I’ll second Schismatrix and emphasize that it has a particular focus on whether it’s better to extend human life by purely organic/biological means or to use mechanical/technological enhancements.
Spinning_Sandwich
Karma: 35
“Turning a person into paperclips is wrong” is an ethical proposition that is Eliezer-true and Human-true and >Paperclipper-false, and Eliezer’s “subjunctive objective” view is that we should just call that “true”.
Despite the fact that we might have a bias toward the Human-[x] subset of moral claims, it’s important to understand that such a theory does not itself favor one over the other.
It would be like a utilitarian taking into account only his family’s moral weights in any calculations, so that a moral position might be Family-true but Strangers-false. It’s perfectly coherent to restrict the theory to a subset of its domain (and speaking of domains, it’s a bit vacuous to talk of paperclip morality, at least to the best of my knowledge of the extent of their feelings...), but that isn’t really what the theory as a whole is about.
So if we as a species were considering assimilation, and the moral evaluation of this came up Human-false but Borg-true, the theory (in principle) is perfectly well equipped to decide which would ultimately be the greater good for all parties involved. It’s not simply false just because it’s Human-false. (I say this, but I’m unfamiliar with Eliezer’s position. If he’s biased toward Human-[x] statements, I’d have to disagree.)
You seem to be overlooking the fact that facts involving contextual language are facts nonetheless.
The “fact” that Obama is president is only social truth. Obama is president because we decided he is. If no one >thought Obama was president, he wouldn’t be president anymore.
There is a counterfactual sense in which this holds some weight. I’m not saying agree with your claim, but I would at least have to give it more consideration before I knew what to conclude.
But that simply isn’t the case (& it’s a fact that it isn’t, of course). Obama’s (present) presidency is not contested, and it is a fact that he is President of the United States.
You could try to argue against admitting facts involving any vagueness of language, but you would run into two problems: this is more an issue with language than an issue with facts; and you have already admitted facts about other things.
Unless you buy into Kant’s synthetic a priori arguments, that’s really all analytic means. Of course, in practice it’s far more interesting & complicated, and it even leads to the kind of applications that have made secure internet commerce possible, not to mention the computers we use to do that.
At least, on some days I think that’s what ‘analytic’ means. Maybe.
I like the idea of pulling some language from logic and saying we have “bound will,” not “free will.”
This may well be compatibilism as intended by its defenders, but that isn’t the impression I’ve ever had from their papers.
I would [very] roughly describe bound will with the following two claims: My will is free from Susie’s will. Neither Susie’s will nor my will is free from physical causes.
Notice that such a term doesn’t care whether the universe is strictly deterministic or merely stochastic.
I think I’m more comfortable with the negation of Platonism than with the positive claim of nominalism, but I suppose in this context we have ‘nominalism’ = ‘~Platonism’.
Whether what is usually meant by ‘nominalism’ is the same is as unclear to me as I am uncomfortable with the idea of making a positive claim about it.
This depends a great deal on both which branch of philosophy we’re talking about & who is evaluating that particular branch’s usefulness.
For example, I find developments in logics, philosophy of science, & general epistemology to be of great interest, and I perceive all three topics to be advancing (listed in order of priority as that goes) as the years go by. I’m sure others feel differently.
It would be hard to get past the fact that, especially between the different branches of philosophy, there is a great deal of “philosophy of language” that is or must be done just to get at what anyone’s talking about. But that is, to some extent, true of any field with a technical language.
So I guess all four answers make sense in some sense.
I probably should have voted for “Other,” but I voted for “Lean toward: yes” because I still outright agree in certain contexts.
Quine’s Two Dogmas is certainly enough to make me doubt the usefulness of the analytic/synthetic distinction as regards ordinary language, but for formal languages, this is not the case. It’s also not clear to me whether it’s impossible to construct a language (for communication) clear enough to make sense of analytic/synthetic distinctions.
This is one of those wonderfully agnostic positions that philosophy often leaves me with.
It helps that generally (ie unless you’re at Princeton/Cambridge/etc) the faculty at a given school will have come from much stronger schools than the grad students there, and similarly for undergrads/grads. And by “helps” I mean that it helps maintain the effect while explaining it, not that it helps the students any.
As far as the range of a recursive function goes, isn’t that the very definition of a recursive set?
I’m definitely enjoying Fixing Frege. This is the third Burgess book I’ve read (Computability & Logic and Philosophical Logic being the other two), and when it’s just him doing the writing, he’s definitely one of the clearest expositors of logic I’ve ever read.
Apparently, he also gets chalk all over his shirt when he lectures, but I’ve never seen this first-hand.
That’s like saying the standard choice of branch cut for the complex logarithm is arbitrary.
