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51

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 06, 2024, 11:14:03 am »

Haven't responded to this yet:

Non-metaphysical objective laws of morality don't make sense to me, at least sans a creator or guided evolution. If morality is unchanging (which we suppose it to be when judging the sins of history), it must have existed before humans evolved. What made humanity evolve to give us the qualia of pre-existing moral laws, which are common to all men? And if moral laws evolved alongside us, in what way can it be objective, other than in the way that we have it in common?

So I think qualia tell us something about the universe because it is evolutionary useful to have a helpful model of the environment. They admittedly also tell us about aspects of the universe that it's not evolutionarily helpful to know, but that's not that surprising; evolution just figured out a general truth-seeking process. Which is very flawed, but still general.

As far as morality goes, I just deny that this is a real thing. I think valence, which is how good any one moment of consciousness feels, is a real thing, and I think it makes sense to try to increase the valence in the universe. I personally try to do that. I think literally every other aspect of morality is a human invention and completely meaningless (except insofar as it correlates with valence, which actually it almost always does, so in practice a lot of morality tends to be great, but nonetheless I deny that it has any non-valence-related meaning).

Thankfully (from my perspective) the trends of moral progress, by and large, seems to be going toward higher valence. E.g., slavery is bad for net valence and now we don't have slavery anymore. Torture is super ultra bad for net valence and now we have much less torture. Factory Farming is super extra ultra bad for net valence and we seem to be on a trajectory to get rid of it maybe? Gay marriage is good for net valence and we have gay marriage now. Etc. There's counter-examples but on the whole that seems to be the trend.

Very few people like this view or morality because it's incredibly reductive, but that's my honest view, and that's why I don't feel a need to invoke religion

52

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 06, 2024, 07:03:08 am »

Btw if I Trump wanted to win, he should absolutely pick Nikki Haley for VP, and then he should subtly hint that maybe he won't make it the full term and Haley could become president so as to give moderate Republicans an incentive to vote for him. Fortunately he has way too much of an ego to do that. It's almost like he's not actually politically smart!

53

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 06, 2024, 06:56:24 am »

Of course Trump is still overvalued; now that polling has leveled, he's just way behind in the fundamentals and arguably on a negative polling trajectory

54

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 06, 2024, 06:55:06 am »

55

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 06, 2024, 05:34:56 am »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGRvuH8nH-M

where has this been all my life? *-*

56

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #215: Getting Engaged

« on: April 05, 2024, 04:03:19 am »

Cool idea but way too strong. Gaining a horse is +1 Card value; playing a card as a way is about +2 Cards value (probably more since you have choice?). And then you have +1 Action. So this is probably stronger than +1 Card, +3 Actions. Just cutting the +1 Action might make it okay.

A Way may be worth about +2 Cards on a terminal. But when added to a card that already gives +1 Action like this creation, +2 Cards is one of the very best Ways. So, this line of reasoning for why the card is overpowered does not seem correct.

Mh, true. Maybe it's fine as is then?

Actually now I'm sort of curious, let me go through the list of all ways. I'd say

S tier (busted): Mouse, Otter, Squirrel, Turtle
A tier (very strong): Goat, Horse, Pig,

and then the rest ranges from meh (Monkey) to totally useless (Rat)

The probability to get an S-tier card is almost exactly 50%, and the probability to get at least an S or A tier is almost exactly 75%. So I think I'm back on this being too strong. Don't underestimate the value of switching, either; there are various ways that didn't make it in A tier like Mole that are situationally extremely strong.  I still think I like just cutting the +Action best. If you can fix something by removing complexity, why do something else? If you want to, you could make it cost 5$ after cutting the +Action.

How would the card be if it cost 5 and you HAD to switch ways?

too strong and even swingier; the penalty of having to switch totally depends on the set of ways. I don't think that's the way to nerf them. (And btw "Horse" and I think also "Way" should both be uppercase.)

Edit: That said, in a meaningful fraction games with this card, after the Ways are revealed the card is going to be overpowered. For example, you're very likely to buy multiples of this card in the presence of Way of the Otter (the +2 Cards Way). That doesn't make for the most interesting gameplay, even if the card is not consistently essential.

