A very specific type of dumbass.
sxae
Karma: 64
I apologise TAG, I can’t say I’m trying to “gotcha” anything intentionally, just to discuss an interesting thought experiment.
I don’t know what the test is that you could perform, though I tried to present one possibility—your beliefs around that memory.
It matters here because I am specifically addressing Jackson’s views on Physicalism as presented in the original thought experiment, not all general views of qualia. The core of the question is if that is because of some physical phenomena.
Maybe that is subjectivity itself. Maybe qualia are how observes perceive their own brain states.
Yes, that is a good summary of what I am proposing here.
Because that test reveals what the actual qualia of the experience is—what separates all of the information about an experience from the subjective essence of that experience. The qualia of an experience is not simply the ability to recall that experience, or simulate that experience in your mind.
Hi gilch! I apologise that this was confusing, hopefully I can clarify what I am trying to say here. Thanks for your in-depth response.
Nothing.
Yes, this was the answer that was meant to be inferred here. Maybe I could have been more clear that this is the correct answer. There isn’t really any question that you can perform to determine which Mary genuinely had the experience and the Mary which did not.
I think it might be useful to think about Mary’s room in more abstract terms, to avoid these contextual assumptions we make about the nature of qualia like with colour. Because colour is a general qualia of existence, as opposed to a specific experience (e.g. the example given elsewhere in the comments of the qualia of climbing Mt. Everest) we have different expectations around it. I would be curious to know if the more abstracted version of Mary’s Room outlined in this comment here would make this clearer.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Joachim!
I am definitely not saying that NFTs are not bad for the environment—they are, as is anything that draws on the mains grid and creates demand. It is absolutely correct to judge cryptocurrency negatively, just as it is correct to judge things like driving a gas guzzler or flying 20 times a year. But it seems like we completely ignore some ways in which the energy we produce is wasted, and hyperfocus on others, and we just end up with a completely screwed up valuation of what needs changing.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply Daniel!
Cheaper spaceships are definitely cheaper to replace if some oppositional nation-state blows them up, but there’s only so many times you can play that game before you end up with the Kessler syndrome issues.
If you’re referring to the vertical launch and takeoff of SpaceX shuttles, that really only affects the last moments of reentry. A SpaceX shuttle still does the vast majority of its braking in the atmosphere.
Launching in weird orbits is absolutely a strategy that nation-states could use to mitigate these risks, but in a field where your margins are already white-knuckle tight, such an arbitrary restraint is at best a huge inefficiency on our ability to progress space exploration.
The $/kg price point is the driving metric of how quickly we can expand our space colonization, so increasing that by an order of magnitude because we can’t just get along seems suboptimal.
Ships cannot simply be allocated to arbitrary launch manuevers—fuel tanks need to be made bigger, designs adjusted, missions planned.
Hohmann transfers, as mentioned, carry with them an arbitrary amount of LEO over an arbitrary stretch of airspace. Restricting your space of possible Hohmann transfers to only “safe” ones will possibly reduce your launch windows to an unmanageable level.
At a minimum they also impose harms on the people who you convinced not to eat meat (since you are assuming that eating meat was a benefit to you that you wanted to pay for). And of course they make further vegetarian outreach harder .
The primary argument for convincing someone to not eat meat is that the long term costs outweigh the short term benefits, so I’m not sure that you can categorically state that convincing someone to stop eating meat is causing them harm. Sure, they don’t get to eat a steak, but the odds of their grandchildren not dying from catastrophic climate collapse go up.
If we expected increased outreach and prosletyization from vegetarians to uniformly make further outreach harder, would we expect to see the rapid and exponential growth of vegetarianism (as it seems to be)?
I think the largest issue with the general concept of moral fungibility is the following:
Moral consequences cannot be reliably predicted—“what if that chicken solved cancer” is an obviously spurious but relevant example.
Moral consequences cannot be reversed—one cannot make chickens out of chicken nuggets, and new chickens are not the same as the old ones.
Morality does not necessarily sum—“two wrongs do not make a right”—I cannot necessarily justify the torture of billions through the ectasy of other billions.
Most people optimize for price, not morality—anyone with the financial capacity and moral freedom to not buy the cheapest or most available eggs is probably already doing so.
The “free-range chicken” scenario does place some nice constraints on this. The slaughter of a single chicken may never be the thing which prevents a medical miracle. Though, at the same time, I very much doubt that the original architects of the poultry market foresaw the long-term consequences of rapid growth, for instance in ecological damage.
But I think the final point is the most significant—you are substantially increasing (doubling!) the number of decisions I need to make when buying an egg. An average person’s default response to any new, non-impactful choice is going to be “no”. Anyone who has a moral system within which they do buy an offset would probably already be seeking to minimise their ecological impact. The issue is not people being unwilling to minimise their impact—it is that minimizing their impact is not the optimal solution. So, this system would likely just preach to the choir and not really substantially impact the amount of damage we’re doing to our world. Anyone who cares enough to alter their decision already is—so if you want to have more people care more, then you need to make those decisions easier, not harder.
