Suppose someone draws a “personal identity” line to exclude this future sunrise-witnessing person. Then if you claim that, by not anticipating, they are degrading the accuracy of the sunrise-witness’s beliefs, they might reply that you are begging the question.
torekp
Karma: 1,321
I have a closely related objection/clarification. I agree with the main thrust of Rob’s post, but this part:
Presumably the question xlr8harder cares about here isn’t semantic question of how linguistic communities use the word “you”...
Rather, I assume xlr8harder cares about more substantive questions like: (1) If I expect to be uploaded tomorrow, should I care about the upload in the same ways (and to the same degree) that I care about my future biological self? (2) Should I anticipate experiencing what my upload experiences? (3) If the scanning and uploading process requires destroying my biological brain, should I say yes to the procedure?
..strikes me as confused or at least confusing.
Take your chemistry/physics tests example. What does “I anticipate the experience of a sense of accomplishment in answering the chemistry test” mean? Well for one thing, it certainly indicates that you believe the experience is likely to happen (to someone). For another, it often means that you believe it will happen to you—but that invites the semantic question that Rob says this isn’t about. For a third—and I propose that this is a key point that makes us feel there is a “substantive” question here—it indicates that you empathize with this future person who does well on the test.
But I don’t see how empathizing or not-empathizing can be assessed for accuracy. It can be consistent or inconsistent with the things one cares about, which I suppose makes it subject to rational evaluation, but that looks different from accuracy/inaccuracy.
I’m not at all convinced by the claim that <valence is a roughly linear function over included concepts>, if I may paraphrase. After laying out a counterexample, you seem to be constructing a separate family of concepts that better fits a linear model. But (a) this is post-hoc and potentially ad-hoc, and (b) you’ve given us little reason to expect that there will always be such a family of concepts. It would help if you could outline how a privileged set of concepts arises for a given person, that will explain their valences.
Also, your definition of “innate drives” works for the purpose of collecting all valences into a category explained by one basket of root causes. But it’s a diverse basket. I think you’re missing the opportunity to make a distinction—Wanting vs. Liking Revisited—which is useful for understanding human motivations.
When dealing with theology, you need to be careful about invoking common sense. According to https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/tensions-in-calvins-idea-of-predestination/ , Calvin held that God’s destiny for a human being is decided eternally, not within time and prior to that person’s prayer, hard work, etc.
The money (or heaven) is already in the box. Omega (or God) can not change the outcome.
What makes this kind of reasoning work in the real (natural) world is the growth of entropy involved in putting money in boxes, deciding to do so, or thinking about whether the money is there. If we’re taking theology seriously though—or maybe even when we posit an “Omega” with magical sounding powers—we need to wonder whether the usual rules still apply.
I view your final point as crucial. I would put an additional twist on it, though. During the approach to AGI, if takeoff is even a little bit slow, the effective goals of the system can change. For example, most corporations arguably don’t pursue profit exclusively even though they may be officially bound to. They favor executives, board members, and key employees in ways both subtle and obvious. But explicitly programming those goals into an SGD algorithm is probably too blatant to get away with.
In addition to your cases that fail to be explained by the four modes, I submit that Leonard Cohen’s song itself also fails to fit. Roughly speaking, one thread of meaning in these verses is that “(approximately) everybody knows the dice are loaded, but they don’t raise a fuss because they know if they do, they’ll be subjected to an even more unfavorable game.” And likewise for the lost war. A second thread of meaning is that, as pjeby pointed out, people want to be at peace with unpleasant things they can’t personally change. It’s not about trapping the listener into agreeing with the propositions that everyone supposedly knows. Cohen’s protagonist just takes it that the listener already agrees, and uses that to explain his own reaction to the betrayal he feels.
Like Paradiddle, I worry about the methodology, but my worry is different. It’s not just the conclusions that are suspect in my view: it’s the data. In particular, this --
Some people seemed to have multiple views on what consciousness is, in which cases I talked to them longer until they became fairly committed to one main idea.
-- is a serious problem. You are basically forcing your subjects to treat a cluster in thingspace as if it must be definable by a single property or process. Or perhaps they perceive you as urging them to pick a most important property. If I had to pick a single most important property of consciousness, I’d pick affect (responses 4, 5 and 6), but that doesn’t mean I think affect exhausts consciousness. Analogously, if you ask me for the single most important thing about a car, I’ll tell you that it gets one from point A to point B; but this doesn’t mean that’s my definition of “car”.
This is not to deny that “consciousness” is ambiguous! I agree that it is. I’m not sure whether that’s all that problematic, however. There are good reasons for everyday English speakers to group related aspects together. And when philosophers or neuroscientists try to answer questions about consciousness, in its various aspects which raise different questions, they typically clue you in as to which aspects they are addressing.
this [that there is no ground truth as to what you experience] is arguably a pretty well-defined property that’s in contradiction with the idea that the experience itself exists.
I beg to differ. The thrust of Dennett’s statement is easily interpreted as the truth of a description being partially constituted by the subject’s acceptance of the description. E.g., in one of the snippets/bits you cite, “I seem to see a pink ring.” If the subject said “I seem to see a reddish oval”, perhaps that would have been true. But compare:
My freely drinking tea rather than coffee is partially constituted by saying to my host “tea, please.” Yet there is still an actual event of my freely drinking tea. Even though if I had said “coffee, please” I probably would have drunk coffee instead.
We are getting into a zone where it is hard to tell what is a verbal issue and what is a substantive one. (And in my view, that’s because the distinction is inherently fuzzy.) But that’s life.