That's not actually unusual for official cards though; plenty of cards are above the general powerlevel bar on specific boards. I think that's fine.

Anyway I like the design of the card a lot aside from the powerlevel, it sounds super fun.

57

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 04, 2024, 06:39:49 pm »

58

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 04, 2024, 06:30:16 pm »

Many years back I was dibbling in German wikis that are parodies of Wikipedia -- basically a wiki where every article is just supposed to be funny.

I'm reminded of this because the wikipedia entry on Stormy Daniels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormy_Daniels reads like it could be a parody. Alas it is not.

And this is apparently the only of Trump's criminal trials that will start pretty soon, so it's kinda a big deal.

59

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 04, 2024, 06:04:01 pm »

Damn look at this. Polling average is now officially tied.

60

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #215: Getting Engaged

« on: April 04, 2024, 05:45:08 pm »

Cool idea but way too strong. Gaining a horse is +1 Card value; playing a card as a way is about +2 Cards value (probably more since you have choice?). And then you have +1 Action. So this is probably stronger than +1 Card, +3 Actions. Just cutting the +1 Action might make it okay.

61

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 04, 2024, 05:37:52 pm »

sorry to interrupt the conversation flow but yeah go Biden woooo!!

62

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 04, 2024, 01:25:39 pm »

(Btw h/t to faust who was the first person to make me realize that objective idealism isn't actually stupid )

63

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 04, 2024, 01:18:57 pm »

Then as for (1), this is gonna sound more esoteric (and it's also not that practically relevant). But I disagree with the premise; I do think that a complete causal understanding of the brain would answer all questions about consciousness. I don't see how it couldn't since it has to explain exactly why people claim they have consciousness in the first place.

So at a super basic level, you could ask what kind of stuff the universe is made of (this wasn't your question, but it'll lead to an answer). The position I usually defend is called dual-aspect monism, which says that there's one kind of stuff with two aspects, the material aspect and the conscious aspect. This sounds the least woo and gives the right framework for the studying the problem, like you need to find a deep connection between physical causality and what consciousness is doing.

But an alternative way you could go about it is just to say, everything is consciousness. So the electromagnetic field just is a field of consciousness. This sounds radical, but actually it amounts to the same thing because even if the EM field just is consciousness, well as long as consciousness is lawful (and I definitely think it is), you should still be able to study it from a distance and derive laws for how it evolves. And, well, that's Marxwell's equations, i.e., a part of the laws of physics. So you don't need to postulate some kind of non-conscious stuff in addition to conscious stuff to explain the appearance of matter and the laws of physics; you get the laws of physics just by virtue of studying the causal behavior of a thing. Mathematical equation is just what it looks like if you describe something only in terms of causality.

So that's the model that I think is ultimately most philosophically robust -- the fields of physics are the fields of consciousness period. And I think that does come back to your question/claim because if the EM field just is a field of consciousness, then it yeah understanding it fully would fully explain consciousness. consciousness doesn't arise from the field; they're the same thing.

Technically this means that a computer has nonzero consciousness since it uses the EM field, but the consciousness isn't unified so it amounts to the same thing. The phrase "mind dust" is sometimes used. Basically it reframes everything from "is this conscious" to "how connected is consciousness here". In almost all cases the answer is "it's incredibly disconnected into billions of miniscule bits". So everything is technically minimally conscious but this has no practical implications. Like yes there are charged particles in a tree so there is consciousness a tree, but the tree doesn't form a unified entity, and it makes no difference if you hack it in two. It was a billion disconnected pieces of mind dust before and it's the same after. Only stuff with nontrivial electromagnetic effects have unified and hence nontrivial pieces of consciousness. Like humans and probably almost all animals.

64

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 04, 2024, 01:02:25 pm »

(btw thanks for asking, I've thought about this a ton of times but every time I try to structure an argument again I find that it was helpful.)

65

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 04, 2024, 01:00:50 pm »

Ok so I'm gonna try to tie #2 and #3 together. This is not how I'd try to convince someone who starts out skeptical but it's more constructive than just focusing on paradoxes.

