I had a very busy IRL day yesterday and have intended to respond to this.
While I am initially inclined to simply do what you ask out of kindness I am still convinced that I have no real reason to do so and therefore acceding here may portray me as a pushover. This really is an instance where some human neutral third party input to this dispute would be extremely helpful and I wish there was more of a culture online of such interventions. I would expect there to be such a culture here on Lesswrong, but perhaps not.
Nevertheless I did consult a non-human mediator. I prompt Gemini with the following in a new chat:
I wrote a post where I said Chalmers's p-zombie argument is so bad "How could any rational person accept something so absurd?" but then go on to say that his argument is more persuasive from color inversion. Someone else characterized this as arguing against Chalmers. Is that an accurate characterization or should they retract it?
As a guard against sycophancy I do phrase it from your perspective. As far as I know any personalization feature of Gemini is turned off, including remembering past chats. Even if I've incorrectly assessed Gemini's outside knowledge, previously I did not interact with Gemini about this post, these comments, nor the general idea of people on Lesswrong or in the Rationalist community arguing against Chalmers.
Its response concludes:
##Conclusion on the characterization
The other person's characterization that you are arguing against Chalmers is accurate with respect to the p-zombie argument. You explicitly argued against the p-zombie argument's soundness and persuasiveness.
They do not need to retract the statement that you argued against him, as you undeniably argued against one of his main arguments. You simply qualified your opposition by showing that you find a related argument to be more compelling. You are essentially a selective critic of his methods, not a complete opponent of his conclusions.
https://gemini.google.com/share/52f7996e8472
This is an increasingly interesting intellectual exercise and I would be open to alternative prompting techniques or perhaps the opinions of other LLM systems as a comparison.
You linked my post Beyond the Zombie Argument as evidence of people on LessWrong purportedly arguing against Chalmers which is a pretty significant misreading of my article.
Your article starts with "As a staunch physicalist I’ve spent a long time wondering how anyone could possibly find the zombie argument compelling." and proceeds to address Chalmers (1996) at one point asking "How could any rational person accept something so absurd?" This seems to purport to argue against Chalmers.
You do seem to say that the color inversion argument is a more convincing argument. However, the disagreement with the zombie argument I think does carry my characterization. Additionally your post somewhat misses Chalmers's eventual dismissal of these questions (well, dismissal in the way Hume dismisses non-empirical questions by placing them outside of scientific inquiry, which arguably is not total dismissal).
I really don't mean any disrespect by this.
This does seem to be the form of argument used when it is demanded that someone proves a negative. I'm surprised no one has brought that up elsewhere in the comments.
It is incumbent on someone making a positive statement to provide evidence. When someone doesn't provide enough evidence for a positive claim critics will point that out but "there is insufficient evidence" can only be repeated so many times.
People continue to press "Well, prove why [positive claim] isn't the case!" and the critic's only response is to iterate through all the positive arguments made for [positive claim] and show they are insufficient.
We do not have to meticulously caveat that when we discuss the concept of "night" we are not talking about the phenomenon of the Sun moving away from our position on the Earth disc to a point where mountains cast our current position in shadow but rather the phenomenon of the Earth rotating away from facing our current position towards the Sun in order to avoid "lying" to any Flat-Earth believers who are listening. In fact I don't think discussions arranging a meeting with a group of Flat Earthers "tomorrow night" would require any such caveats or explanations nor incur any case of "lying," despite what are presumably somewhat different conceptions of what "night" is. Such minor differences are for the purposes of such a conversation basically completely negligible.
very different
The degree to which his definition is "very different" is not clear. Definitions vary at least slightly from person to person all the time but we don't make long semantic declarations in normal conversation unless it serves some specific functional purpose.
What purpose is the new definition of the term "Santa Claus" serving here
The child can engage his friends in conversations about what gifts Santa Claus brought him.
In this case the analogy would be that compatibilists are parents explaining to confused children that the "Santa Claus" which is delivering presents to their school friends is in fact the generosity of those children's parents. Perhaps some more religious parents would be defining Santa Claus or Free Will with reference to more fantastical elements such as a man in a red suit or an extradimensional ethereal substance which somehow telekinetically manipulates our bodies.
