The philosophy thread general discussion

"Who the heck is Steven Pinker"

He's a cognitive psychologist who, among many other things, wrote "The Better Angels of our Nature'' which provided statistical and historical evidence that violence has been declining in society for over 400 years. He gives reasons why this might be the case (the Enlightenment, expanding the rule of law, better education, economic stability, etc.). He also wrote "Enlightenment Now which argues that the quality of human life has improved over the same time period. Discloure: I read "The Better Angels of our Nature" and liked it, I haven't read "Enlightenment Now." Obviously he's a strong supporter of the effect of the European Enlightenment on world history.

In what context did you hear about him?

Edited by DeMarquis on Apr 23rd 2021 at 5:20:59 AM

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal's most recent strip showcases a robot specifically programmed to mess with philosophers.

In which a would-be philosopher loses a philosophical argument to literally nobody.

Edited by M84 on May 23rd 2021 at 11:53:12 PM

One might make the sarcastic observation that this is literally all of philosophy: arguing with nobody about nothing. More on point, the robot is making an excellent argument for solipsism.

and sophistry. Gorgas would be proud

"Who is this "I" that thinks? What is thought?" Descartes argument never really held up.

Actually, a solipsist would insist they the do exist, just that nothing else does. This robot is arguing that it itself does not exist.

Edited by DeMarquis on May 23rd 2021 at 12:06:23 PM

There's also the question of whether a computer program that simulates interaction with human beings, no matter how sophisticated, is thinking or following rote instructions. Then we must naturally ask the same of ourselves, which goes back to the free will debate we were having.

Edit: What I'm saying, De Marquis, is that the computer believing that it does not exist supports a solipsist worldview in which the interrogator is the only thinking entity. Thus, the computer and the interrogator both agree that the computer is not real.

Edit 2: @Raichu: What I'm saying is that decoherence presents a potential solution to the dilemma between Bell's Theorem and the determinacy of free will. The essential randomness of quantum events is smoothly absorbed into the enormously complex structure that is the brain and in that mixture, the most likely outcome always holds. There is never any "collapse of the waveform"; that is an illusion created by our observations.

Edited by Fighteer on May 23rd 2021 at 12:25:09 PM

What do you mean, Descartes's argument never held up?

"I think, therefore I am" is impossible to deny. You can't deny that you think, although you may think that the "you" that necessarily exists is not "you" in some other sense that might be worth caring about more, it is a thinking entity of some sort that you know must exist. We could argue about what really constitutes thought or conscious experience or whatever, but it's impossible to legitimately deny that there is something. If you're participating in a conversation about the topic, you're faced with incontrovertible evidence of your own existence. (Whereas others in a conversation with you can't actually know with absolute certainty that you exist or can think.) If you truly don't believe you exist, you can't actually think or act or believe, because all of those things betray your own existence to you, and aren't things you can intend to do without presupposing that existence and acting upon it. All you can do is define "I", "exist", or "think" differently than Descartes did, but you could update his argument with new terms and it would work. I really, genuinely, cannot understand how it possibly could ever not work.

It's also not really a question of if the machine is thinking or following rote instructions; the problem of other minds isn't a question about "free will" but about "will" at all. It's interiority that is relevant. A computer with interiority thinks even if it's deterministic, and a computer without interiority, whether deterministic or indeterministic, does not.

(And see, this is part of why I'm so critical of you guys' conception of free will; people insisting my idea of free will is only an idea of will, keep mixing up the implications of free will with the implications of will at all because that's what free will actually means. Incompatibilism is built on a specious accidental motte and bailey. It draws a distinction between "choice" and "free choice" based on some specious things about causality, instead of actual limitations on agency, so that determinism is necessarily incompatible with "free choice", and thus with free will. The ability to choose is no longer sufficient to have free will. But this is an artificial, unintuitive distinction. It sounds good when you make it as a point in an argument, but it doesn't really overwrite your actual intuition, and so people later reconflate "choice" and "free choice", "will" and "free will", and conclude determinism is antithetical to "will" at all, and presume with that view in practice, as it comes to judging morality or consciousness or hypothetical scenarios. The distinction is forgotten until you need to remember it for a discussion where the incompatibilist premise is challenged, I keep seeing this happen, including here, I am telling you guys.)

