The first object-level issue the author talks about is whether the brain is close to the Landaeur limit. No particular issue is cited, only that somebody else claimed a lot of authority and claimed I was wrong about something, what exactly is not shown.
The brain obviously cannot be operating near the Landaeur limit. Thousands of neurotransmitter molecules and thousands of ions need to be pumped back to their original places after each synaptic flash. Each of these is a thermodynamically irreversible operation and it staggers the imagination that every ion pumped en masse back out of some long axon or dendrite, after ions flooded en masse into it to propagate electrical depolarization, is part of a well-designed informational algorithm that could not be simplified. Any calculation saying that biology is operating close to the Landaeur limit has reached a face-value absurdity.
Of course, this may not seem to address anything, since OP failed to state what I was putatively wrong about and admits to not understanding it themselves; I can’t refute what isn’t shown.
The first substantive criticism OP claims to understand theirself is on Zombies.
I say:
Your “zombie”, in the philosophical usage of the term, is putatively a being that is exactly like you in every respect—identical behavior, identical speech, identical brain; every atom and quark in exactly the same position, moving according to the same causal laws of motion—except that your zombie is not conscious.
The author would have you believe this is a ludicrous straw position.
I invite anyone to simply read the opening paragraphs of the SEP encyclopedia entry on P-zombies:
If zombies are to be counterexamples to physicalism, it is not enough for them to be behaviorally and functionally like normal human beings: plenty of physicalists accept that merely behavioral or functional duplicates of ourselves might lack qualia. Zombies must be like normal human beings in all physical respects, and they must have the physical properties that physicalists suppose we have. This requires them to be subject to the causal closure of the physical, which is why their supposed lack of consciousness is a challenge to physicalism. If instead they were to be conceived of as creatures whose behavior could not be explained physically, physicalists would have no reason to bother with the idea: there is plenty of evidence that, as epiphenomenalists hold, our movements actually are explicable in physical terms (see e.g. Papineau 2002).
This is a debate that has gone on for very long in philosophy. I’d say it’s gone on too long.
But whether or not particular thought experiments, by seeming metaphysically possible, license other conclusions about metaphysics, is exactly the entire substance. The base thought experiment is not or should not be in dispute: it’s a being whose physics duplicate the physics of a human being including the causal closure of what is said to be ‘physics’, i.e., all of the causes of behavior are included into the p-zombie. Some people go on at fantastic length from this to say that it demonstrates the possibility of an extra consciousness that they call “epiphenomenal”, and some say that it demonstrates the possibility of a nonphysical consciousness that they don’t call “epiphenomenal”, but it’s my position that somewhere along the way of a long argument they have dropped the ball on the original thought experiment; whatever they call “consciousness” that isn’t in the supposed p-zombie, it can’t be among the causes of why we talk about consciousness, or why our verbally reportable stream of thought talks about consciousness, etc, because the zombie behaves outwardly like we do and also includes the minimal closure of the causes of that physical behavior.
The author of the above post has misrepresented what my zombies argument was about. It’s not that I think philosophers openly claim that p-zombies demonstrate epiphenomenalism; it’s that I think philosophers are confused about what this thought experiment demonstrates.
The author having been shown to be wrong on the first points addressed, which I chose in order rather than selectively sampling, I hope you accept this as obvious evidence that the rest would be no better if you looked into them in detail or I responded in detail. For a post claiming to show that I’m often grossly wrong, actual quotes from me, with linked context and dates attached, are remarkably thin on the ground.
You will mark that in this comment I first respond to a substantive point and show it to be mistaken before I make any general criticism of the author; which can then be supported by that previously shown, initial, first-thing, object-level point. You will find every post of the Less Wrong sequences written the same way.