What I make of those studies is that stimulating the thalamus activates the whole corticothalemic loop.
Yes, precisely, but the inverse is not the case. It seems to make a strong argument that the loops "start" in the thalamus and that the thalamus has a primary role.
There you said the thalamus is where consciousness is happening. That is just flat wrong. It's a system phenomenon.
Literally every empirical phenomenon is a system phenomenon at some level. Everything is the undifferentiated Brahman according to the Kharmic religions, and they're basically right in some sense. But we make abstractions for events which are local in space and time.
US federal governance or a match of fisticuffs in an arena are complex system phenomena with many disparate influences but the language and abstractions we use place these things at a particular place and time because that is where these influences converge in time and space and resolve their conflicts.
(I think our discussion has become perfectly looped at this point.)
I do think having easy to understand language is important and advantageous. If everytime someone tried talking about the US government we got a long-winded nuancing that technically we are in a democracy and the people in Washington D. C. aren't in control of the US government that would cause confusion.
an arena of competition
This really doesn't seem to clash with the Washington D. C. metaphor; many people consider the power politics of the US government to be a competitive activity.
The broader issue is locality of events in time and space. Take sports competition: a common saying is that wins are made in the gym. There is a causal chain that leads back from any event to previous events not local in space which, with enough compute, have a knowable deterministic effect on the event's outcome. We still don't say that an MMA match takes place in the respective training gyms of the fighters, the fight happens in the octagon. That is where the disparate influences on the outcome of the fight converge in time and space to resolve conflicts to a unitary resolution.
As a more practical matter, what do you make of the studies I mentioned that produce awareness in either unresponsive human patients or anesthetized animals with only stimulation of the thalamus? That seems very powerfully indicative that the thalamus is where consciousness is happening.
Reddit Mod is a "job" AI will likely replace.
There currently is a kerfuffle over the actions of a moderator of r/art which seem to be a shining example of the petty and arbitrary cruelty in which Reddit mods are free to indulge as unpaid volunteers. This made me think that Reddit Mods are very similar to Dungeon Masters in Hasbro's Dungeons and Dragons game, although why may not be clear to you readers.
Hasbro's DnD seems to be on a mission to alienate DMs from DnD in order to more directly access the players, which Hasbro llikely views as their real customers. It sees DMs as unpaid volunteers which intermediate the use of their product by consumers. In the past (under TSR) this was seen as a beneficial use of free labor but under the corporate ownership of Hasbro DMs were seen as extracting value from the role of player intermediary which could theoretically go to Hasbro's bottom line. Hasbro until recently had been pursuing an online strategy which would move the pen-and=paper RPG into an online platform which likely eventually would obviate the need for DMs. In an online platform directly controlled by Hasbro not a single dollar of Hasbro's money would be lost to a DM's horny depiction of a female character, the DM's unique approach to personal hygiene, nor the arbitrary and unfair cruelty of a power=tripping DM.
Outside of the online platform Hasbro has also moved to shift power away from DMs and towards players. Mechanically there are things like the new death save system which makes a player character death much more mechanically difficult than in past editions of the game. The caveats in old editions that the written rules are just suggestions and that the rulings of the DM are final have been removed. Recently there has been rumors of a move to disallow the DM screen, a folding barrier which allowed the DM to conceal things like maps of areas yet unseen by players or detailed character sheets for NPCs. All of this seems designed to dimish the role of the DM.
And a similar effort to more directly control the expereince of end-users likely will happen at Reddit. This latest controversy is over a mod not only permanently banning a professional artist from r/art for an offhand comment that prints of the art he posted were availible but also erasing his entire r/art post history simply for offering an apology and asking to be reinstated. This is pretty representative of the arbitrary nature of Reddit mod power and likely has been repeated many times in cases where the user did not have access to a large audience on a different platform, as did the artist in this case.
Reddit will likely recognize that an AI facilitated system could let them hire a handful of paid moderators who will be committed to act in a fair and professional manner, disintermediating the existing volunteer moderators. Reddit is already a bulk of the training data for most LLMs and Reddit itself already has a massive dataset of moderator actions which could be used for training. All it would likely take at this point is a major controversy or perhaps a string of moderate controversies to motivate them to implement a new system.