I like SMBC but this comic only works if you interpret the robot as a liar. It can't actually genuinely think that it does not exist as it says it does. If it doesn't believe that it exists, it can't believe statements like "I was programmed" which presuppose its existence. At best it just holds inconsistent views, and thus only say untrue things unintentionally, but I really don't know how you could possibly truly deny your own existence and then even think to attempt to act.

@Fighteer's edit 2: Yeah, but you're still wrong about it allowing for local and real outcomes, which looking back is the main thing I responded to about it.

This isn't anything special about decoherence, is the thing. It's pretty much a feature of any interpretation of quantum mechanics, because the apparent functional determinism of macroscopic events is observable fact. Whether quantum systems decohere, or wave-functions actually do collapse, isn't directly relevant, regular statistics would smooth all that variation out by the time you get to the level of the brain anyways. That said, yeah decoherence is as far as I'm aware a pretty sensible interpretation to hold and does nicely explain how quantum indeterminism gets absorbed into larger systems that may as well be deterministic.

Bell's Theorem doesn't present any real conflict with the determinism of free will because I think we all agree quantum randomness doesn't really aggregate to the level of affecting human decision, yeah? As I recall I only brought it up because I was trying to explain what the deal is with "local realism" and how it's not generally subscribed to by modern physicists. (It's a little amusing to be the one making the case that determinism is not the mainstream opinion, in physics, as a determinist.)

Something about him blaming "Leftist Academia" over so many of his fans being alt righters or somesuch. What beckoned for my attention is that he is a Canadian psychologist and I was like damn, what the hell is wrong with psychology in Canada, you got two nutjobs now

I was thinking about divine command theory. It's an example of what I'll call empirical moral theories. There's is something in the world (God)that you have to observe to be on firm moral ground. There are also logical moral theories. These claim that you can just reason your way to the correct moral principles. Moral truths are like mathematical truths. And the current moral theory might have something like Duch book arguments for it.

If either of these is true, that is a fact about the kind of question we are asking. An AI could be a value empiricist even if morality isn't empirical. Such an AI won't accept anything else as an answer, because it is simply asking a different question than us.

I don't think morality falls under either of these. I don't think we are looking for an empirical reference or that morality is just some ideal universal treaty or super rationality.

The latter two sound like they are important questions, but I don't think it covers what people mean by "what is the right thing to do?" It seems like anything like that could say that a universe inhabited by emotionless paperclip-maximizers and pebble-sorters could be fine. Like maybe they just have a very good arrangement where they don't waste their resources fighting each other.

An idea I've seen termed, "idealizing subjectivism" says there is some principled way to sort out the mess of human values or at least an individual's values. I've also seen this called "coherent extrapolated volition". This is in some ways a weaker claim. An alien's CEV probably has little to do with mine or vice versa. On the other hand, it factors in things we care about.

@Raichu KFM: Looks like I missed the two responses to my previous post, for which, I apologize. Allow me to try to make up for that now:

""I think, therefore I am" is impossible to deny. You can't deny that you think, although you may think that the "you" that necessarily exists is not "you" in some other sense that might be worth caring about more, it is a thinking entity of some sort that you know must exist."

You answered your own question. "I think, therefore I am" has two parts: one part recognizes the experience of thinking, the other attributes this experience to something called "I". It is the second part that is disputable. There is no way to know that you exist, even as a thinking entity, if we define "entity" as an independent agent of some kind. For all you know, your experience of thinking is an illusion created by some other entity (perhaps you are a dream, or a subroutine, or an extrusion of a higher dimensional being). The "you" that you think exists is based on your memories, which have no way of knowing are accurate or real.

"All you can do is define "I", "exist", or "think" differently than Descartes did, but you could update his argument with new terms and it would work."

That depends on what you mean by "work". As he stated it, it cannot be considered a complete argument independent of additional assumptions.

"It's interiority that is relevant. A computer with interiority thinks even if it's deterministic, and a computer without interiority, whether deterministic or indeterministic, does not."

