Thanks for the thoughts! Here’s my attempt at laying out a strong form of why I don’t think constructivism as applied to ethics & suffering leads to productive areas:
Imagine someone arguing that electromagnetism was purely a matter of definitions- there’s no “correct” definition of electricity, so how one approaches the topic and which definition one uses is ultimately a subjective choice.
But now imagine they also want to build a transistor. Transistors are, in fact, possible, and so it turns out that there is a good definition of electricity, by way of quantum theory, and of course many bad ones that don’t ‘carve reality at the joints’.
So I would say very strongly that we can’t both say that electricity is subjective and everyone can have their own arbitrary poetic definition of what it is and how it works, but also do interesting and useful things with it.
Likewise, my claim is that we can be a subjectivist about qualia and about suffering and say that how we define them is rather arbitrary and ultimately subjective, or we can say that some qualia are better than others and we should work to promote more good qualia and less bad qualia. But I don’t think we can do both at the same time. If someone makes a strong assertion that something is bad and that we should work to reduce its prevalence, then they’re also implying it’s real in a non-trivial sense; if something is not real, then it cannot be bad in an actionable sense.
Imagine that tomorrow I write a strong denouncement of blegblarg on the EA forum. I state that blegblarg is a scourge upon the universe, and we should work to rid ourselves of it, and all right-thinking people should agree with me. People ask me, “Mike…. I thought your post was interesting, but…. what the heck is blegblarg??”—I respond that “Well, blegblarg doesn’t have a crisp definition, it’s more of a you-know-it-when-you-see-it thing where there’s no ‘correct’ definition of blegblarg and we can each use our own moral compass to determine if something is blegblarg, but there’s definitely a lot of it out there and it’s clearly bad so we should definitely work to reduce it!”
This story would have no happy ending. Blegblarg can’t be a good rallying cry, because I can’t explain what it is. I can’t say it’s good or bad in a specific actionable sense, for the same reason. One person’s blegblarg is another person’s blargbleg, you know? :)
I see a strict reading of the constructivist project as essentially claiming similar things about suffering, and ultimately leading to concluding that what is, and isn’t, suffering, is fundamentally arbitrary—i.e., it leads to post-modern moral nihilism. But you’re clearly not a moral nihilist, and FRI certainly doesn’t see itself as nihilist. In my admittedly biased view of the situation, I see you & FRI circling around moral realism without admitting it. :) Now, perhaps my flavor of moral realism isn’t to your liking- perhaps you might come to a completely different principled conclusion about what qualia & valence are. But I do hope you keep looking.
p.s. I tend to be very direct when speaking about these topics, and my apologies if anything I’ve said comes across as rude. I think we differ in an interesting way and there may be updates in this for both of us.
So I would say very strongly that we can’t both say that electricity is subjective and everyone can have their own arbitrary poetic definition of what it is and how it works, but also do interesting and useful things with it.
As long as we’re both using the same equations of physics to describe the phenomenon, it seems that exactly how we define “electricity” may not matter too much. The most popular interpretation of quantum mechanics is “shut up and calculate”.
As another analogy, “life” has a fuzzy, arbitrary boundary, but that doesn’t prevent us from doing biology.
If someone makes a strong assertion that something is bad and that we should work to reduce its prevalence, then they’re also implying it’s real in a non-trivial sense; if something is not real, then it cannot be bad in an actionable sense.
An example I like to use is “justice”. It’s clear to many people that injustice is bad, even though there’s no crisp, physics-based definition of injustice.
“Well, blegblarg doesn’t have a crisp definition, it’s more of a you-know-it-when-you-see-it thing where there’s no ‘correct’ definition of blegblarg and we can each use our own moral compass to determine if something is blegblarg, but there’s definitely a lot of it out there and it’s clearly bad so we should definitely work to reduce it!”
Replace “blegblarg” with “obscenity”, and you have an argument that many people suffering from religious viruses would endorse.
But you’re clearly not a moral nihilist
I am. :) At least by this definition: “Moral nihilists consider morality to be constructed, a complex set of rules and recommendations that may give a psychological, social, or economical advantage to its adherents, but is otherwise without universal or even relative truth in any sense.”
my apologies if anything I’ve said comes across as rude
I was worried about the same in reverse. I didn’t find your comments rude. :)
I was worried about the same in reverse. I didn’t find your comments rude. :)
Good! I’ll charge forward then. :)
As long as we’re both using the same equations of physics to describe the phenomenon, it seems that exactly how we define “electricity” may not matter too much. The most popular interpretation of quantum mechanics is “shut up and calculate”.
That is my favorite QM interpretation! But following this analogy, I’m offering a potential equation for electricity, but you’re saying that electricity doesn’t have an equation because it’s not ‘real’, so it doesn’t seem like you will ever be in a position to calculate.