I think the best starting point is thinking about computation, specifically what you are using to compute. If physicalism is true then all computation must be based on physical mechanisms in the broadest sense, and if so, we can roughly differentiate between physical complexity, which is how complex of a mechanism you use, and logical complexity, which is how many of your mechanisms you are chaining together. I've made this graphic for an article a few weeks ago that illustrates this:



So one extreme case is what I call standard computation, which is where you use ultra primitive mechanisms but you go apeshit in how complex your logical arrangement of those is. All digital computers (and actually analog computers as well) fall into that category. Your only mechanisms are two different voltage levels to differentiate two states, and some wire designs to implement binary logic on those two states. That is almost literally it (I think some marginally more complex physical pieces exist in some computers). Standard computation is also the only thing that's analyzed under "theory of computation" in mathematics. Like computability, turing machines, complexity theory, all of that stuff assumes that you have a very basic set of operations that you can combine in arbitrarily complex ways.

Then nonstadard computation is just everything else. Clever mechanical divices for integration, a soap bubble that "computes" a spherical shape, a wire whose surface you make repulsive such that it self-untangles, clever arrangements of coupled oscillators, and also the EM field.

My claim then would be that standard computation cannot support consciousness. It doesn't matter whether it's analog or digital or based on electricity or water; the important feature is that you have a set of extremely primitive physical mechanisms and all the complexity comes in at how you chain them together. And the way to see that this doesn't support consciousness is just that it fundamentally doesn't have the right properties.

So for example, consciousness seems to have objective, discrete boundaries. There's a set of qualia in your consciousness, and a different set in mine, and they're perfectly split. If we start interacting, they remain perfectly split. That gives you two paradoxes, one is that no qualia sharing takes place even though we causally interact, and the other more fundamental one is that it doesn't even seem logically coherent for partial merging. Like, any quale can either belong to one set or the other and not both, but the degree of functional integration between systems seems to be a spectrum. (Btw, qualia are just literally all components of your consciousness, tactice, visual, etc; anything and everything you perceive is a quale or set of qualia.) This is called the boundary problem, or binding problem, or combination problem.

Another issue is that consciousness seems to have inherent content. Like, red looks a certain way, a harmonic chord sounds a certain way, and more subtly, all qualia seem to be valenced (i.e., feel good or bad). You can't bootstrap yourself toward that with standard computation because you start from empty content (just two abstract states) and you can't ever get from there to nonempty content. (I think this argument is very unpersuasive to people not already sympathetic to this idea, but  I do think it's true.)

Yet another problem is that standard computation, since it's entirely based on abstract states, is fundamentally dependent on interpretation. Like, suppose a digital computer were conscious and right now would experience pain. All that's actually happening at the physical level is that data strings are moved around (i.e., sequences of bits, which physically are sets of pieces on a wire that either have around 1V or 2V). But presumably the consciousness (so the felt pain in this case) is frame-invariant (i.e., it is one way regardless of who interprets it). So how does that work? Does the universe try to interpret what's going on by looking at the surrounding system? That doesn't sound like something that could be an actual law. Does it depend on the system's counterfactual response to other inputs? If so then you have more to work with, but now consciousness depends on counterfactuals, which physics does not, so you lose connection between consciousness and causality. Mike Johnson had this thought experiment where he just said, suppose I shake a bag of popcorn, did I just torture someone? It's difficult to argue that the answer is no since there would be an interpretation of the atoms in the bag and how they correspond to informational states that makes the computation represent the simulation of someone who is experiencing pain. So this whole strand of argument is called the interpretation problem and seems altogether impossible to resolve.

I think the underlying problem behind all this is that small discrete objects are just the wrong level of interpretation. If consciousness is supposed to be operating within the laws of physics, then there must be a deep connection between the laws of physics and the laws of consciousness. In fact they should be isomorphic, i.e., equivalent in a deep mathematical sense. Certainly what they say about causality should be exactly equivalent. But the laws of physics are written over fundamental forces and fields, so the laws of consciousness must be as well. That means any approach that first tries to round everything to an ontology of discrete computational elements like logical 1s or 0s (or rational numbers in case of analog computers) is just inherently doomed, and all the problems above and various others are just ways at pointing at consequences of this disconnect. You have to analyze consciousness at the lowest possible level, the same as physics.

