Just posting to let readers know I'm still here. I've been busy mostly in the comments of TGGP's and Overcoming Bias blogs, to the extent that I've been writing on this topic at all. To give some pretense of value to this post, here's what I've been thinking about in the past week:
1. The degree to which status seeking, and a general primate aesthetic of wanting to be part of a dialectic (and secondarily, to be part of the winning side of it) warps our quest for knowledge and understanding, particularly with regards to thinkers on the topic of persistence maximizing such as Yudkowsky, Aubrey de Grey, and (to a lesser extent) Robin Hansen. And of course, me, too.
2. (this comes as no surprise) the problem of discernment technology and the maintenance of my actual subjective conscious experience. I've been thinking about a term "theatre of consciousness" to describe my subjective conscious experience, which seems limited to sensory experiences and word-thoughts along a limited and quantized (in various ways) period of time. This thinking is provoked by Caledonian's (I believe that's his name and who provoked it) challenges to me to define my subjective conscious experience. At the core the experience, and my desire to preserve it, seems to come from a monkey intuition/aesthetic that's probably the same place that our notions of cause-and-effect and everything we do in science arises from. I put that in as the beginning of a longer critical examination of the argument I'm encountering rather frequently these days seeking to pit the notion of subjective conscious experience against empiricism (the argument basically being "whatever element of it is not falsifiable RIGHT NOW is not worthy of examination/antiscience some such thing"). Intuitively this argument seems wrong-headed to me, but it'll take more posts, time, and discussion to either flush out why I think this intuitively, or (good luck to my critics on this) to concede that my position on this is "silly".
Have a good day, readers!
Off topic, but I thought you might be interested in a piece on "brain-doping": http://reason.com/blog/show/125906.html
Posted by: TGGP | April 09, 2008 at 11:55 AM
It seems like Eliezer wrote this just for you.
Posted by: TGGP | April 18, 2008 at 11:21 PM
TGGP, elaborate how it addresses my concerns regarding discernment technology and maintenance of my subjective conscious experience? I don't read him as going much beyond:
1. Maintaining subjective conscious experience doesn't seem to be the same as maintaining all the same particles, etc. of a subjective conscious entity.
2. If you drop an anvil on a subjectively conscious human, such that you scramble their brains and they're unable to proclaim that they're a subjectively conscious human, there's a good chance they may no longer be experiencing a subjective conscious state.
I don't think I've expressed a condradictory stance regarding either position. Though I think it's in my interest for thought on both of these ideas (and other related ideas) to be fleshed out further, to maximize my persistence odds rationally.
Posted by: Hopefully Anonymous | April 19, 2008 at 02:54 PM
I just realized that I seem to want to maximize my persistence odds more than almost anyone I know. Perhaps, perhaps, with the possible exception of Aubrey de Gray.
I wonder to what degree this constitutes evidence that I'm the only one in apparent reality actually alive. Or possibly, one of only two people in apparent reality actually alive (the other being Aubrey).
An alternate theory is that the relatively numerous people doing better at effectively maximizing their persistence odds than Aubrey and I are also alive and just doing so more nontransparently than us, possibly for rational, persistence-maximizing reasons (for example, perhaps James Simon and Sergey Brin are at least equally focused on maximizing their persistence odds).
Posted by: Hopefully Anonymous | April 24, 2008 at 01:21 AM
actually alive
What does that mean?
Aubrey de Gray
I think he stated that he's too old for life-extensions, so he's altruistically working on behalf of the young and possibly immortal generation.
Posted by: TGGP | April 25, 2008 at 01:38 PM
TGGP, Aubrey could be a big fat liar, just like we all know you are. :P
as for what "actually alive" means, here I'm using it to mean actually experiencing things from a subjective vantage point. As opposed to being a hallucination, a hollow simulation (enough to consistently fool observers such as myself, not enough to actually have its own subjective experiences), an implanted memory, or even something made up and inserted in the media, with some creative writing and models for pictures (I haven't met most of the people I've heard about or seen in media).
Posted by: Hopefully Anonymous | April 25, 2008 at 09:42 PM
Some relevant recent books on the topic of consciousness (the 2nd one looks particularly interesting, and calls consciousness one of the most challenging current areas for scientific exploration).
http://mymindonbooks.com/?p=536
That there's this type of work going on causes me to feel a bit more justified in my skepticism of those who blithely dismiss interest in the subjective conscious experience as "believing in souls" or an exploration of nonsense.
Posted by: Hopefully Anonymous | April 25, 2008 at 10:39 PM
Aubrey could be a big fat liar, just like we all know you are
I'm not going to claim to be compulsively honest, but I don't recall ever admitting to lying or being transparent in it online. I realize that your remark might have been nothing more than a joke, but in the off-chance it isn't I'm curious as to where I slipped up.
As opposed to being a hallucination, a hollow simulation (enough to consistently fool observers such as myself, not enough to actually have its own subjective experiences)
According to Nick Bostrum, there is a good chance you are already an example of the latter.
an implanted memory
In a sense aren't all our memories implanted by our environment through an imperfect instrument (the brain)? I suppose the difference between the norm and "implanted memories" (I don't know if they have ever existed, so I am thinking of fictional examples) is like the difference between something being created by natural selection or intelligent design. Of course the boundary between an organism and an environment is a vague one with extended phenotypes and all, and in some sense human beings can be just as much a product of human-directed breeding as dogs.
Confirmation bias is common. Perhaps you should feel a bit more justified, but I wouldn't say by much.
Posted by: TGGP | April 26, 2008 at 11:03 PM