“Well, blegblarg doesn’t have a crisp definition, it’s more of a you-know-it-when-you-see-it thing where there’s no ‘correct’ definition of blegblarg and we can each use our own moral compass to determine if something is blegblarg, but there’s definitely a lot of it out there and it’s clearly bad so we should definitely work to reduce it!”
Replace “blegblarg” with “obscenity”, and you have an argument that many people suffering from religious viruses would endorse.
But that doesn’t address the concern: if you argue that something is bad and we should work to reduce it, but also say there’s no correct definition for it and no wrong definition for it, what are you really saying? You note elsewhere that “We can interpret any piece of matter as being conscious if we want to,” and imply something similar about suffering. I would say that a definition that allows for literally anything is not a definition; an ethics that says something is bad, but notes that it’s impossible to ever tell whether any particular thing is bad, is not an ethics.
An example I like to use is “justice”. It’s clear to many people that injustice is bad, even though there’s no crisp, physics-based definition of injustice.
This doesn’t seem to match how you use the term ‘suffering’ in practice. E.g., we could claim that “protons oppress electrons” or “there’s injustice in fundamental physics” — but this is obviously nonsense, and from a Wittgensteinian “language game” point of view, what’s happening is that we’re using perfectly good words in contexts where they break down. But you do want to say that there could be suffering in fundamental physics, and potentially the far future. It looks like you want to have your cake and eat it too, and say that (1) “suffering” is a fuzzy linguistic construct, like “injustice” is, but also that (2) we can apply this linguistic construct of “suffering” to arbitrary contexts without it losing meaning. This seems deeply inconsistent.
But you’re clearly not a moral nihilist
I am. :) At least by this definition: “Moral nihilists consider morality to be constructed, a complex set of rules and recommendations that may give a psychological, social, or economical advantage to its adherents, but is otherwise without universal or even relative truth in any sense.”
That definition doesn’t seem to leave much room for ethical behavior (or foundational research!), merely selfish action. This ties into my notion above, that you seem to have one set of stated positions (extreme skepticism & constructivism about qualia & suffering, moral nihilism for the purpose of ‘psychological, social, or economical advantage’), but show different revealed preferences (which seem more altruistic, and seem to assume something close to moral realism).
The challenge in this space of consciousness/valence/suffering research is to be skeptical-yet-generative: to spot and explain the flaws in existing theories, yet also to constantly search for and/or build new theories which have the potential to avoid these flaws.
You have many amazing posts doing the former (I particularly enjoyed this piece ) but you seem to have given up on the latter, and at least in these replies, seem comfortable with extreme constructivism and moral nihilism. However, you also seem to implicitly lean on valence realism to avoid biting the bullet on full-out moral nihilism & constructivism— your revealed preferences seem to be that you still want meaning, you want to say suffering is actually bad, I assume you don’t think it’s 100% arbitrary whether we say something is suffering or not. But these things are not open to a full-blown moral nihilist.
Anyway, perhaps you would have very different interpretations on these things. I would expect so. :) I’m probing your argument to see what you do think. But in general, I agree with the sentiments of Scott Aaronson:
Yes, it’s possible that things like the hard problem of consciousness, or the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, will never have a satisfactory resolution. But even if so, building a complicated verbal edifice whose sole purpose is to tell people not even to look for a solution, to be satisfied with two “non-overlapping magisteria” and a lack of any explanation for how to reconcile them, never struck me as a substantive contribution to knowledge. It wasn’t when Niels Bohr did it, and it’s not when someone today does it either.
I want a future where we can tell each other to “shut up and calculate”. You may not like my solution for grounding what valence is (though I’m assuming you haven’t read Principia Qualia yet), but I hope you don’t stop looking for a solution.
But following this analogy, I’m offering a potential equation for electricity, but you’re saying that electricity doesn’t have an equation
I haven’t read your main article (sorry!), so I may not be able to engage deeply here. If we’re trying to model brain functioning, then there’s not really any disagreement about what success looks like. Different neuroscientists will use different methods, some more biological, some more algorithmic, and some more mathematical. Insofar as your work is a form of neuroscience, perhaps from a different paradigm, that’s cool. But I think we disagree more fundamentally in some way.
if you argue that something is bad and we should work to reduce it, but also say there’s no correct definition for it and no wrong definition for it, what are you really saying?
My point is that your objection is not an obstacle to practical implementation of my program, given that, e.g., anti-pornography activism exists.
