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The Olson twins are do not at all have qualitative identity.
Not 100% , but enough to illustrate the concept.
So I just don’t know what your position is.
I didn't have to have a solution to point out the flaws in other solutions. My main point is that a no to soul- theory isn't a yes to computationalism. Computationalism isn't the only alternative, or the best.
You claim that there doesn’t need to be an answer;
Some problems are insoluble.
that seems false, as you could have to make decisions informed by your belief.
My belief isn't necessarily the actually really answer ..is it? That's basic rationality. You need beliefs to act...but beliefs aren't necessarily true.
And I have no practical need for a theory that can answer puzzles about destructive teleportation and the like.
You currently value your future self more than other people, so you act like you believe that’s you in a functional sense.
Yes. That's not an argument in favour of the contentious points, like computationalism and Plural Is. If I try to reverse the logic, and great everything I value as me, I get bizarre results...I am my dog, country, etc.
Are you the same person tomorrow? It’s not an identical pattern, but a continuation.
Tomorrow-me is a physical continuation , too.
I’m saying it’s pretty-much you because the elements you wouldn’t want changed about yourself are there.
If I accept that pattern is all that matters , I have to face counterintuitive consequences like Plural I's.
If I accept that material continuity is all that matters, then I face other counterintuitive consequences, like having my connectome rewired.
Its an open philosophical problem. If there were an simple answer , it would have been answered long ago.
"Yer an algorithm, Arry" is a simple answer. Just not good
If you value your body or your continuity over the continuity of your memories, beliefs, values, and the rest of your mind that’s fine,
Fortunately, it's not an either-or choice.
I certainly do believe in the plural I (under the speciall cirrumstance I discussed); we must be understanding something differently in the torture question. I don’t have a preference pre-copy for who gets tortured; both identical future copies are me from my perspective before copying. Maybe you’re agreeing with that?
...and post copy I have a preference for the copy who isn't me to be tortured. Which is to say that both copies say the same thing, which is to say that they are only copies. If they regarded themselves as numerically identical, the response "the other one!" would make no sense, and nor would the question. The questions presumes a lack of numerical identity, so how can it prove it?
I was addressing a perfect computational copy. An imperfect but good computational copy is higher resolution, not lower, than a biological twin. It is orders of magnitude more similar to the pattern that makes your mind, even though it is less similar to the pattern that makes your body.
You're assuming pattern continuity matters more than material continuity. There's no proof of that, and no proof that you have to make an either-or choice.
What is writing your words is your mind, not your body, so when it says “I” it meets the mind.
The abstract pattern can't cause anything without the brain/body.
Noncomputational physicalism sounds like it’s just confused. Physics performs computations and can’t be separated from doing that.
Noncomputational physicalism isn't the claim that computation never occurs. Its the claim that the computational abstraction doesn't capture everything that's relevant to consciousness/mind. Its not physically necessary that the computational abstraction captures all the causally relevant information, so it isn't logically necessary, a fortiori.
Dual aspect theory is incoherent because you can’t have our physics without doing computation that can create a being that claims and experiences consciousness like we do.
Computation is a lossy , high level abstraction of a what a physical system does. It doesn't fundamentally cause anything in itself.
Now, you can argue that a physical duplicate would make the same claims to be conscious without actually having consciousness, and that's literally a p-zombie argument.
But we do have consciousness. The insight of DAT is that "reports of consciousness have a physical/computational basis" isn't exclusive of "reports of consciousness are caused by consciousness". You can have your cake and eat it!
Of course, the above is all about consciousness-qua-awareness , not consciousness qua personal identity.
I concede it’s possible that consciousness includes some magic nonphysical component (that’s not computation or pattern instantiated by physics as a pure result of how physics works).
If it's physical, why call it magical?
It's completely standard that all computations run on a substrate. If you want to say that all physics is computation, OK, but then all computation is physics. You then no longer have plural I's, because physics doesn't allow the selfsame object to have multiple instances.
Do you think a successful upload would say things like “I’m still me!” and think thoughts like “I’m so glad I payed extra to give myself cool virtual environment options”? That seems like an inevitability if the causal patterns of your mind were captured. And it would be tough to disagree with a thing claiming up and down it’s you, citing your most personal memories as evidence
It's easy to disagree if there is another explanation, which there is: a functional duplicate will behave the same, because it's a functional duplicate..whether it's conscious of not, whether it's you or not.
You’ve got a lot of questions to raise, but no apparent alternative.
Non computationalism physicalism is an alternative to either or both the computationalist theories. (That performing a certain class of computations is sufficient to be conscious in general, or that performing a specific one is sufficient to be a particular conscious individual. Computation as a theory of consciousness qua awareness isn't known to be true, and even if it is assumed, it doesn't directly give you a theory of personal identity).
