Search Ideas
This works if the tests are identical. What happens if idea A passes test 1 but fails test 2, while idea B passes test 2 but fails test 1?
Rational Decision-Making
It’s rational to adopt only those ideas which, as written, don’t have pending criticisms, and to reject ideas that do.
If an idea, as written, has no pending criticisms, it’s rational to adopt it and irrational to reject it. What reason could you have to reject it? If it has no pending criticisms, then either no reasons to reject it (ie, criticisms) have been suggested or all suggested reasons have been addressed already.
If an idea, as written, does have pending criticisms, it’s irrational to adopt it and rational to reject it – by reference to those criticisms. What reason could you have to ignore the pending criticisms and adopt it anyway? After all, the previous paragraph applies to pending criticisms, too.
See also:
Rational Decision-Making
It is rational to adopt only those ideas which, as written, don’t have pending criticisms, and to reject ideas that do.
If an idea, as written, has no pending criticisms, it’s rational to adopt it and irrational to reject it. What reason could you have to reject it? If it has no pending criticisms, then either 1) no reasons to reject it (ie, criticisms) have been suggested or 2) all suggested reasons have been addressed already.
If an idea, as written, does have pending criticisms, it’s irrational to adopt it and rational to reject it – by reference to those criticisms. What reason could you have to ignore the pending criticisms and adopt it anyway? After all, the previous paragraph applies to pending criticisms.
See also:
The evidential standard seems asymmetric.
You have said that there ultimately cannot be a purely behavioral criterion for consciousness, because what matters is an explanation of the underlying program (#5693). But at the same time, apparently rigid or “blatantly robotic” behavior is allowed to count as evidence against consciousness.
In the other direction, apparently flexible, sophisticated or sentient-like animal behavior does not seem able to count correspondingly in favor of consciousness, because it could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.
If behavior alone cannot establish sentience because we need to understand the underlying processing, I don’t see why apparently robotic behavior should by itself count more readily toward insentience. Unless there is already an independent reason to think phenomenal experience requires universal creativity, the evidential standard seems to favor insentience in advance.
I agree that this is not “learning” in the special Deutschian sense of universal knowledge creation. I was using “learning” in the ordinary biological sense of experience-dependent changes in processing and behavior.
In fact, the passage you link makes that distinction explicitly: Deutsch allows that the robot’s useful change can be called learning, while denying that it constitutes genuine creation of new knowledge.
That distinction is actually part of my point. I’m not claiming continuity in universal creativity between humans and other animals. I’m pointing to continuity in the older, non-universal capacities (such as sensory, nociceptive, affective and ordinary learning processes). Whether those processes can support phenomenal experience is precisely what is under discussion.
I also wonder whether your note here should be a criticism rather than a comment. As I understand Veritula, an outstanding criticism makes the parent idea problematic and therefore not rationally adoptable, whereas comments are neutral.
A suggestion that an idea could be phrased more simply seems like a useful comment, but unless the wording actually makes the content of the claim ambiguous or substantively defective, I don’t see why it should count as a reason to reject the idea itself.
I initially wondered whether you were right that I could simplify this, but I think the distinction is necessary here. Writing “they … feel pain” would already assume part of the conclusion under dispute: that animal nociceptive processing is accompanied by phenomenal pain.
By “sensory, affective, nociceptive and learning mechanisms” I was trying to refer to processes we can identify without assuming that they involve conscious experience. The wording is less simple, but in this case I think the precision actually matters.
I agree of course that consciousness, if computational, need not depend on neurons as a particular material substrate. But that is different from saying that the organization and activity implemented by those neurons tell us nothing.
The article you link makes this distinction itself: substrate independence means that most details of the substrate do not matter; what matters is the relevant pattern or structure of information processing. Studying homologous neural systems can give us evidence about exactly that organization and processing.
So my claim is not “they have similar neurons, therefore they have similar experiences.” It is that there is evolutionary continuity not only in the neural substrate, but also in how systems involved in sensory, nociceptive and affective processing are organized, what signals they process, and how they interact with other systems.
That seems evidentially relevant to what information processing is occurring. Substrate independence does not make that evidence irrelevant.
Yes, it’s a guess. So the leap to universal creativity does not itself imply that phenomenal experience appeared in the same leap.
I proposed an alternative possibility (#5739): older, shared systems may already have supported phenomenal experience before universal creativity emerged. I’m not claiming that this alternative is established either.
I’m not sure “no other explanation is known” is quite right. For example, IIT offers a very different theory under which consciousness depends on a system’s intrinsic causal organization. My conjecture that phenomenal experience could predate universal creativity is at least compatible with that kind of account.
So it seems to me that we currently have competing conjectures here, rather than one known explanation and no alternative.
I agree that shared evolutionary history by itself would not establish that the same “software” is running. But that wasn’t my claim.
My point is that humans inherited from earlier animals many of the same organized systems involved in things like sensory processing, nociception, affect and learning. The emergence of universal creativity could have changed the overall cognitive architecture dramatically without implying that all of those older systems acquired their phenomenal properties only at that same point.