If you want a more precise specification, you could define suffering as “whatever Brian says is suffering”. See “Brian utilitarianism”.
we could claim that “protons oppress electrons” or “there’s injustice in fundamental physics” — but this is obviously nonsense
It’s not nonsense. :) If I cared about justice as my fundamental goal, I would wonder how far to extend it to simpler cases. I discuss an example with scheduling algorithms here. (Search for “justice” in that interview.)
we can apply this linguistic construct of “suffering” to arbitrary contexts without it losing meaning
We do lose much of the meaning when applying that concept to fundamental physics. The question is whether there’s enough of the concept left over that our moral sympathies are still (ever so slightly) engaged.
That definition doesn’t seem to leave much room for ethical behavior
In my interpretation, altruism is part of “psychological advantage”, e.g., helping others because you want to and because it makes you feel better to do so.
I assume you don’t think it’s 100% arbitrary whether we say something is suffering or not
I do think it’s 100% arbitrary, depending how you define “arbitrary”. But of course I deeply want people to care about reducing suffering. There’s no contradiction here.
in accordance with new developments in the foundational physics, but we’re unlikely to chuck quantum field theory in favor of some idiosyncratic theory of crystal chakras. If we discover the universe’s equation for valence, we’re unlikely to find our definition of suffering at the mercy of intellectual fads.
Quantum field theory is instrumentally useful for any superintelligent agent. Preventing negative valence is not. Even if the knowledge of what valence is remains, caring about it may disappear.
But I think that, unambiguously, cats being lit on fire is an objectively bad thing.
I don’t know what “objectively bad” means.
slide into a highly Darwinian/Malthusian/Molochian context, then I fear that could be the end of value.
I’m glad we roughly agree on this factual prediction, even if we interpret “value” differently.
Thanks for the thoughts! Here’s my attempt at laying out a strong form of why I don’t think constructivism as applied to ethics & suffering leads to productive areas:
Imagine someone arguing that electromagnetism was purely a matter of definitions- there’s no “correct” definition of electricity, so how one approaches the topic and which definition one uses is ultimately a subjective choice.
But now imagine they also want to build a transistor. Transistors are, in fact, possible, and so it turns out that there is a good definition of electricity, by way of quantum theory, and of course many bad ones that don’t ‘carve reality at the joints’.
So I would say very strongly that we can’t both say that electricity is subjective and everyone can have their own arbitrary poetic definition of what it is and how it works, but also do interesting and useful things with it.
Likewise, my claim is that we can be a subjectivist about qualia and about suffering and say that how we define them is rather arbitrary and ultimately subjective, or we can say that some qualia are better than others and we should work to promote more good qualia and less bad qualia. But I don’t think we can do both at the same time. If someone makes a strong assertion that something is bad and that we should work to reduce its prevalence, then they’re also implying it’s real in a non-trivial sense; if something is not real, then it cannot be bad in an actionable sense.
Imagine that tomorrow I write a strong denouncement of blegblarg on the EA forum. I state that blegblarg is a scourge upon the universe, and we should work to rid ourselves of it, and all right-thinking people should agree with me. People ask me, “Mike…. I thought your post was interesting, but…. what the heck is blegblarg??”—I respond that “Well, blegblarg doesn’t have a crisp definition, it’s more of a you-know-it-when-you-see-it thing where there’s no ‘correct’ definition of blegblarg and we can each use our own moral compass to determine if something is blegblarg, but there’s definitely a lot of it out there and it’s clearly bad so we should definitely work to reduce it!”
This story would have no happy ending. Blegblarg can’t be a good rallying cry, because I can’t explain what it is. I can’t say it’s good or bad in a specific actionable sense, for the same reason. One person’s blegblarg is another person’s blargbleg, you know? :)
I see a strict reading of the constructivist project as essentially claiming similar things about suffering, and ultimately leading to concluding that what is, and isn’t, suffering, is fundamentally arbitrary—i.e., it leads to post-modern moral nihilism. But you’re clearly not a moral nihilist, and FRI certainly doesn’t see itself as nihilist. In my admittedly biased view of the situation, I see you & FRI circling around moral realism without admitting it. :) Now, perhaps my flavor of moral realism isn’t to your liking- perhaps you might come to a completely different principled conclusion about what qualia & valence are. But I do hope you keep looking.
p.s. I tend to be very direct when speaking about these topics, and my apologies if anything I’ve said comes across as rude. I think we differ in an interesting way and there may be updates in this for both of us.
As long as we’re both using the same equations of physics to describe the phenomenon, it seems that exactly how we define “electricity” may not matter too much. The most popular interpretation of quantum mechanics is “shut up and calculate”.
As another analogy, “life” has a fuzzy, arbitrary boundary, but that doesn’t prevent us from doing biology.
An example I like to use is “justice”. It’s clear to many people that injustice is bad, even though there’s no crisp, physics-based definition of injustice.