The non existence, or incoherence, of personal identity is another. There doesn't have to be an answer to "when is a mind me".
Note that no one except andeslodes is arguing against copying. The issue is when a mind is me, the person typing this, not a copy-of-me.
Reproduce the matter, you’ve reproduced the mind.
Well, that's only copying.
Consciousness, qua Awareness, and Personal Identity are easily confused, not least because both are often called "consciousness".
A computational theory of consciousness is sometimes called on to solve the second problem, the problem of personal identity. But there is no strong reason to think a computational duplicate of you, actually is you, since there is no strong reason to think any other kind of duplicate is.
Qualitative identity is a relationship between two or more things that are identical in all their properties. Numerical identity is the relationship a thing has only to itself. The Olsen twins enjoy qualitative identity; Stephanie Germanota and Lady Gaga have numerical identity. The trick is to jump from qualitative identity to numerical identity, because the claim is that a computational duplicate of you, is you, the very same person.
Suppose you found out you had an identical twin. You would not consider them to be you yourself. Likewise for a biological clone. A computational duplicate would be lower resolution still, so why would it be you? The major problem is that you and your duplicate exist simultaneously in different places, which goes against the intuition that you are a unique individual.
You’re fighting against the counterintuitive conclusion. Sure I’d rather have a different version of me be tortured; it’s slightly different. But I won’t be happy about it. And my intuition is still drawn toward continuity being important, even though my whole rational mind disagrees. I’ve been back and forth over this extensively, and the conclusion is always the same- ever since I got over the counter-intuitive nature of the plural I
You don't really believe in the plural I theory, or you would have a different and we to the torture question.
Non -computationalist physicalism doesn't have to be the claim that material continuity matters , and pattern doesnt: it can be the claim that both do. So that you cease to be you if you are destructively cloned, and also if your mind is badly scrambled. No bullet biting about plural Is is required.
Both determinism and free will are metaphysical assumptions. In other words, they are presuppositions of thought.
Neither is a presupposition of thought. You don't have to presume free will, beyond some general decision making ability, and you don't have to presume strict determinism beyond some good-enough causal reliability. Moreover, both are potentially discoverable as facts.
A choice must be determined by your mental processes, knowledge and desires. If choices arose out of nowhere, as uncaused causes, they would not be choices.
False dichotomy. A choice can be influenced by your mental processes, knowledge and desires without being determined by them.
A choice is not an uncaused cause. A choice is when thought generates an intention, based on pre-existing preferences and knowledge, and that intention generates action toward making the intention real.
You can't assume that any kind of choice counts as free will.
Free will is not “free” in the sense of being uncaused. It is “free” in the sense that you are the cause
I see determinism, you are not the cause, only a cause. The choice you made was already a fact before you were born.
. If an uncaused cause arose out of nowhere and made you pick the chocolate, that would not be a choice. It would be a strange, supernatural event.
Indeterminism based free will doesn't have to separate you from your own desires, values, and goals, because, realistically ,they are often conflicting , so that they don't determine a single action. This point is explained by the parable of the cake. If I am offered a slice of cake, I might want to take it so as not to refuse my hostess, but also to refuse it so as to stick to my diet. Whichever action I chose, would have been supported by a reason. Reasons and actions can be chosen in pairs.
. By contrast, I am free to make a cup of coffee right now, because I have the power to turn that intention into a reality.
That's only freedom in the compatibilists sense.
Determinism is a presupposition of science
No, much of science is statistical and probablistic.
The free will | determinism paradox is one of a family of paradoxes created by thinking about the self as an object.
Determinism excludes libertarian free will by removing the ability to have done otherwise: you have offered nothing to restore it.
You don’t have to be a substance dualist to believe a sim (something computationally or functionally isomorphic to a person) could be a zombie. It's a common error , that because dualism is a reason to reject something as being genuinely conscious,it is the only reason --there is also an argument based on physicalism.
There are three things that can defeat the multiple realisability of consciousness:-
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Computationalism is true, and the physical basis makes a difference to the kinds of computations that are possible.
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Physicalism is true, but computationalism isn't. Having the right computation without the right physics only gives a semblance of consciousness.
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Dualism is true. Consciousness depends on something that is neither physics nor computation.
So there are two issues: what explains claims of consciousness? What explains absence of consciousness?
Computationalism is a theory of multiple realisability: the hardware on which the computation runs doesn't matter, so long as it is adequate to run the computation, so grey matter and silicon can run the same computations...and a lot of physical details are therefore irrelevant to conscious.
Computationalism isn't a direct consequence of physicalism.