And well then the EM field is pretty much the only candidate. It's one of the fundamental fields in the standard model, and all of the others seem like non-starters. It solves the interpretation problem because it deals in physical forces rather than abstract codes that need to be interpreted, and there is this physical phenomenon where the field lines can form a topologically closed shape that makes it causally separate from the rest of the field, which solves the boundary problem.

66

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 04, 2024, 12:18:47 pm »

EM theory

It does make a lot of sense that the brain should work this way, although I don't think that it is the entire picture. If you exhaustively studied EM field computation and patterns in the brain, you still wouldn't be able to understand consciousness physically. What differentiates EM field patterns and computation from digital computation in such a drastic way as to give the first capability to experience but not the second?

So, I think there are three separate questions here, which I would rephrase like this:

1. To what extent would a complete causal understanding of the brain, including the EM field, explain the phenomenal aspect of consciousness? (In other words, does the EM field theory solve the hard problem?)

2. What's the evidence that digital computation doesn't support consciousness?

3. If in fact #2 is true, then why is it that digital computation doesn't support consciousness and the EM field does?

Questions #2 and #3 sound almost identical but actually my answer would be very different. Because a lot of the case for #2 is either empirical (i.e., from comparing computational properties of consciousness and unconscious human processing and digital processing, it seems like the last two are similar and  the first is different) or based on totally non-constructive arguments (like, assume digital computers could be conscious, here is how I derive a contradiction). Then once you have these arguments, you can see that they don't apply to the EM field, but that still doesn't really answer #3.

Gonna take a moment to think about how to best address these without writing several thousand words

67

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 04, 2024, 07:01:18 am »

It's actually kind of funny how much the EM theory pattern-matches with religious or otherwise dualistic conceptions of the mind, especially before you read the footnotes. Like, it gives humans a special thing that computers don't have* **, it makes the mind non-material***, it implies that consciousness works very differently from the type of computation that's studied in computer science****, and it even rescues the naive idea of consciousness as this thing you put into a system, rather than a necessary byproduct of intelligence, which is the respectable adult view. But it's still perfectly compatible with physicalism.

* but other animals do, probably even insects
** but you could absolutely build conscious computers, we're just not currently doing it
*** but 100% physical
**** but the type of computation is still completely deterministic

68

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 04, 2024, 06:50:21 am »

But if I had to make one argument against the thesis, the fact that outside fields don't have any measurable effect would be it.

Correct: I meant no consciously perceived effects. You can probably measure them using neurotech, but they don't seem to affect consciousness.

69

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #215: Getting Engaged

« on: April 04, 2024, 06:46:46 am »

^ Interesting card. This completely nukes various engines like village/rabble, but of course you can play around that.

70

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 04, 2024, 06:30:40 am »

There are many objections I could raise against naturalism, but my chief one would probably be the fact that some parts of essential human experience cannot correspond to entirely physical phenomena. If you call man's sense of right and wrong, for instance, an illusion, what trust can you have in any other mental faculty? I can no more say that killing innocents, or betraying your friends is wrong than say that one and one makes three. But if the first one has no basis in what is real, what trust can I have in that the second one isn't an illusion? This is of course an entirely philosophic argument, which may be weaker in your eyes than for instance the Kalam Cosmological argument, but this comment is getting far too long now.

So you have to differentiate between the qualia of moral judgment, i.e. what it feels like to have moral intuitions, and whether these have any truth to them -- and I'm not sure what precise point you're making. Are you saying the qualia is difficult to explain, i.e., the fact that we have a sense of right and wrong? Or are you saying that the sense of right and wrong clearly has some truth to it, and the difficult part is to explain the source of this truth in a physicalist universe? Those would be two very different points.

71

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 04, 2024, 06:26:28 am »

So the relevant part of the field is probably actually very spatially small. It's definitely entirely contained within the skull.

72

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 04, 2024, 06:25:30 am »

Interesting! What does this theory entail?