As the entire post violates basic rules of epistemic conduct by opening with a series of not-yet-supported personal attacks, I will not be responding to the rest in detail. I’m sad about how anything containing such an egregious violation of basic epistemic conduct got this upvoted, and wonder about sockpuppet accounts or alternatively a downfall of EA. The relevant principle of epistemic good conduct seems to me straightforward: if you’ve got to make personal attacks (and sometimes you do), make them after presenting your object-level points that support those personal attacks. This shouldn’t be a difficult rule to follow, or follow much better than this; and violating it this hugely and explicitly is sufficiently bad news that people should’ve been wary about this post and hesitated to upvote it for that reason alone.
Hi Eliezer. I actually do quite appreciate the reply because I think that if one writes a piece explaining why someone else is systematically in error, it’s important that the other person can reply. That said . . .
You are misunderstanding the point about causal closure. If there was some isomorphic physical law, that resulted in the same physical states of affairs as is resulted in by consciousness, the physical would be causally closed. I didn’t say that your description of what a zombie is was the misrepresentation. The point you misrepresented was when you said “It is furthermore claimed that if zombies are “possible” (a term over which battles are still being fought), then, purely from our knowledge of this “possibility”, we can deduce a priori that consciousness is extra-physical, in a sense to be described below; the standard term for this position is “epiphenomenalism”.”
No, the term is non-physicalism. This does not entail epiphenomenalism. If you say the standard term for believers in zombies is epiphenomenalists, then even if you have a convincing argument for why believers in zombies must be epiphenomenalists (which you don’t) then it is still totally misleading to say the standard term is something totally different from what it is. I think I have a convincing argument for why Objective List Theorists should accept hypersensitivity—the idea that slight changes in well-being supervene on arbitrarily small changes in welfare goods—but it would be misleading to say “the standard term for the belief in objective list theory is belief in hypersensitivity.”
The quote you give from the SEP page is “If zombies are to be counterexamples to physicalism, it is not enough for them to be behaviorally and functionally like normal human beings: plenty of physicalists accept that merely behavioral or functional duplicates of ourselves might lack qualia.” But here behavior and function are about the external outputs of the thing—you could have a behavioral and functional duplicate of me made with silicon. However, it wouldn’t be physically identical because it would be physically different—made of different stuff. That is the point that is being made.
If I am wrong why is it that Chalmers and the SEP page both deny that you have to be an epiphenomenalist to be a nonphysicalist?
You said “It is furthermore claimed that if zombies are “possible” (a term over which battles are still being fought), then, purely from our knowledge of this “possibility”, we can deduce a priori that consciousness is extra-physical, in a sense to be described below; the standard term for this position is “epiphenomenalism”.
(For those unfamiliar with zombies, I emphasize that this is not a strawman. See, for example, the SEP entry on Zombies. ”
However, the SEP entry, as I note in the article, explicitly says that you do not have to be an epiphenomenalist to be a zombie believer.
“True, the friends of zombies do not seem compelled to be epiphenomenalists or parallelists about the actual world. They may be interactionists, holding that our world is not physically closed, and that as a matter of actual fact nonphysical properties do have physical effects.”
As for the final points sockpuppets, if a moderator would like to look into whether there are sockpuppet accounts, be my guest. I’d be willing to bet at 9.5 to .5 odds that if a moderator looked into it, they would not find lots of newly created accounts
I’d also be happy to bet about whether, if we ask a philosopher of mind like Chalmers, Goff, or Chappell which of us is correct about the zombie argument, they would say me!
Finally, you suggest that saying bad things about people before addressing the object level is bad conduct. Why? You never give a reason for this. It seems to me that if a post is arguing that some public figure should not be deferred to as much as he is currently being deferred to, on account of his frequent errors, there is nothing wrong with describing that that is your aim at the outset.
