I didn’t read through the math, but appreciate this post. Are you familiar with Douglas Hofstader’s “Metamagical Themas”? It’s a collection of articles he wrote for Scientific American in the early 1980s. I haven’t read it in a while but I remember him arguing persuasively that the right thing to do is cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma. It was a concept he called “superrational” thinking (which I guess now has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality). You’ve generalized this concept beyond superrational thinkers and towards real world cases where even minor correlations may suggest cooperation is the rational strategy.
tyler.seacrest
Karma: 4
I recently found this post and I have been fascinated by it for weeks. It explains so much of what I see in online and academic discourse on consciousness. Roughly I think you could say that Camp #1 are illusionists and Camp #2 are realists, but what traditional labels tend to do is sort people by what they believe. The Camp #1 / Camp #2 distinction sorts people based on their intuitions, what they feel when they introspect. The difference is critical.
I’m very curious how those differences may come about. I’m a physicalist but in Camp #2, and despite great effort I still have no idea what Dennett means when he says “I don’t deny consciousness, but I deny qualia”. If find this bizarre. I’m sure Camp #1 folk would find it equally strange that no matter how they try they just don’t get what is this qualia stuff everyone is talking about. It’s possible people are born into the camps that they end up in, perhaps even have neurological differences that make them experience the world in different ways. However, I think it is also very possible just years of belief actually changes your intuition about things. For example, if you read Dennett when you’re young, that might actually cause you to see the world a different way. But it’s not just that Camp #1 folk are deliberately obtuse, or that Camp #2 folk are superstitious. There is something deeper going on.
Thanks Rafael for the post and would look forward to other consciousness thoughts from you.