And?
When you complexify, things get messier. My point is that making a generalization is possible (though it’s probably best to sum over integers with 0 \leq arg(z) < \pi, as you pointed out), which is the only claim I’m interested in disputing. Whether it’s nice to look at is irrelevant to whether it’s functional enough to be punnable.
You can still find divisors for Gaussian integers. If x, y, and xy are all Gaussian integers, which will be trivially fulfilled for any x when y=1, then x, y both divide xy.
You can then generalize the \sigma function by summing over all the divisors of z and dividing by |z|.
The resulting number \sigma(z) lies in C (or maybe Q + iQ), not just Q, but it’s perfectly well defined.
On the common sense view that qualia are the kolors generated by our minds, which do so based on sensory input about the colors in the world, it makes sense that color-to-kolor conversion (if you will) should be imperfect even among people with properly functioning sight.
Its possible my writing wasn’t clear enough to convey this point (or that you were objecting to CCC, not me), but I was getting at the idea that we probably do experience slightly different kolors. It was never my intention to be philosophically “rigorous” about that, just to raise the point.
I’m not just talking about behavior. The kinds of things involved in experiencing a program involve subjective qualities, like whether Counter-Strike is more fun than Day of Defeat, which maybe can’t be learned just from reading the code.
It’s possible the analogy is actually flawed, and one is contained in its underlying components while the other is not, but I don’t understand how they differ if they do, or why they should.
If you are a superscientist, there is nothing you can learn from running a programme that you cannot get from >examining the code.
If you believe this, then you must similarly think that Mary will learn nothing about the qualia associated with colors if she already understands everything about the physics underlying them.
In case I haven’t driven the point home with enough clarity (for example, I did read the link the first time you posted it), I am claiming that there is something to experiencing the program/novel/world inasmuch as there is something to experiencing colors in the world. Whether that something is a subset of the code/words/physics or something additional is the whole point of the problem of qualia.
And no, I don’t have a clear idea what a satisfying answer might look like.
You’d have to explain what the rand function is, since that is apparently an un-Google-able term unless you want Ayn Rand (I don’t), the C++ random return function, or something called the RAND corporation.
The second question is due to compactness.
I’m the kind of person who reads things like Fixing Frege for fun after prelims are over.
Edit: Oh, & I don’t mean to be rude, but I probably wouldn’t call anyone a working mathematician/logician unless they were actively doing research either in a post-doc/tenure position or in industry (eg at Microsoft).
It’s possible I already had & that you’re misunderstanding what my examples are about: the difference between the physical/digital/abstract structure underlying something & the actual experience it produces (eg qualia for perceptions of physical things, or pictures for geometric definitions, etc).
I maintain that the difference between code & a running program (or at least our experience of a running program) is almost exactly analogous to the difference between physical matter & our perception of it. The underlying structure is digital, not physical, and has physical means of delivery to our senses, but the major differences end there.
It’s just another cool problem about colors.
As far as Mary’s Room goes, you might similarly argue that you could have all of the data belonging to Pixar’s next movie, which you haven’t seen yet, without having any knowledge of what it looks like or what it’s about. Or that you can’t understand a program without compiling it & running it.
I’m not entirely sure how much credibility I lend to that. There are some very abstract things (fairly simple, yes) which I can intuit without prior experience, and there are many complicated things which I can predict due to a great deal of prior experience (eg landscapes described in novels).
But I mostly raised it as another interesting problem with a proposed [partial] solution.
I wouldn’t predict the existence of self-replicating molecules either. In fact, I’m not sure I’m in a position to predict anything at all about physical phenomena without appealing to empirical knowledge I’ve gathered from this particular physical world.
It’s a pickle, all right.
You’ll notice that the next few sentences of my post address this same idea for fully functional members of different species. But it doesn’t technically refute the claim for qualia, only that we’re not all equally responsive to the same stimuli.
It is, for example, technically possible (in the broadest sense) that color-blind people experience the same qualia we do, but they are unable to act on them, much in the same way that a friend with ADD might experience the same auditory stimuli I do, but then is too distracted to actually notice or make sense of it.
I note, however, that the physical differences in color-blindness (or different species’ eyes) are enough reason to lend little credibility to this idea.
Having been a TA at two universities in two different states, I can assure you that considering university students would increase the prevalence of small laptops & tablets, not decrease it. Although not literally true, it is perfectly true in the colloquial sense that everyone has them.
Restricting the sample to just the students I’ve taught (several hundred, probably less than a thousand), I’d view prediction 20 as mostly true in all but the most literal sense. (For instance, I find the difference between touch interfaces with fingers vs those with a stylus to be irrelevant to the spirit of overall truth of the prediction.)