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Author Topic: The Necro Wars  (Read 337375 times)

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faust

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3075 on: March 24, 2022, 04:16:08 pm »

In this model, is the universal observer conscious *in addition* to everyone, or just the one subject-of-experience that *is* everyone?
The latter.
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silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3076 on: March 24, 2022, 04:24:10 pm »

So you actually *agree* with me that all people are subjectively identical? That's rad.

But I still don't entirely understand the position. Or rather, I don't understand how if at all it is actually different from panpyschism + Open Individualism, which says that

- the "content" of the universe (i.e., matter) is inherently conscious
- this consciousness is all experienced by the same entity

This seems to be roughly what you just described. So what *additional* thing do you get by holding Idealism?

faust

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3077 on: March 24, 2022, 04:34:08 pm »

So you actually *agree* with me that all people are subjectively identical? That's rad.

But I still don't entirely understand the position. Or rather, I don't understand how if at all it is actually different from panpyschism + Open Individualism, which says that

- the "content" of the universe (i.e., matter) is inherently conscious
- this consciousness is all experienced by the same entity

This seems to be roughly what you just described. So what *additional* thing do you get by holding Idealism?
It seems to me then that panpsychism + open individualism is just objective idealism.

Well, almost. You seem to hold the opinion that the laws of physics are somehow separate from the consciousness that makes up the universe, while I would say that they are also part of that entity.
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silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3078 on: March 24, 2022, 04:53:52 pm »

Quote
Well, almost. You seem to hold the opinion that the laws of physics are somehow separate from the consciousness that makes up the universe, while I would say that they are also part of that entity.

I disagree with that summary; I would not describe them as separate.

The analogy I like the most is this. Imagine that instances of consciousness are like the faces of a polyhedron



As you probably know, there is a transformation where you map each face onto its center point. If we do this to the above, we get this:



My position is that matter is like the second thing, and thus the laws of physics describe the second thing. Since the transformation is reversible, you can understand everything by just looking at the second thing. E.g., if you imagine that the polyhedron evolves according to some algorithm, there is an analogous algorithm that makes the center points evolve, and if you just understand that fully, then you can predict everything. In other words, the laws of physics get to be complete.

I like this analogy because the two aspects look quite different, and in particular, if you only look at it from the material lens, it seems like matter is "empty" (like points). But they're not separate, they're two ways of looking at the same thing. It's also called "dual-aspect monism"

silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3079 on: March 24, 2022, 04:57:59 pm »

I think the problem I'm running into here (and it's great if I can understand that better) is that I'm looking at these strictly in terms of causality, and thus what I mean by idealism is not quite what other people mean by idealism.

Most importantly, in my understanding of idealism, consciousness and matter *are separate*.

faust

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3080 on: March 24, 2022, 05:18:10 pm »

I think the problem I'm running into here (and it's great if I can understand that better) is that I'm looking at these strictly in terms of causality, and thus what I mean by idealism is not quite what other people mean by idealism.

Most importantly, in my understanding of idealism, consciousness and matter *are separate*.
I don't think that objective idealism states that these consciousness and matter are separate. Though whether you say "matter doesn't exist, all is consciousness" or "matter and consciousness are the same" or "matter is a function of consciousness" doesn't seem to make a big difference.
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faust

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3081 on: March 24, 2022, 05:22:45 pm »

Quote
Well, almost. You seem to hold the opinion that the laws of physics are somehow separate from the consciousness that makes up the universe, while I would say that they are also part of that entity.

I disagree with that summary; I would not describe them as separate.

The analogy I like the most is this. Imagine that instances of consciousness are like the faces of a polyhedron



As you probably know, there is a transformation where you map each face onto its center point. If we do this to the above, we get this:



My position is that matter is like the second thing, and thus the laws of physics describe the second thing. Since the transformation is reversible, you can understand everything by just looking at the second thing. E.g., if you imagine that the polyhedron evolves according to some algorithm, there is an analogous algorithm that makes the center points evolve, and if you just understand that fully, then you can predict everything. In other words, the laws of physics get to be complete.

