Re:Unreason: a meme you need
« Reply #45 on: 2003-01-06 07:34:42 »
From CryoNet #20787 - #20793
> Nevertheless, this organisation (the Raelians) exists, and in financial terms > it appears to be far greater than all the cryonics service providers put > together.
Don't that beat all though? Why is it things totally irrational and based upon pure conjecture and hearsay are believed enthusiastically over our fact based and reasonable expectations founded upon good science!? Totally incredible!
Re:Unreason: a meme you need
« Reply #46 on: 2003-01-06 08:26:08 »
Nice to see you still here Walpurgis. Your point is well enough made, but I am not exactly persuaded that cryonics really belongs in the realm of the rational either.
You seem to have a position that is not far removed from saying that Reason, in itself, is a moral good. I am not sure whether that is true or not. I think whether a given individual holds to that belief is purely a matter taste.
I don't think I would phrase it that way. I would say that any act or activity that cannot be reasonably justified cannot be reasonably condoned.
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Unless the the vast majority of) intelligent, sane, reasonable, and reasoning people agree that it can be demonstrated logically that Reason is, in itself, a virtue, it is unreason to say it is one.
I think the vast majority of intelligent, sane, reasonable, and reasoning people would agree to what I said above.
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In contrast, I think we can pretty much all agree that happiness is a virtue (even Plato was confident about that, as a first principle, without feeling a need to support it by means of reason). And I think we can all agree that the Golden rule is about as good a way as the human race has found of promoting happiness for all.
A lobotomy would probably make someone happier. I'm not sure that is obviously a good idea though.
The GoldenRule is only a fair approximation of how to treat people. Wouldn't it be even better to treat people how they would like to be treated, rather than how you would like to be treated?
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But that approach does not necessarily exclude concepts that are orthoganal to reason. For instance, should practices akin to Zen meditiation be denigrated because the mind states it promotes aren't based on reason (and indeed Zen meditation of the Rinzai sect is based on such questions as "what is the sound of one hand clapping?") Is there really a need to exclude such things?
Such things would not necessarily be excluded. Does Zen meditation help the individual (or others) without harming the individual (or others)? If so, then it can be reasonably justified. If not, it cannot be condoned.
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In other words, is EVERYTHING of value based on reason?
But many of us are struck by the fact that there is NO awareess in a Dell PC; it isn't happy, it isn't sad, etc., it gets no pleasure out of watching a fireplace, etc. Now if you have a computer 10 times as complicated, there doesn't seem to be anything that will bridge the gap between zero consciousness and SOME consciousness. So many of us assume a computer 10 times as complex won't be conscious. By that reasoning, a computer with 10 times further complexity still won't be conscious... and by induction, a computer of no complexity will ever be conscious.
You could use the same slippery slope reasoning to prove that humans are not concious by looking at animals of increasing complexity. Obviously (I hope) it is a fallacious argument.
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Personally, I think that something that we could term a machine will probably one day be conscious. But I think it will be due to us understanding something we have NO CLUE AT ALL ABOUT now.
Possibly. Or maybe we will understand it terms of emergent phenomena generated by complex adaptive systems. Maybe consciousness is similar to life, arising from complex interactions in systems composed of parts that don't themselves exhibit the property.
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I do believe that a computer could pass the Turing test. That can be done by very sophisticated mimicry. But that is totally orthoganal to the question of whether a computer could EXPERIENCE the visual phenomenon of a fireplace. Not just DO things based on the input, but EXPERIENCE it, as we do in a quiet moment, when we are doing nothing about it but watching. To me, that is a way of representing the difference between a thing and a person.
I agree a computer could pass the TuringTest but I don't think it could without being conscious.
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Ultimately, my view is that the fact that we have no clue what consciousness is is why philosophers can't agree on anything important. There is simply no foundation for reasoning about the key questions. Ultimately, until we understand consciousness, everything must start with one irrational assumption or another, and reason will follow from there... leading to contradictory (if perfectly-reasoned) conclusions.
Why do you think an understanding of consciousness is necessary for reasoning about all important questions? Is it because you think all important questions are about human happiness?
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Until then, the Golden Rule will do pretty well. And it is very, very possible that such things as Zen meditiation, and the Christian theologian Paul Tillich's "ultimate ground of being" will get us closer to understanding the basis for our lives than reason alone ever could. And to deny that based on a prejudice against anything other than pure reason will not only cripple the new religion, but actually make it less valuable and very possibly less truthful. Reason alone can not tell us which is true; only human experience can.
I don't think anyone is suggesting "reason alone" whatever that means. (Another strawman argument.)
