In physics, I got a BS in ’81, a MS in ’84, and published two peer-reviewed journal articles in ’03 & ’06. I’m not tracking the latest developments in physics very closely, but what I’m about to tell you is very old standard physics that I’m quite sure hasn’t changed. Even so, it seems to be something many people just don’t get. So let me explain it.
They have a lawlike connection to other properties. Which lawlike connections you choose to call causes isn't (at least obviously) handed to you by the universe.
Basically, the universe is presented to us as a series of events and we postulate laws connecting these events together. Given kinds of events A, B (say A= yelling "Ohh shit", B= colliding with another car and C= getting a jolt to the neck) we normally check which of A, B cause C by considering scenarios where A or B occurs on it's own and seeing if C still happens (Since car crashes without any pre-crash swearing still result in a jolt but swears without a collision don't we conclude it is the collision that causes the jolt).
This simply procedure runs into problems when the events A, B only occur together. We can't say (IMO doesn't even make sense to ask) which of brain state or mental state causes the future brain state because we never observe one without the other.
I interpreted Robin's reply to AG as saying that we shouldn't let our values depend on the answers to such questions
I can understand that, based on the first sentence about it being harder to discover what you want if you assume you must to do it by means of unscientific constructs. I don't know what Robin was getting at with that sentence.
Consciousness is different from evolution, or viscosity, or carbon in that those concepts all help us make predictions, and we can judge theories about them by testing those predictions. But at least some important questions about consciousness seem to be "non-empirical" in the sense that they don't seem to be relevant to predictions and can't be tested by any observations or experiments we can conceivably do on a physical system. For example, the question of which of my Options 1-5 generates the most experience, or the question (in AG's opening comment) of whether ems are really conscious.
I interpreted Robin's reply to AG as saying that we shouldn't let our values depend on the answers to such questions, and I wanted to challenge that.
I interpret Robin as saying just that consciousness is almost certainly a physical phenomenon, just like everything else. It doesn't seem to be a claim that you shouldn't value consciousness. It certainly seems plausible to me that we will one day be able to create good conceptual models that successfully describe consciousness, capturing what we care about and excluding what we don't, that we can extrapolate to get a better understanding of what else is and isn't conscious. And that such understanding won't require positing new kinds of matter or anything of the kind.
In this view, consciousness really exists in the same way that evolution, or viscosity, or carbon really exist. But until we have a similarly precise definition of consciousness, you can perfectly well make your best guess as to what is and isn't conscious, you don't have to (and shouldn't) assume consciousness is undefinable until proven otherwise.
Am I wrong in thinking that much of this comment thread is semantic, a debate around what it means to be "physical" and in the realm of "physics"? Feelings need to be encoded some-where and from some-thing so in principle wouldn't a sufficiently large definition of "physics" cover that? That seems trivial. Or is someone claiming feelings don't have any underlying structure? That seems crazy.
But he's not telling you or ems to give up acting on illusion. Only that illusion provides no way of explaining real phenomena.
Let's say, following Hanson's analogy, that we want to understand how you choose or chose a mate. Let's say you think you're looking for magic. If we maintain that the explanation shouldn't invoke magic, it doesn't say we can specify a way for you to choose that doesn't, subjectively, involve looking for magic.
I'm taking issue with "But you make the problem harder if you insist that those answers must depend on distinctions you have no way to observe or empirically infer, and have no evidence that they even exist." The implied advice here is to give up such dependencies, and that's what I'm arguing against.
My values seem to depend on the idea of different physical systems generating different amounts of experience. I don't know if ultimately that really makes sense but I'm not sure enough that it doesn't to give up trying to figure out the answer. A more reasonable analogy is If I had a preference to marry a magical spouse, then I'd want a higher level of confidence that magic really doesn't exist before giving up looking for magic in our world.
You might as well claim magic exists because you find yourself with a preference to marry a magical spouse, and are struggling to figure out who is magical.
