Wrong Questions

The AI hallucination, peculiar to males, would be another example.

As for the regular questions, Wittenstein was aiming to show the way out of the fly-bottle, as he put it; by showing what the words in the question ordinarily mean, and how they come to seem profound exactly when they go empty, ``on holiday'' as he put it.

As for reading Philosophical Investigations, Stanley Cavell The Claim of Reason makes it interesting by elaborating it further.

How do you apply this approach to questions like "to what extent was underconsumption the cause of the Great Depression?" No conceivable experiment could answer such a question, even given a time machine (unlike, say, "Who shot JFK?") but I think such questions are nevertheless important to our understanding of what to do next.

The best answer I have to such questions is to posit experiments in which we rewind history to a particular date, and re-run it a million times, performing some specific miracle (such as putting money into a billion carefully-chosen wallets) on half a million of those occasions, and gather statistics on how the miracle affects economic indicators.

I can take a shot at a couple of these. For free will, suppose it turns out that neural activity is not fully determined by mechanistic principles, but is in some cases determined by thermal/quantum noise. And yet, it turns out that out of that noise, certain neural activity patterns appear seemingly magically. Neurons A, B and C fire together to make a decision, even though the most detailed investigation shows that whether they would fire or not was purely random. And yet these correlations appear persistently, too often for random statistical correlations to explain, and correspond to our subjective feelings of free will. A likely model is that there is another, otherwise inaccessible, realm which is influencing neural activity and that the brain is a specially-tuned "receiver" designed to amplify quantum chaos into determinate action. The free will comes from this other realm.

For why anything exists at all, one possibility is the Tegmark/Schmidhuber model where the universe is pure information, part of a much larger information world which has Platonic existence. In this concept, all information patterns and "information objects" have a form of existence, and sufficiently complex information objects look like universes such as the one we observe. These models then aim to impose a measure on information patterns, making some more prominent than others. Suppose these theories can be developed to the point that this measure can be computed, and it turns out to predict that there is by far one highest-measure information pattern which includes conscious entities. And further, that that information pattern corresponds in 100% agreement to our universe, even to the point where it computes that we ourselves, we human beings, are by far the most prominent conscious information patterns in the informational multiverse. Then I think this would be a very strong candidate for an explanation of why anything exists, and in particular why the observed universe and we observers exist.

"to what extent was underconsumption the cause of the Great Depression?"

Tabooing the word "cause", one finds that this question is a disguise for something like "Given the economic data of the period immediately preceding the Great Depression, can we prevent an economic collapse by making sure we don't underconsume?"

As I was putting the "free will" question to myself, I decided to re-frame it as "would an AI have free will" Answer: obviously not, it's an optimization process. Then I thought: an AI is different from a trivial arithmetic solver, the AI's search strategy is not fully determined by the goal. What would an AI be like whose strategy was wholly undetermined? It would thrash around randomly. So, insight: the uncertainty in our strategy is another name for our ignorance of the search domain. At the one end, zero information, total randomness. At the other, full information, determinism. In the middle, a "free" (meaning: ignorant) choice of search strategies which corresponds to the feeling of free will.

Interesting corollary: more knowledgeable people must be less free. To them, strategies we might try are obviously useless.

This reminds me of logical positivism.

Here's a question: "Are there such things as wrong questions, and is there some sort of test to help me identify them?"

Interestingly, I couldn't imagine any concrete, specific state of how-the-world-is that would answer that question.

Jason Brennan,

Suppose the state of how-the-world-is is that over time, beings with certain biased decision-making algorithms have evolved. As products of evolution, the algorithms are pretty good for making sure the beings running them have offspring, but are less good at obtaining representations of the "true" state of the world or at processing complex information. Such beings are likely to form queries which contain false assumptions, category errors, or other flaws.

The screwy concept in "Why does anything exist at all?" is not existence, it is "why." There's nothing wrong with "why" as such, it just doesn't apply to existence. That's what makes for wrong questions: pairing up words that don't apply to each other, such as "What is the sound of blue?"

