trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The two insights of materialism
by Academian — 2010-03-24T14:47:12.969Z

Preceded by: There just has to be something more, you know? Followed by: Physicalism: consciousness as the last sense.

Contents: 1. An epistemic difficulty 2. How and why to be a materialist

An epistemic difficulty

Like many readers of this blog, I am a materialist. Like many still, I was not always. Long ago, the now-rhetorical ponderings in the preceding post in fact delivered the fatal blow to my nagging suspicion that somehow, materialism just isn't enough.

By materialism, I mean the belief that the world and people are composed entirely of something called matter (a.k.a. energy), which physics currently best understands as consisting of particles (a.k.a. waves). If physics reformulates these notions, materialism can adjust with it, leading some to prefer the term "physicalism".

Now, I encounter people all the time who, because of education or disillusionment, have abandoned most aspects of religion, yet still believe in more than one than one kind of reality. It's often called "being spiritual". People often think it feels better than the alternative (see Joy in the merely real), but it also persists for what people experience as an epistemic concern:

The inability to reconcile the "experiencing self" concept with one's notion of physical reality.

This is among the the most common epistemic discomforts with materialism (I only say "discomfort", because a blank spot on your map does not correspond to a blank territory). The inside view — introspection — shows us something people call a "mind" or "spirit", and the outside view — our eyes — shows us something we call a "brain", which looks nothing at all the same. But the perceived distance between these concepts signals that connecting them would be extremely meaningful, the way superficially unrelated hypotheses and conclusions make for a very powerful theorem. For the connection to start making sense, one must realize that "you are made of matter" is as much a statement about matter as a statment about you…

The two insights of materialism: That the reconciliation of mind and matter –

is not misinformation about mind, but extra information about matter, and

is not misinformation about matter, but extra information about mind.

These are really two insights, and underusin...
There just has to be something more, you know?
by Academian — 2010-03-24T00:38:44.899Z

A non-materialist thought experiment.

Okay, so you don't exactly believe in the God of the Abrahamic scriptures verbatim who punishes and sets things on fire and lives in the sky. But still, there just has to be something more than just matter and energy, doesn't there? You just feel it. If you don't, try to remember when you did, or at least empathize with someone you know who does. After all, you have a mind, you think, you feel — you feel for crying out loud — and you must realize that can't be made entirely of things like carbon and hydrogen atoms, which are basically just dots with other dots swirling around them. Okay, maybe they're waves, but at least sometimes they act like dots. Start with a few swirling dots… now add more… keep going, until it equals love. It just doesn't seem to capture it.

In fact, now that you think about it, you know your mind exists. It's right there: it's you. Your "experiencing self". Maybe you call it a spirit or soul; I don't want to fix too rigid a description in case it wouldn't quite match your own. But cogito-ergo-sum, it's definitely there! By contrast, this particle business is just a mathematical concept — a very smart one, of course — thought of by scientists to explain and predict a bunch of carefully designed and important measurements. Yes, it does that extremely well, and you're not downplaying that. But that doesn't explain how you see blue, or taste strawberry — something you have direct access to. Particles might not even exist, if that means anything to say. It might just be that observation itself follows a mathematical pattern that we can understand better by visualizing dots and waves. They might not be real.

So actually, your mind or spirit — that thing you feel, that you — is much more certain an extant than scientific "matter". That must be something very important to understand! Certainly you can tell your mind has different parts to it: hearing, seeing, reasoning, moving, remembering, empathizing, picturing, yearning… When you think of all the things you can remember alone — or could remember — the complexity of all that data is mindbogglingly vast. Imagine the task of actually having to ta...
Levels of communication
by Kaj_Sotala — 2010-03-23T21:32:25.903Z

Communication fails when the participants in a conversation aren't talking about the same thing. This can be something as subtle as having slightly differing mappings of verbal space to conceptual space, or it can be a question of being on entirely different levels of conversation. There are at least four such levels: the level of facts, the level of status, the level of values, and the level of socialization. I suspect that many people with rationalist tendencies tend to operate primarily on the fact level and assume others to be doing so as well, which might lead to plenty of frustration.

The level of facts. This is the most straightforward one. When everyone is operating on the level of facts, they are detachedly trying to discover the truth about a certain subject. Pretty much nothing else than the facts matter.