‘Chalmers, Goff, or Chappell’ This is stacking the deck against Eliezer rather unfairly; none of these 3 are physicalists, even though physicalism is the plurality, and I think still slight majority position in the field: https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4874
Re Chalmers agreeing with you, he would, he said as much in the LessWrong comments and I recently asked him in person and he confirmed it. In Yudkowsky’s defense it is a very typical move among illusionists to argue that Zombiests can’t really escape epiphenomenalism, not just some ignorant outsider’s move (I think I recall Keith Frankish and Francois Kammerer both making arguments like this). That said I remain frustrated that the post hasn’t been updated to clarify that Chalmers disagrees with this characterization of his position.
Eliezer quoted the SEP entry as support for his position and you, in your response, cut off the part of said quote which contained the support and only responded to the remaining part which did not contain the supporting point (eg the key words: causal closure). This seems bad-faith to me even though I think you’re right that Eliezer did not account for interactionist dualism (though I disagree that it is necessarily a critical error, I don’t think one should be expected to note every possibilty no matter how low prob in the course of an argumentation.)
He didn’t quote it—he linked to it. I didn’t quote the broader section because it was ambiguous and confusing. The reason not accounting for interactionist dualism matters is because it means that he misstates the zombie argument, and his version is utterly unpersuasive.
Unfortunate. I find the author’s first two sections weak but I find the third section about animal consciousness to be interesting, concrete, falsifiable, written clearly, and novel-to-me.
The relevant principle of epistemic good conduct seems to me straightforward: if you’ve got to make personal attacks (and sometimes you do), make them after presenting your object-level points that support those personal attacks. This shouldn’t be a difficult rule to follow, or follow much better than this; and violating it this hugely and explicitly is sufficiently bad news that people should’ve been wary about this post and hesitated to upvote it for that reason alone.
This might well be a reasonable norm to follow, and it might well even be the type of norm that enlightened rational actors can converge on as good, but I think it’s far from settled practice, and I don’t think Omnizoid is defecting on established norms at least in this instance (in the way that e.g., doxxing or faking data is widely considered defecting in most internet discussions).
I strongly upvoted this article because I believe that it is incredibly important for EA to be able to point out the proverbial emperors lacking clothes. I would have preferred for the tone to be more reserved, but overall the OP has provided a large amount of citations, examples, arguments and evidence to back up their critique. It also matches with my experience of your writing on my area of expertise(physics), which features misleading distortions and excessive overconfidence.
I think as the founder of rationalism, you benefit from a large population of fans that are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and be biased towards your positions, and for the intellectual health of the community this needs to be balanced with substantial, evidence-based skepticism and critique, a standard which I believe the OP has lived up to here.
The first object-level issue the author talks about is whether the brain is close to the Landaeur limit. No particular issue is cited, only that somebody else claimed a lot of authority and claimed I was wrong about something, what exactly is not shown.
The brain obviously cannot be operating near the Landaeur limit. Thousands of neurotransmitter molecules and thousands of ions need to be pumped back to their original places after each synaptic flash. Each of these is a thermodynamically irreversible operation and it staggers the imagination that every ion pumped en masse back out of some long axon or dendrite, after ions flooded en masse into it to propagate electrical depolarization, is part of a well-designed informational algorithm that could not be simplified. Any calculation saying that biology is operating close to the Landaeur limit has reached a face-value absurdity.
Of course, this may not seem to address anything, since OP failed to state what I was putatively wrong about and admits to not understanding it themselves; I can’t refute what isn’t shown.
The first substantive criticism OP claims to understand theirself is on Zombies.
I say:
The author would have you believe this is a ludicrous straw position.
I invite anyone to simply read the opening paragraphs of the SEP encyclopedia entry on P-zombies:
This is a debate that has gone on for very long in philosophy. I’d say it’s gone on too long.
