minusdash

• minusdashMar 2, 2015, 8:55 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: How to de­bate when au­thor­ity is ques­tioned, but re­ally not needed?

  Well, you need to decide if it’s worth discussing further. Anonymous internet comment sections are often very low quality (tribalism, astroturfing, trolling etc.). If you think they are just trolling you, then ignore them. If you think they want to have a discussion, then you should defend your point or concede that you just stated a layman’s opinion.

  Comments don’t have the space to put your own academic paper there defending what you claim.

• minusdashMar 2, 2015, 11:32 AM

  1 point

  on: How to de­bate when au­thor­ity is ques­tioned, but re­ally not needed?

  They are right, I think. People don’t have endless time to discuss things with everyone. You put a statement on the table. Now I look at it and superficially see that it’s some sort of economics statement. Now should I waste my time examining your standpoint further? Can I expect to get well founded opinions from you? Will I profit from this exchange? If I can verify that you indeed have spent a long time thinking about economics and other people have considered your economy related thinking processes good enough to give you a diploma, then I can expect to get valuable opinions from you.

  It’s not sure, but one has to filter out all the cranks. Asking for qualifications is one way. There are thousands of unqualified people who have their own refutations of relativity, or false proofs of P!=NP etc. Should we really give equal time to all of these people, just because they might be onto something?

  You seem to look at yourself from the inside and say well I’m an honest and smart guy, why won’t they listen to me? But for them you’re just a random guy, nobody can see your inner qualities that you think you possess. If you want to become better than a “random guy from the street”, you need to provide some evidence that you’re worth listening to.

  People always treat you for how you appear to the outside. It’s the same fallacy that people commit when they say “I want someone to love me for who I am inside, not for any of my attributes like my body type, job, money, sense of humor, intelligence, musical talent etc., but for the inner me”. There’s no inner you for us. Only what you do.

• minusdashMar 2, 2015, 11:17 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: smijer’s comment on: Some Claims Are Just Too Extraordinary

  Yes, exactly. Hallucinations and altered consciousness periods don’t simply mean that your sane and usual rational mind is still there and it simply receives strange visual inputs as if you were enjoying a movie. Sometimes your very own thought processes are disturbed, it’s not like a little rational homunculus can always remain skeptical. So if you then try to think about journals and science, it won’t feel like a better alternative hypothesis. You will be genuinely confused and maybe imagine reading something in a journal that you didn’t, or imagine that some conspiracy is out there and you’re now uncovering it, etc. A real strong hallucination can be very very strong. Some on-the-fence atheists convert to a religion when they have some extreme experience of pleasure and bliss and feel that some miraculous event happened. They will know that religion is true, it will be the first and foremost truth they can imagine. It’s really hard to imagine what it feels like to be someone else. Again, no rational homunculi pulling the string in our heads.

• minusdashMar 2, 2015, 10:22 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: johnsonmx’s comment on: The mys­tery of pain and pleasure

  Good is a complex concept, not an irreducible basic constituent of the universe. It’s deeply rooted in our human stuff like metabolism (food is good), reproduction (sex is good), social environment (having allies is good) etc. We can generalize from this and say that the general pattern of “good” things is that they tend to reinforce themselves. If you feel good, you’ll strive to achive the same later. If you feel bad, you’ll strive to avoid feeling that in the future. So if an experience makes more of it then it’s good, otherwise it’s bad.

  Note that we could also ask: “Is there a general principle to be found with regard to which patterns within conscious systems innately feel like smelling a rose, or isn’t there?” We could build rose smell detecting machines in various ways. How can you say that one is really having the experience of smelling it while another isn’t?

• minusdashMar 2, 2015, 10:07 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: johnsonmx’s comment on: The mys­tery of pain and pleasure

  I don’t know how limited plasticity is. Speculation: maybe if we put on some color filter glasses that changes red with green or somehow mixes up the colors, then maybe even after a long time we’d still have the experience of the original red, even when looking at outside green material. Okay, let’s say it’s not plastic enough, we’d still feel an internal red qualia. But in what sense?

  What if the brain would truly rewire to recognize plants and moldy fruit etc. in the presence of “red” perception and the original “green” pattern would feed into visceral avoidance of “green” liquids (blood) and would wire into the speech areas in such a way that nominal “green” sensation is extremely linked to the word “red” (for example as measured by these experiments where the words meaning colors are colored with different colors, for example the word blue written in yellow). In this case, how could we say that the person is still “seeing green” when presented with objectively red things? What would be our anticipation under this hypothesis?