Physicalism has it that an exact atom-by-atom duplicate of a person will be a person and not a zombie, because there is no nonphysical element to go missing. That's the argument against p-zombies. But if actually takes an atom-by-atom duplication to achieve human functioning, then the computational theory of mind will be false, because there CTM implies that the same algorithm running on different hardware will be sufficient. Physicalism doesn't imply computationalism, and arguments against p-zombies don't imply the non existence of c-zombies-duplicates that are identical computationally, but not physically.
So it is possible,given physicalism , for qualia to depend on the real physics , the physical level of granularity, not on the higher level of granularity that is computation.
A computational duplicate of a believer in consciousness and qualia will continue to state that it has them , whether it does or not, because its a computational duplicate , so it produces the same output in response to the same input. Likewise, a duplicate of a non believer will deny them. (This point is clearer if you think in terms of duplicates of specific individuals with consistent views, like Dennett and Chalmers, rather than a generic human ).
@JuliaHP
Instead of analyzing whether you yourself are conscious or not, analyze what is causally upstream of your mind thinking that you are conscious, or your body uttering the words “I am conscious”.
Since an effect can have more that one cause that isn't going to tell you much.
None of these are free will (as commonly understood
Some believe that free will must be a tertium datur, a third thing fundamentally different to both determinism and indeterminism. This argument has the advantage that it makes free will logically impossible,and the disadvantage that hardly any who believes in free will defined it that way. In particular, naturalistic libertarians are happy to base free will on a mere mixture of determinism and indeterminism.
Another concern about naturalistic libertarianism is that determinism is needed to put a decision into effect once it had been made. If one's actions are unrelated to ones decisions, one would certainly lack control in a relevant sense. But it is not the case that we are able to get the required results 100% of the time, so full determinism is perhaps unnecessary to achieve a realistic, "good enough" level of control. Additionally, there does not have to be the same amount of indeterminism at every stage of the deciding-and-acting process. In "two stage" models, the agent alternates between going into a more indeterministic mode to make the "coin toss" , and then into a more deterministic mode to implement it.
If you made choices (or some element of them) not controlled by your personality, experience, thoughts and anything else that comes under the heading of ‘the state of your brain as a result of genetics and your prior environments’, they would be random, which still isn’t free will
Because of the stipulative definition? Such choices can still relate to onesaims., values personality , and history.
And that is precisely why they are determined. They are determined by you
If they are determined by me and nothing else, that would be something like free will...but it's not pure determinism, because pure determinism means everything is inevitable from the dawn of time , including my decisions. It is something you can get from a two stage theory, though.
everything seems to collapse to tautology
Successful explanation makes things seem less arbitrary, more predictable, more obvious. A tautology is the ultimate in non arbitrary obviousness.
You are using "The criminal justice system" to mean " The US criminal justice system " throughout. Typical-countrying is particularly problematic in this case, because the US is such an outlier.
The way to humanize a prison system is not to replace unofficial tortures with official ones. Other countries have abandoned capital and corporal punishment , and have lower incarceration rates.
If the death penalty is not so bad, why does almost everyone on death row seek to appeal it?
I wonder what MIRI thinks about this 2013 post (“The genie knows, but doesn’t care”) nowadays. Seems like the argument is less persuasive now,
The genie argument was flawed at the time, for reasons pointed out at the time, and ignored at the time.
Bayesianism works up to a point. Frequentism works up to a point. Various other things work.
You haven't shown that frequentism doesn't work, or that frequentism and bayesianism are mutually exclusive.
What does it even mean to live in a Bayesian universe? A universe needs some basic properties to make probabilistic reasoning possible and meaningful. Probabilistic reasoning is only meaningful in deterministic universe if the reasoner is limited, so that there is some Knightian uncertainty. It's always meaningful in an indeterministic universe if the indeterminism itself follows statistical patterns -- otherwise you have possibility without probability. (Complex systems can defy simple statistical patterns, as Pinker notes) Frequentism also requires events to fall into reference classes with n>1 members. That clearly isn't always -- or never -- the case in our universe. Bayesian probability is much less demanding.
Which to choose out of frequentism and Bayesianism? Frequentism is always better where you can use it because it is objective. But Bayesianism can be used where frequentism can't. So the answer is "both" -- specifically, use frequentism when you can, and Bayesianism when you can't.
This can be seen more charitably as desire to cut to the chase -- to solicit a small amount of actionable advice rather than a large body of background theory. Since everyone's time is limited, that can be instrumentally rational.
Good points. I think the term moral realism is probably used in a variety of ways in the public sphere. I think the relevant sense is “will alignment solve itself because a smart machine will decide to behave in a way we like”. If there’s some vague sense of stuff everyone “should” do, but it doesn’t make them actually do it, then it doesn’t matter for this purpose.