I'm uncertain about my preferences in these examples because (in part) I want to pick the system that "generates the most experiences" which seems to be a non-physical concept that I don't know how to observe or empirically infer.
If your values are not similar to mine in this regard, then I'd take a different approach in discussing this with you, but you still haven't answered my initial question of how you'd approach the problem of ranking these choices, so I really don't know. To try this one more time, why are you uncertain about your preferences in this situation?
None of the examples you gave include apparently non-physical concepts. They are all clearly physical situations where many of us are uncertain about our preferences.
I was trying to point out that it's not some people "insist" on having values that depend on apparently non-physical concepts, such as "this system generates more experiences than that system", but rather we already have values like this. Until someone shows that "generates more experiences" does not make sense and can never be made sense of (or otherwise conclusively shows that we don't or shouldn't have values like this), it seems better to keep the dependencies and wait for a future resolution, than to zero out those parts of our values because we don't currently know what to do with them.
It is easy to imagine strange situations where people have trouble knowing what they'd prefer. Doesn't mean anything mystical or non physical is going on there.
I thought you might make that choice, which is why I asked for a ranking of the options (e.g., what would you choose if Option #1 wasn't available). It seems unlikely to me that options 2-5 are all completely valueless or equally valuable, so even if you'd pick Option #1 as your first choice, ranking the remaining options still seems to require distinctions that we don't know how to observe or empirically infer.
A strong reason to suspect that duplicate experiences shouldn't be discounted to 0 is that we don't seem to mind that copies of ourselves in other quantum worlds (or far away from us in the same world if we're living in a spatially infinite universe) are having the same experiences as us.
Talking about future evolution doesn't seem directly relevant, since this thread is about trying to figure out our own values, not the values of hypothetical people who evolved under different selective pressures. Aside from that, I don't see why an em who would choose #2 over #1 would be evolutionarily disfavored, since he would be just as motivated to work hard to earn money for a good retirement, and you'd find more copies of him in retirement.
Option #1 seems the safe choice, and the one that should be more selected by evolutionary pressures. I'm not sure I should care about exactly the same experience being repeated, relative to having new experiences.
That's not such a simple question.
They have a lawlike connection to other properties. Which lawlike connections you choose to call causes isn't (at least obviously) handed to you by the universe.
Basically, the universe is presented to us as a series of events and we postulate laws connecting these events together. Given kinds of events A, B (say A= yelling "Ohh shit", B= colliding with another car and C= getting a jolt to the neck) we normally check which of A, B cause C by considering scenarios where A or B occurs on it's own and seeing if C still happens (Since car crashes without any pre-crash swearing still result in a jolt but swears without a collision don't we conclude it is the collision that causes the jolt).
This simply procedure runs into problems when the events A, B only occur together. We can't say (IMO doesn't even make sense to ask) which of brain state or mental state causes the future brain state because we never observe one without the other.
I interpreted Robin's reply to AG as saying that we shouldn't let our values depend on the answers to such questions
I can understand that, based on the first sentence about it being harder to discover what you want if you assume you must to do it by means of unscientific constructs. I don't know what Robin was getting at with that sentence.
Consciousness is different from evolution, or viscosity, or carbon in that those concepts all help us make predictions, and we can judge theories about them by testing those predictions. But at least some important questions about consciousness seem to be "non-empirical" in the sense that they don't seem to be relevant to predictions and can't be tested by any observations or experiments we can conceivably do on a physical system. For example, the question of which of my Options 1-5 generates the most experience, or the question (in AG's opening comment) of whether ems are really conscious.
I interpreted Robin's reply to AG as saying that we shouldn't let our values depend on the answers to such questions, and I wanted to challenge that.
I interpret Robin as saying just that consciousness is almost certainly a physical phenomenon, just like everything else. It doesn't seem to be a claim that you shouldn't value consciousness. It certainly seems plausible to me that we will one day be able to create good conceptual models that successfully describe consciousness, capturing what we care about and excluding what we don't, that we can extrapolate to get a better understanding of what else is and isn't conscious. And that such understanding won't require positing new kinds of matter or anything of the kind.