Please define what you mean by "interiority". If you mean the subjective experience of thinking, we have no way of knowing that computers possess that. Also, please explain the logical connection between what you call 'interiority" and what you call "will". I suspect that I will end up agreeing with you, but I dont want to make any assumptions about your argument.

As for the rest of it, I know of no definition of "determined" that is compatible with "free", so the two seem mutually exclusive to me.

@Aszur: "Something about him blaming "Leftist Academia" over so many of his fans being alt righters or somesuch."

Didn't hear about that, got a link for me?

@Evans Verres: "It's an example of what I'll call empirical moral theories. There's is something in the world (God)that you have to observe to be on firm moral ground. There are also logical moral theories. These claim that you can just reason your way to the correct moral principles."

If someone is going to claim that moral differences are based on empiricism, then they have to carefully point out all the objective evidence that they think leads to a definite moral conclusion. I've never seen any. Likewise, if anyone wants to claim that moral distinctions can be derived by logic, then they have to illustrate every step in their chain of reasoning, including their premise. I haven't seen any compelling examples. Every moral argument I have ever seen begins with some sort of umproven (and unprovable) assumption of some kind (such as "it is better to exist than not to exist" for example). When people ordinarily present moral arguments, they invariably take the form of "If you believe in X (some core value) then in Y situation the only sound conclusion is Z."

"An idea I've seen termed, "idealizing subjectivism" says there is some principled way to sort out the mess of human values or at least an individual's values. I've also seen this called "coherent extrapolated volition"."

Sounds interesting, got a link or a reference we can use to read up on it? I think that the only way to "sort out the mess" of conflicting human values is to abandon most of them and become fanatically devoted to one over-riding narrow set of principles, which is termed "absolutism." Historically, this has not ended well.

The problem is that human beings have emotional needs (ie, fundamental values) that conflict with each other, thus no final reconciliation is either possible or desirable.

Edited by DeMarquis on Jul 11th 2021 at 7:49:37 AM

I firmly believe that absolute moral principles do not exist — indeed cannot. The universe as a whole couldn't care less whether some arrogant apes on a backwater planet define certain things as "good" and others as "bad".

However, in order for us arrogant apes to get along with each other, we must agree on (or at least enforce) some of those principles. The problem then becomes deciding which principles those are, and this has been the self-assigned "job" of philosophers for thousands of years.

My beliefs are conflicted. I believe that on a personal level we should seek to have healthy relationships and contribute in a positive way to our societies. Note of course that "healthy" and "positive" are undefined priors, as De Marquis calls out in his post. To one person, "positive" means recycling trash and eating organic food; to another, it means owning as many guns as possible and driving all the people who look funny out of town.

However, at larger scales our morality can only be that which allows human beings and/or consciousness as a whole to continue existing in the universe. Anything else is axiomatically self-destructive.

At a macroscopic level, I believe that morality is evolutionary: that it is not a cause but rather an effect — an emergent phenomenon if you will — of societies figuring out how to live together and survive. An enlightened, peaceful society that is destroyed by an aggressive, expansionist society is gone. Its morality failed the test of survival. Archaeologists may dig up its writings and say, "Yep, they were nice people. Sad that didn't work out."

Another way of putting it is that the only viable moral framework is that which leads to species survival, but it's not as simple as that. Morality has layers. Going deeper, the only viable moral framework is that which leads a society to survive within the species. Going deeper, the only viable moral framework is that which leads a group (race, culture, tribe, etc.) to survive within its larger society. Going deeper, the only viable moral framework is that which allows an individual to survive and prosper within their group.

We can see that morality can only be empirical in the sense that it survives and leads whoever follows it to pass it on. It is evolutionary but not predetermined (well, it might be depending on how that free will argument works out, but whatever).

I view Less Wrong as an interesting experiment in ethical reasoning and many of the insights that I've read from it are valuable, but it has devolved over the years into a self-righteous circle jerk.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 11th 2021 at 8:06:46 AM

though "logical moral theories" does sound like the kind of think guys like Less Wrong would get behind. Make of that what you will.