"Why" only applies when there is an alternative that could have been, but nothingness can't be (as soon as it tries it becomes something) so there's no alternative to existence.

Ian: I don't follow. Why is it that there simply couldn't have been, well, nothing at all. No reality of any form in any way at all in any sense existing. No subjective experiences and nothing to experience and no one to do the experiencing?

Just... nothing.

So I'm not sure the "why" question is invalid for existance. Sure seems like a reasonable question. In other words, how is it that you figure that the question of existance is such that "why?" or "how is it that existance came to exist?" or "how is it that anything at all exists?" or any question of that form is invalid?

Hal, in effect you're saying "Our world exists because it is an information pattern, and all information patterns exist". But why do they all exist?

Psy-Kosh: let's Taboo "exist" then... What does it exactly mean? For me, it's something like "I have some experiences, whose cause is best modeled by imagining some discrete object in the outer world". The existence or non-existence of something affects what I will feel next.

Some further expansions: "why": how can I predict one experience from another? "world": all the experiences we have? (Modeled as a discrete object... But I can't really imagine what can be modeled by the fact that there is no world.)

So the question "why does our world exist" becomes something like "what is the experience from which we can predict we will have any experiences at all... Sounds a little bit more controversial than the original.

By the way, have we tried this transformation in the opposite direction? Turning the question "what is the sound of blue" to one which seems to make sense...

Latanius: I was including the issue of subjective experience. As in "Why is there any subjective experience at all?" ie, why is there ANYTHING, including subjective experience. Your answer doesn't leave me with a "okay, now the question has been answered" sense.

Actually, as near as I can tell, you're trying to answer a different question, specifically, it looks like you're trying to address the question of "how do I know my experiences in any way correlate with the Real World(tm)? Maybe I'm just hallucinating everything? Maybe there's nothing but dreams?" etc etc etc...

The question at hand is more "why is there anything? At all. Including subjective experience. ie, how is it that there's something at all other than, well, nothing?"

Maybe the question is deconstructable, but it doesn't seem like it's been deconstructed here yet.

Alternate form of the question, used by some physicists: "What breaths fire into the equations?" Great, there're some equations that are good at describing reality. Are they so compelling that there actualy need be a reality/set of subjective experiences/whatever for them to describe?

It may be just some form of mental confusion on my part. But as of yet, it sure seems like a real question to me.

Mitchell, that's a good point. My scenario might be considered evidence that all information patterns exist, and that we live among them, but can not really answer the question of why this is true.

One issue is that the question of "why", and of reasons why things are true, has many different interpretations and variations. Sometimes just giving evidence for something can be considered to answer a "why" question. For example, if someone asks for reasons why Macs are better than PCs, he is usually asking for evidence that Macs are better. But in other cases, people want more, and certainly someone asking why anything exists would be one of those.

Psy-Kosh: Maybe I really tried to approach the meaning of the question from the direction of subjective experience. But I think that the concept of "existence" includes that there is some observer who can decide if that thing we're talking about does really exist or doesn't, given his/her stable existence.

Maybe that's why the question can't be easily answered (and maybe has no answer at all) because the concept of "world" includes us as well. So if we want to predict something about the existence of the world (that is what the word "why" means, I think), we haven't observe anything: it's a logical truth that any world in which this question is asked really does exist.

But if we statisfy the two assumptions in the question (the existence of the world is observable by us, and is repeatable, so we can make predictions about it), it starts to make sense, but it becomes less mysterious somehow. Some possible answers: because the previous one did already collapse in an anti-big-bang, I've just seen that..., or we usually have to wait for it to recreate itself, therefore nothing exists right now... Or it exists because I was bored and created a new one, or maybe because I was bored and started Half-Life (which also fits our new world-concept in some way)... etc.