  Now, I think emotions are the same thing. Of course it could be that the brain architecture cannot rewire itself to start sweating and shouting and producing adrenaline in the presence of the previously pleasure associated pattern. Maybe the two modules are too far away or there is some other physical limitation. Then the question is pointless, it’s about an impossible scenario. If the brain can’t rewire itself then it still produces the old kind of behavior that is inconsisent with reality so it is observable (e.g. smiling when we would expect a normal person to should actually shout in pain).

  I don’t think we can view pleasure as simply existing inside the brain without considering the environment. Similarly, the motor cortex doesn’t contain the actual information of what the limbs look like. It’s a relay station. It only works because the muscles are where they are. You can’t tell what a motor neuron controls unless you follow its axon and look at what muscle it is attached to. The neuron by itself isn’t a representation of the muscle or that muscles movement. An emotional neural pattern is also only associated with that emotion to the extent that it results in certain responses and is triggered by certain stimuli. Things are not labeled up in the universe. Does the elephant feel like it’s using its nose when it’s lifting things up? Or does it rather feel like an arm? It isn’t a productive line of thinking. If it quacks… It’s like asking whether abortion is really a sin, whether “irregardless” is really an English word, whether a submarine can really swim.

  When you replace the pattern but keep all behavior and physiological responses normal, then I’d say the person is having the usual emotions that we associate with the responses and behavior that we can observe. The problem isn’t about what we anticipate but the fact that we are at edge cases that we haven’t encountered yet and we don’t have an intuitive idea of how we should interpret such a situation.

  I think you should start smaller and slower. Try thinking about animals with simpler brains like worms, and what it means that it is having a certain sensation.

• minusdashMar 2, 2015, 1:14 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: johnsonmx’s comment on: The mys­tery of pain and pleasure

  “what are the characteristic mathematics of (i.e., found disproportionally in) self-identified pleasurable brain states?”

  Certain areas of the brain get more active and certain hormones get into the bloodstream. How does this help you out?

• minusdashMar 2, 2015, 1:04 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: johnsonmx’s comment on: The mys­tery of pain and pleasure

  This all seems to be about the “qualia” problem. Take another example. How would you know if an alien was having the experience of seeing the color red? Well, you could show it red and see what changes. You could infer it from its behavior (for example if you trained it that red means food—if indeed the alien eats food).

  Similarly you could tell that it’s suffering when it does something to avoid an ongoing situation, and if later on it would very much prefer not to go under the same conditions ever again.

  I don’t think there is anything special about the actual mechanism and neural pattern that expresses pain or suffering in our brains. It’s that pattern’s relation to memories, sensory inputs and motor outputs that’s important.

  Probably you could even retrain the brain to consider a certain fixed brain stimulus to be pleasure even though it was previously associated with pain. It’s like putting on those corrective glasses that turn the visual input by 180° and the brain can adapt to that situation and the person is feeling normal after some time.

• minusdashFeb 23, 2015, 9:36 PM

  0 points

  on: Con­junc­tion Fallacy

  There’s also a linguistic issue here. The English “and” doesn’t simply mean mathematical set theoretical conjunction in everyday speech. Indeed, without using words like “given” or “suppose” or a long phrase such as “if we already know that”, we can’t easily linguistically differentiate between P(Y | X) and P(Y, X).

  “How likely is it that X happens and then Y happens?”, “How likely is it that Y happens after X happened?”, “How likely is it that event Y would follow event X?”. All these are ambiguous in everyday speech. We aren’t sure whether X has hypothetically already been observed or it’s a free variable, too.

• minusdashFeb 2, 2015, 1:27 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: Maniakes’s comment on: Ra­tional Home Buying

  Or maybe it’s just outrageous to ask for $40 when it’s clearly possible to sell it for $20. So you kind of punish the shop that asks for $40 because you see them as dishonest and morally repulsive. Sometimes you also have to pay attention to what behavior you encourage with your actions. Not only the immediate dollar value.

  Why don’t Christmas tree sellers sell the last, leftover Christmas trees for much cheaper, right before Christmas? Because then lots of people would just wait until that time and then buy it cheap. If buyers know that the seller will rather throw out the goods to the thrash rather than sell them cheaper then they will just casually buy the tree knowing that the price is stable and it’s all fair. Short-sighted optimization would tell the seller to just sell the leftovers cheaper rather than throw them away.

  Similarly, you may want to “send a message” to the $40 shop that you will rather drive a lot than participate in such an outrageous deal.