I think “the good is what you should do” is remarkably devoid of useful meaning. People often mean very little by “should”, are unclear both to others and themselves, and use it in different ways in different situations.
For understanding human ethics, the important thing is that it grounds out in punishments and rewards -- the good is what you should do , and if you don't do it, you face punishment. Another thing that means is that a theory of ethics must be sufficient to justify putting people in jail. But a definition is not a theory.
My theory is that “good” is usually defined as an emotion, not another set of words, and that emotion roughly means “I want that person on my team” (when applied to behavior),
If your whole theory of ethics is to rubber stamp emotions or opinions, you end up with a very superficial theory that is open to objections like the Open Question argument. Just because somebody feels it is good to do X does not mean it was necessarily is --it is an open question. If the good is your emotions , then it is a closed question...your emotions are your emotions , likewise your values are your values, and your opinions are your opinions. The openness of the question "you feel that X is good, but is it really?" is a *theoretical" reason for believing that "goodness" works more like "truth" and less like "belief".
(And the OQA is quite likely what this passage by Nostalgebraist hints at:-
*Who shoots down the enemy soldiers while thinking, “if I had been born there, it would have been all-important for their side to win, and so I would have shot at the men on this side. However, I was born in my country, not theirs, and so it is all-important that my country should win, and that theirs should lose.
There is no reason for this. It could have been the other way around, and everything would be left exactly the same, except for the ‘values.’
I cannot argue with the enemy, for there is no argument in my favor. I can only shoot them down.)
because evolution engineered us to find useful teammates, and that feeling is its mechanism for
And having gathered our team to fight the other team, we can ask ourselves whether we might actually be the baddies.
The *practical* objection kicks in when there are conflicts between subjective views.
A theory of ethics needs to justify real world actions -- especially actions that impact other people , especially actions that impact other people negatively.( It's not just about passively understanding the world, about 'what anticipated experiences come about from the belief that something is “good” or “bad”?')Why should someone really go to jail ,if they havent really done anything wrong? Well, if the good is what you should do, jailing people is justifiable , because the kind of ting you shouldn't do is the kind of thing you deserve punishment for.
Of course, the open question argument doesn't take you all the way to full strength moral realism. Less obviously, there are many alternatives to MR. Nihilism is one: you can't argue that emotivism is true because MR is false -- emotivism might be wrong because ethics is nothing. Emotivism might also be wrong because some position weaker than MR is right.
If good means “what you should do” then it’s exactly the big claim Steve is arguing against.
If Steve is saying that the moral facts need to be intrinsically motivating, that is a stronger claim than "the good is what you should do", ie, it is the claim that "the good is what you would do". But, as cubefox points out, being intrinsically motivating isn't part of moral realism as defined in the mainstream. (it is apparently part of moral realism as defined in LW, because of something EY said years ago). Also, since moral realism is metaethical claim, there is no need to specify the good at object level.
I’d be happy to come back later and give my guesses at what people tend to mean by “good”; it’s something like “stuff people do whom I want on my team” or “actions that make me feel positively toward someone”.
Once again, theories aren't definitions.
People don't all have to have the same moral theory. At the same time, there has to be a common semantic basis for disagreement, rather than talking past, to take place. "The good is what you should do" is pretty reasonable as a shared definition, since it is hard to dispute, but also neutral between "the good" being define personally, tribally, or universally.
Faith in maths prodigies can be misplaced. Faith in maths can be misplaced. No one has ever proved that you can solve everything with maths. The people who believe it believe it because a guru figure said so.
Positivism isn't necessarily true, and if it is, it still doesn't get you to 6, because LP recommends you have no metaphysics which would imply no solipsistic metaphysics. (LP might be compatible with the claim that your own sense-data are all you can know , but that isn't quite the same thing).
There's a soft patch around 5 and 6. Why is testability important? It's a charactersitic of science, but science assumes an external world. It's not a characteristic of philosophy -- good explanation is enough in philosophy, and the general posit of some sort of external world does explanatory work. And it's separate from the specific posit that the external world is knowable in some particular way.
There is the simple observation that one has no conscious experience during dreamless sleep. (A panpsychist could respond that maybe one merely lacks memory of one's sleeping experience, but that would be epicyclic).
That's just ordinary compatibilism -- as I said, "it’s not libertarian free will." All the work is being done by using a definition of free will that doesn't require indeterministic "elbow room", so none of it is being done by all the physics and metaphysics. If it is valid, it would be just as valid under naturalistic monism, supernaturalistic determinism, etc.