Replace “blegblarg” with “obscenity”, and you have an argument that many people suffering from religious viruses would endorse.
I am. :) At least by this definition: “Moral nihilists consider morality to be constructed, a complex set of rules and recommendations that may give a psychological, social, or economical advantage to its adherents, but is otherwise without universal or even relative truth in any sense.”
I was worried about the same in reverse. I didn’t find your comments rude. :)
Good! I’ll charge forward then. :)
That is my favorite QM interpretation! But following this analogy, I’m offering a potential equation for electricity, but you’re saying that electricity doesn’t have an equation because it’s not ‘real’, so it doesn’t seem like you will ever be in a position to calculate.
But that doesn’t address the concern: if you argue that something is bad and we should work to reduce it, but also say there’s no correct definition for it and no wrong definition for it, what are you really saying? You note elsewhere that “We can interpret any piece of matter as being conscious if we want to,” and imply something similar about suffering. I would say that a definition that allows for literally anything is not a definition; an ethics that says something is bad, but notes that it’s impossible to ever tell whether any particular thing is bad, is not an ethics.
This doesn’t seem to match how you use the term ‘suffering’ in practice. E.g., we could claim that “protons oppress electrons” or “there’s injustice in fundamental physics” — but this is obviously nonsense, and from a Wittgensteinian “language game” point of view, what’s happening is that we’re using perfectly good words in contexts where they break down. But you do want to say that there could be suffering in fundamental physics, and potentially the far future. It looks like you want to have your cake and eat it too, and say that (1) “suffering” is a fuzzy linguistic construct, like “injustice” is, but also that (2) we can apply this linguistic construct of “suffering” to arbitrary contexts without it losing meaning. This seems deeply inconsistent.
That definition doesn’t seem to leave much room for ethical behavior (or foundational research!), merely selfish action. This ties into my notion above, that you seem to have one set of stated positions (extreme skepticism & constructivism about qualia & suffering, moral nihilism for the purpose of ‘psychological, social, or economical advantage’), but show different revealed preferences (which seem more altruistic, and seem to assume something close to moral realism).
The challenge in this space of consciousness/valence/suffering research is to be skeptical-yet-generative: to spot and explain the flaws in existing theories, yet also to constantly search for and/or build new theories which have the potential to avoid these flaws.
You have many amazing posts doing the former (I particularly enjoyed this piece ) but you seem to have given up on the latter, and at least in these replies, seem comfortable with extreme constructivism and moral nihilism. However, you also seem to implicitly lean on valence realism to avoid biting the bullet on full-out moral nihilism & constructivism— your revealed preferences seem to be that you still want meaning, you want to say suffering is actually bad, I assume you don’t think it’s 100% arbitrary whether we say something is suffering or not. But these things are not open to a full-blown moral nihilist.
Anyway, perhaps you would have very different interpretations on these things. I would expect so. :) I’m probing your argument to see what you do think. But in general, I agree with the sentiments of Scott Aaronson:
I want a future where we can tell each other to “shut up and calculate”. You may not like my solution for grounding what valence is (though I’m assuming you haven’t read Principia Qualia yet), but I hope you don’t stop looking for a solution.
I haven’t read your main article (sorry!), so I may not be able to engage deeply here. If we’re trying to model brain functioning, then there’s not really any disagreement about what success looks like. Different neuroscientists will use different methods, some more biological, some more algorithmic, and some more mathematical. Insofar as your work is a form of neuroscience, perhaps from a different paradigm, that’s cool. But I think we disagree more fundamentally in some way.
My point is that your objection is not an obstacle to practical implementation of my program, given that, e.g., anti-pornography activism exists.
If you want a more precise specification, you could define suffering as “whatever Brian says is suffering”. See “Brian utilitarianism”.
It’s not nonsense. :) If I cared about justice as my fundamental goal, I would wonder how far to extend it to simpler cases. I discuss an example with scheduling algorithms here. (Search for “justice” in that interview.)
We do lose much of the meaning when applying that concept to fundamental physics. The question is whether there’s enough of the concept left over that our moral sympathies are still (ever so slightly) engaged.
In my interpretation, altruism is part of “psychological advantage”, e.g., helping others because you want to and because it makes you feel better to do so.
I do think it’s 100% arbitrary, depending how you define “arbitrary”. But of course I deeply want people to care about reducing suffering. There’s no contradiction here.
Quantum field theory is instrumentally useful for any superintelligent agent. Preventing negative valence is not. Even if the knowledge of what valence is remains, caring about it may disappear.
I don’t know what “objectively bad” means.
I’m glad we roughly agree on this factual prediction, even if we interpret “value” differently.