Rationality Quotes June 2013

I upvoted your comment, because I wished for it to have more upvotes.

Gosh. New item added to my list of "Not everyone does that."

...I have difficulty imagining what it would be to be like someone who isn't the little voice in their own head, though. Seriously, who's posting that comment?

I have an internal monologue. It's a bit like a narrator in my head, narrating my thoughts.

I think - and this is highly speculative on my part - that it's a sign of thinking mainly with the part of the brain that handles language. Whenever I take one of those questionnaires designed to tell whether I use mainly the left or right side of my brain, I land very heavily on the left side - analytical, linguistic, mathematical. I can use the other side if I want to; but I find it surprisingly easy to become almost a caricature of a left-brain thinker.

My internal monologue quite probably restricts me to (mainly) ideas that are easily expressed in English. Up until now, I could see this as a weakness, but I couldn't see any easy way around it. (One advantage of the internal monologue, on the other hand, is that I usually find it easy to speak my thoughts out loud; because they're already in word form)

But now, you tell me that you don't seem to have an internal monologue. Does this mean that you can easily think of things that are not easily expressed in English?

Obligatory link to Yvain's article on the topic.

A very high proportion of what I call thinking is me talking to myself. I have some ability to imagine sounds and images, but it's pretty limited. I'm better with kinesthesia, but that's mostly for thinking about movement.

What's your internal experience composed of?

Can't speak for Nancy, but I think I know what she refers to.

Different people have different thought... processes, I guess is the word. My brother's thought process is, by his description, functional; he assigns parts of his mind tasks, and gets the results back in a stack. (He's pretty good at multi-tasking, as a result.) My own thought process is, as Nancy specifies, an internal monologue; I'm literally talking to myself. (Although the conversation is only partially English. It's kind of like... 4Chan. Each "line" of dialogue is associated with an "image" (in some cases each word, depending on the complexity of the concept encoded in it), which is an abstract conceptualization. If you've ever read a flow-of-consciousness book, that's kind of like a low-resolution version of what's going on in my brain, and, I presume, hers.

I've actually discovered at least one other "mode" I can switch my brain into - I call it Visual Mode. Whereas normally my attention is very tunnel vision-ish (I can track only one object reliably), I can expand my consciousness (at the cost of eliminating the flow-of-consciousness that is usually my mind) and be capable of tracking multiple objects in my field of vision. (I cannot, for some reason, actually move my eyes while in this state; it breaks my concentration and returns me to a "normal" mode of thought.) I'm capable of thinking in this state, but oddly, incapable of tracking or remembering what those thoughts are; I can sustain a full conversation which I will not remember, at all, later.

Add one to the sample size. My thought process is also mostly lacking in sensory modality. My thoughts do have a large verbal component, but they are almost exclusively for planning things that I could potentially say or write.

Rather than trying to justify how this works to the others, I will instead ask my own questions: How can words help in creating thoughts? In order to generate a sentence in your head, surely you must already know what you want to say. And if you already know what you have to say, what's the point of saying it? I presume you cannot jump to the next thought without saying the previous one in full. With my own ability to generate sentences, that would be a crippling handicap.

Wikipedia article. I'm really curious how you would describe your thoughts if you don't describe them as an internal monologue. Are you more of a visual thinker?

When I think about stuff, often I imagine a voice speaking some of the thoughts. This seems to me to be a common, if not nearly universal, experience.

http://fc02.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2010/110/9/8/Good_News_Everyone_by_martynasx.jpg

Did it work for you?

I find that sometimes, after reading for a long time, the verbal components of my thoughts resemble the writing style of what I read.

Not exactly what you are asking for, but I've found that if I spend an extended period of time (usually around a week) heavily interacting with a single person or group of people, I'll start mentally reading things in their voice(s).

While reading books. Always particular voices for every character. So much so, I can barely sit through adaptations of books I've read. And my opinion of a writer always drops a little bit when I meet hjm/her, and the voice in my head just makes more sense for that style.

Sure. Or after listening to a charismatic person for some time.

Speaking as someone who's been trough that, I don't think that the article gives a complete picture. Part of the problem appears to be (particularly by reports from newer generations) in such instaces is the feeling of unreality, as the only times when we tend to see such situations is when we're sitting comfortably, so a lot of us are essentially conditioned to sit comfortably during such events.

However, this does tend to get better with some experience of such situations.

