51 points by rbanffy 3 days ago | 69 comments
api 3 days ago
There are so many unknowns that we can literally say nothing about it. Nothing. We have no idea. We have a sample size of one and virtually nothing to even calibrate any of the scales for any of the parameters in any model. For all we know abiogenesis (life from non-living matter) is phenomenally rare to the point that there is an average of less than one example per galaxy per billion years. Or it could be common but complex life could be rare. Or, or, or, or... the or's become infinite because we have no information to constrain them. It's even worse than an endless theology argument since at least there you're arguing within a set of theoretical philosophical boundaries. This is literally unbounded.
We have only barely started to explore a tiny fraction of the vastness of the universe. It's far too early to make statements like these.
I do think exploring it is a fun way to enumerate all the possibilities for what we might or might not find out there, but it can at times get problematic. You have "longtermists" out there who actually cite the Fermi paradox in political, social, or ideological arguments, arguing for real world policies on the basis of an unconstrained untestable hypothesis.
D-Coder 3 days ago
You can't even prove to me that you exist.
Yet we all seem to be able to agree on a lot of things. Re Fermi, we're pretty sure that gravity, physics, chemistry are the same throughout the universe. Biological forms did evolve on our planet, and our planet doesn't seem super-unusual. Given those things, we're pretty sure that there are planets with biological forms. Given that, I think we can say that there is a significant chance that other intelligent biological forms are out there somewhere. And then we get the Paradox.
kelseyfrog 3 days ago
shermantanktop 3 days ago
kelseyfrog 3 days ago
shermantanktop 3 days ago
And these are smart people… I just think most people generally struggle with contingent probability.
Do have links to this type of treatment of Drake?
kelseyfrog 3 days ago
n4r9 3 days ago
anon84873628 3 days ago
n4r9 2 days ago
jasfi 3 days ago
hax0ron3 3 days ago
>While it is no longer a question of understanding the magic itself, we still have to explain how it happens. The “hard problem” has been replaced by the “illusion problem”. It consists in explaining why it seems to us that we are phenomenally conscious
Lol. "why it seems to us that we are phenomenally conscious". Maybe because we are phenomenally conscious? The very subjective experience of pondering whether we are phenomenally conscious, or for that matter the subjective experience of anything else whatsoever, is already proof sufficient that we are phenomenally conscious because it is an example of phenomenal consciousness. Granted, maybe there are some good defenses of illusionism out there, but based on this text it seems to me that illusionism is just a sort of hail mary pass attempt to save reductive physicalism by deploying a bunch of hand-waving and deceptive semantics.
w0de0 3 days ago
“Reductive physicalism” doesn’t need to be saved; there’s nothing else; physicalism is the fundamental philosophy of science, the prerequisite for a functional, predictive physics.
Consciousness is the quandary, not physicality.
walleeee 3 days ago
"I don't like the word materialism because we don't know what the material is."
It's all a quandary, no? Wonderfully useful predictive models aside, we have almost as little metaphysical/ontological purchase as we have w.r.t. qualia.
And though it is difficult to argue with physicalism (broadly conceived), there are compelling critiques of reductive physicalism.
anon84873628 3 days ago
>Another view is that eliminativism assumes the existence of the beliefs and other entities it seeks to "eliminate" and is thus self-refuting.
That said, Illusionism should not be seen as a "hail mary pass attempt to save reductive physicalism". From the same Wiki page:
>In the context of materialist understandings of psychology, eliminativism is the opposite of reductive materialism, [which argues] that mental states as conventionally understood do exist, and directly correspond to the physical state of the nervous system.
The last line is a link to the page for "neural correlates of consciousness". The evidence for which, to me, sure suggests that there is a casual relationship between physical and mental events.
ronjobber 3 days ago
I think it's a bit funny to call this a causal relationship. People do it all the time and what is meant depends on the meaning of "cause", but it is a bit ambiguous here if the physical events are other events that cause the mental events.
My mental model of reductive physicalism is that the physical events are the mental events, i.e. the mental event occurs if and only if the physical event occurs.
n4r9 3 days ago
dbspin 3 days ago
n4r9 3 days ago
I agree that it's not obvious. I suppose where I disagree with anti-physicalists is that I think it can conceivably be resolved by reference to physical facts. I can imagine reading a computer program that simulates the human brain and thinking "ah yes, that captures everything about what I feel". Whereas I don't think the anti-physicalists will ever accept such a possibility.
CalRobert 3 days ago
When do you imagine it started? Does your mental model explain this physically/algorithmically? (Honest question, I consider this often and really have no clue)
n4r9 3 days ago
HeuristicsCG 3 days ago
n4r9 3 days ago
> There are few explicit defenders of panpsychism at the present time. The most prominent are David Griffin, Gregg Rosenberg, David Skrbina and Timothy Sprigge.
https://plato.stanford.edu/ARCHIVES/WIN2009/entries/panpsych...
ronjobber 3 days ago
HeuristicsCG 3 days ago
CalRobert 3 days ago
n4r9 3 days ago
Teever 2 days ago
exitb 3 days ago
If not, what’s missing?
yldedly 3 days ago
1. Have a robot build perception models of its environment and itself
2. Have the robot allocate computational resources and sensory bandwidth to the models using attention
3. Have the robot control attention using model predictive control
Because the attention model is less detailed than its actual attention, by virtue of being a model, it doesn't represent the mechanisms of attention or modeling accurately. Instead, it uses non-physical concepts such as "mental possession" to model itself or other agents paying attention to things, or "qualia" to denote the recursion that occurs when percepts we attend to are summarized by the attention model (which in turn can be attended to, and so on).
n4r9 2 days ago
sctb 3 days ago
I don't think so, I think fundamentally it's just a concept used to express a more generalized form of perception (i.e. not divided into discrete senses, either internal or external). I'm happy to leave it at that, but YMMV.
n4r9 2 days ago
HeuristicsCG 3 days ago
xpuente 3 days ago
It may not magically appear. It may, by design, be woven into the learning process.