But in matters of morality, the scientific evidence will not allow us to come to meaningful conclusions. So, there, we need to be guided by something like the Golden Rule. IOW, the Golden Rule must trump reason, because of reason leads to anything inconsistent from the Golden Rule, I think most reasonable people would think it likely that the initial assumptions the reasoning process began from were probably incorrect.
Here is a simple counter-argument.
1. The Golden Rules states that you should treat others how you wish to be treated yourself. 2. I wish to be treated like a responsible adult. 3. Therefore, (from 1 and 2) I should treat others as responsible adults.
However, not everyone else is responsible and not everyone else is an adult. Something is clearly wrong with the argument. Could it be the first premise?
There's been a lot of verbiage here and frankly it's a bit confusing to know what, if anything, we actually disagree on. The slightest imperfection in stating a position in these kinds of matters leads to all kinds of misunderstandings. So I want to see if I can get it straight:
1) I personally agree that reason is a virtue. If most other reasonable people agree (and I assume they would) I have no problem including it as one of the articles of faith in the new religion.
My assertion, though, is that the Golden Rule (or some substitute with similar intent) must trump reason. Without that, we run the risk of some reasoning process coming out with a conclusion such as "all believers in Christianity should be shot". It would be fairly impossible to convince me that such a result isn't possible, since the point of view that led to the Holocaust was in fact thought be some intelligent people to be based on reason.
So I assert that the GRE (Golden Rule or Equivalent) must trump reason, although reason would still be a virtue.
Do you agree or disagree?
2) You say: "The GoldenRule is only a fair approximation of how to treat people. Wouldn't it be even better to treat people how they would like to be treated, rather than how you would like to be treated?" I think the problem with your formulation is probably that some people are greedy. But I don't see a need to debate it.
I think the Golden Rule has appeared in so many different religions and philosophies because it is the best the human race has been able to come up with. We could try to do better, but I suspect that would be mere hubris. I strongly suspect we should just be guided by the fact that the Golden Rule has been converged on so many times, and take that as the first virtue. If we can agree on (1), it seems VERY reasonable to me that the GR should be the GRE based on precedent; I certainly have no moral wisdom beyond that of the sages of the past who have proposed it, and I don't think any of us do. I see no reason to recreate the wheel in this area.
And I think, as Walpurgis has proposed, we could add that no harm is done to others.
Can we agree on the above?
3) You say "Does Zen meditation help the individual (or others) without harming the individual (or others)? If so, then it can be reasonably justified. If not, it cannot be condoned." That's great.
But the harder question is, what if something evolved in the religion that was akin to Tillich's "ultimate ground of being", where there were non-reason-based images, thoughts, etc. that do not contradict reason but are not grounded in reason? Another way of putting it, I think, is....
Should God as ultimate ground of being be something that is simply not allowed as part of the parables, images, etc., or is it allowable as long as it doesn't contradict scientific knowledge? That is, can the word God or some less tainted equivalent be used? Can god-memes exist in this religion that don't depend on a conscious entity in the sky LITERALLY making judgements and issuing orders?
That is, are we going to irrationally assume that we know that there is no value in such images/memes just because we can't explain their value through reason? Are we going to assume that we know better and ignore many people's direct experience that they do in fact have spiritual value?
Summary) These are the key questions that I personally would like to see convergence on.
1. The Golden Rules states that you should treat others how you wish to be treated yourself. 2. I wish to be treated like a responsible adult. 3. Therefore, (from 1 and 2) I should treat others as responsible adults.
However, not everyone else is responsible and not everyone else is an adult. Something is clearly wrong with the argument. Could it be the first premise?
Hmmmm... your use of the Golden Rule above is different from how I (and I think most others) have interpreted it... so I don't think it invalidates it but rather shows that it is possible to create a non-common-sense interpretation that is clearly of no value.
Your interpretation is on a scale that, if one continued down it, would lead to "I wish someone would become my happy and content slave. Therefore I should become someone's happy and content slave."
That's obviously not what it means. Some previous usages have turned it into the negative "do not do to others what you don't want them to do to you" probably specifically to avoid those kinds of interpretations.
In the old days, the Golden Rule HAD to be an extremely simple meme -- a few words. The advantages of a short easy to remember meme had to compete with the disadvantage of logically nonsensical interpretations; and the utility of a short meme won. But arguably, on the Internet, perhaps the shortness is not so important, and we could go for a longer statement that is less vulnerable to absurd interpretations.
This is a very interesting area to look at and think about in my view and an interesting discussion.
