LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I thought the idea was that they replicated human input-output behavior while having "no one home".

No, the idea is that p-zombies are perfect atom-by-atom copies of humans, except with "no one home". From https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/:

Zombies [...] are exactly like us in all physical respects but without conscious experiences[.]

Which (from my perspective) is a much stranger thing to imagine than just "a thing that somehow produces human input-output behavior via an algorithm that lacks our inner awareness". A p-zombie is implementing the same algorithm as us, but minus "how that algorithm feels from the inside".

(Or more precisely, minus phenomenal consciousness. The p-zombie may still have "a way it feels inside" in the sense that the p-zombie can internally track things about its brain and produce highly sophisticated verbal reports about its "experiences". But by hypothesis, this p-zombie access consciousness isn't accompanied by "the lights actually being on inside".)

If you just assume that there's no primitive for consciousness, I would agree that the argument for illusionism is extremely strong since [unconscious matter spontaneously spawning consciousness] is extremely implausible.

How is this implausible at all? All kinds of totally real phenomena are emergent. There's no primitive for temperature, yet it emerges out of the motions of many particles. There's no primitive for wheel, but round things that roll still exist.

Maybe I've misunderstood your point though?

Not sure if this answers, but the book Superforecasting explains, among other things, that probabilistic thinkers tend to make better forecasts.

I'll just flag that I still don't know this argument, either, and I'm curious where you're getting it from / what it is.

I just read the Factored Cognition sequence since it has now finished, and this post [? · GW] derives WFC as the condition necessary for honesty to be an equilibrium in debate where the human judge gets to assume optimal play.

I think one reason doctors want such highly credible evidence is that they're defending themself against attacks by snake oil salesmen. Historically, there have been many attempts to sell "treatments" that have absolutely no benefit at all, and for an individual doctor, it is very hard to tell whether they're being sold something that actually works or not. 

Another related reason for wanting highly credible evidence is that doctors tend to be conservative, out of a desire to do not prescribe things that might harm their patient (they don't necessarily believe harm coming from a prescription they make is the same sort of thing as harm coming from a disease they didn't stop).  

Now I don't know why he actually reasons the way he does, but these are some possibilities. Perhaps you should make more efforts to understand his reasoning before coming up with a strategy to convince him.

This is a familiar dialectic in philosophical debates about whether some domain X can be reduced to Y (meta-ethics is a salient comparison to me). The anti-reductionist (A) will argue that our core intuitions/concepts/practices related to X make clear that it cannot be reduced to Y, and that since X must exist (as we intuitively think it does), we should expand our metaphysics to include more than Y. The reductionist (R) will argue that X can in fact be reduced to Y, and that this is compatible with our intuitions/concepts/everyday practices with respect to X, and hence that X exists but it’s nothing over and above Y. The nihilist (N), by contrast, agrees with A that it follows from our intuitions/concepts/practices related to X that it cannot be reduced to Y, but agrees with D that there is in fact nothing over and above Y, and so concludes that there is no X, and that our intuitions/concepts/practices related to X are correspondingly misguided. Here, the disagreement between A vs. R/N is about whether more than Y exists; the disagreement between R vs. A/N is about whether a world of only Y “counts” as a world with X. This latter often begins to seem a matter of terminology; the substantive questions have already been settled.

Is this a well-known phenomenon? I think I've observed this dynamic before and found it very frustrating [LW(p) · GW(p)]. It seems like philosophers keep executing the following procedure:

1. Take a sensible, but perhaps vague, everyday concept (e.g. consciousness, or free will), and give it a precise philosophical definition, but bake in some dubious, anti-reductionist assumptions into the definition.
2. Discuss the concept in ways that conflate the everyday concept and the precise philosophical one. (Failing to make clear that the philosophical concept may or may not be the best formalization of the folk concept.)
3. Realize that the anti-reductionist assumptions were false.
4. Claim that the everyday concept is an illusion.
5. Generate confusion (along with full employment for philosophers?).

If you'd just said that the precisely defined philosophical concept was a provisional formalization of the everyday concept in the first place, then you wouldn't have to claim that the everyday concept was an illusion once you realize that your formalization was wrong!

After several nudges (which I'm grateful for, in hindsight), my votes are in.

Voted! I put most (but not all) my votes on AI Alignment posts that are incredibly valuable to me, and I believe to the field.

I might actually read some more stuff today and give my additional votes to a couple of relevant posts.

If there is a wiki page on group houses, this definitely belongs there.

I like the idea of co-living with other rationalists (in theory, never tried it), but I would definitely want to be able to leave quickly if I ever changed my mind.

No one ever thought that phenomenal zombies lacked introspective access to their own mental states

I'm surprised by this. I thought p-zombies were thought not to have mental states.

I thought the idea was that they replicated human input-output behavior while having "no one home". Which sounds to me like not having mental states.

If they actually have mental states, then what separates them from the rest of us?