But whether or not particular thought experiments, by seeming metaphysically possible, license other conclusions about metaphysics, is exactly the entire substance. The base thought experiment is not or should not be in dispute: it’s a being whose physics duplicate the physics of a human being including the causal closure of what is said to be ‘physics’, i.e., all of the causes of behavior are included into the p-zombie. Some people go on at fantastic length from this to say that it demonstrates the possibility of an extra consciousness that they call “epiphenomenal”, and some say that it demonstrates the possibility of a nonphysical consciousness that they don’t call “epiphenomenal”, but it’s my position that somewhere along the way of a long argument they have dropped the ball on the original thought experiment; whatever they call “consciousness” that isn’t in the supposed p-zombie, it can’t be among the causes of why we talk about consciousness, or why our verbally reportable stream of thought talks about consciousness, etc, because the zombie behaves outwardly like we do and also includes the minimal closure of the causes of that physical behavior.
The author of the above post has misrepresented what my zombies argument was about. It’s not that I think philosophers openly claim that p-zombies demonstrate epiphenomenalism; it’s that I think philosophers are confused about what this thought experiment demonstrates.
The author having been shown to be wrong on the first points addressed, which I chose in order rather than selectively sampling, I hope you accept this as obvious evidence that the rest would be no better if you looked into them in detail or I responded in detail. For a post claiming to show that I’m often grossly wrong, actual quotes from me, with linked context and dates attached, are remarkably thin on the ground.
You will mark that in this comment I first respond to a substantive point and show it to be mistaken before I make any general criticism of the author; which can then be supported by that previously shown, initial, first-thing, object-level point. You will find every post of the Less Wrong sequences written the same way.
As the entire post violates basic rules of epistemic conduct by opening with a series of not-yet-supported personal attacks, I will not be responding to the rest in detail. I’m sad about how anything containing such an egregious violation of basic epistemic conduct got this upvoted, and wonder about sockpuppet accounts or alternatively a downfall of EA. The relevant principle of epistemic good conduct seems to me straightforward: if you’ve got to make personal attacks (and sometimes you do), make them after presenting your object-level points that support those personal attacks. This shouldn’t be a difficult rule to follow, or follow much better than this; and violating it this hugely and explicitly is sufficiently bad news that people should’ve been wary about this post and hesitated to upvote it for that reason alone.
Hi Eliezer. I actually do quite appreciate the reply because I think that if one writes a piece explaining why someone else is systematically in error, it’s important that the other person can reply. That said . . .
You are misunderstanding the point about causal closure. If there was some isomorphic physical law, that resulted in the same physical states of affairs as is resulted in by consciousness, the physical would be causally closed. I didn’t say that your description of what a zombie is was the misrepresentation. The point you misrepresented was when you said “It is furthermore claimed that if zombies are “possible” (a term over which battles are still being fought), then, purely from our knowledge of this “possibility”, we can deduce a priori that consciousness is extra-physical, in a sense to be described below; the standard term for this position is “epiphenomenalism”.”
No, the term is non-physicalism. This does not entail epiphenomenalism. If you say the standard term for believers in zombies is epiphenomenalists, then even if you have a convincing argument for why believers in zombies must be epiphenomenalists (which you don’t) then it is still totally misleading to say the standard term is something totally different from what it is. I think I have a convincing argument for why Objective List Theorists should accept hypersensitivity—the idea that slight changes in well-being supervene on arbitrarily small changes in welfare goods—but it would be misleading to say “the standard term for the belief in objective list theory is belief in hypersensitivity.”
The quote you give from the SEP page is “If zombies are to be counterexamples to physicalism, it is not enough for them to be behaviorally and functionally like normal human beings: plenty of physicalists accept that merely behavioral or functional duplicates of ourselves might lack qualia.” But here behavior and function are about the external outputs of the thing—you could have a behavioral and functional duplicate of me made with silicon. However, it wouldn’t be physically identical because it would be physically different—made of different stuff. That is the point that is being made.
If I am wrong why is it that Chalmers and the SEP page both deny that you have to be an epiphenomenalist to be a nonphysicalist?
