “phenomenal consciousness” refers to the experience of qualia, although we don’t know what that means aside from pointing at the fact that everyone seems to experience qualia and that mechanisms affect but don’t seem to be qualia. “Subjective experience” usually refers to the same thing, but is often used to emphasize the fact that the experience of qualia seems to depend on the individual; e.g., you don’t experience my experiencing red the way I do and vice versa.

Mercurial Sep 7, 2011, 12:17 AM
0 points
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Good resource for marketing research?
Fair enough! Thanks!

Mercurial Sep 6, 2011, 10:48 PM
0 points
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Good resource for marketing research?
Thanks, Luke!

Is there any reason to preference this particular text over any given other one in marketing?

Mercurial Sep 6, 2011, 10:47 PM
0 points
in reply to: Morendil’s comment on: Good resource for marketing research?

Yours is an exciting project and I wish you the best—I can’t wait to see what comes out of it.

Thanks!

Your major hurdle probably isn’t going to be marketing-in-general, but specifically finding an answer to the why of the above observation.

I have a pretty good idea as to why at this point. Some of it is because it’s pretty difficult to sort out the touted-and-good stuff from the touted-and-overhyped stuff in education research. The popularity of a theory and the status of a researcher making a given comment both have vastly more weight in this field than they should, possibly more even than empirical evidence. It’s unpopular to overthrow widely cited theories with findings from neuroscience, for instance. There’s virtually no control for cognitive biases from what I’ve been able to tell.

That said, you’re right in that it’s possible that I’ve just missed something critical and that the stuff I’m thinking of applying flat-out doesn’t work like I expect it will. That’s why I’m going to spend a few years doing some rational research verifying the methods and working out the pragmatics before I actually start the business.

Still, you might be interested in this fellow’s writings, as they have been quite influential among a crowd which substantially overlaps the readership of LW: he writes about “entrepreneurship as a practice that can be managed rather than purely an art form to be experienced”.

I think this is the same fellow EvelynM suggested, yes? I’ll certainly take a look, although I’m skeptical for reasons I mentioned in my reply to EvelynM.

Mercurial Sep 6, 2011, 10:39 PM
0 points
in reply to: play_therapist’s comment on: Good resource for marketing research?

I think you might start by deciding first what kind of students you want to attract.

That’s a good point. I’ve put some thought into this, but not a huge amount—probably because of a flinch. To me, the real point of what I’m doing is to produce competent, mentally healthy individuals. Ideally that would include everyone, but pragmatically that just isn’t going to happen. So, whom shall I omit early on? It’s an uncomfortable question, but you’re quite right that it needs asking.

Mercurial Sep 6, 2011, 10:33 PM
0 points
in reply to: EvelynM’s comment on: Good resource for marketing research?
I had never heard of this fellow before. Doing a quick skim of his website, it looks to me like his main claim of expertise is that he has successfully started a number of businesses despite the odds seemingly being stacked against him.

While I agree that it’s probably a good idea to talk to people like that, I’m concerned that they might think they know why they succeeded but not actually know. Is there a reason to believe that this fellow knows his real reasons for his success rather than just what the experience of being successful is like?
What links here?
- Mercurial's comment on Good resource for marketing research? by Mercurial (Sep 6, 2011, 10:47 PM; 0 points)

Mercurial Sep 6, 2011, 10:28 PM
0 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Good resource for marketing research?
This will probably start with some research based on summer sessions meant to verify that the methods as implemented really do work as advertised, and to hammer out the kinks that will inevitably appear. So yes, I agree, this seems like a good idea. I’d just like to get some research-based info on whether what seems to me like a good idea really is a good idea!

Mercurial Sep 6, 2011, 10:26 PM
0 points
in reply to: jsalvatier’s comment on: Good resource for marketing research?
Great! Thanks!