On 2/16/08, Matt Mahoney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I believe his target is the existence of consciousness. There are many proofs > showing that the assumption of consciousness leads to absurdities, which I > have summarized at http://www.mattmahoney.net/singularity.html > In mathematics, it should not be necessary to prove a theorem more than once. > But proof and belief are different things, especially when the belief is hard > coded into the brain.
I would have thought a minimally necessary part of constructing a proof in this domain would be to give a fairly precise conceptual analysis or partial analysis (e.g. necessary conditions) of our concept of consciousness and show why the conditions of its application do not in fact obtain. The standard practice in philosophy is to defend such an analysis by arguing it best unifies and explains our case intuitions about when we apply it. (It may be helpful to compare this to standard practice in linguistics in relying on our grammatical intuitions to theorize about grammar.) If there was anything like this in the link you sent, I'm having a difficult time identifying and reconstructing it. I do see, among other things, a series a questions that confuse the issue of personal identity with that of the existence of consciousness. We might be quite sure *that* something is conscious without being sure whose consciousness it is or how it is related to other consciousnesses we have known and cared about. There's been some very good work on personal identity issues done by Derek Parfit in "Reasons and Persons" and Jeff McMahan in "The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life." Ultimately, they both conclude that personal identity is in the end just a distraction but something very close to it, the right kinds of psychological (and, for McMahan, physical) continuity, is what really matters. There's no need to bring in uploading or artificial neurons to see this point either. Imagine that your cerebral hemispheres will be transplanted into two different bodies and go on to live separate lives. Since there's not really any grounds to say that one is you and not the other, and they can't both be you, we should conclude neither one is you though obviously they bear a very close relation to you. Furthermore, it is easy to imagine that if their lives are going fairly well and they are continuing on with your projects, this is clearly preferable to simply dying. I think we should say that part of what normally matters in you continuing to exist has been preserved even though technically, neither one of them is you. Maybe it makes sense to regret the lack of unity, but I think everything that really matters can be captured by talking about the right kinds of psychological and physical relations of connectedness and continuity, without getting obsessed over incessantly asking, "But is it you? Which one is you? Where are you? etc." > The result will not be pretty. The best definition (not solution) of > friendliness is probably CEV ( http://www.singinst.org/upload/CEV.html ) which > can be summarized as "our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the > people we wished we were, had grown up farther together". What would you wish > for if your brain was not constrained by the hardwired beliefs and goals that > you were born with and you knew that your consciousness did not exist? What > would you wish for if you could reprogram your own goals? The logical answer > is that it doesn't matter. The pleasure of a thousand permanent orgasms is > just a matter of changing a few lines of code, and you go into a degenerate > state where learning ceases. Your counterfactuals seem very different from Eliezer's and less relevant to what matters. I think Eliezer's definition was plausible because it approximated the standards we use to deliberate about our values. As such, it is getting at deeper values or procedures that we implicitly presuppose in any serious discussion of values at all. Even if you were to question whether you should use that standard, your cognitive architecture would still have to do so by reference to some internal standard in order to even count as a meaningful type of questioning and Eliezer's definition would probably be a decent intuitive characterization of it. Of course, you are free to pose any type of bizarre counterfactual you want, but I don't see how evaluating it would be relevant to what matters in the way that Eliezer's would. I would prefer to leave behind these counterfactuals altogether and try to use information theory and control theory to achieve a precise understanding of what it is for something to be the standard(s) in terms of which we are able to deliberate. Since our normative concepts (e.g. should, reason, ought, etc) are fundamentally about guiding our attitudes through deliberation, I think they can then be analyzed in terms of what those deliberative standards prescribe. ------------------------------------------- singularity Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/11983/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/11983/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&id_secret=96140713-a54b2b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
