Nubulous

Karma: 42

Nubulous 17 Feb 2010 6:31 UTC
4 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread: February 2010, part 2
Slight variant: Humour is a form of teaching, in which interesting errors are pointed out. It doesn’t need to involve an outsider, and there’s no particular class of error, other than that the participants should find the error important.
If the guy sitting behind you starts moaning and grunting, if it’s a mistake (e.g. he’s watching porn on his screen and has forgotten he’s not alone) then it’s funny, whereas if it’s not a mistake, and there’s something wrong with him, then it isn’t.
Humour as teaching may explain why a joke isn’t funny twice—you can only learn a thing once. Evolutionarily, it may have started as some kind of warning, that a person was making a dangerous mistake, and then getting generalised.

Nubulous 18 Jan 2010 11:42 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: JanetK’s comment on: Dennett’s heterophenomenology

Why would anyone choose the map rather than the territory as their foundation?

I couldn’t agree more, which is why I was attempting to discourage people from doing so.

Why engage in science if you are not willing to accept the inferences that it makes about reality? Am I not going to believe in atoms because it doesn’t match what I see with my eyes?

But the justification for any physical theory is precisely that it predicts what you see with your own eyes. Indeed, that’s what a physical theory is—a means of predicting what you will experience. Atoms, as a feature of such a theory, seem quite useful and worth “believing” in.

Do you have any explanations of illusions?

Illusions are when your theory of what you should experience breaks down, and produces wrong answers.

when science makes steady progress it usually ends up with an explanation in materialistic terms.

But as I pointed out above, physics is not materialist, so your claim is untrue.

Nubulous 18 Jan 2010 9:50 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: Dennett’s heterophenomenology
Evidence implies observation. Observation implies conscious experience. So your evidence for a world independent of conscious experience turns out to be … conscious experience. I expect you can see why that isn’t going to work.

Nubulous 17 Jan 2010 8:00 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Bo102010’s comment on: Dennett’s heterophenomenology
The only proposed explanation of consciousness I’ve seen on Less Wrong is “maybe if we arrange stuff in the right way, consciousness will happen”. Even if true, it’s not enough of an explanation to enable argument about it.

Dennet

Dennett presents a resolutely functionalist description of experience, then tells us that nothing resembling qualia can be found within it, to the great surprise of no-one at all.

think that qualia are real things

To believe that the phenomenal world, the world you actually live in, is a fiction, while an invented “physical” world, for which no evidence exists, is the real world, is not merely wrong, it’s an irrationality which makes a complete mockery of the goals of this website.

Nubulous 17 Jan 2010 3:49 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Dennett’s heterophenomenology
When alleged rationalists experience an “irk”, because someone has reminded them that their theories describe a world utterly unlike the one that actually exists, we call this “cognitive dissonance”. When they vote it down we call it “denial”.

Nubulous 9 Jan 2010 7:50 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: Consciousness
Since we can presumably generate the appropriate signals in the optic nerve from scratch if we choose, light and its wavelength have nothing whatsoever to do with color.

Nubulous 15 Oct 2009 20:53 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: How to think like a quantum monadologist
This site is full of people interested in implementing intelligence (and even themselves) on a new substrate …. but they’re not going to be interested in the relationship between physics and thought ?

Nubulous 12 Oct 2009 17:41 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: Link: PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness (Peter Watts)
Indeed. (I thought it would be a bit of a spoiler to be more specific)

Nubulous 12 Oct 2009 16:07 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Morendil’s comment on: Link: PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness (Peter Watts)
I found this interesting pdf of a discussion involving Jaynes (and Dennett) and it makes clear what he believed, which was that the change was mostly cultural, and that uncontacted tribes might be bicameral, but there were none left. ( I’m not sure this is true—anyone reading this have an anthropologist handy ? )
Also contains a very odd fact (?) about children.

EDIT: Oops, didn’t notice it was on Jaynes’ own website. So presumably quite a lot more stuff there.

Nubulous 12 Oct 2009 12:10 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Morendil’s comment on: Link: PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness (Peter Watts)
How does Jaynes explain the lack of this kind of thinking among peoples who have culture and genes unchanged in the last 3000 years ?

Nubulous 12 Oct 2009 7:03 UTC
0 points
in reply to: JulianMorrison’s comment on: Link: PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness (Peter Watts)
It wasn’t intended to be a refutation. The technical claims of the papers may be correct, they just aren’t, as the linked article claims, about consciousness.

Nubulous 12 Oct 2009 0:29 UTC
−7 points
on: Link: PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness (Peter Watts)
Oh, an explanation of z-consciousness. Well done. We’ll stack it with the others.

Consciousness. An open problem for 2700 years. Oh, hang on..: 2701.

Nubulous 11 Oct 2009 7:21 UTC
1 point
on: How to get that Friendly Singularity: a minority view
If you want to integrate the phenomenal into your ontology, is there any reason you’ve stopped short of phenomenalism ?

EDIT: Not sarcasm—quite serious.