• minusdashJan 24, 2015, 7:27 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: Na­ture: Red, in Truth and Qualia

  Propositional knowledge and introspection may be analogous to running a virtual machine in user-space, in which you can instantiate the redness object. But that’s not a redness object in the real (non-virtual) program. The “real” running program only has user-space objects that are required for the execution of the virtual machine (virtual registers, command objects, etc).

• minusdashJan 20, 2015, 5:18 PM

  8 points

  on: Mys­te­ri­ous An­swers to Mys­te­ri­ous Questions

  Desiring a mysterious explantion is like wanting to be in a room with no people inside. Once you explain it it’s not mysterious any more. The property depends on your actions: emptyness is destroyed by you entering, mysticism is destroyed by you explaining it. Just an alternative to the map-territory way of putting it

• minusdash 20 Jan 2015 4:43 UTC

  −3 points

  on: An In­tro­duc­tion to Con­trol Theory

  Control theory is an actual, real engineering subject. Not only this self-help, psychology, wow, mind-blown, feel-good BS.

• minusdash 20 Jan 2015 4:41 UTC

  1 point

  on: The curse of identity

  I guess you can’t want to want stuff. When you genuinely want something (not prestige but an actual goal) you’ll easily be in the “flow experience” and lose track of time and actually progress toward the goal without having to force yourself. Actually you have to force yourself to stop in order to sleep and eat because you’d just do this thing all day if you could! Find the thing where you slip into flow easily and do the most efficient thing that’s at the same time quite similar to this activity.

• minusdash 11 Jan 2015 18:49 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Bizarre Illusions

  Somewhat related: I think we do have a 3D map of the environment even for things that we aren’t looking at at the moment. For example I feel as if I had a device in my brain that keeps track of which people are in which parts of the house right now (or where some emotionally-loaded objects are). I don’t have to exert conscious effort specifically for this.

  Another thing: it’s interesting to think about why we can see dots and lines and shapes at all. By this I mean, why do these low-level things reach our conscious awareness? You aren’t consciously aware of your blood sugar level or hormone levels. You do feel a sort of aggregated well-being feeling consciously but the details don’t reach the conscious level. It’s a strange and bizarre thing to think about what vision could be like if our consciousness didn’t have access to dots and shapes and colors style low-level image data and we only “felt” the gist of it, for example by only feeling our current 3D model in some way. (It could be similar to blindsight.)

  One answer could be that our vision is so complicated that the unconscious parts just can’t cope with it fully, they can’t analyze it sufficiently, and conscious processes (evolutionarily recent brain parts) need access to the basic “pixel-data” like things as well.

  But again, maybe when we intentionally try to look at specific dots (as if looking at pixels, interpreting the visual field as a screen), we maybe aren’t really looking at the low-level input but rather a reconstruction. Maybe we are seeing lines, corners and other geometric primitives laid on top of one another, like an SVG image, not like a BMP image. Maybe we don’t really have conscious access to the low-level visual signals, we just have access to a reconstruction.

  I don’t think neuroscience has found out these things already, but it should be possible to read off of connections of brain areas.

• minusdash 11 Jan 2015 15:11 UTC

  0 points

  on: Bizarre Illusions

  I remember not really “getting” these illusions when I was a kid. I just didn’t find them interesting, it looked too straightforward.

  The idea of a “2D screen inside our head” is not our natural intuition. Before learning about these things, I just felt that I simply percieve the environment around me. I don’t see a flat pixel grid in front of me when I walk around, I rather have a model of the environment that I continuously update and I percieve the objects “from where they are”, just like I feel leg pain as if it were “in my leg”, despite the fact that pain actually happens in the brain. I see objects where they are in the 3D model, not where they are on a virtual screen.

  The screen and pixels analogy may be so prevalent in modern times because of the TV, photos or even earlier realistic paintings. But early art was not really realistic, which I think either shows they were

  • not skilled enough to draw realistic art with perspective distortions and shading, or

  • they didn’t think of vision the way we do today, they were more focusing on the objects and their prototypical shapes, rather than their position in the visual field and the “actual colors”.

  The second explanation seems more plausible to me.

  These illusions are only illusions if you take the “2D screen and pixels” view of vision. Now that view is also important for technological applications, and it’s also biologically relevant (retina cells are sort-of pixels), I’m just saying it’s not really an illusion against builtin intuition.

• minusdash 3 Jan 2015 1:42 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Emile’s comment on: In­tel­lec­tual Hip­sters and Meta-Contrarianism

  That’s a triad too: naive instinctive signaling /​ signaling-aware people disliking signaling /​ signaling is actually a useful and necessary thing.