See, I thought the plane was still in the air. Now I understand that the brace position is useless. This is why "gathering as much information as possible" is part of my plan. Unfortunately, with such a preliminary plan, there's a good chance I won't realise this quickly enough and become one of the passive casualties. As I stated earlier, I don't mind this.

Stanislaw Lem wrote a short story about this. (I don't remember its name.)

In the story, English detectives are trying to solve a series of cases where bodies are stolen from morgues and are later discovered abandoned at some distance. There are no further useful clues.

They bring in a scientist, who determines that there is a simple mathematical relationship that relates the times and locations of these incidents. He can predict the next incident. And he says, therefore, that he has "solved" or "explained" the mystery. When asked what actually happens - how the bodies are moved, and why - he simply doesn't care: perhaps, he suggests, the dead bodies move by themselves - but the important thing, the original question, has been answered. If someone doesn't understand that a simple equation that makes predictions is a complete answer to a question, that someone simply doesn't understand science!

Lem does not, of course, intend to give this as his own opinion. The story never answers the "real" mystery of how or why the bodies move; the equation happens to predict that the sequence will soon end anyway.

One can easily imagine some weird data easily described by (and predicted by) very simple mathematical formula, but yet I don't consider this to be explanation. Something lacks here; my curiosity just doesn't accept bare formulas as answers.

I suspect that this situation arises because of the very small prior probability of formula being true. But is it really?

I think the situation happens because of bias. Demonstrating an empirical effect to be real takes work. Finding an explanation of an effect also takes work. It's very seldom in science that both happens at exactly the same time.

Their are a lot of drugs that are designed in a way where we think that the drug works by binding to specific receptors. Those explanations aren't very predictive for telling you whether a prospective drug works. Once it's shown that a drug actually works it's often that we don't fully understand why it does work.

"For whatever reason, " seems like it should be a legitimate hypothesis, as much as ", therefore ". The former technically being the disjunction of all variations of the latter with possible reasons substituted in.

But, then again, at the point when we are saying "for whatever reason, ", we are saying that because we haven't been able to think of the correct explanation yet—that is, because we haven't been creative enough, a bounded rationality issue. So we're perhaps not really in a position to evaluate a disjunction of all possible reasons.

“Indeed, Sire, Monsieur Lagrange has, with his usual sagacity, put his finger on the precise difficulty with the hypothesis [of a Creator of the Universe]: it explains everything, but predicts nothing.”

Of course, "bad things", and even more so "iterated bad things", have to be viewed relative to expectations, and at the proper level of abstraction. Explanation:

Right level of abstraction

"I punched myself in the face six times in a row, and each time, it hurt. But this is not mere bad luck! I conclude that I am bad at self-face-punching! I must work on my technique, such that I may be able to punch myself in the face without ill effect." This is the wrong conclusion. The right conclusion is "abstain from self-face-punching".

Substitute any of the following for "punching self in face":

• Extreme sports
• Motorcycle riding
• Fad diets
• Prayer

Right expectations

"I've tried five brands of water, and none of them tasted like chocolate candy! My water-brand-selection algorithm must be flawed. I will have to be even more careful about picking only the fanciest brands of water." Again this is the wrong conclusion. The right conclusion is "This water is just fine and there was nothing wrong with my choice of brand. I simply shouldn't have such ridiculous expectations."

Substitute any of the following for "brands of water" / "taste like chocolate candy":

• Sex partners / knew all the ways to satisfy my needs without me telling them
• Computer repair shops / fixed my computer for free after I spilled beer on it, and also retrieved all my data [full disclosure: deep-seated personal gripe]
• Diets / enabled me to lose all requisite weight and keep it off forever

The intended formulation, I should think, is "You are the only denominator guaranteed to be common to all of your failed relationships" (which is to say that it might be a contingent fact about your particular set of failed relationships that it has some more common denominators, but for any set of all of any particular person's failed relationships, that person will always, by definition, be common to them all).

Even this might be false when taken literally... so perhaps we need to qualify it just a bit more:

"You are the only interesting denominator guaranteed to be common to all of your failed relationships." (i.e. if we consider only those factors along which relationships-in-general differ from each other, i.e. those dimensions in relationship space which we can't just ignore).

That, I think, is a reasonable, charitable reading of the original quote.