And compatibilism isn't universally accepted as the solution to free will because the quale of freedom is libertarian -- one feels that one could have done otherwise. (At least , mine is like that).
An additional non physical layer of consciousness might buy you qualia, but delivers no guarantee that they will be accurate... a quale of libertarian free will is necessarily illusory under determinism.
An additional non physical layer of consciousness might have bought you downwards causation and libertarian free will.
But you are not legitimising it as a subjective impression that correctly represents reality... only as an illusion: you can feel free in a deterministic world, but you can't be free in one.
Under physicalist epiphenomenalism (which is the standard approach to the mind-matter relation), the mind is super-impressed on reality, perfectly synchronized, and parallel to it.
Under dualist epiphenomenalism, that might be true. Physicalism has it either that consciousness is non existent rather than causally idle (eliminitavism), or identical to physical brain states (and therefore sharing their causal powers).
Understanding why some physical systems make an emergent consciousness appear (the so called “hard problem of consciousness”) or finding a procedure that quantify the intensity of consciousness emerging from a physical system (the so called “pretty hard” problem of consciousness) is impossible:
You could have given a reason why.
It's a warning if the history consists of various groups having extreme confidence about solving all the problems in ways that subsequent groups don't accept.
You are conflating subjective as in "by subjects" with subjective as in "for subjects". A subject can have preferences for objectivity, universality, impartiallity, etc.
The other problem is that MWI is up against various subjective and non-realist interpretations, so it's not it's not the case that you can build an ontological model of every interpretation.
Huh? The whole point of the Born rule is to get a set of ordinary probabilities, which you can then test frequentistically, over a run of experiments. Quantum mechanical measure-- amplitude-- isn't ordinary probability, but that's the thing you put into the Born rule, not the thing you get out of it. And it has it's own role, which is explaining how much contribution to a coherent superposition each component state makes.
ETA
There is a further problem interpreting the probabilities of fully decohered branches. (Calling then Everett branches is very misleading -- a clear theory of decoherence is precisely what's lacking in Everett's work)
Whether you are supposed to care about them ethically is very unclear, since it is not clear how utilitarian style ethics would apply, even if you could make sense of the probabilities. But you are not supposed to care about them for the purposes of doing science, since they can no longer make any difference to your branch. MWI works like a collapse theory in practice.
always thought that in naive MWI what matters is not whether something happens in absolute sense, but what Born measure is concentrated on branches that contain good things instead of bad things.
It's tempting to ethically discount low measure decoherent branches in some way, because that most closely approximates conventional single world utilitarianism -- that is something "naive MWI" might mean. However, one should not jump to the conclusion that something is true just because it is convenient. And of course, MWI is a scientific theory so it doesn't comes with built in ethics.
The alternative view starts with the question of whether a person low measure world still count as a full.person? If they should not, is that because they are a near-zombie, with a faint consciousness that weighs little in a hedonic utilitarian calculus? If they are not such zombies, why would they not count as a full person -- the standard utilitarian argument that people in far-off lands are still moral patients seems to apply. Of course, MWI doesn't directly answer the question about consciousness.
(For example, if I toss a quantum fair coin n times, there will be 2^n branches with all possible outcomes.)
If "naive MWI" means the idea that any elementary interaction produces decoherent branching, then it is wrong for the reasons I explain here. Since there are some coherent superpositions, and not just decoherent branches, there are cases where the Born rule gives you ordinary probabilities, as any undergraduate physics student knows.
(What is the meaning of the probability measure over the branches if all branches coexist?)
It's not the existence, it's the lack of interaction/interference.
By "equally" I meant:
"in the same ways (and to the same degree)".
If you actually believe in florid many worlds, you would end up pretty insuoucient, since everything possible happens, and nothing can be avoided.
Same way you know anything. "Sharp valued" and "classical" have meanings, which cash out in expected experience.
I’d guess that this illusion comes from not fully internalizing reductionism and naturalism about the mind.
Naturalism and reductionism are not sufficient to rigourously prove either form of computationalism -- that performing a certain class of computations is sufficient to be conscious in general, or that performing a specific one is sufficient to be a particular conscious individual.
This has been going on for years: most rationalists believe in computationalism, none have a really good reason to.
Arguing down Cartesian dualism (the thing rationalists always do) doesn't increase the probability of computationalism, because there are further possibilities , including physicalism-without-computationalism (the one rationalists keep overlooking) , and scepticism about consciousness/identity.
One can of course adopt a belief in computationalism, or something else, in the basis of intuitions or probabilities. But then one is very much in the ream of Modest Epistemology, and needs to behave accordingly.
"My issue is not with your conclusion, it’s precisely with your absolute certainty, which imo you support with cyclical argumentation based on weak premises".