And... physical equations are definitely something which differ from nothing. Some rules for a... world... But I think if something is becoming so blurry like the concept of "world" just now, we better ask what subsystem in our mind is applied for the wrong problem, and what are those problems which it is intended to solve.

Psy-Kosh: "So I'm not sure the "why" question is invalid for existance. Sure seems like a reasonable question. In other words, how is it that you figure that the question of existance is such that "why?" or "how is it that existance came to exist?" or "how is it that anything at all exists?" or any question of that form is invalid?"

I believe that, like all concepts, we get "why" by abstracting away from our experiences in this universe, and that it is therefore this universe that gives the concept it's meaning. It doesn't make sense to step outside the universe to compare it to another alternative universe beside it and try an use concepts from our universe in that space. They don't have any meaning there.

I believe that you are correct about the concept of existence, that it is not a real thing, but rather an artifact of our perception.

Which is why positivists say that something is only real if it can be perceived, directly or indirectly. They say that we only need to take into account things that can be perceived, because if it affects us, we are perceiving it.

Now that I think of this again, I see one possible flaw, if something is imperceptible now, it might still become perceptible later. For physical objects there might be a law to protect us, but our knowledge of non-physical (i.e. mental) objects leave much to be desired.

The state of affairs (not State of Affairs) wherein nothing exists cannot possibly by inconsistent, for it contains nothing. The question is, why this populated, consistent world (presumably it is not inconsistent) and not the other?

Perhaps this question is a wrong question because nothing, in fact, does exist. I'm envisioning something beyond the multiverse, alternate realities that are exactly that, other realities, totally disjoint from ours, inaccessible in every possible and impossible way. Like the universe under your fingernail... except it's not under your fingernail, it is Nowhere. Some of these realities are empty; nothing exists. But some, like ours, are not.

We talk of the origin of existence. What if it originated multiple times? Basically, let's assume the statements "nothing exists" and "something exists" are both true. Where does that take us?

These alternative realities do not exist, because they do not conform to our mode, our universe's (or multiverse's) mode of existence; but they conform to their own mode. Or do they? Nes or yo?

To my mind, I have free will to the degree that there is an "I". My decision is determined by my environment and my self. Were there, hypothetically, some other individual in my place they might well make a different decision. So I determine my actions, and can therefore be said to have free will.

It is true that my state follows from my history and my genetics (arguably a part of my history, in a sense), but I assert that this is irrelevant because of our main reasons for caring about "free will." In my experience, people care about whether we have "free will" for two reasons. The first is a sort of despair in the face of inevitability that echoes the determinism of classical Greek mythology - the gods have something planned and no matter what you do it will happen. This, of course, is not a feature of physical determinism - what you do is a part of the system, and if you had done something else things might have turned out considerably differently. What you will do is determined, but it's determined through who you are, not in spite of it.

The second reason people care about free will is to allow us to reason about responsibility and blame. This can also be dealt with by much of the above, however, along with an observation that blame and praise, and the brains expecting these, are themselves a part of the system.

And if that seems too easy, then ask "Why does anything exist at all?", and then tell me what a satisfactory answer to that question would even look like.

And no, I don't know the answer to that last one. But I can guess one thing, based on my previous experience with unanswerable questions.

What if we take "X exists" to simply mean "X was not made up, i.e., not a fiction, hallucination, illusion, or delusion"? Then the question becomes "Why is anything not a fiction, hallucination, illusion, or delusion at all?" Well, if everything was made up, we would be in the rather awkward position of every made up thing being made up by another made up thing, which must have also been made up by some other made up thing, etc. That's not quite a solution, but it prohibits you from imagining a world in which nothing existed, as an empty black void.

There's also the classic analysis of the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" which seems somewhat related. Well, when we say that anything which can take the value x is a something, we also imply "there is x". X having the value of a something is sufficient for the truth of "There is X." And similarly "nothing" is the term that we apply when we are presented with a list of properties which no object has, e.g., nothing is a circular square. This is not to say that there is this object, nothing, out there in the universe which is both circular and square, obviously. So the reason that it can't be that there is nothing, is because "nothing is" is English's short hand for negated existential quantification, so of course it is never positively quantified.