Hah! Um... hm. A quick perusal of Google results for "sea squirt -tenure" gets me some moderately interesting stuff about their role as high-sensitivity harbingers for certain pollutants, and something about invasive sea-squirt species in harbors. But nothing about their life-cycle per se. I give a tentative "no."

The way I like to think about it is that convincingness is a 2-place function - a simulation is convincing to a particular mind/brain. If there's a reasonably well-defined interface between the mind and the simulation (e.g. the 5 senses and maybe a couple more) then it's cheating to bypass that interface and make the brain more gullible than normal, for example by introducing chemicals into the vat for that purpose.

From that perspective, dreams are not especially convincing compared to experience while awake, rather dreamers are especially convincable.

Dennett's point seems to be that a lot of computing power would be needed to make a convincing simulation for a mind as clear-thinking as a reader who was awake. Later in the chapter he talks about other types of hallucinations.

I suggest you read the opening chapter of Consciousness Explained. Someone's posted it online here.

It could counteract the gravitational pull which would cause the surface of a hollow Earth to collapse otherwise. Edit: It would not :-(

I'm not sure pleasure/pain is that useful, because 1) they have such an intuitive link to reaction/function 2) they might be meta-qualities: a similar sensation of pain can be strongly unpleasant, entirely tolerable or even enjoyable depending on other factors.

What you've done with colours is combine what feels like a somewhat arbitary/ineffable qualia and declare it inextricable associated with one that has direct behavioural terms involved. Your talk of what's required to 'make the inversion succesfully' is misleading: what if the monkey has GREEN and antsiness rather than RED and antsiness?

It seems intuitive to assume 'red' and 'green' remain the same in normal conditions: but I'm left totally lost as to what 'red' would look like to a creature that could see a far wider or narrower spectrum than the one we can see. Or to that matter to someone with limited colour-blindness. There seems to me to be the Nagel 'what is it like to be a bat' problem, and I've never understood how that dissolves.

It's been a long time since I read Dennett, but I was in the camp of 'not answering the question, while being fascinating around the edges and giving people who think qualia are straightforward pause for thought'. No-one's ever been able to clearly explain how his arguments work to me, to the point that I suggest that either I or they are fundamentally missing something.

If the hard problem of consciousness has really been solved I'd really like to know!

I realize that non-materialistic "intrinsic qualities" of qualia, which we perceive but which aren't causes of our behavior, are incoherent. What I don't fully understand is why have I any qualia at all. Please see my sibling comment.

Thanks for your reply and engagement.

How can you tell? Maybe this is exactly what the sort of process I'm describing feels like!

I agree. We already know what we feel like. Once we know empirically what kind of process we are, we can indeed conclude that "that's what that kind of process feels like".

What I don't understand is why being some kind of process feels like anything at all. Why it seems to myself that I have qualia in the first place.

I do understand why it makes sense for an evolved human to have such beliefs. I don't know if there is a further question beyond that. As I said, I don't know what an answer would even look like.

Perhaps I should just accept this and move on. Maybe it's just the case that "being mystified about qualia" is what the kind of process that humans are is supposed to feel like! As an analogy, humans have religious feelings with apparently dedicated neurological underpinnings. Some humans feel the numinous strongly, and they ask for an answer to the Mystery of God, which to them appears as obvious as any qualia.

However, an answer that would be more satisfactory (if possible) would be an exploration and an explanation of mind-space and its accompanying qualia. Perhaps if I understood the actual causal link from which kind of process I am, to which qualia I have, part of the apparent mystery would go away.

Does being like some other kind of process "feel like" anything? Like what? Would it be meaningful for me to experience something else without becoming something else? Are the qualia of a cat separate from being a cat? Or would I have to have a cat-mind and forget all about being human and verbal and DanArmak to experience the qualia of a cat, at which point I'd be no different than any existing cat, and which I wouldn't remember on becoming human again?

When computations that report their subjective experience become ubiquitous, we will take the computational nature of qualia for granted in much the same way.