Yep.
There isn’t a special extra “me” thing separate from my brain-state, and my precise causal history isn’t that important to my values.
If either kind of consciousness depends on physical brain states, computationalism is false. That is the problem that has rarely been recognised, and never addressed.
The particular* brain states* look no different in the teleporter case than if I’d stepped through a door; so if there’s something that makes the post-teleporter Rob “not me” while also making the post-doorway Rob “me”, then it must lie outside the brain states, a Cartesian Ghost.
There's another option: door-Rob has physical continuity. There's an analogy with the identity-over-time of physical objects: if someone destroyed the Mona Lisa, and created an atom-by-atom duplicate some time later, the duplicate would not be considered the same entity (numerical identity).
There isn’t an XML tag in the brain saying “this is a new brain, not the original”!
That's not a strong enough argument. There isn't an XML tag on the copy of the Mona Lisa, but it's still a copy.
This question doesn’t really make sense from a naturalistic perspective, because there isn’t any causal mechanism that could be responsible for the difference between “a version of me that exists at 3pm tomorrow, whose experiences I should anticipate experiencing” and “an exact physical copy of me that exists at 3pm tomorrow, whose experiences I shouldn’t anticipate experiencing”.
There is, and its multi-way splitting, whether through copying or many worlds branching. The present you can't anticipate having all their experiences, because experience is experienced one-at-a-time. They can all look back at their memories, and conclude that they were you, but you can't simply reverse that and conclude that you will be them , because the set-up is asymmetrical.
Scenario 1 is crazy talk, and it’s not the scenario I’m talking about. When I say “You should anticipate having both experiences”, I mean it in the sense of Scenario 2.
Scenario 2: “Two separate screens.” My stream of consciousness continues from Rob-x to Rob-y, and it also continues from Rob-x to Rob-z. Or, equivalently: Rob-y feels exactly as though he was just Rob-x, and Rob-z also feels exactly as though he was just Rob-x (since each of these slightly different people has all the memories, personality traits, etc. of Rob-x — just as though they’d stepped through a doorway).
But that isn't an experience. It's two experiences. You will not have an experience of having two experiences. Two experiences will experience having been one person.
If I expect to be uploaded tomorrow, should I care about the upload in the same ways (and to the same degree) that I care about my future biological self?
- Yeah.
Are you going to care about 1000 different copies equally?
I am talking about the minimal set of operations you have to perform to get experimental results. A many worlder may care about other branches philosophically, but if they don't renormalise , their results will be wrong, and if they don't discard, they will do unnecessary calculation.
Err...physicists can make them in the laboratory. Or were you asking whether they are fundamental constituents of reality?
The claim that humans are at least TM's is quite different to the claim that humans are at most TM's. Only the second is computationalism.
Meanwhile the many-worlds interpretation suffers from the problem that it is hard to bridge to experience,
Operationally, it's straightforward: you keep "erasing the part of the (alleged) wavefunction that is inconsistent with my indexical observations, and then re-normalizing the wavefunction"...all the time murmering under your breath "this is not collapse..this is not collapse".
(Lubos Motl is quoted making a similar comment here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2D9s6kpegDQtrueBE/multiple-worlds-one-universal-wave-function?commentId=8CXRntS3JkLbBaasx)
That claim is unjustified and unjustifiable
Nothing complex is a black box , because it has components, which can potentially be understood.
Nothing artificial is a black box to the person who built it.
An LLM is , of course, complex and artificial.
Everything is fundamentally a black box until proven otherwise.
What justifies that claim?
Our ability to imagine systems behaving in ways that are 100% predictable and our ability to test systems so as to ensure that they behave predictably
I wasn't arguing on that basis.
every particle interaction creates n parallel universes which never physically interfere with each other”
Although a fairly standard way of explaining MWI, this is an example of conflating coherence and decoherence. To get branches that never interact with each other again, you need decoherence, but decoherence is a complex dynamical process..it takes some time...so it is not going to occur once per elementary interaction. It's reasonable to suppose that elementary interactions produce coherent superpositions, on the other hand, but these are not mutually isolated "worlds". And we have fairly strong evidence for them.. quantum computing relies on complex coherent superpositions....so any idea that all superpositions just automatically and instantly decohere must be rejected.
People keep coming up with derivations, and other people keep coming up with criticisms of them, which is why people keep coming up with new ones.
I don’t think this is correct, either (although it’s closer). You can’t build a ball-and-disk integrator out of pebbles, hence computation is not necessarily substrate neutral.
Meaning that a strong version of computational substrate independence , where any substrate will do, is false? Maybe, but I was arguing against hypothetical, that "the substrate independence of computation implies the substrate independence of consciousness", not *for* the antecedent, the substrate independence of computation.
