Positioning oneself to make a difference

My main criterion for whether a computational property is objectively present in a physical system, or is a matter of interpretation, is whether it involves semantics. Pure physics only gives you state machines with no semantics. In this case, I think quicksort comes quite close to being definable at the state-machine level. "List" sounds representational, because usually it means "list of items represented by computational tokens", but if you think of it simply as a set of physical states with an ordering produced by the intrinsic physical dynamics, then "sorting a list" can refer to a meta-dynamics which rearranges that ordering, and "current pivot position" can be an objective and strictly physical property.

The property dualism I'm talking about occurs when basic sensory qualities like color are identified with such computational properties. Either you end up saying "seeing the color is how it feels" - and "feeling" is the extra, dual property - or you say there's no "feeling" at all - which is denial that consciousness exists. It would be better to be able to assert identity, but then the elements of a conscious experience can't really be coarse-grained states of neuronal ensembles, etc - that would restore the dualism.

We need an ontology which contains "experiences" and "appearances" (for these things undoubtedly exist), which doesn't falsify their character, and which puts them in interaction with the atomic aggregates we know as neurons, which presumably also exist. Substance dualism was the classic way to do this - the soul interacting with the pineal gland, as in Descartes. The baroque quantum monadology I've hinted at, is the only way I know to introduce consciousness into physical causality that avoids both substance dualism and property dualism. Maybe there's some other way to do it, but it's going to be even weirder, and seems like it should still involve what we would now call quantum effects, because the classical ontology just does not contain minds.

I identify with your desire to solve the problem "mathematically" to a certain point. Husserl, the phenomenologist, said that distinct ontological categories are to be understood by different "eidetic sciences". Mathematics, logic, computer science, theoretical physics, and maybe a few other disciplines like decision theory, probability theory, and neoclassical economics, are all eidetic. Husserl's proposition was that there should also be eidetic sciences for all the problematic aspects of consciousness. Phenomenology itself was supposed to be the eidetic science of consciousness, as well as the wellspring of the other eidetic sciences, because all ontology derives from phenomenology somehow, and the eidetic sciences study "regional ontologies", aspects of being.

The idea is not that everything about reality is to be discovered apriori and through introspection. Facts still have to come through experience. But experience takes a variety of forms: along with sensory experience, there's logical experience, reflective experience, and perhaps others. Of these, reflective experience is the essence of phenomenology, and the key to developing new eidetic sciences; that is, to developing the concepts and methods appropriate to the ontological aspects that remain untheorized, undertheorized, or badly theorized. We need new ideas in at least two areas: the description of consciousness, and the ontology of the conscious object. We need new and better ideas about what sort of a thing could "be conscious", "have experiences" like the ones we have, and fit into a larger causal matrix. And then we need to rethink physical ontology so that it contains such things. Right now, as I keep asserting, we are stuck with property dualism because the things of physics, in any combination, are fundamentally unlike the thing that is conscious, and so an assertion of identity is not possible.

For more detail, see everything else I've written on this site, or wait for the promised paper. :-)

Tim, that's an astonishing assertion. It sounds to me like you just claimed that we fully understand the mechanism that generates consciousness.

As an AI researcher, I can tell you that if an explanation of consciousness fell into my lap tomorrow, I would be intellectually fascinated, but it would do nothing to solve any of the problems I'm currently facing.

Part of what we'd like an AI to be able to do is minimize pain and maximize pleasure. How do we go about building such an AI, if we don't know which patterns of neuron firings (or chemical reactions, or information processing, or whatever) constitute pain, and which constitute pleasure? Do you not consider that to be part of the problem of consciousness, or related to it?

(Well, one way is if the AI could itself solve such problems, but I'm assuming that's not what you meant...)

Are you just referring to the rough philosophy job market, or some specific posts at that blog?

Out of motivated curiosity, are you familiar with other elements of academia in Australia?

I don't play chess, but it occurs to me that what you're talking about sounds like applying greedy algorithms to life. And I realized recently that that's what I do. At any given moment, take the action that is the biggest possible step towards your goal.

For example: You're trying to cut expenses. The first step you make is to cut your biggest optional expense. (Analogously: first deal with your biggest time sink, your biggest worry.) A lot of people start with the little details or worry about constructing a perfect long-term plan; my instinct is always to do the biggest step in the right direction that's possible right now.

The prime tenet of successful strategy in any domain - chess, life, whatever - is "always act to increase your freedom of action". In essence, the way to deal with an uncertain future is to give yourself as many ways of compensating for it as possible. (Edit: removed confused relationship to utility maximization).

It's much more difficult to apply this to a life-sized board, but it's still a very strong heuristic.