Can we agree that trying to find a more logically pure GR statement is a worthy goal and a candidate for the first virtue, one that would trump arguments based on reason that came to a conclusion inconsistent with this "verbose Golden Rule"?
I agree a computer could pass the TuringTest but I don't think it could without being conscious.
Here's where I think we can avoid a slippery slope by being clear on our objectives. With regard to the above, some would agree with you and some would agree with me.
We don't know what the answer is.
In my discussion, I wasn't trying to present an absolute justification for anything, but only to show that there is AN argument, wrong or right, but that can't be reasonably proved false, that we do not have the foundation to prove a particularly way of living by reason alone.
Or do you believe that the right way of living can be proven purely through reason? Plate didn't. He thought that happiness as a good was clear without recorurse to reason.
Let's be clear: is there something that is a non-reason-based moral foundation or not? I think there is and that that must trump logical arguments that seem to contradict it. Do you agree or disagree?
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Why do you think an understanding of consciousness is necessary for reasoning about all important questions? Is it because you think all important questions are about human happiness?
I don't think that. These kinds of discussions are difficult because any imperfection in statement leads to such misinterpretation. I do think that if you want to prove something that would trump the common-sense interpretation of the Golden Rule by means of reason alone, you would have to first understand consciousness.
Plenty of other worthwhile stuff can be done by reason in my view. But I am trying to get at its limits.
BTW, I am very familiar with and somewhat friendly toward the idea that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that is, in some way, grounded in complexity.
My only big problem with it, in fact, other than that it is speculation (albeit intelligent speculation), is that it seems that every generation thinks they have found THE answer, and emergent phenomena seems to be our generation's pet answer. That makes me view it with suspicion; I am doubtful that it happens to be our generation that is really on the verge of understanding consciousness because that would be Just Too Cool.
But I would certainly not claim that the emergent phenomena view of consciousness can be disproved or is necessarily wrong.
But there are reasons why I started a company to create a Web site named "Emergent Music" (http://www.emergentmusic.com).
Here's where I think we can avoid a slippery slope by being clear on our objectives. With regard to the above, some would agree with you and some would agree with me.
We don't know what the answer is.
But we do know this much, in order to for it pass the TuringTest the AI will have to behave as if it is conscious. An observer will have no way to distinguish between an AI that passes that test that is really conscious and one that only appears to be conscious.
I agree that we can never know with certainty that it is really conscious, but then again you can never know with certainty that anyone else is conscious. You have only the empirical evidence and Bayes Theorem, which can give you a probability that your assessment is correct.
OTOH if the probability is greater than 0.999, you can be pretty darn certain.
I'm afraid of getting bogged down in Turing Test questions because, although I think they are fascinating, are not the core issues for the CoV. There are some things we are discussing that I think are very important. Potentially VERY important. Because I think there is SOME chance that the experiment you have started, and I have separately thought about and have no joined along with others, may, POSSIBLY, be the seed of a new religion of incredible importance to the human race. Probably not. But it could happen. There is no way to know that it couldn't.
I want an equivalent to common-sense interpretations of the Golden Rule to trump reason that contradicts. it. To me, the idea that the traditional GR's have evolved to be very short and pithy due to the needs of meme propogation in a word-of-mouth world, and the implication that the new religion might want a longer and less pithy but better-defined version, is REALLY, REALLY fascinating and something of potential great importance. It is something that I never thought of before this thread. So for me this thread is very cool because of that.
With regard to the turning test, just as an interesting but trivial discussion that I don't want to get too distracted by: It is all a matter of prejudice, but perhaps well-informed prejudice.
I could claim myself to be an AI expert based on the fact that there are spam filters that use mathematics created by me to "read" emails and decide whether they are spam or non spam (see bogofilter and spambayes). And I have been a software professional for 20 years and managed large projects. In my humble opinion, software as we know it is not capable of consciousness. A machine which involves some kind of analogue to software may well be conscious at some point in the future. It may be due to emergent phenomena based on complexity. Or it may not. Who the heck knows. But in my personal opinion, it will not be software as we know it.
And further, based on my experience in the software field, I think a machine could pass the turing test without being conscious, but it would be a VERY complicated piece of software with enormous data available to it. So what? It's still doable. In my view, the question of passing the turning test is orthogonal to the question of consciousness.
But that's just my prejudice. Other intelligent people have other prejudices.
I have the hope that one day we will understand consciousness the way we understand electricity, and we will be able to KNOW a machine is conscious (as well as we know our friends are conscious). Just a hope.
So I assert that the GRE (Golden Rule or Equivalent) must trump reason, although reason would still be a virtue.
Do you agree or disagree?