What the Turing Thesis says is that a Turing machine, and also any system capable of emulating a Turing machine, is computationally general (i.e., can solve any problem that can be solved at all). You can build a Turing machine out of lots of substrates (including pebbles), hence lots of substrates are computationally general. So it’s possible to integrate a function using pebbles, but it’s not possible to do it using the same computation as the ball-and-disk integrator uses—the pebbles system will perform a very different computation to obtain the same result.
I don't see the relevance.
So even if you do hold that certain computations/algorithms are sufficient for consciousness, it still doesn’t follow that a simulated brain has identical consciousness to an original brain. You need an additional argument that says that the algorithms run by both systems are sufficiently similar.
OK. A crappy computational emulation might not be conscious, because it's crappy. It still doesn't follow that a good emulation is necessarily conscious. You're just pointing out another possible defeater.
This is a good opportunity to give Eliezer credit because he addressed something similar in the sequences and got the argument right:
Which argument? Are you saying that a good enough emulation is necessarily conscious?
Albert: “Suppose I replaced all the neurons in your head with tiny robotic artificial neurons that had the same connections, the same local input-output behavior, and analogous internal state and learning rules.” Note that this isn’t “I upload a brain” (which doesn’t guarantee that the same algorithm is run)
If it's detailed enough, it's guaranteed to. That's what "enough" means
but rather “here is a specific way in which I can change the substrate such that the algorithm run by the system remains unaffected”.
Ok...that might prove the substrate independence of computation, which I wasn't arguing against. Past that, I don't see your point
The result (at least partially) of a particular physical substrate. Physicalism and computationalism are both not-dualism , but they are not the same as each other.
The Church-Turing thesis gives us the “substrate independence principle”. In principle, AI could be conscious.
The C-T thesis gives you the substrate independence of computation. To get to the substrate independence of consciousness, you need the further premise that the performance of certain computations is sufficient for consciousness, including qualia. This is, of course, not known.
MW has to show that decoherence is a natural consequence, which is the same thing. It can't be taken on faith, any more than entropy should be. Proofs of entropy were supplied a long time ago, proofs of decoherence of a suitable kind, are a work in progress.
What does highly sensitive mean? In classical physics, an observer can produce an energy output much greater than the energy input of the observation. ,but no splitting is implied. In bare Everettian theory, an observer becomes entangled with the coherent superposition they are observing, and goes into a coherent superposition themself ..so no decoherentsplitting is implied. You still haven't said where and the initial decoherent splitting occurs.
Bohmian mechanics adds hidden variables. why would it be simpler?
Amount of calculation isn’t so much the concern here as the amount of bits used to implement that calculation. And there’s no law that forces the amount of bits encoding the computation to be equal. Copenhagen can just waste bits on computations that MWI doesn’t have to do
And vice versa. You can do unnecessary calculation under any interpretation, so that's an uninteresting observation.
The importantly is that the minimum amount of calculation you have to do get an empirically adequate theory is the same under any interpretation, because interpretations don't change the maths, they just ... interpret it.... differently. In particular, a.follower many worlder has to discard unobserved results in the same way as a Copenhagenist -- it's just that they interpret doing so as the unobserved results existing in another branch, rather than being snipped off by collapse. The maths is the same, the interpretation is different. You can also do the maths without interpreting it, as in Shut Up And Calculate.
Copenhagen has to have rules for when measurements occur and what basis they occur in
This gets back to a long-standing confusion between Copenhagen and objective collapse theories (here, I mean, not in the actual physics community). Copenhagen ,properly speaking, only claims that collapse occurs on or before measurement. It also claims that nothing is known about the ontology of.the system before collapse -- it's not the case that anything "is" a wave function. An interpretation of QM doesn't have to have an ontology, and many dont. Which, of course, is another factor that renders the whole Kolmogorov. Complexity approach inoperable.
Objective collapse theories like GRW do have to specify when and collapse occurs...but MW theories have to specify when and how decoherence occurs. Decoherence isn't simple.
You're saying that if you have decoherent splitting of an observer, that leads to more decoherent splitting. But where does the initial decoherent splitting come from?
We don't have to regard basis as objective, ITFP.
Why? If you could prove that large environments must cause decoherence into n>1 branches you would have solved the measurement problem as it is currently understood.
but rather that Copenhagen used up some extra bits in the machine that generates the output tape in order to implement the wavefunction collapse procedure. (
Again: that's some less calculation that the reader of the tape has to do.
I'm not talking about the code complexity of interleaving the SI's output.
