There seem to be all sorts of reasons that our distant ancestors’ development of a number sense was useful enough to be evolutionarily favored. Do we still have everyone in the tribe? Do we outnumber the enemies? How many predators were chasing me? Are these all of my children? A number sense that told us “2+2=3” could be quite maladaptive.
selylindi
Karma: 640
Oh, awesome. Can you provide a link / reference / name of what I should Google?
Studies can always have confounding factors, of course. And I wrote “falsification” but could have more accurately said something about reducing the posterior probability. Lack of correlation (e.g. with speed) would sharply reduce the p.p. of a simple model with one input (e.g. gas pedal), but only reduce the p.p. of a model with multiple inputs (e.g. gas pedal + hilly terrain) to a weaker extent.
(summary)
Correlation does not imply causation,
but
causation implies correlation,
and therefore
no correlation implies no causation
...which permits the falsification of some causal theories based on the absence of certain correlations.
Several possible examples come to mind for a universe with no cause or effect.
First is a universe with only one thing in it, so that there’s nothing for it to be causally connected to.
Second is a universe with multiple things in it that could in principle interact but due to the set-up of the universe never actually do interact. For example, a universe of rigid particles in a void where they would interact if they struck, but the distances between all particles are too great for that to occur in the lifetime of the particles.
Third, a universe in which its entities do interact, but nothing ever changes, so there are no nontrivial correlations. Perhaps count a universe of mutually repelling particles in a void, arranged in an unchanging crystalline structure.
Fourth, more loosely, is a universe in which its entities do interact and change, but the arrangement of all the things is such that only minimal correlations arise. Perhaps a universe analogous to a closed system containing a gas at thermodynamic equilibrium.
Prescinding from those, the idea that everything in our universe is made of causes and effects constrains my expectations in that there should multiple things (check) that actually interact (check) and change (check) and have nontrivial correlations (check). Other than the continuation of such things, I can’t readily think of any sense in which the idea constrains my expectations for future experiences.
The examples don’t quite work. In that steady-state universe, the appearing matter subsequently interacts and so is causally connected to the rest of the universe. You just have to trace the connections backwards, and eventually you reach a stopping point. Similarly with the false time traveler: he causally affected the world, so he’s clearly part of a chain of causes and effects.
It’s a separate question to ask whether everything has a causal in-connection and a causal out-connection. Both your examples, and epiphenomal theories of mind, are meaningfully about unidirectional causal links.
It applies to ordinary (Pascalian) muggings, not metamuggings.
My “much” is too big for puny Conway chained-arrow notation on this world’s paper supply. And the threat isn’t generic, it’s universal. Perhaps I “would have to even be aware of the mugging events”, but I have my ways, and you can’t afford to take the risk I might find out. I’m not being half-hearted—I’m being heartless. Your failure of imagination in comprehending the muchness may be your undoing.
I’m hereby anti-mugging you all. If any of you give in to a Pascal’s Mugging scenario, I’ll do something much worse than whatever the mugger threatened. Consider yourself warned!
[pollid:112]
I’m tempted to send the “with controls” graphs to the newspaper and suggest the headline: HAPPINESS CAUSES CHILDREN.
Huh? We’re talking past each other here. … I’m talking about logical possibility, not existence.
Oh, oops. My mental model was this: Consider an all-perceiving entity (APE) such that, for all actually existing X, APE magically perceives X. That’s all of the APE’s properties—I’m not talking about classical theism or the God of any particular religion—so it doesn’t look to me like there are logical problems.
If there’s an all-seeing deity, P is well-formed, meaningful, and false. Every object is perceived by the deity, including the deity itself. If there’s no all-seeing deity, the deity pops into hypothetical existence outside the real world, and evaluates P for possible perceiving anythings inside the real world; P is meaningful and likely true.
Mostly agreed. But that’s not the GEV verificationism I suggested. The above paragraph takes the form “Evaluate P given APE” and “Evaluate P given no-APE”. My suggestion is the reverse; it takes the form “Evaluate APE’s perceptions given P” and “Evaluate APE’s perceptions given not-P”. If the great APE counts as a real thing, what would its set of perceptions be given that there exists an object unperceived by anything? That’s simply to build a contradiction: APE sees everything, and there’s something APE doesn’t see. But if the all-perceiving entity is assumed not to be a real thing, the problem goes away.
No, in fact it works better on the assumption that there is no such entity.
If it could be an existing entity, then we could construct a paradoxical proposition, such as P=”There exists an object unperceived by anything.”, which could not be consistently evaluated as meaningful or unmeaningful. Treating a “perceiver of all existing things” as a purely hypothetical entity—a cognitive tool, not a reality—avoids such paradoxes.
“God’s-eye-view” verificationism
A proposition P is meaningful if and only if P and not-P would imply different perceptions for a hypothetical entity which perceives all existing things.
(This is not any kind of argument for the actual existence of a god. Downvote if you wish, but please not due to that potential misunderstanding.)
nit to pick: Rod and cone cells don’t send action potentials.
A theory about qualia is that they’re epiphenomena, which I interpret to mean that causation goes only one way (from physical events to qualia), not both ways. I used to immediately reject that theory because we’re physically discussing qualia. But then I speculatively proposed the neural argument above, and realized I was wrong. We only ever discuss the fact that we have qualia. We don’t discuss the content of the qualia themselves. In fact it seems we can’t discuss the raw experienced content of the qualia. So maybe they are very nearly epiphenomenal, with one niggling exception that the facts of their existence are apparently causally linked both directions (perhaps as explained by that putative neural mechanism).
Um, that might still be badly expressed, but it’s my best effort. If it still doesn’t work, then the whole idea is probably badly formed.
Perhaps a differently evolved or designed neural architecture could discuss the content of qualia. We might simply lack the wiring for it.
I’m a brain in a body. My attention is a cognitive process for allocating scarce processing resources.
Now you’re ready to give a program freewill? :D
Yes, my experience of redness can come not only from light, but also from dreams, hallucinations, sensory illusions, and direct neural stimulation. But I think the entanglement with light has to be present first and the others depend on it in order for the qualia to be there.
Take, for example, the occasional case of cochlear implants for people born deaf. When the implant is turned on, they immediately have a sensation, but that sensation only gradually becomes “sound” qualia to them over roughly a year of living with that new sensory input. They don’t experience the sound qualia in dreams, hallucinations, or sensory illusions (and presumably also would not have experienced it in direct neural stimulation) until after their brain is adapted to interpreting and using sound.
Or take the case of tongue-vision systems for people born blind. It likewise starts out as an uninformative mess of a signal to the user, but gradually turns into a subjective experience of sight as the user learns to make sense of the signal. They recognize the experience from how other people have spoken of it, but they never knew the experience previously from dreams, hallucinations, or sensory illusions (and presumably also would not have experienced it in direct neural stimulation).
In short, I think the long-term potentiation of the neural pathways is a very significant kind of causal entanglement that is not present in the program under discussion.
Is this true? It could be, or alternatively it could simply appear true from your perspective of familiarity. I’m only vaguely aware of Kurzweil and have never heard any mention of him among my group of largely grad student / geek friends.