The level of status. Probably the best way of explaining what happens when everyone is operating on the level of status is the following passage, originally found in Keith Johnstone's Impro:

MRS X: I had a nasty turn last week. I was standing in a queue waiting for my turn to go into the cinema when I felt ever so queer. Really, I thought I should faint or something.
[Mrs X is attempting to raise her status by having an interesting medical problem. Mrs Y immediately outdoes her.]

MRS Y: You're lucky to have been going to a cinema. If I thought I could go to a cinema I should think I had nothing to complain of at all.
[Mrs Z now blocks Mrs Y.]
MRS Z: I know what Mrs X means. I feel just like that myself, only I should have had to leave the queue.
[Mrs Z is very talented in that she supports Mrs X against Mrs Y while at the same time claiming to be more worthy of interest, her condition more severe. Mr A now intervenes to lower them all by making their condition seem very ordinary.]
MR A: Have you tried stooping down? That makes the blood come back to your head. I expect you were feeling faint.
[Mrs X defends herself.]
MRS X: It's not really faint.
MRS Y: I always find it does a lot of good to try exercises. I don't know if that's what Mr A means.
[She seems to be joining forces with Mr A, but implies that he was unable to say what he meant. She doesn't say 'Is that what you mean?' but protects herself by her typically high-status circumlocution. Mrs Z now lowers everybody, and immediately lowers herself to avoid counterattack.]
MRS Z: I thin

...
Co-operative Utilitarianism
by RichardChappell — 2010-03-23T20:36:38.120Z

Donald Regan's masterful (1980) Utilitarianism and Co-operation raises a problem for traditional moral theories, which conceive of agents as choosing between external options like 'push' or 'not-push' (options that are specifiable independently of the motive from which they are performed). He proves that no such traditional theory T is adaptable, in the sense that "the agents who satisfy T, whoever and however numerous they may be, are guaranteed to produce the best consequences possible [from among their options] as a group, given the behaviour of everyone else." (p.6) It's easy to see that various forms of rule or collective consequentialism fail when you're the only agent satisfying the theory -- doing what would be best if everyone played their part is not necessarily to do what's actually best. What's more interesting is that even Act Utilitarianism can fail to beat co-ordination problems like the following:

Poof: push
Not-push

Whiff: push
10
0

Not-push
0
6

Here the best result is obviously for Whiff and Poof to both push. But this isn't guaranteed by the mere fact that each agent does as AU says they ought. Why not? Well, what each ought to do depends on what the other does. If Poof doesn't push then neither should Whiff (that way he can at least secure 6 utils, which is better than 0). And vice versa. So, if Whiff and Poof both happen to not-push, then both have satisfied AU. Each, considered individually, has picked the best option available. But clearly this is insufficient: the two of them together have fallen into a bad equilibrium, and hence not done as well as they (collectively) could have.
Regan's solution is build a certain decision-procedure into the objective requirements of the theory:

The basic idea is that each agent should proceed in two steps: First he should identify the other agents who are willing and able to co-operate in the production of the best possible consequences. Then he should do his part in the best plan of behaviour for the group consisting of himself and the others so identified, in view of the behaviour of non-members of the group. (p.x)

This theory, which Regan calls 'Co-operative Utilitarianism', secures the property of adaptability. (You can read Regan for the technical details; here I'm simply aimin...
Necessary, But Not Sufficient
by pjeby — 2010-03-23T17:11:03.256Z

There seems to be something odd about how people reason in relation to themselves, compared to the way they examine problems in other domains.

In mechanical domains, we seem to have little problem with the idea that things can be "necessary, but not sufficient". For example, if your car fails to start, you will likely know that several things are necessary for the car to start, but not sufficient for it to do so. It has to have fuel, ignition, and compression, and oxygen... each of which in turn has further necessary conditions, such as an operating fuel pump, electricity for the spark plugs, electricity for the starter, and so on.

And usually, we don't go around claiming that "fuel" is a magic bullet for fixing the problem of car-not-startia, or argue that if we increase the amount of electricity in the system, the car will necessarily run faster or better.

For some reason, however, we don't seem to apply this sort of necessary-but-not-sufficient thinking to systems above a certain level of complexity... such as ourselves.

When I wrote my previous post about the akrasia hypothesis, I mentioned that there was something bothering me about the way people seemed to be reasoning about akrasia and other complex problems. And recently, with taw's post about blood sugar and akrasia, I've realized that the specific thing bothering me is the absence of causal-chain reasoning there.