I am talking about interpreting the serial output of the SI ....de-interleaving , as it were. If you account for that , then the total complexity is exactly the same as Copenhagen and that's the point. I'm not a dogmatic Copenhagenist, so that's not a gotcha.
Basically , the amount of calculation you have to do to get an empirically adequate theory is the same under any interpretation, because interpretations don't change the maths, they just ... interpret it .....differently. The SI argument for MWI only seems to work because it encourages the reader to neglect the complexity implicit in interpreting the output tape.
"it" isn't a single theory.
The argument that Everettian MW is favoured by Solomonoff induction, is flawed.
If the program running the SWE outputs information about all worlds on a single output tape, they are going to have to be concatenated or interleaved somehow. Which means that to make use of the information, you gave to identify the subset of bits relating to your world. That's extra complexity which isn't accounted for because it's being done by hand, as it were..
I'm not trying to say all forms of MW are hopeless. I am saying
- there is more than one form
- there are trade offs between simplicity and correctness -- there's no simple and adequate MWI.
Decoherence isn't simple -- you can't find it by naively looking at the SWE, and it took three or four decades for physicists to notice.
It also doesnt't unequivocally support MW -- when we observe decoherence, we observe it one universe at a time, and maybe in the one and only universe.
"Decoherence does half the job of solving the measurement problem. In short, it tells you that you will not in practice be able to observe that Schroodinger's cat is in a superposition, because the phase between the two parts of the superposition would not be sufficiently stable. But the concept of decoherence does not, on its own, yield an answer to the question "how come the experimental outcome turns out to be one of A or B, not both A and B carried forward together into the future?"
The half-job that decoherence succeeds in doing is to elucidate the physical process whereby a preferred basis or pointer basis is established. As you say in the question, any given quantum state can be expressed as a superposition in some basis, but this ignores the dynamical situation that physical systems are in. In practice, when interactions with large systems are involved, states in one basis will stay still, states in another basis will evolve VERY rapidly, especially in the phase factors that appear as off-diagonal elements of density matrices. The pointer basis is the one where, if the system is in a state in that basis, then it does not have this very fast evolution.
But as I say, this observation does not in and of itself solve the measurement problem in full; it merely adds some relevant information. It is the next stage where the measurement problem really lies, and where people disagree. Some people think the pointer basis is telling us about different parts of a 'multiverse' which all should be regarded as 'real'. Other people think the pointer basis is telling us when and where it is legitimate to assert 'one thing and not both things happen'.
That's it. That's my answer to your question.
But I can't resist the lure, the sweet call of the siren, "so tell us: what is really going on in quantum measurement?" So (briefly!) here goes.
I think one cannot get a good insight into the interpretation of QM until one has got as far as the fully relativistic treatment and therefore field theory. Until you get that far you find yourself trying to interpret the 'state' of a system; but you need to get into another mindset, in which you take an interest in events, and how one event influences another. Field theory naturally invites one to a kind of 'input-output' way of thinking, where the mathematical apparatus is not trying to say everything at once, but is a way of allowing one to ask and find answers to well-posed questions. There is a distinction between maths and physical stuff. The physical things evolve from one state to another; the mathematical apparatus tells us the probabilities of the outcomes we put to it once we have specified what is the system and what is its environment. Every system has an environment and quantum physics is a language which only makes sense in the context of an environment.
In the latter approach (which I think is on the right track) the concept of 'wavefunction of the whole universe' is as empty of meaning as the concept of 'the velocity of the whole universe'. The effort to describe the parts of such a 'universal wavefunction' is a bit like describing the components of the velocity of the whole universe. In saying this I have gone beyond your question, but I hope in a useful way."
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/256874/simple-question-about-decoherence
ETA:
“Despite how tidy the decoherence story seems, there are some peo-ple for whom it remains unsatisfying. One reason is that the deco-herence story had to bring in a lot of assumptions seemingly extra-neous to quantum mechanics itself: about the behavior of typicalphysical systems, the classicality of the brain, and even the nature ofsubjective experience. A second reason is that the decoherence storynever did answer our question about the probability you see the dotchange color – instead the story simply tried to convince us the ques-tion was meaningless.” Quantum Computing since Democritus, 2nd Ed, P. 169.
Regarding basis as an observers own choice of "co-ordinate grid", and regarding observing (or instrument) as having a natural basis , is a simple and powerful theory of basis. Since an observer's natural basis is the one that minimises superpositions, the fact that observers make quasi-classical observations drops out naturally, without any cosmological assumptions. But, since there is no longer a need for a global and objective basis, a basis that is a feature of the universe, there is no longer a possibility of many worlds as an objective feature of the universe: since an objective basis is needed to objectively define a division into worlds, there such a division is no longer possible, and splitting is an observer-dependent phenomenon.