Hmm. It gets tricky because we get into like, what does the English word “experience” mean. “Phenomenal properties” is supposed to pick out the WOW! aspect of experiences, that thing that’s really obvious and vivid that makes us speculate about dualism and zombies. I think Frankish uses “experience” basically to mean whatever neural events cause us to talk about pain, hunger etc, so I don’t think an eliminativist would deny those exist. But I’m not sure.
Illusionism is the doctrine that phenomenal consciousness does not exist. Frankish introduced the term, so it makes sense to anchor it to his usage.
In the essay “Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness”, Frankish makes very clear that he is not advocating a “conservative realist” position in which phenomenal properties can be reduced to brain states. Illusionism is in fact ideologically close to dualism - both agree that phenomenal properties are too weird to be explained by physical phenomena, they just disagree on what to make of this. He distinguishes ...
when we say that A is B, we generally do not mean that A is strictly identical to B - which it clearly isn’t. This applies even when we say things like 2+2 = 4. Obviously, "2+2" and "4" are not even close to being identical.
This seems to mix up labels and referents. 2+2 is strictly identical to 4. The statement “2+2=4” is not the same as the statement “‘2+2’=‘4’”
It seems that this may unfortunately make s-risk more likely, as AGI may find it worthwhile to run experiments on humans. See “More on the ‘human experimentation’ s-risk” at the bottom of this page: https://www.reddit.com/r/SufferingRisk/wiki/intro/
Two things one might be considered about with regard to psychedelic usage are acute highly unpleasant experiences (“bad trips”) and HPPD. Anecdotally, both happened to me from my first and only psychedelic experience.
My HPPD is very mild now and doesn’t bother me, though it did at first. Some people have other drugs on hand during their psychedelic experiences as “tripkillers” in case they have a very bad psychological reaction.
Psychedelics are pretty psychologically strong stuff and I would not recommend experimenting with them at your son’s age.
I think the intuition error in the Chinese Room thought experiment is that the Chinese Room doesn’t know Chinese, just because it’s the wrong size/made out of the wrong stuff.
If GPT-3 was literally a Giant Lookup Table of all possible prompts with their completions then sure, I could see what you’re saying, but it isn’t. GPT is big but it isn’t that big. All of its basic “knowledge” it gains during training but I don’t see why that means all the “reasoning” it produces happens during training as well.
Nabokov is less popular and more prestigious than JK Rowling, and I prefer reading him, and get more pleasure out of doing so. I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that people who say they prefer Beethoven to nightcore are lying to themselves. People’s tastes really do differ quite a lot.
I also think “only listen to/read/watch whatever gives you most units of pleasure per minute” is a meme that discourages people from seeking out a wide range of experiences. It’s suspiciously “wireheady”. If life was just guilty pleasures it would be a lot more boring. Bette...
Borges is a very famous writer, so the fact that people keep mentioning him is not much evidence of coordination
Anticipated experience is just my estimate for the percentage of future-mes with said experience. Whether any of those future-mes "actually exist" is meaningless, though, it's all just models.
So the idea is that you’re taking a percentage of the yous that exist across all possible models consistent with the data? Why? And how? I can sort of understand the idea that claims about the external world are meaningless in so far as they don’t constrain expectations. But now this thing we’ve been calling expectations is being identified with a structure inside ...
A couple thoughts:
I think of explanations as being prior to predictions. The goal of (epistemic) rationality, for me, is not to accurately predict what future experiences I will have. It’s to come up with the best model of reality that includes the experiences I’m having right now.
I’ve even lately come to be skeptical of the notion of anticipated experience. In Many Worlds, there is no such thing as “what I will experience”, there are just future people descended from me who experience different things. There are substitute notions that play the role ...
I think for your purposes you can just define meaningless as “neither true nor false” without detouring into possibility
By cosmological multiverse, I mean Level I or II. It is arguable that the distinction between branching and diverging is meaningless, or that Level I and II should be viewed as branching, but that is not the usual view.
I think it’s clear it’s not meaningless, and that those who think it’s meaningless just favor viewing every kind of splitting as branching. Let me explain: To say the future branches, what I mean is that there is no fact of the matter what exactly will happen in the future. To say the future diverges, what I mean, is that there is a fact of ...
I think I agree it makes verificationism a bit more plausible if you already find Tegmark IV plausible.
Regarding the quantum multiverse - yes, I agree, that is the usual way of thinking about things, moreover the usual thinking is that most ordinary statements about the future are similarly indeterminate. On the other hand, this isn’t the usual thinking about the cosmological multiverse. In a quantum multiverse, universes literally branch, in a cosmological multiverse, universes merely diverge. So, assuming the usual views about these multiverses are corre...
This looks like an argument, not for verificationism, but for the impossibility of knowing that verificationism is false. This seems unproblematic to me.
I am also skeptical of premise 3. It relies on a certain conception of personal identity in Level IV - that in some sense we are all our copies in the multiverse, so they count as a single observer
I think “acausal-focused” works well as an adjective, compare to “suffering-focused”. As a noun, perhaps “acausal-focused altruism”?
I strongly agree. This has been discussed in the literature, I believe. For instance, it comes up in discussions of the semantic paradoxes. There is no paradox involved in “disquotation” for propositions: the proposition that p just is the proposition that it’s true that p.
When you’re talking about sentences though, you run into the liar paradox if you say that “p” is true if and only if p.
The vast majority of philosophers definitely do not favor maximizing the amount of hedonium. Pure hedonistic utilitarianism is a relatively rare minority view. I don’t think we should try to explain how people end up with specific idiosyncratic philosophical views by this kind of high-level analysis…