When I was a kid, I remember reading once about a scientist saying that the problem with locating brain functions by what's impaired when somebody has brain damage there, is that it's like opening up a TV set and taking out a resistor. If the picture goes bad, you might then conclude that the resistor is the "source of pictureness", when all you have really proved is that the resistor (or brain part) is necessary for pictureness.

Not that it's sufficient.

And so, in every case where an akrasia technique works for you -- whether it's glucose or turning off your internet -- all you have really done, is the equivalent of putting the missing resistor back into the TV set.

This is why "different things work for different people", in different circumstances. And it's why "magic bullets" are possible, like vitamin C as a cure for scurvy. When you fix a deficiency (as long as it's the only deficiency present) then it seems like a "magic" fix.

But, just becaus...
Subtext is not invariant under linear transformations
by PhilGoetz — 2010-03-23T15:49:35.282Z

You can download the audio and PDFs from the 2007 Cognitive Aging Summit in Washington DC here; they're good listening. But I want to draw your attention to the graphs on page 6 of Archana Singh-Manoux's presentation. It shows the "social gradient" of intelligence. The X-axis is decreasing socioeconomic status (SES); the Y-axis is increasing performance on tests of reasoning, memory, phonemic fluency, and vocabulary. Each graph shows a line sloping from the upper left (high SES, high performance) downwards and to the right.

Does anything leap out at you as strange about these graphs?

What leapt out at me was, "Why the hell would anybody make a graph with their independent variable decreasing along the X-axis?"

Socio-economic status (SES) basically means income. It has a natural zero. The obvious thing to do would be to put it on the X-axis with zero towards the left, increasing towards the right. These graphs have zero off somewhere on the right, with income increasing towards the left. That's so weird that it couldn't happen by accident. It would be like "accidentally" drawing the graph with the Y-axis flipped.

What could be the intent behind flipping the X-axis when presenting the data?

If you drew the data the normal way, it would suggest that there's a natural zero-level to both SES and cognition; and that increasing SES increases cognition, possibly without limit.

But when you flip the X-axis, you're limited. You can't go too far to the right, or you'd hit zero. And you can't go off to the left, because we don't think that way in the West. We start at the left and move right.

By flipping the X-axis, the presenter has communicated that SES and intelligence have natural bounds. Instead of communicating the idea that higher SES is a good thing that leads to higher intelligence, this presentation of the data suggests that the leftmost point on each graph (the anchoring point) is "normal", and a lack of wealth has caused a deficiency in people of lower SES.

(And, of course, rotating around the line Y=X would suggest that intelligence makes you rich.)
Understanding your understanding
by SilasBarta — 2010-03-22T22:33:23.315Z

Related to: Truly Part of You, A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation

Partly because of LessWrong discussions about what really counts as understanding (some typical examples), I came up with a scheme to classify different levels of understanding so that posters can be more precise about what they mean when they claim to understand -- or fail to understand -- a particular phenomenon or domain.

Each level has a description so that you know if you meet it, and tells you what to watch out for when you're at or close to that level. I have taken the liberty of naming them after the LW articles that describe what such a level is like.

Level 0: The "Guessing the Teacher's Password" Stage

Summary: You have no understanding, because you don't see how any outcome is more or less likely than any other.

Description: This level is only included for comparison -- to show something that is not understanding. At this point, you have, a best, labels that other people use when describing the phenomenon. Maybe you can even generate the appearance of understanding on the topic. However, you actually have a maximum entropy probability distribution. In other words, nothing would surprise you, no event is more or less likely to happen, and everything is consistent with what you "know" about it. No rationalist should count this as an understanding, though it may involve knowledge of the labels that a domain uses.

Things to watch out for: Scientific-sounding terms in your vocabulary that don't correspond to an actual predictive model; your inability to say what you expect to see, and what you would be surprised by.

Level 1: The "Shut up and Calculate" Stage

Summary: You can successfully predict the phenomenon, but see it as an independent, compartmentalized domain.

Description: This is where you can predict the phenomenon, using a generative model that tells you what to expect. You are capable of being surprised, as certain observations are assigned low probability. It may even be tremendously complicated, but it works.

Though low on the hierarchy, it's actually a big accomplishment in itself. However, when you are at this stage, you see its dynamics as being unrelated to anything else, belonging to its own domain, following its own rules. While it might have parallels to things you do understand, you see no reason why the p...
What would you do if blood glucose theory of willpower was true?
by taw — 2010-03-22T20:18:21.388Z

There's considerable amount of evidence that willpower is severely diminished if blood glucose get down, and this effect is not limited to humans. And a small sugary drink at the right time is enough to restore it.