Fair point about the experience itself vs its description. But note that all the controversy is about the descriptions. “Qualia” is a descriptor, “sensation” is a descriptor, etc. Even “illusionists” about qualia don’t deny that people experience things.
There are many features you get right about the stubbornness of the problem/discussion. Certainly, modulo the choice to stop the count at two camps, you’ve highlighted some crucial facts about these clusters. But now I’m going to complain about what I see as your missteps.
Moreover, even if consciousness is compatible with the laws of physics, … [camp #2 holds] it’s still metaphysically tricky, i.e., it poses a conceptual mystery relative to our current understanding.
I think we need to be careful not to mush together metaphysics and epistemics. A conceptual mystery, a felt lack of explanation—these are epistemic problems. That’s not sufficient reason to infer distinct metaphysical categories. Particular camp #2 philosophers sometimes have arguments that try to go from these epistemic premises, plus additional premises, to a metaphysical divide between mental and physical properties. Those arguments fail, but aside from that, it’s worthwhile to distinguish their starting points from their conclusions.
Secondly, you imply that according to camp #2, statements like “I experienced a headache” cannot be mistaken. As TAG already pointed out, the claim of incorrigibility is not necessary. As soon as one uses a word or concept, one is risking error. Suppose you are at a new restaurant, and you try the soup, and you say, “this soup tastes like chicken.” Your neighbor says, “no, it tastes like turkey.” You think about it, the taste still fresh in your mind, and realize that she is right. It tastes (to you) like turkey, you just misidentified it.
Finally, a bit like shminux, I don’t know which camp I’m in—except that I do, and it’s neither. Call mine camp 1.5 + 3i. It’s sort of in-between the main two (hence 1.5) but accuses both 1 + 2 of creating imaginary barriers (hence the 3i).
The belief in irreducibility is much more of a sine qua non of qualiaphobia,
Can you explain that? It seems that plenty of qualiaphiles believe they are irreducible, epistemically if not metaphysically. (But not all: at least some qualiaphiles think qualia are emergent metaphysically. So, I can’t explain what you wrote by supposing you had a simple typo.)
I think you can avoid the reddit user’s criticism if you go for an intermediate risk averse policy. On that policy, there being at least one world without catastrophe is highly important, but additional worlds also count more heavily than a standard utilitarian would say, up until good worlds approach about half (1/e?) the weight using the Born rule.
However, the setup seems to assume that there is little enough competition that “we” can choose a QRNG approach without being left behind. You touch on related issues when discussing costs, but this merits separate consideration.
“People on the autistic spectrum may also have the experience of understanding other people better than neurotypicals do.”
I think this casts doubt on the alignment benefit. It seems a priori likely that an AI, lacking the relevant evolutionary history, will be in an exaggerated version of the autistic person’s position. The AI will need an explicit model. If in addition the AI has superior cognitive abilities to the humans it’s working with—or expects to become superior—it’s not clear why simulation would be a good approach for it. Yes that works for humans, with their hardware accelerators and their clunky explicit modeling, but...
I read you as saying that simulation is what makes preference satisfaction a natural thing to do. If I misread, please clarify.
Update: John Collins says that “Causal Decision Theory” is a misnomer because (some?) classical formulations make subjunctive conditionals, not causality as such, central. Cited by the Wolfgang Schwarz paper mentioned by wdmcaskill in the Introduction.
I have a terminological question about Causal Decision Theory.
Most often, this [causal probability function] is interpreted in counterfactual terms (so P (S∖A) represents something like the probability of S coming about were I to choose A) but it needn’t be.
Now it seems to me that causation is understood to be antisymmetric, i.e. we can have at most one of “A causes B” and “B causes A”. In contrast, counterfactuals are not antisymmetric, and “if I chose A then my simulation would also do so” and “If my simulation chose A then I would also do so” are both true. Brian Hedden’s Counterfactual Decision Theory seems like a version of FDT.
Maybe I am reading the quoted sentence without taking context sufficiently into account, and I should understand “causal counterfactual” where “counterfactual” was written. Still, in that case, I think it’s worth noting that antisymmetry is a distinguishing mark of CDT in contrast to FDT.
I love #38
A time-traveller from 2030 appears and tells you your plan failed. Which part of your plan do you think is the one …?
And I try to use it on arguments and explanations.
Right, you’re interested in syntactic measures of information, more than a physical one My bad.
the initial conditions of the universe are simpler than the initial conditions of Earth.
This seems to violate a conservation of information principle in quantum mechanics.
On #4, which I agree is important, there seems to be some explanation left implicit or left out.
#4: Middle management performance is inherently difficult to assess. Maze behaviors systematically compound this problem.
But middle managers who are good at producing actual results will therefore want to decrease mazedom, in order that their competence be recognized. Is it, then, that incompetent people will be disproportionately attracted to—and capable of crowding others out from—middle management? That they will be attracted is a no-brainer, but that they will crowd others out seems to depend on further conditions not specified. For example, if an organization lets people advance in two ways, one through middle management, another through technical fields, then it naturally diverts the competent away from middle management. But short of some such mechanism, it seems that mazedom in middle management is up for grabs.
Given the disagreement over what “causality” is, I suspect that different CDT’s might have different tolerances for adding precommitment without spoiling the point of CDT. For an example of a definition of causality that makes interesting impacts on decision theory, see Douglas Kutach, Causation and its Basis in Fundamental Physics. There’s a nice review here. Defining “causation” Kutach’s way would allow both making and keeping precommitments to count as causing good results. It would also at least partly collapse the divergence between CDT and EDT. Maybe completely—I haven’t thought that through yet.