But that is all arguing from definition, which I know is silly when you are dealing with finding a truth, but what about when dissolving a question?

Some people were talking about The Ship of Theseus -- the question "If a ship's parts are replaced one-by-one over time, after each part is replaced is it still the same ship?" First thing that came to my mind was that this was a wrong question. I saw it fundamentally as the same mistake as the Blegg/Rube problem -- they know every property about the ship that's relevant to the question, and yet still there feels like a question left unanswered.

Am I right about this?

How many nothings do you expect to exist? Zero of them?

And if that seems too easy, then ask "Why does anything exist at all?", and then tell me what a satisfactory answer to that question would even look like.

And no, I don't know the answer to that last one. But I can guess one thing, based on my previous experience with unanswerable questions. The answer will not consist of some grand triumphant First Cause. The question will go away as a result of some insight into how my mental algorithms run skew to reality, after which I will understand how the question itself was wrong from the beginning—how the question itself assumed the fallacy, contained the skew.

Yup, basically. See

• Stephen Maitzen (2012). "Stop Asking Why There's Anything", Erkenntnis, 77(1), 51-63.

I find that all questions fall into one of 3 categories:

1. Well defined: These questions are clear, and contain all the basic information you need to answer them, with little or no need to infer what the questioner meant. Word problems are a good example, and so is someone asking for directions or asking what you would like for dinner.

2. Poorly defined: These are problems that you don't know how to solve, at least at first. Maybe you have to learn what the questioner means, or maybe you have to acquire some fundamental understanding in order to evaluate several possible methods of coming to a solution. Most engineering R&D problems fit in this box, but other examples include the chicken/egg problem and asking whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound.

3. What is the square root of a potato: At least that's how I've always described such questions to people. These are questions that are so poorly defined that they are demonstrably completely incoherent. There is no possible way of interpreting these questions which could possibly have an answer. It's when a question is "not even wrong". This seems quite similar to what Yudkowsky is describing here, although maybe he is referring to things somewhere between #2 and #3. I guess you could create a spectrum running from #1 to #3 type questions, but I've found that problems tend to fall pretty neatly into these 3 categories, so I haven't found it useful to think of them as lying along a spectrum.

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A key requirement of free will is to be unexplainable. If we can explain free will then it's no longer "free will" - it's just a process, deterministic or probabilistic, that can be followed step by step.

Even if current science cannot explain it, the idea that it can be explained already disqualifies it from being free will.

So, the state of affairs where we have free will is to have some component in our decision making process that is complex enough and yet fundamentally unexplainable.

It's the state of affairs where sound is acoustic vibrations.

To me, the answer to any of such questions, is "name is name". A reference to a thing is that thing itself, yet simultaneously not that thing. It is also always empty, and unbound. Or we can keep arguing in absolutes, and be sure the answer is always past the horizon.

Thing is, there are quite a few questions about our universe which simply cannot be definitively answered using only information from within our universe.

Take "free will" for example.  Does our thinking arise entirely from natural phenomenon, or is there some extra-universal component to it?  Well, if it is the latter, then the only way for us to find out from inside the universe is if the universe is built in a way to make it obvious.  If there's some discontinuity between cause and effect with regard to thinking or similar.

But if there is a supernatural influence on our thinking, why the heck would it be bound by our limited perception of the time dimension?  It's outside every normal dimension except time?  The characters in a novel, if they start trying to examine whether or not they have "free will", find exactly what the author wishes them to.  And it will be as perfectly consistent as the author cares to make it.  You can only break out of the sandbox if there's a flaw in the sandbox, deliberate or otherwise.

"Simple models" are good.  Using the simplest model that produces accurate predictions reduces mistakes and confusion.  But the model is not the universe, and the apparent simplicity could be an entirely local phenomenon.