By the end of the article, you are left trying to untangle a set of interleaved similes and metaphors the writer has unhooked and completely decoupled from reason.
This is his conclusion:
> The qualia dial validates zagnets while still letting the universe exist independently. Zagnets frequently end up having to deny the existence of the objective universe in order to exist themselves. Sometimes, to get around this problem, zagnets propose that consciousness is a part of the natural world, just not the part that zombies are competent at observing. Taking this approach, zagnets can run but they can't hide. Eventually, some grandson of Dennett might be insulting Penrose-style zagnets with quantum measurement devices and Searle-style zagnets with group-mind detectors even though today we believe such devices to be impossible. The qualia dial gives both subjectivity and objectivity their due.
If you ever wonder how we got here, stuff like this was the prelude.
There was a strong sense that AI was around the corner. Marvin Minsky gave our commencement address and expressed anger at us that we hadn't solved the problem of copying his consciousness onto a computer yet, and expressed the urgency that this problem be solved before he died (it was 2016 when he died, and we failed).
Goatishness was in the air, but it smelled like techno-optimism. Remember also that this was a brief, bright period between the fall of the Berlin wall but before 9/11 and well before climate change seemed all that serious, so we felt free to speak like this because it helped us convince ourselves and each other we were tackling big challenges so fearlessly we couldn't help but speak gibberish.
100%
The initial gambit is to make the reader part of a clever in-group by out-grouping “zombies”, then the writer proceeds to quickly gish-gosh a bunch of concepts that would require lots of further thought, but instead expects the reader to just go with it. You can get anywhere if you just go with it
Edit: But I do like JL on other subjects. I think it just proves the point that Plato made in the Defence of Socrates
If I understand correctly what the author is trying to say, I think that theoretical physicist Sean Carrol communicates similar kinds of ideas with a much greater eloquence. A recommended watching, "Poetic Naturalism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv0mKsO2goA But then again, maybe I'm just "riffing on" with them.
Few people are really dumb, but when we're designing, writing and teaching, it's important to keep track of what logical level of abstraction we are speaking at. My reading was that Lanier in this piece seemed to take a joke reference and a codeword (zombie/zagnet) and treat them both as black boxes, where there was no logical coherence in what the relationship or effect of one was on the other, and it just produced a wandering narrative.
Of course, any real-life attempts to use a box of gas to do such computations will fail. What's missing is the enormously complicated mapping between the starting and ending states of the gas, and the inputs and outputs of the factoring problem. This mapping is not just a matter of mapping bits in a local way into positions of gas atoms, but requires incredibly non-local dependencies between components. Interpreting the position of just a single atom in the gas requires knowing what pretty much all the other atoms in the gas are doing as well. If you had to actually compute that mapping, it would be about as difficult as both both simulating the gas's dynamics, and factoring the number.
At this point, a reasonable person would probably start to suspect that the actual factoring calculation is being shoved into the interpretation of the inputs/outputs of the system, and that the box of gas itself is not doing any calculations at all. Indeed, suppose that rather than letting the gas sit for a time t equalling perhaps a few seconds in order to do its computation, we instead let t=0. In this case, that atoms don't move at all during the "computation", but by clever mapping of inputs and outputs, we can still interpret this as "factorizing the number". Clearly the actual computation is happening in the "mappings" not in the gas.
This isn’t a strong rebuttal to this paper, though I read it closely, enjoy both sides of the mind-body problem, and do my best to seek some sort of external truth in the matter…
But I’m inclined to disagree with Jaron on the following point: What if the contents of the mind (consciousness notwithstanding for a moment), which surely must include information or data, doesn’t represent the complete anatomy of the systems involved in the mind-body problem. What if subjective experience is an objective realization of some sort of a information-vitality singularity.
Then we could not be confident that the argumentation (mainly the metaphors) in this paper accurately model reality - at least as far as I can tell.
And that’s really it: What if the mind-body problem, with its dual objective/subjective complexities, cannot be modeled until we first understand consciousness. Put differently:
What if we can’t model the M-B problem until we first solve it.
Perhaps objective experiment? Some sort of truly demonstrable proof by induction? Whatever gets us away from abstracting the problem itself. In the meantime, I’m fond of some of the various theological approaches. And if I was put to the question, my bet is that this answer is unknowable.
I’m not sure if I’m a zombie? I’d rather be a cynical zagnet; I certainly don’t think that subjective experience does not exist.
I ought to buy anyone who reads through this comment a drink. Here lies my knee jerk reaction. Thanks for posting, and thank you to Jason for giving me a bit to chew on.
Speaking of, I'll take you up on the offer for a drink.
I tend to think something like a combination of the 3rd substance and panpsychism model accounts for our experience in context of discoveries that make descartes pineal gland theory seem dubious.
Thank you for your comment. I haven't engaged much with "3rd substance and panpsychism" much, so that'll be on my procrastinating reading list this week. I'm writing a book about Why We Play certain games, and I'm always tempted by the rabbit hole that is M-B problem.
Maybe thinking about the M-B is one of the things that distinguishes Man?
Thanks for wading through, I'd have bet dollars to donuts I wouldn't get a response. Cheers :)
This seems to imply that every rock (complex body of information) contains infinite consciousnesses, variable by interpretation.
This seems to imply that the interpretation of data is the key element of computation, but that view is confounded by a scenario where a huge flip book contains all of the possible screen presentations of a simulation, and the following page is determined by the choices of the observer. In this case, the computation and the data is arguably both contained within the data, with the act of representation carried out by the act of observation.
This suggests that the act of observation is in fact the critical second component, data and observation with computation being an integral part of one, or the other, rather than a distinct entity at all.
This indeed suggests that computation is not real- ultimately there is only data and observation.
Where that leads us is squarely into the quantum realm, with “wave collapse” due to measurement of information. I’m not sure where we go from there but I thought that was an interesting intersection.
Twenty years later, we have fed data into a machine learning algorithm that does indeed, spit out scientific theories to explain the data. Maybe not "best possible", but perhaps even more interestingly, solutions the almighty human mind hasn't already thought of.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-generates-hypo...
Loved the essay, very fun read.
Woah
I replaced all the footnotes with markdown notation footnotes (sadly github gist doesn't understand them), but I can't figure out the heading layout.
Waste of time like most philosophy.
> Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018)
The irony of posting this on HN isn't lost on me (though hopefully HN avoids many of Lanier's criticisms.)
The essay is from 1995. So... yeah, that's pretty on the nose actually.