You said “It is furthermore claimed that if zombies are “possible” (a term over which battles are still being fought), then, purely from our knowledge of this “possibility”, we can deduce a priori that consciousness is extra-physical, in a sense to be described below; the standard term for this position is “epiphenomenalism”.
(For those unfamiliar with zombies, I emphasize that this is not a strawman. See, for example, the SEP entry on Zombies. ”
However, the SEP entry, as I note in the article, explicitly says that you do not have to be an epiphenomenalist to be a zombie believer.
“True, the friends of zombies do not seem compelled to be epiphenomenalists or parallelists about the actual world. They may be interactionists, holding that our world is not physically closed, and that as a matter of actual fact nonphysical properties do have physical effects.”
As for the final points sockpuppets, if a moderator would like to look into whether there are sockpuppet accounts, be my guest. I’d be willing to bet at 9.5 to .5 odds that if a moderator looked into it, they would not find lots of newly created accounts
I’d also be happy to bet about whether, if we ask a philosopher of mind like Chalmers, Goff, or Chappell which of us is correct about the zombie argument, they would say me!
Finally, you suggest that saying bad things about people before addressing the object level is bad conduct. Why? You never give a reason for this. It seems to me that if a post is arguing that some public figure should not be deferred to as much as he is currently being deferred to, on account of his frequent errors, there is nothing wrong with describing that that is your aim at the outset.
‘Chalmers, Goff, or Chappell’ This is stacking the deck against Eliezer rather unfairly; none of these 3 are physicalists, even though physicalism is the plurality, and I think still slight majority position in the field: https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4874
We could ask a physicalist too—Frankish, Richard Brown, etc.
Re Chalmers agreeing with you, he would, he said as much in the LessWrong comments and I recently asked him in person and he confirmed it. In Yudkowsky’s defense it is a very typical move among illusionists to argue that Zombiests can’t really escape epiphenomenalism, not just some ignorant outsider’s move (I think I recall Keith Frankish and Francois Kammerer both making arguments like this). That said I remain frustrated that the post hasn’t been updated to clarify that Chalmers disagrees with this characterization of his position.
Yes, there are some arguments of questionable efficacy for the conclusion that zombieism entails epiphenomenalism. But notably:
Eliezer hasn’t given any such argument.
Eliezer said that deniers of zombieism are by definition zombieists. That’s just flatly false.
Eliezer quoted the SEP entry as support for his position and you, in your response, cut off the part of said quote which contained the support and only responded to the remaining part which did not contain the supporting point (eg the key words: causal closure). This seems bad-faith to me even though I think you’re right that Eliezer did not account for interactionist dualism (though I disagree that it is necessarily a critical error, I don’t think one should be expected to note every possibilty no matter how low prob in the course of an argumentation.)
He didn’t quote it—he linked to it. I didn’t quote the broader section because it was ambiguous and confusing. The reason not accounting for interactionist dualism matters is because it means that he misstates the zombie argument, and his version is utterly unpersuasive.
Unfortunate. I find the author’s first two sections weak but I find the third section about animal consciousness to be interesting, concrete, falsifiable, written clearly, and novel-to-me.
This might well be a reasonable norm to follow, and it might well even be the type of norm that enlightened rational actors can converge on as good, but I think it’s far from settled practice, and I don’t think Omnizoid is defecting on established norms at least in this instance (in the way that e.g., doxxing or faking data is widely considered defecting in most internet discussions).
I strongly upvoted this article because I believe that it is incredibly important for EA to be able to point out the proverbial emperors lacking clothes. I would have preferred for the tone to be more reserved, but overall the OP has provided a large amount of citations, examples, arguments and evidence to back up their critique. It also matches with my experience of your writing on my area of expertise(physics), which features misleading distortions and excessive overconfidence.
I think as the founder of rationalism, you benefit from a large population of fans that are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and be biased towards your positions, and for the intellectual health of the community this needs to be balanced with substantial, evidence-based skepticism and critique, a standard which I believe the OP has lived up to here.