I agree that we need something in addition to reason to avoid the Holocaust scenario, but the GRE isn't going to do it. What if one side wants to be treated like warriors and may the best man win? Using the GRE they will still kill the other guys.
I think the Golden Rule has appeared in so many different religions and philosophies because it is the best the human race has been able to come up with. We could try to do better, but I suspect that would be mere hubris. I strongly suspect we should just be guided by the fact that the Golden Rule has been converged on so many times, and take that as the first virtue. If we can agree on (1), it seems VERY reasonable to me that the GR should be the GRE based on precedent; I certainly have no moral wisdom beyond that of the sages of the past who have proposed it, and I don't think any of us do. I see no reason to recreate the wheel in this area.
Well I've pointed out some obvious problems with the GRE, and your argument seems to be "it is an old tradition so it must be optimal". I am not convinced.
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And I think, as Walpurgis has proposed, we could add that no harm is done to others.
And here you admit it can be improved.
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That is, are we going to irrationally assume that we know that there is no value in such images/memes just because we can't explain their value through reason? Are we going to assume that we know better and ignore many people's direct experience that they do in fact have spiritual value?
Summary) These are the key questions that I personally would like to see convergence on.
I will say it again: If the act or activity cannot be reasonably justified, it cannot be condoned. Notice that says nothing about images, processes, memes or anything else that was used to choose the action. There is a lot of room here for creativity, intution, instinct, emotion and other non-rational tools. Anything that helps us act in a way that can be reasonably justified is valuable.
1. The Golden Rules states that you should treat others how you wish to be treated yourself. 2. I wish to be treated like a responsible adult. 3. Therefore, (from 1 and 2) I should treat others as responsible adults.
However, not everyone else is responsible and not everyone else is an adult. Something is clearly wrong with the argument. Could it be the first premise?
Hmmmm... your use of the Golden Rule above is different from how I (and I think most others) have interpreted it... so I don't think it invalidates it but rather shows that it is possible to create a non-common-sense interpretation that is clearly of no value.
What exactly is wrong with my interpretation?
If the GRE needs a common-sense interpretation, are you saying that you need reason to apply it correctly?
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Your interpretation is on a scale that, if one continued down it, would lead to "I wish someone would become my happy and content slave. Therefore I should become someone's happy and content slave."
You lost me. Can you spell out how my interpretation would lead to reversing the sense of the maxim?
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In the old days, the Golden Rule HAD to be an extremely simple meme -- a few words. The advantages of a short easy to remember meme had to compete with the disadvantage of logically nonsensical interpretations; and the utility of a short meme won. But arguably, on the Internet, perhaps the shortness is not so important, and we could go for a longer statement that is less vulnerable to absurd interpretations.
Why did it have to be an extremely simple meme? People in the "old days" were just as intelligent as we are.
I think the whole problem with the GRE is its simplicity. You need to apply it reasonably given different situations.
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Can we agree that trying to find a more logically pure GR statement is a worthy goal and a candidate for the first virtue, one that would trump arguments based on reason that came to a conclusion inconsistent with this "verbose Golden Rule"?
My only big problem with it, in fact, other than that it is speculation (albeit intelligent speculation), is that it seems that every generation thinks they have found THE answer, and emergent phenomena seems to be our generation's pet answer. That makes me view it with suspicion; I am doubtful that it happens to be our generation that is really on the verge of understanding consciousness because that would be Just Too Cool.
At least this generation knows that there is no such thing as THE answer and that we are just coming up with better (more accurate, more sophisticated) models for the phenomena we are trying to understand. Given that, I see no reason to be suspicous of complexity theories of consciousness.
I don't think Empathy as a virtue (and I have been aware you have it listed) is concete enough. The GR has, over and over again, I think, evolved specifically to be a more concrete and humanly understandable version of the word "empathy".AND you don't have it as the first virtue.
If Empathy CLEARLY is stated as the first virtue and as something that must trump so-called reason that contradicts basic empathy, then I think we are getting on the right track.
I agree that the traditional short-pithy GR statements are vulnerable in a number of ways; I hypothesize that this is a sacrifice that evolution has made so that they will be understandable, short, and pithy, and that that sacrifice has historically been worth it.
I hypothesize that they were the best that could be done in a largely word-of-mouth world, and that maybe something better can be done in an internet world.
I think the argument "it's what's traditional so let's use it" is a strong one. I would like us to be guided strongly by the GR, even if an Internet-based statement of empathy ultimately turns out to have substantial differences in some way.
Can you agree that Empathy should clearly be stated as something that trumps reason that contradicts it; i.e., as the first Virtue?
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