We're talking really small numbers. Total blood glucose of a healthy adult is about 5g and it varies within fairly limited range. Then there's maybe 45g in total body waters. Then there's about 100g of glycogen in liver, plus yet larger amount in muscles and other organs, but which doesn't seem to take part in sugar level regulation. For comparison a small can of coke contains 33g - a really small amounts at appropriate times can make a big difference.

This leads to two issues. First, is blood glucose a good explanation for willpower deficiency and therefore akrasia? I'd say there's significant amount of evidence that some effect exists, but is it really the most important factor? Humans are complicated, science knows very little about how we work, and probably half of what it "knows" is false or at best only half-true. Caution is definitely warranted.

And the second issue - if this theory was true - and by manipulating blood glucose levels you could achieve far greater willpower whenever you wanted, what would you do? It seems that exploiting it isn't that easy, and I'd love to hear if any of you tried it before.
SIA doomsday: The filter is ahead
by KatjaGrace — 2010-03-22T15:16:48.000Z

The great filter, as described by Robin Hanson:

Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we?

I will argue that we are not far along at all. Even if the steps of the filter we have already passed look about as hard as those ahead of us, most of the filter is probably ahead. Our bright future is an illusion; we await filtering. This is the implication of applying the self indication assumption (SIA) to the great filter scenario, so before I explain the argument, let me briefly explain SIA.

SIA says that if you are wondering which world you are in, rather than just wondering which world exists, you should update on your own existence by weighting possible worlds as more likely the more observers they contain. For instance if you were born of an experiment where the flip of a fair coin determined whether one (tails) or two (heads) people were created, and all you know is that and that you exist, SIA says heads was twice as likely as tails. This is contentious; many people think in such a situation you should think heads and tails equally likely. A popular result of SIA is that it perfectly protects us from the doomsday argument. So now I’ll show you we are doomed anyway with SIA.

Consider the diagrams below. The first one is just an example with one possible world so you can see clearly what all the boxes mean in the second diagram which compares worlds. In a possible world there are three planets and three stages of life. Each planet starts at the bottom and moves up, usually until it reaches the filter. This is where most of the planets become dead, signified by grey boxes. In the example diagram the filter is after our stage. The small number of planets and stages and the concentration of the filter is for simplicity; in reality the filter needn’t be only one unlikely step, and there are many planets and many phases of existence between dead matter and galaxy colonizing civilization. None of these things are important to this argument.

.

.

The second diagram shows three possible ...
The scourge of perverse-mindedness
by simplicio — 2010-03-21T07:08:28.304Z

This website is devoted to the art of rationality, and as such, is a wonderful corrective to wrong facts and, more importantly, wrong procedures for finding out facts.
There is, however, another type of cognitive phenomenon that I’ve come to consider particularly troublesome, because it militates against rationality in the irrationalist, and fights against contentment and curiousity in the rationalist. For lack of a better word, I’ll call it perverse-mindedness.
The perverse-minded do not necessarily disagree with you about any fact questions. Rather, they feel the wrong emotions about fact questions, usually because they haven’t worked out all the corollaries.
Let’s make this less abstract. I think the following quote is preaching to the choir on a site like LW:
“The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
-Richard Dawkins, "God's Utility Function," Scientific American (November, 1995).
Am I posting that quote to disagree with it? No. Every jot and tittle of it is correct. But allow me to quote another point of view on this question.
“We are not born into this world, but grow out of it; for in the same way an apple tree apples, the Earth peoples.”
This quote came from an ingenious and misguided man named Alan Watts. You will not find him the paragon of rationality, to put it mildly. And yet, let’s consider this particular statement on its own. What exactly is wrong with it? Sure, you can pick some trivial holes in it – life would not have arisen without the sun, for example, and Homo sapiens was not inevitable in any way. But the basic idea – that life and consciousness is a natural and possibly inevitable consequence of the way the universe works – is indisputably correct.
So why would I be surprised to hear a rationalist say something like this? Note that it is empirically indistinguishable from the more common view of “mankind confronted by a hostile universe.” This is the message of the present post: it is not only our knowledge that matters, but also our attitude to that knowledge. I believe I share a desire with most others here to seek truth naively, swallowing the hard pills when it becomes necessary. However, there is no need to turn every singl...