Sorry TAG I’m not quite sure I follow, but I do appreciate your feedback. This post is a refutation of Jackson’s view, so I’m not surprised that it is focusing on a negative. Whether something would alter the quality of those experiences is the crux of Jackson’s whole thought experiment—asking what changes between a mind with perfect information about an experience, and a mind who has genuinely had that experience. So, that question does seem at the heart of this thought experiment.
Perhaps a different way to think about Mary’s Room is the following:
You have two identical minds, A and B. You know that one mind has perfect information about an experience, and the other mind has genuinely experienced it. What questions can you ask each mind to determine which is which? Are you always able to determine an answer? Whatever pops out the end as the distinction between the perfect information and the subjective experience is, by definition, what the qualia of that experience was.
If there are any experiences or qualia, even changeable ones, Jackson has made his point.
Has he? As I understand it, Jackson is arguing specifically for a non-physicalist interpretation of qualia in his work, not just for the existance of qualia. He is arguing that you can have perfect information about an experience, yet actually experiencing that thing will still bring some new aspect to the experience, and whatever that aspect is is the qualia. The issue is with the nature of what the qualia of an experience is, and whether there is a physical manifestation of it, not whether it is a thing. It obviously is, as we constantly experience it. So, no, sorry if I have come across as arguing that qualia do not exist, that is not the position I’m trying to discuss here.
We were looking for to disappear, indicating that the probability of a candidate no longer factors into our considerations.
I’m surprised that we are looking for to disappear entirely, I’m not sure I understand that. Quadratic voting shines when you have lots of votes with the same voting token pool, because you force people to allocate resources to decisions they really care about. It’s absolutely not meant to decide one decision—it’s meant to force people to allocate limited resources over a long period, and by doing so reveal their true valuation of those decisions. I would therefore fully expect to play a part in every agent’s considerations, as they must consider the probability of success in each vote in order to plan allocation of voting tokens for every other vote.
Hey TAG, thanks for your reply and your great points.
If you could show that Mary never experiences a colour quale, whether as the result of a direct experience, or a real memory, or an implanted memory, you refute the argument.
Well, I don’t believe I’m trying to say that the color quale doesn’t exist—rather that the quale is the subject’s beliefs around that experience or memory, and that those beliefs are entirely physical constructs that exist within a physical brain.
What’s the problem? If Mary has a present experience of a blade of grass, she will have a novel colour quale, and she also will if she experiences a sufficiently vivid recollection… and that still applies if the memory was an implant.
This is based on an admittedly wild assumption that experiences memories that you know to not be yours would alter the quality of those experiences. The impact I think is lost when we deal with something as ubiquitious to the human experience as color. But Jackson seems to be making a general claim about all experiential qualia with this thought experiment, not a specific claim about color qualia, even if that is the example he chooses.
Maybe another example is implanting a memory of climbing Mount Everest—euphoric king-of-the-world moment included when you reach the peak. The belief around the veracity of that memory would alter your relationship to it, and you would gain some new qualia experience if you actually went and did it.
Another solution to “Objection 1: Quadratic voting discourages voting on losing propositions” is the idea that only the winners of a quadratic vote actually pay an average of the tokens, and everyone else gets a refund—sort of like a blind Dutch auction of the decision.
For example, a quadratic vote is taken between two binary options A and B. A receives 400 votes, B receives 500. B wins the vote, so an average of 450 is taken from the voting token pool of B and 50 tokens are redistributed equally amongst B. Everyone who voted for A gets a full refund.
Consider in your example of selecting a head of state. If a political party overextend their voting to elect their guy—that is, that they overvalue the position—then they will be punished by a lack of voting tokens compared to the opposition for other cabinet positions.
I suppose the question is whether we can predict the “hidden inner mind” through some purely statistical model, as opposed to requiring some deeper understanding of human psychology of an AI. I’m not sure that a typical psychologist would claim to be able to predict behaviour through their training, whereas we have seen cases where even simple, statistical predictive systems can know more about you than you know about yourself - [1].
There’s also the idea that social intelligence is the ability to simulate other people, so perhaps that is something that an AI would need to do in order to understand other consciousnesses—running shallow simulations of those other minds.
Well, I apologize that this has not been clear for you. I am somewhat surprised that you can so elegantly summarize my position while simultaneously saying I haven’t made that position, but maybe I’m just a lot, lot worse at expressing myself than I think I am haha.
Sorry, I’m not sure what this is regarding exactly. As in, am I asking Mary questions? Yes. Or am I asking a question about the thought experiment? Also yes. Or if the thought experiment is designed to provide a question as to what qualia is, or an answer? You tell me! I think it reveals something about what qualia is, at least, as the distinction between information about a thing and subjective experience of a thing.
Why is a belief a non-physical thing? It’s just a state within a system, arrangement of neurons, etc. The fact that it is a belief, and therefore something that has physical and real presence, is my whole refutation of Jackson’s view that it is something immeasurable or materially unknowable.