So the laptop analogy shows that common ancestry does not entail identical software, which I agree with. What I don’t think it shows is that the continuity of these particular inherited systems is evidentially irrelevant to whether phenomenal experience may already have been present before universality.
By “phenomenal experience” I simply mean there being something it is like to see red, feel pain, fear, etc. Your claim that animals are insentient is itself a claim that these experiences are absent.
Whether such experience can occur without universal/critical cognition is precisely what is under dispute. So saying that these distinctions may not exist, because ultimately there is one kind of information processing that gives rise to consciousness, seems to assume the package-deal hypothesis rather than provide an argument for it.
If there is an independent reason why phenomenal experience cannot occur without universal creativity, that would address the criticism. But I don’t think collapsing the distinction itself does.
I don’t think the movie/video-game analogy captures what I find interesting about dreaming here, because it seems to put phenomenal awareness, meta-awareness and control on a single scale of “critical ability”.
These capacities can dissociate: In an ordinary non-lucid dream there can already be vivid phenomenal experience without awareness that one is dreaming. Lucidity adds that meta-awareness, but does not necessarily add control (lucid dreams can themselves occur with or without substantial control over what happens).
So rather than a simple progression from passive/uncritical to active/critical, dreaming seems to give us different combinations of phenomenal experience, meta-awareness and control.
That is precisely why I think it provides some evidence that phenomenal experience is not tightly bound to the other capacities.
I think “awareness” is doing two different jobs here. Of course we are consciously experiencing an ordinary dream (seeing, feeling, fearing, etc.). That is a premise of my criticism.
What is characteristically absent in a non-lucid dream is awareness that one is dreaming, together with much of the associated reality monitoring and critical reflection. Becoming aware that one is dreaming is precisely what distinguishes lucid dreaming.
So saying “we’re aware of them” does not seem to address the distinction I was making between phenomenal experience and reflective/metacognitive awareness.
I agree that behavior which is blatantly robotic can be evidence that the behavior itself does not involve universal creativity, questioning or error correction. But I don't see how that gets us to the stronger conclusion that it “has nothing to do with consciousness.”
A system could execute a rigid, preprogrammed behavior while still having phenomenal experiences such as seeing color or feeling pain. The robotic character of the behavior seems relevant to whether the system is exercising universal creativity, but not by itself to whether anything is being experienced.
To infer insentience from the robotic behavior, we would still need the separate premise that phenomenal experience cannot accompany non-universal information processing, which is the point under dispute.
Suppose we eventually can write complete generative programs for both a crow and a human. You say that the human program “would result in consciousness.”
I agree that this follows from your theory if universal creativity entails consciousness. But then I don’t think it can also serve as an independent argument for that connection. The possibility of a universally creative philosophical zombie is ruled out by your theory, rather than independently by the fact that the program is universally creative.
Likewise, your theory predicts that the crow program would be unconscious if it remains non-universal. Competing theories of consciousness could make different predictions about the same two programs. For example, IIT explicitly allows functionally equivalent systems to differ in consciousness depending on their intrinsic causal organization. I’m not assuming IIT is correct. It just illustrates that knowing what the two programs can do would not by itself decide which theory of consciousness is correct.
So I think the simulation comparison inherits the disagreement about which theory of consciousness is correct; it does not by itself resolve the link between universal creativity and phenomenal experience.
I understand “we can write the programs and simulate animals” to mean that we can write an underlying program capable of generating an animal’s full behavioral and cognitive repertoire across novel circumstances. If you only mean that we can reproduce particular behaviors, then I don’t see the asymmetry, since we can reproduce particular human behaviors computationally too.
But I think we should be careful with the stronger claim. As far as I know, we cannot currently write such a complete generative program for animals such as crows or apes either. Indeed, even for vastly simpler animals such as the fruit fly or C. elegans, despite having mapped its complete connectome, our executable models still reproduce only parts of its behavior rather than the organism’s full repertoire.
A sticky button can't work here: the main content area has to be a horizontal scroll container so deeply nested trees can grow sideways, and that stops position: sticky from sticking. The workarounds (reworking the global layout, or JavaScript positioning that jitters on mobile) are too risky for such a small benefit.
Tyler suggested (#3904) we use the chart type from Kialo:
Could be a useful visualization in addition to trees.
Each top-level idea would be the center node. Then red segments around it for pending criticisms. Gray for non-pending criticisms and neutral comments.
Unlike Kialo, though, each segment would have the same size as the other segments on its circle.
Offer easy way to link to latest version of an idea. The ability already exists – an idea link + /latest will always go to the latest version – but isn’t directly exposed in the form of a link or button yet.
Reiterating/refining #3904: There should be a graphical indication for pending criticisms. The dropdown line should be red if the comment it leads to is a pending criticism. The yellow pills can be turned gray to be easier on the eyes.
This says nothing about the yellow color of the criticisms pills, which I think Tyler is saying are too harsh on the eyes.
That doesn’t mean the pill has to stay yellow. Too harsh.
That doesn’t mean the pill has to say yellow. Too harsh.
And dimmer red for refuted criticisms, brighter red for pending ones! Default gray for comments.
Would get alternating dim and bright depending on insertion order. Confusing!