In this view, consciousness really exists in the same way that evolution, or viscosity, or carbon really exist. But until we have a similarly precise definition of consciousness, you can perfectly well make your best guess as to what is and isn't conscious, you don't have to (and shouldn't) assume consciousness is undefinable until proven otherwise.
Am I wrong in thinking that much of this comment thread is semantic, a debate around what it means to be "physical" and in the realm of "physics"? Feelings need to be encoded some-where and from some-thing so in principle wouldn't a sufficiently large definition of "physics" cover that? That seems trivial. Or is someone claiming feelings don't have any underlying structure? That seems crazy.
But he's not telling you or ems to give up acting on illusion. Only that illusion provides no way of explaining real phenomena.
Let's say, following Hanson's analogy, that we want to understand how you choose or chose a mate. Let's say you think you're looking for magic. If we maintain that the explanation shouldn't invoke magic, it doesn't say we can specify a way for you to choose that doesn't, subjectively, involve looking for magic.
I'm taking issue with "But you make the problem harder if you insist that those answers must depend on distinctions you have no way to observe or empirically infer, and have no evidence that they even exist." The implied advice here is to give up such dependencies, and that's what I'm arguing against.
My values seem to depend on the idea of different physical systems generating different amounts of experience. I don't know if ultimately that really makes sense but I'm not sure enough that it doesn't to give up trying to figure out the answer. A more reasonable analogy is If I had a preference to marry a magical spouse, then I'd want a higher level of confidence that magic really doesn't exist before giving up looking for magic in our world.
What precise Hanson claim are you taking issue with?
You might as well claim magic exists because you find yourself with a preference to marry a magical spouse, and are struggling to figure out who is magical.
I'm uncertain about my preferences in these examples because (in part) I want to pick the system that "generates the most experiences" which seems to be a non-physical concept that I don't know how to observe or empirically infer.
If your values are not similar to mine in this regard, then I'd take a different approach in discussing this with you, but you still haven't answered my initial question of how you'd approach the problem of ranking these choices, so I really don't know. To try this one more time, why are you uncertain about your preferences in this situation?
None of the examples you gave include apparently non-physical concepts. They are all clearly physical situations where many of us are uncertain about our preferences.
I was trying to point out that it's not some people "insist" on having values that depend on apparently non-physical concepts, such as "this system generates more experiences than that system", but rather we already have values like this. Until someone shows that "generates more experiences" does not make sense and can never be made sense of (or otherwise conclusively shows that we don't or shouldn't have values like this), it seems better to keep the dependencies and wait for a future resolution, than to zero out those parts of our values because we don't currently know what to do with them.
It is easy to imagine strange situations where people have trouble knowing what they'd prefer. Doesn't mean anything mystical or non physical is going on there.
I thought you might make that choice, which is why I asked for a ranking of the options (e.g., what would you choose if Option #1 wasn't available). It seems unlikely to me that options 2-5 are all completely valueless or equally valuable, so even if you'd pick Option #1 as your first choice, ranking the remaining options still seems to require distinctions that we don't know how to observe or empirically infer.
A strong reason to suspect that duplicate experiences shouldn't be discounted to 0 is that we don't seem to mind that copies of ourselves in other quantum worlds (or far away from us in the same world if we're living in a spatially infinite universe) are having the same experiences as us.
Talking about future evolution doesn't seem directly relevant, since this thread is about trying to figure out our own values, not the values of hypothetical people who evolved under different selective pressures. Aside from that, I don't see why an em who would choose #2 over #1 would be evolutionarily disfavored, since he would be just as motivated to work hard to earn money for a good retirement, and you'd find more copies of him in retirement.
Option #1 seems the safe choice, and the one that should be more selected by evolutionary pressures. I'm not sure I should care about exactly the same experience being repeated, relative to having new experiences.