If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren [in China].
The "principle" is that consciousness plays a role in determining behavioral choices. It is not the case that it does "not further participate in causing any other event at all". That is incorrect. Consciousness does cause other events. But that doesn't mean it is somehow outside of physics. It's just at a different level of description, much like how you can talk about hurricanes without getting outside gas molecules and fluid flow. They are higher level, abstract patterns running on the substrate of the underlying implementation.
Consciousness is an algorithm, and that algorithm adds value to the animal that has it. You cannot get as successful behavior without it. That's why it evolves naturally.
(You might want to look up Compatibilism. Deterministics chess-playing programs have "free will" also.)
re epiphenomenalism, I agree with you. I’m not convinced that it is even a physically coherent concept. How could a physical event or process be caused but not further participate in causing any other event at all? It would seem to fly in the face of numerous conservation principles of physics.
I’m not clear on what principle we could expect all naturally evolved intelligent systems to necessarily feature consciousness. On the other hand who knows what features might exist in alien intelligences, as inconceivable to us as our subjectivity might be to them.
At one extreme, the only thing you know is Descartes: you (alone) are conscious.
If you avoid solipsism, then consciousness is almost certainly an expected and necessary part of an evolved complex animal. It's no doubt a spectrum, and humans probably have "the most" consciousness on earth, but it isn't even a single metric: bats have a different first-person experience (flying, sonar), and octopuses even more (potentially self-aware tentacles in a kind of group communal consciousness).
Your theory seems to suggest consciousness as an epiphenomena, and hints at philosophical "zombies". Such theories are almost certainly false.
You might be interested in this interview with a young person who both has such relatively (for her age) conventional beliefs about the climate crisis, along with an awareness that she's developed a psychosis about the end of the world or threats to her personally being imminent. She wrote her undergrad thesis on the distinction between conspiracy theorists who can hold fringe beliefs without it interfering with their everyday lives, and how they contrast with people like herself:https://www.youtube.com/wat...
I don't think your key assumption in the grabby aliens paper is compatible with aliens being similar to us. As far as I can tell, your argument implies that I should update towards *individuals like me* existing early in the universe. If individuals like me are created through predictable civilisation generation processes, then this suggests that such processes may only function early on. However, if the means by which they are suppressed are expansionary alien civilisations then those alien civilisations cannot create many individuals like me, or else once again I would expect to be born much later on, as a member of an expansionary alien civilisation.
One scenario in which it might make sense to include aliens’ welfare in our calculations is when considering action X which would increase our species’ chance of spreading to the stars, but risk destruction of the cosmos with a probability which is acceptable iff one places a sufficiently high value on an alien life.
Hey, congratulations! I love that paper. The argument in it forced me to change my views on the topic. Hopefully you will receive interesting responses from other researchers.
But it's still speculative. Ramking highly means it's attractive to a relatively large number of people.- probably in this case because it's clever and insightful. But there's a bunch of possible explanatiins for why we don't see aliens, so your explanation hardly counts as proven. It's as plausible as any others I've heard, but plausible is all it is.
It probably is somewhat arbitrary given how very little we presently know about the nature and function of consciousness in (earthly) neural processing. Lacking any reason to think otherwise, I imagine that there are innumerable architectures of intelligent control that might evolve in the alien equivalents of our nervous system. Do we have a reason to think that something very like our consciousness would be part of a significant fraction of these architectures? Possibly what we experience as consciousness is so bound up with some exact particulars of the earthly evolutionary path that it’s occurrence elsewhere is astronomically improbable. Unfortunately all we know is that consciousness occurs in one out of one of the evolved apex intelligences that we know about, and that isn’t much to go on. Given the uncertainties I should probably be morally circumspect, so I will make it a policy to treat any aliens I encounter compassionately.
Hmm I already have plenty of reason to support the survival of humanity... and am I even confident humans encountering aliens would be good for those aliens?
"we need to explain why humans have arrived so early in the history of the universe"
No, we don't.
The idea that we have to suggests problems with the assumptions; we cannot possibly have enough data to "know" that we're "too early" or otherwise "need explaining".
(See also [not literally] iiterally everything about the entire discussion including the Fermi Paradox or Great Filter.
If our estimates are drastically off from our observed data, maybe our estimates suck, rather than there being some Mystery Data We're Missing.
Everything I've seen about all the estimates has always been glorified handwaving.)
(Disclosure: I'm perfectly content to assume that aliens exist, and within our light cone; it's a big goddamn space and I see no reason to believe life or sapience are so rare that They Just Don't Happen Much.
Still see no reason to believe any have come to say hi, or to extract our fluids, or are about to destroy us.)
Maybe, in part, it's because we just can't do anything one way or another about such aliens and their feelings? Recall: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference." For what it is worth, I have always felt sorry for the dinosaurs who died 65 million years ago. But I'm not losing any sleep over them.
But..it is true, at bottom I really do not care about even other sentient beings on the planet.
I do sleep soundly at night even with the Taliban running Kabul, or CCP running Tibet.
When I do not sleep soundly, it is due to marital or professional problems.
I don't care about aliens suffering by the billions of beings, perhaps even trillions, across the galaxy. They could all be in the worst agonies...and would I really care?