Nubulous 11 Oct 2009 6:25 UTC
1 point
on: Open Thread: October 2009
I came up with the following while pondering the various probability puzzles of recent weeks, and I found it clarified some of my confusion about the issues, so I thought I’d post it here to see if anyone else liked it:

Consider an experiment in which we toss a coin, to chose whether a person is placed into a one room hotel or duplicated and placed into a two room hotel. For each resulting instance of the person, we repeat the procedure. And so forth, repeatedly. The graph of this would be a tree in which the persons were edges and the hotels nodes. Each layer of the tree (each generation) would have equal numbers of 1-nodes and 2-nodes (on average, when numerous). So each layer would have 1.5 times as many outgoing edges as incoming, with ²⁄₃ of the outgoing being from 2-nodes. If we pick a path away from the root, representing the person’s future, in each layer we are going to have an even chance of arriving at a 1- or 2- node, so our future will contain equal numbers of 1- and 2- hotels. If we pick a path towards the root, representing the person’s past, in each layer we have a ²⁄₃ chance of arriving at a 2-node, meaning that our past contained twice as many 2-hotels as 1-hotels.

Nubulous 11 Oct 2009 5:13 UTC
0 points
in reply to: PlaidX’s comment on: The Presumptuous Philosopher’s Presumptuous Friend
Because if you agree that the correct way to measure the probability is as the occurrence ratio along the path, the degree of splitting is only significant to the extent that it affects the occurrence ratio, which in this case it doesn’t. The coin toss chooses equiprobably which hotel comes next, then it’s on to the next coin toss to equiprobably choose which hotel comes next, and so forth. So each path has on average equal numbers of each hotel, going forwards.

Nubulous 10 Oct 2009 23:39 UTC
0 points
in reply to: PlaidX’s comment on: The Presumptuous Philosopher’s Presumptuous Friend
When we speak of a subjective probability in a person-multiplying experiment such as this, we (or at least, I) mean “The outcome ratio experienced by a person who was randomly chosen from the resulting population of the experiment, then was used as the seed for an identical experiment, then was randomly chosen from the resulting population, then was used as the seed.… and so forth, ad infinitum”.

I’m not confident that we can speak of having probabilities in problems which can’t in theory be cast in this form.

In other words, the probability is along a path. When you look at the problem this way, it throws some light on why there are two different arguable values for the probability. If you look back along the path, (“what ratio will our person have experienced”) the answer in your experiment is 1000000:1. If you look forward along the path, (“what ratio will our person experience”) the answer is 1:1 (in the flaming-tires case there’s no path, so there’s no probability).

Nubulous 8 Oct 2009 0:43 UTC
0 points
in reply to: PlaidX’s comment on: The Presumptuous Philosopher’s Presumptuous Friend
I don’t know what I meant either. I remember it making perfect sense at the time, but that was after 35 hours without sleep, so.....

The answer to the second part is no, I would expect a 50:50 chance in that case.
In case you were thinking of this as a counterexample, I also expect a 50:50 chance in all the cases there from B onwards. The claim that the probabilities are unchanged by the coin toss is wrong, since the coin toss changes the number of participants, and we already accepted that the number of participants was a factor in the probability when we assigned the 99% probability in the first place.

Nubulous 6 Oct 2009 13:08 UTC
0 points
in reply to: PlaidX’s comment on: The Presumptuous Philosopher’s Presumptuous Friend
You’re reading a little more into what I said than was actually there. I was just remarking on the change of dependence between the parts of the problem, without having thought through what the consequences would be.

Now that I have thought it through, I agree with the presumptuous philosopher in this case. However I don’t agree with him about the size of the universe. The difference being that in the hotel case we want a subjective probability, whereas in the universe case we want an objective one. Subjectively, there’s a very high probability of finding yourself in a big universe/hotel. But subjective probabilities are over subjective universes, and there are very very many subjective large universes for the one objective large universe, so a very high subjective probability of finding yourself in a large universe doesn’t imply a large objective probability of being found in one.

Nubulous 6 Oct 2009 7:15 UTC
0 points
in reply to: PlaidX’s comment on: The Presumptuous Philosopher’s Presumptuous Friend
The most obvious difference is that the original problem involved the smaller or the larger set of people whereas this one uses the smaller and the larger.

Nubulous 1 Oct 2009 5:27 UTC
3 points
in reply to: JamesAndrix’s comment on: The Anthropic Trilemma

I fail to see why that is the general case.

If you have two people to start with, and one when you’ve finished, without any further stipulation about which people they are, then you have lost a person somewhere. To come to a different conclusion would require an additional rule, which is why it’s the general case.
That additional rule would have to specify that a duplicate doesn’t count as a second person. But since that duplicate could subsequently go on to have a separate different life of its own, the grounds for denying it personhood seem quite weak.

For that matter, I fail to see why losing some(many, most) of my atoms and having them be quickly replaced by atoms doing the exact same job should be viewed as me dying at all.

It’s not dying in the sense of there no longer being a you, but it is still dying in the sense of there being fewer of you.
To take the example of you being merged with someone, those atoms you lose, together with the ones you don’t take from the other person, make enough atoms, doing the right jobs, to make a whole new person. In the symmetrical case, a second “you”. That “you” could have gone on to live its own life, but now won’t. Hence a “you” has died in the process.

In other words, merge is equivalent to “swap pieces then kill”.
The above looks as though it will work just as well with bits, or the physical representation of bits, rather than atoms (for the symmetrical case).