I like this analogy because the two aspects look quite different, and in particular, if you only look at it from the material lens, it seems like matter is "empty" (like points). But they're not separate, they're two ways of looking at the same thing. It's also called "dual-aspect monism"
My tentative feeling on this that I think similarly about it, but I tend to believe that information is lost when passing from consciousness to matter, so it's impossible to reconstruct everything from looking at matter.
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silverspawn

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3082 on: March 24, 2022, 05:52:08 pm »

I don't think that objective idealism states that these consciousness and matter are separate. Though whether you say "matter doesn't exist, all is consciousness" or "matter and consciousness are the same" or "matter is a function of consciousness" doesn't seem to make a big difference.

well the first one (which would be subjective idealism) does seem to be different since the matter and consciousness aren't the same or isomorphic, but matter is just a hallucination.

I believe you then also disagree with how I characterized them in my diagram language? That was

Objective Idealism as

[Consciousness] -> [Matter]

and panpyschism as

[consciousness] ≘ [matter]

(It was my intention to imply with the arrow that they are not the same thing, nor inherently tied)

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3083 on: March 25, 2022, 06:42:04 am »

I don't think that objective idealism states that these consciousness and matter are separate. Though whether you say "matter doesn't exist, all is consciousness" or "matter and consciousness are the same" or "matter is a function of consciousness" doesn't seem to make a big difference.

well the first one (which would be subjective idealism) does seem to be different since the matter and consciousness aren't the same or isomorphic, but matter is just a hallucination.

I believe you then also disagree with how I characterized them in my diagram language? That was

Objective Idealism as

[Consciousness] -> [Matter]

and panpyschism as

[consciousness] ≘ [matter]

(It was my intention to imply with the arrow that they are not the same thing, nor inherently tied)
Ah. I think I thought your arrow was something like causation. Like Consciousness causes Matter (where I'd agree). If it is supposed to be more like "Consciousness affect matter" but matter is its own separate thing independently of of consciousness, then that is not my philosophy, and from what I understand it is standard in objective idealism that the observer and the observed are inseparable.
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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3084 on: March 25, 2022, 06:59:58 am »

Thanks, this is very useful to know. I think I'm going to rewrite the first post as not "here is a way to classify all theories" but "I want to answer the causal influence question, here are the possibilities, they probably to some extent map onto existing theories.

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3085 on: March 25, 2022, 07:01:51 am »

Sayeth LessWrong:



My second question was how much the person was influenced by reading Eliezer's sequences, the second chart shows % who chose Reductionist Functionalism grouped by influence; results are unsurprising. At least people actually understand the sequences' position, for the most part.

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3086 on: March 25, 2022, 07:20:32 am »

All of this is very close to the center of the distribution in terms of what I expected.

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3087 on: March 25, 2022, 07:31:52 am »

It does seem to me like causal *interaction* is the thing that's important to figure out. In particular, it being real and it being about matter rather than computation or bits. This matters for valence realism and structuralism, whether or not AI is conscious, whether human brains are special, and how to go about aligning AI

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3088 on: March 25, 2022, 07:32:48 am »

Not to mention about whether small animals like chickens or even insects are conscious.

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3089 on: March 26, 2022, 08:40:35 am »

Ok I think what I will do is

- ditch the entire first two posts of the sequence as is
- rewrite them without using academic terminology altogether. no epiphenomenalism, panpyschism, interactionism, functionalism, whatever. No isms of any kind.

Instead, we just ask how consciousness and matter interact, and we stipulate four theories, namely

1. they're two different things that affect each other
2. they're two different things but only matters does stuff
3. they're inherently tied together
4. there is only matter

then we eliminate #1 and #2 based on the Meta Problem & approximate completeness of physics. That leaves [inherently tied] & [consciousness doesn't exist]. Then we differentiate 3 into 3.1 and 3.2 based on whether consciousness lives entirely on the algorithmic level or not. This will take up the bulk of the work, and that part of the sequence should roughly still be usable. Then in the end I talk about why I don't think "consciousness doesn't exist" is reasonable, haven't gotten to that yet anyway.