Things get interesting when one proposes that there may be multiple sets of moral frameworks which could equally promote human success and survival, but these alternative moral frameworks are incompatible with each other, requiring that humanity pick one. What happens if we can't?

I happen to believe, for instance, that this describes the situation we are currently in.

Edited by DeMarquis on Jul 11th 2021 at 8:20:23 AM

Less Wrong are a bunch of pretentious asshats. The "Roko's Basilisk" shitshow highlighted this.

"I firmly believe that absolute moral principles do not exist — indeed cannot. The universe as a whole couldn't care less whether some arrogant apes on a backwater planet define certain things as "good" and others as "bad"."

This really only makes sense if morality is something you need to observe. If Morality is just really advance game theory or just us get our spaghetti code sorted out, it isn't an issue if the universe doesn't care.

I, unfortunately, don't have much for scholarly links. Both of these terms were made up for the posts I saw them in. Googling "Idealizing subjectivism" got me some results about ideal observer theory, but I think this is supposed to be more involved than that. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FSmPtu7foXwNYpWiB/on-the-limits-of-idealized-values

What would you do if you got a fully material account of "conscious" human behavior? That is, what if you got an account of why we report having subjective experiences and argue about the nature of subjectivity? There is something going on in our heads that we are reporting as qualia. Would you say I guess I'm a p-zombie or would you say I guess I was wrong about qualia?

You mean if someone proved to the satisfaction of the scientific community that consciousness is completely deterministic, predictable, and based in the physical world? I would be unsurprised: this is what I currently suspect. I would be surprised that we have eliminated all uncertainty, however. Quantum information theory suggests that this may be impossible.

My main concern would be that entities of various sorts would seek to use this information to program human behavior for unscrupulous purposes... more than they already do, at least.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 15th 2021 at 1:04:01 PM

I don't see how we could ever prove that. We can't tell if anything is conscious other than ourselves. How could we tell whether the science experiment had produced something that was actually conscious, or just something that looked like it was from outside? The best we could do is to show that we can make things which look like they're conscious to an external viewer.

And even if we somehow proved that this thing we had made was conscious, that wouldn't mean that its consciousness existed only in its material structure. We would only know that there are physical processes we can perform which lead to a consciousness arising. But we already know that: it happens every time someone has a baby. Any non-materialist understanding of consciousness will certainly have an explanation for embryos becoming conscious children. (Classic explanations include God intervening to give the child awareness, or there being a bunch of souls who keep entering new bodies whenever their old ones die.) Almost any such explanation will be able to explain how this "artificial" thing became conscious.

Personally, I don't think consciousness can be a consequence of the material universe. I grant that a materialist universe could make something that looked conscious to external observers. For all I know, that's all that's happening with every other human in the world apart from me. But I know that I am actually aware of myself, and awareness is something that is fundamentally not material.

Put another way, if matter alone could make something that looked like it was conscious, it still won't actually become conscious just because a few atoms are moving in an interesting way. To suggest that waving atoms around in the right way can summon consciousness seems similar to the magicians who thought that if they used the right candles and chants they could summon a ghost!

Edited by pi4t on Sep 16th 2021 at 4:02:17 AM

Those are all traditional arguments in favor on non-materialism, but the problem is that they apply equally well to all qualia whatsoever, not just self-awareness. My experience of the color orange, for example. You can't know that I experience orange in the same way that you do, and we can never prove that the subjective experience of orange arises from material causes alone. This may not bother you, perhaps you believe that all experience arises at least in part from non-material causes. But it does make certain findings in neuropsychology hard to interpret. We know that what happens in or to the brain affects conscious experience, so it would appear to be creating those experiences. For example, certain kinds of brain injury can eliminate color perception. That makes it seem as if the brain is creating color. The same sort of thing happens with consciousness. Why should we not come to the same conclusion?

"But I know that I am actually aware of myself, and awareness is something that is fundamentally not material."

I believe that you would have a very difficult time supporting that statement with objective fact or logic. Why should this be true?

@pi4t

I'm suggesting something else. The idea is science shows that humans insist they have subjective experiences for material reasons. So even if there is something immaterial there, it isn't the cause of these declarations.