I'd like to see posts on life lessons learned from chess and go, if someone would care to write them.

Here is a whole book of them (pretty goof, IMO) How Life Imitates Chess by Gary Kasparov

I'd like to see posts on life lessons learned from chess and go, if someone would care to write them.

Go has many lessons, but you have to be somewhat tentative about taking them to heart, at least until you reach those ethereal high dan levels of learning. (That's one lesson right there.)

If you accept funding to do something to help the world, you're not helping the world unless you're underpaid, and the degree you're helping the world is proportional to the degree you're underpaid.

This is not remotely true. The implicit assumption is that life is a zero-sum game, and payment constitutes the annihilation of wealth. In reality, payment constitutes the transfer of wealth: when you spend your money, you're providing income to the people who provide you with goods and services, and enabling them to purchase goods and services from their own suppliers, etc. Economics is a positive-sum game.

If you accept funding to do something to help the world, you're not helping the world unless you're underpaid, and the degree you're helping the world is proportional to the degree you're underpaid.

OR, you manage to secure funding from people or sources that would otherwise have been wasted or used inefficiently.

you're not helping the world unless you're underpaid

I guess you mean "paid less than you want" or "paid less than the industry standard", rather than "not paid enough". Obviously, to do a job you need to be paid enough to do the job. I have been genuinely poor my whole life and it makes everything difficult. It was a late and horrifying discovery when I saw that people with PhDs had an annual income greater than my decadal income, and realized what a difference that would have made. Essentially, I have always done the bare minimum necessary to keep myself alive, and then tried to work directly on whatever seemed the most important at the time. I have had no academic career to speak of; if I had published papers, rather than just writing emails and blog comments, my situation would be completely different.

If you accept funding to do something to help the world, you're not helping the world unless you're underpaid, and the degree you're helping the world is proportional to the degree you're underpaid.

Therefore, you can provide unlimited help to the world by refusing to be paid at all.

This comment puzzled me at first. I agree with the principle behind it, but I don't think the conclusion follows.

The principle seems to be: if everyone had full knowledge of the utility they owed to every other person's actions, and there were a mechanism for frictionlessly negotiating a sort of blackmail (I'll stop doing it unless I get compensated exactly for the utility I give others, out of principle), then what people end up getting paid is in some ideal sense the proper amount. I feel like this probably represents some sort of optimality under an implied expressed utility. I may have mangled my economics significantly here.

So, saying that someone is receiving money to do charitable work ought to be underpaid if they want to feel any part of the charity is morally due to them, just means underpaid in the highly theoretical sense I tried to outline above. Their moral credit should probably equal the amount by which they're underpaid.

I don't think it makes sense to argue that you should avoid being funded (well enough to be comfortable financially) if you do work that's thought of as charitable. But I suppose you should be suspicious of your own self-serving bias about how much good you're doing, the higher your stipend.

If you accept funding to do something to help the world, you're not helping the world unless you're underpaid

Why? Are you using Marx's theory of labor value (fair wage = added value)?

If you accept funding to do something to help the world, you're not helping the world unless you're underpaid, and the degree you're helping the world is proportional to the degree you're underpaid.

This is not remotely true. The implicit assumption is that life is a zero-sum game, and payment constitutes the annihilation of wealth. In reality, payment constitutes the transfer of wealth: when you spend your money, you're providing income to the people who provide you with goods and services, and enabling them to purchase goods and services from their own suppliers, etc. Economics is a positive-sum game.

If you accept funding to do something to help the world, you're not helping the world unless you're underpaid, and the degree you're helping the world is proportional to the degree you're underpaid.

This is not remotely true. The implicit assumption is that life is a zero-sum game, and payment constitutes the annihilation of wealth. In reality, payment constitutes the transfer of wealth: when you spend your money, you're providing income to the people who provide you with goods and services, and enabling them to purchase goods and services from their own suppliers, etc. Economics is a positive-sum game.

If you accept funding to do something to help the world, you're not helping the world unless you're underpaid, and the degree you're helping the world is proportional to the degree you're underpaid.

This is not remotely true. The implicit assumption is that life is a zero-sum game, and payment constitutes the annihilation of wealth. In reality, payment constitutes the transfer of wealth: when you spend your money, you're providing income to the people who provide you with goods and services, and enabling them to purchase goods and services from their own suppliers, etc. Economics is a positive-sum game.

Uf. I hope you have a large supply of coffee (or something stronger), and a high tolerance for PowerPoint presentations.

Whatever people say, we do need some sane philosophy done on that front.

I don't believe Mitchell Porter's qualifies.