The reader can keep track of what isms they correspond to if they want to, but not taking a position on that avoids any debate about what certain isms mean, and that's a really good thing.

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3090 on: March 26, 2022, 08:42:12 am »

I'm also considering replacing "consciousness" with "qualia", which is a more narrow and less overloaded term. Qualia are the things that consciousness consists of. So the experience of warmth is a quale, the experience of seeing green is another quale. the plural is qualia.

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3091 on: March 26, 2022, 08:51:22 am »

I do increasingly realize that "the brain is not like a computer" is a claim for which there exists a heap of evidence the size of Mount Everest which almost everyone likes to ignore. It's something you "learn" to do when studying computer science (and Machine Learning in particular). None of what you learn seems to vibe with how your every day problem solving feels like, but you just learn to accept this, and you don't periodically make small updates toward the "there is a fundamentla difference" hypothesis.

The massive problem here is of course that the "there is a fundamental difference" position is overwhelmingly held for bad reasons, i.e., the U-shaped information curve I've talked about earlier.

All of this will be really important in the "why does consciousness exist" part. The actual best reason is "I think therefore I am", but this is not going to convince anyone, so the other line of attack is pointing out that there is a massive difference between how humans solve problems and how computers solve them.

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3092 on: March 26, 2022, 08:55:17 am »

By far the biggest thing here is The Binding Problem that I've talked about before. Most of all it's the biggest piece of evidence against functionalism the idea that qualia lives on the algorithmic level of abstraction. But since binding has causal effect, e.g. visual illusions, it's also the biggest hint that consciousness actually exists. Since Binding has causal effect, I can make falsifiable predictions based on it, e.g., I predict that you won't ever have image classifiers based on neural networks be fooled by visual illusions in the way that humans are.

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3093 on: March 26, 2022, 08:58:53 am »

Another thing is that there is such a thing as a qualia state space and asking different people to rank the difference between various perceptions should give correlated results. E.g., ask a hundred people whether red/orange or red/purple are more subjectively different. This doesn't really correspond to a material property, afaik the distance should be identical for both.

Problem with this is that most people actually are bad at this kind of introspection because they never practice it, but it should still be possible

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3094 on: March 26, 2022, 09:46:46 am »

Unrelated, Isusr talked about why he got his Ukraine take wrong:

Quote
I wasn't surprised by Ukrainian resistance. In the article you link, I wrote "The Ukrainian government will fight a total war to defend its sovereignty." which was bet against in the comments. I was surprised by Russian incompetence. My model for why I was wrong goes like this.

    I wasn't paying attention to Russia's build-up on Ukraine's border. When Russia invaded, I quickly copied the predictions of Western experts on Russia.
    Western experts copied their predictions from public reports by US intelligence.
    US intelligence copied their predictions from secret reports stolen from Russia.
    Russian intelligence was garbage due to systemic corruption and the fact Putin didn't tell his lower echelons they'd be invading Ukraine for real.

Ironically, I wrote a story last year satirizing a world where every intelligence agency just steals each other's data.
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What Awaclus did certainly worked better

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3095 on: March 26, 2022, 02:36:36 pm »



White to move. Mate in 3. What's the move?

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3096 on: March 27, 2022, 02:52:01 am »

1: ed 2: h4 3: Qb5
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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3097 on: March 27, 2022, 03:01:26 am »

my favorite one: White to move, mate in 4
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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3098 on: March 27, 2022, 03:53:54 am »

Agree that was pretty cool :-)


Kf3 -> Qc2 -> Kf4 -> Qc1#

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Re: The Necro Wars
« Reply #3099 on: March 27, 2022, 03:56:41 am »

Agree that was pretty cool :-)


Kf3 -> Qc2 -> Kf4 -> Qc1#

yup, of course.

Now i think I should've spoilered my answer :(
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