The "principle" is that consciousness plays a role in determining behavioral choices. It is not the case that it does "not further participate in causing any other event at all". That is incorrect. Consciousness does cause other events. But that doesn't mean it is somehow outside of physics. It's just at a different level of description, much like how you can talk about hurricanes without getting outside gas molecules and fluid flow. They are higher level, abstract patterns running on the substrate of the underlying implementation.
Consciousness is an algorithm, and that algorithm adds value to the animal that has it. You cannot get as successful behavior without it. That's why it evolves naturally.
(You might want to look up Compatibilism. Deterministics chess-playing programs have "free will" also.)
re epiphenomenalism, I agree with you. I’m not convinced that it is even a physically coherent concept. How could a physical event or process be caused but not further participate in causing any other event at all? It would seem to fly in the face of numerous conservation principles of physics.
I’m not clear on what principle we could expect all naturally evolved intelligent systems to necessarily feature consciousness. On the other hand who knows what features might exist in alien intelligences, as inconceivable to us as our subjectivity might be to them.
At one extreme, the only thing you know is Descartes: you (alone) are conscious.
If you avoid solipsism, then consciousness is almost certainly an expected and necessary part of an evolved complex animal. It's no doubt a spectrum, and humans probably have "the most" consciousness on earth, but it isn't even a single metric: bats have a different first-person experience (flying, sonar), and octopuses even more (potentially self-aware tentacles in a kind of group communal consciousness).
Your theory seems to suggest consciousness as an epiphenomena, and hints at philosophical "zombies". Such theories are almost certainly false.
You noted how apocalyptic thinking is surprisingly common among young people:https://twitter.com/robinha...
You might be interested in this interview with a young person who both has such relatively (for her age) conventional beliefs about the climate crisis, along with an awareness that she's developed a psychosis about the end of the world or threats to her personally being imminent. She wrote her undergrad thesis on the distinction between conspiracy theorists who can hold fringe beliefs without it interfering with their everyday lives, and how they contrast with people like herself:https://www.youtube.com/wat...
I don't think your key assumption in the grabby aliens paper is compatible with aliens being similar to us. As far as I can tell, your argument implies that I should update towards *individuals like me* existing early in the universe. If individuals like me are created through predictable civilisation generation processes, then this suggests that such processes may only function early on. However, if the means by which they are suppressed are expansionary alien civilisations then those alien civilisations cannot create many individuals like me, or else once again I would expect to be born much later on, as a member of an expansionary alien civilisation.
One scenario in which it might make sense to include aliens’ welfare in our calculations is when considering action X which would increase our species’ chance of spreading to the stars, but risk destruction of the cosmos with a probability which is acceptable iff one places a sufficiently high value on an alien life.
Fixed; thanks
s/They one were animals/They once were animals/
s/we meet will frontier aliens/we meet will be frontier aliens/
Hey, congratulations! I love that paper. The argument in it forced me to change my views on the topic. Hopefully you will receive interesting responses from other researchers.
But it's still speculative. Ramking highly means it's attractive to a relatively large number of people.- probably in this case because it's clever and insightful. But there's a bunch of possible explanatiins for why we don't see aliens, so your explanation hardly counts as proven. It's as plausible as any others I've heard, but plausible is all it is.
It probably is somewhat arbitrary given how very little we presently know about the nature and function of consciousness in (earthly) neural processing. Lacking any reason to think otherwise, I imagine that there are innumerable architectures of intelligent control that might evolve in the alien equivalents of our nervous system. Do we have a reason to think that something very like our consciousness would be part of a significant fraction of these architectures? Possibly what we experience as consciousness is so bound up with some exact particulars of the earthly evolutionary path that it’s occurrence elsewhere is astronomically improbable. Unfortunately all we know is that consciousness occurs in one out of one of the evolved apex intelligences that we know about, and that isn’t much to go on. Given the uncertainties I should probably be morally circumspect, so I will make it a policy to treat any aliens I encounter compassionately.
Hmm I already have plenty of reason to support the survival of humanity... and am I even confident humans encountering aliens would be good for those aliens?
That's a generic argument against ever having to explain anything, as you can't ever be absolutely SURE it needs to be explained.
"we need to explain why humans have arrived so early in the history of the universe"
No, we don't.
The idea that we have to suggests problems with the assumptions; we cannot possibly have enough data to "know" that we're "too early" or otherwise "need explaining".
(See also [not literally] iiterally everything about the entire discussion including the Fermi Paradox or Great Filter.
If our estimates are drastically off from our observed data, maybe our estimates suck, rather than there being some Mystery Data We're Missing.
Everything I've seen about all the estimates has always been glorified handwaving.)
(Disclosure: I'm perfectly content to assume that aliens exist, and within our light cone; it's a big goddamn space and I see no reason to believe life or sapience are so rare that They Just Don't Happen Much.
Still see no reason to believe any have come to say hi, or to extract our fluids, or are about to destroy us.)
Maybe, in part, it's because we just can't do anything one way or another about such aliens and their feelings? Recall: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference." For what it is worth, I have always felt sorry for the dinosaurs who died 65 million years ago. But I'm not losing any sleep over them.
But..it is true, at bottom I really do not care about even other sentient beings on the planet.
I do sleep soundly at night even with the Taliban running Kabul, or CCP running Tibet.
When I do not sleep soundly, it is due to marital or professional problems.
I don't care about aliens suffering by the billions of beings, perhaps even trillions, across the galaxy. They could all be in the worst agonies...and would I really care?