So, obviously all signal communication involves the electromagnetic force, both in the brain and in computers. But in computers, we only want it to act in very local, well-defined ways. Since electric fields naturally extend outward into all directions, computers actually have mechanisms that suppress those "global" effects. They're considered a potential source of error that needs to be prevented.

The EM hypothesis says that the brain doesn't suppress these but instead is structured around those global effects and uses them for computation. This explains a long list of things, the split brain thing being one of them, another being the general phenomenon of brain waves, which is that groups of neurons tend to fire in sync. If the brain were like a digital computer that would just seem like unnecessary redundancy, but if you care about global fields, then the strength of the signal matters. And it is known in physics that the EM field can give rise to mathematically complex phenomena, it's just not applied to the brain.

In essence, it's like each neuron is treated as a small antenna rather than a discrete piece in a wire. Someone I talked to called it the "radio brain" idea. Or I should say, it's also treated like a small antenna. I actually do think that there is still a substantial portion of the brain that does work based on discrete units. It's a mixture between discrete computation and global effects.

What prevents strong EMP's from messing with consciousness, incase it exists in the electromagnetic field,

I think the brain is just very well insulated to protect it from outside effects. But if I had to make one argument against the thesis, the fact that outside fields don't have any measurable effect would be it. The insulation seems suspiciously perfect.

  and how do you explain the fact that electric stimuli in the brain seem unable to affect some integral parts of the conscious experience? "There is no place in the cerebral cortex where electrical stimulation will cause a patient to believe or decide" - Wilder Penfield, Mystery of the Mind, as quoted in part one of Irreducable Mind.

In my model the entire cerebral cortex is completely unconscious and basically a digital computer with neuromorphic hardware, and the holistic EM field is maybe instantiated by the thalamus, though that's speculative. So electric stimulation to the cortex not affecting consciousness would actually fit with the model. Afaik you can also have substantial parts of the cortex damaged and have consciousness remain remarkably unaffected. And that also goes with the insulating thing since the cortex is like the spatially outer shell of the brain. (The lobes are all parts of the cerebral cortex, except the limbic lobe.)



I do think electrical stimulation of the cortex should have indirect effects on consciousness since like the two halves communicate a lot. But the model would say that messing with the thalamus should have far more direct and drastic effects.

73

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 03, 2024, 07:01:23 pm »

Isn't it crazy that you can literally sever the corpus callosum (primary synaptic connection between both hemispheres) and consciousness is almost unaffected, and none of the academically theories of consciousness bother to have an explanation? Isn't that the just absolutely nuts? It's like if you had a phenomenon where each object spontaneously repairs itself once it's cut for the first time, and all the physicists are like "nah that doesn't seem important; our theory doesn't need to explain that"

That seems hard to explain without invoking an incorporeal soul.

The EM field theory explains it! The electromagnetic field doesn't rely on synaptic connections. It's a physical phenomenon, just not a material one.

Agree that a biblical soul also explains it but well that's not a plausible theory in my book. I'm very much a physicalist, in the sense of thinking that the laws of physics exhaustively describe causality in the universe. If you couldn't explain consciousness without invoking religion, that would be one thing, but I think you can.

Entirely unrelated, have you seen the game Balatro, silverspawn? It's kind of like deckbuilding poker.

No, never heard of it. But note that the unique thing about poker is that you can play it for money; it's not a game I'd study if it were just for fun.

74

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: April 03, 2024, 03:52:25 pm »

Isn't it crazy that you can literally sever the corpus callosum (primary synaptic connection between both hemispheres) and consciousness is almost unaffected, and none of the academically theories of consciousness bother to have an explanation? Isn't that the just absolutely nuts? It's like if you had a phenomenon where each object spontaneously repairs itself once it's cut for the first time, and all the physicists are like "nah that doesn't seem important; our theory doesn't need to explain that"

75

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #215: Getting Engaged

« on: April 03, 2024, 06:57:17 am »

The problem I see is that the effect permits me to play my own Friendly Village, at which point everyone else can play a second Action card, and it's not really clear in which order everything should go, and there are probably cases where this matters. Granted, Friendly Village is usually a card you wouldn't want to play on your opponent's turn, so maybe this won't come up.