I agree. To clarify, I believe all of these propositions:

• Full materialism
• Humans are physical systems that have self-awareness ("consciousness") and talk about it
• That isn't a separate fact that could be otherwise (p-zombies); it's highly entangled with how human brains operate
• Other beings, completely different physically, would still behave the same if they instantiated the same computation (this is pretty much tautological)
• If the computation that is myself is instantiated differently (as in an upload or em), it would still be conscious and report subjective experience (if it didn't, it would be a very poor emulation!)
• If I am precisely cloned, I should anticipate either clone's experience with 50% probability; but after finding out which clone I am, I would not expect to suddenly "switch" to experiencing being the other clone. I also would not expect to somehow experience being both clones, or anything else. (I'm less sure about this because it's never happened yet. And I don't understand quantum mechanics, so I can't properly appreciate the arguments that say we're already being split all the time anyway. Nevertheless, I see no sensible alternative, so I still accept this.)

To a poor person, having walls at all is more important than having white walls.

To a poor person, having a car at all is more important than having one with no dents in the panels. I don't see that as justifying vandalising the cars at a second-hand dealer by night so as to pick one up cheap the next day.

But we're working from just four words of graffiti here, from an unknown author, and the site where Google led me from the original German text is dead.

I don't think a single downvote is that significant. I've seen so many inexplicable downvotes that I would suspect there's a bot that every time a new comment is posted generates a random number between 0 and 1 and downvotes the comment if the random number is less than 0.05 -- if I could see any reason why anyone would do that.

Now that you've suggested it...

I don't think a single downvote is that significant. I've seen so many inexplicable downvotes that I would suspect there's a bot that every time a new comment is posted generates a random number between 0 and 1 and downvotes the comment if the random number is less than 0.05 -- if I could see any reason why anyone would do that.

It actually depends on how many total votes the post in question has accumulated, and how much karma the user in question has accumulated.

A completely new user doesn't need to have to worry about anomalous downvotes, because they're too new to have a reputation. Likewise, a well-established user doesn't need to worry about anomalous downvotes, because they get lost in the underflow. I'd say somewhere around the 200 mark it can become problematic to one's reputation; and, of course, one or two consecutive anomalous downvotes that act as the first votes on a given post can easily set a trend to bury that post before anyone has a chance to usefully comment on it.

The ironic thing about it is that compulsory schooling was introduced in Germany for the stated purpose of turning children into 'good Christians".

Yeah, when people in power create tools to help them maintain the power, if those tools are universal enough, they will be reused by the people who get the power later.

In a case like evolution, do you sincerely believe that the intellectual elite should use their power to push a Texan public school to teach evolution even if the parents of the children and the local board of education don't want it?

The trade-offs need to be discussed rationally. The answer would probably be "yes", but there are some negative side effects. For example, you create a precedent for other elites to push their agenda. (Just like those Christians did with the compulsory education.) Maybe a third option could be found. (Something like: Don't say what schools have to teach, but make the exams independent on schools. Make the evolutionary knowledge necessary to pass a biology exam. Make it public when students or schools or cities are "failing in biology".)

Rosenberg writes:

So, when they say, “No one saw this crisis coming,” they may be telling the truth, at least as far as they know it. Neither they nor anyone in their circles would entertain such thoughts. Likewise, they may not see the next crisis until it hits them.

Plenty of big banks did make money by betting on the crisis. There were a lot of cases where banks sold their clients products the banks knew that the products would go south.

Realising that there are important political things that don't happen in the open is a meaningful conclusion. Matt isn't in a position where he can make claims for which he doesn't have to provide evidence.

In 2011 Julian Assange told the press that the US government has an API with the can use to query the data that they like from facebook. On the skeptics stackexchange website there a question whether their's evidence for Assange claim or whether he makes it up. It doesn't mention the possibility that Assange just refers to nonpublic information. The orthodox skeptic just rejects claims without public proof.

Two years later we know have decent evidence that the US has that capability via PRISM. In 2011 Julian had the knowledge that it happens because Julian has the kind of connection that you need to get the knowledge but had no way of proving it.

If you know Italian or German Leoluca Orlando racconta la mafia / Leoluca Orlando erzählt die Mafia is a great book that provides a paradigm of how to operate in a political system with conspiracies.

Leoluca Orlando was major in Palermo with is the capital of Sicily and fought there against the Mafia. That means he has good credentials about telling something about how to deal with it.

He starts his book with the sentence:

I know it. But I don't have evidence.

Throughout the book he says things about the Sicilian Mafia that he can't prove but that he knows. In his world in which he had to take care to avoid getting murdered by the Mafia and at the same time fight it, that's just how the game works.

He also makes the point that it's very important to have politicians who follow a moral codex.

The book end by saying that the new Mafia now consists of people in high finance.