The question is if you got this result, would you decide "well I guess this is what qualia are" or would you decide you are just a passive observer. It seems that my brain is inclined to go with the former, and it is the one making the decisions.

It is my personal belief that our subjective experience of consciousness is inseparable from the material fact of consciousness: we could not choose to be other than what we are and we perceive ourselves as exercising free will whether we actually are or not.

It is not useful to treat ourselves as automatons even if science proves beyond a doubt that we are.

Whether or not self-consciousness comes entirely from material causes or not doesn't seem like a fundamental question to me. That is, the nature of consciousness wouldn't change no matter what the causes were—it would still be self-consciousness (unlike, say, free will).

@DeMarquis: I disagree with your argument in two connected ways.

1) The conclusion that "the brain is creating colour" seems to be an invalid logical conclusion. Or possibly conflating terminology, depending on what you mean by "creating". I grant that the brain has an influence on colour; indeed, it has an influence on consciousness too. But just because damage to the brain can influence our perception on colour doesn't mean that it creates that perception! We also cease to perceive colour (or anything else) when we lose consciousness, so we might equally say that our consciousness "creates" colour. If we're in a dark room then we see in black and white, so we could say that light "creates" colour. A more accurate conclusion is that colour is created by an interaction between the brain, consciousness, light entering the eye and perhaps other factors too.

2) This error also exists in your attempt to draw the same conclusion about consciousness. You state correctly that consciousness can be influenced by the state of the brain. But to conclude that A is created by B simply because it's influenced by B is clearly invalid. On that basis we would conclude that disease is created by bad ventilation, that a signal could make a train move without an engine, and that houses create their occupants. Since consciousness also seems to be able to influence the brain to produce certain chemicals, we might even conclude that consciousness creates the brain! Since these conclusions are clearly ridiculous, why can we conclude that consciousness is created by the brain from the fact that it's influenced by it?

Normally, if you claim that A is created by B, you'd be expected to be able to give the mechanism by which it was created, to avoid precisely this error. Not only have I never heard any plausible mechanism by which a brain could generate consciousness, but such a mechanism seems fundamentally impossible - making a real consciousness appear by arranging blobs of matter correctly seems similar to conjuring a real object into existence by writing out a series of equations. That's a difficulty which you need to address before you can even begin to claim that any particular consciousness is created by a particular brain, and it seems insurmountable to me.

Just to be clear on my own position: I think that our consciousness is something supernatural (or perhaps I should say supermaterial, since it's clearly a part of "nature" in the broader sense). Although our consciousness is housed in our brain, and may well fundamentally require a brain to work (so you can't be conscious without a functioning one) it's outside the material world and comes from a different source. (I further hold that this source is God, but that's outside the scope of the current discussion). There may well be other conscious beings which are not composed of matter at all, whose consciousness does not require a physical brain. (Again, I further hold that there actually are such beings: angels, demons, God, etc. But again, outside the scope of this discussion.)

Edited by pi4t on Sep 17th 2021 at 6:26:01 AM

You are making an argument from ignorance. Just because it's difficult for you to imagine something doesn't make that thing false. You are also committing a related fallacy: assuming that because we do not currently have a perfect scientific model of consciousness we will never have such a model. Further, you are shifting the burden of proof from "generally agreed upon by knowledgeable people" to "satisfactory to me".

Without intending to dunk on your faith, you have revealed a portion of your reasoning. Since you already accept the existence of supernatural phenomena, it is less difficult for you to conceive of consciousness as supernatural (or at least outside the magisterium of deterministic phenomena, which is the same thing no matter how you word it).

Meanwhile, no worthwhile scientist would ever declare a problem unsolvable and ascribe the answer to God. Okay, fine, Isaac Newton did that, but we've moved beyond the limitations he was working with during his time.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 17th 2021 at 9:45:09 AM

Yeah I mean we know brains can generate consciousness cos we can look at them doing it.

You can't go "well, there must be some other mechanism here because the thing that is clearly happening right in front of me is impossible, because reasons".

Why is it impossible? why can't a network of electrical signals produce consciousness in the way they blatantly do?