The criticisms you made of FDT don’t seem like especially devastating criticisms (I admit I might be biased as someone who has argued for an FDT-like theory myself, though notably with important differences).
Admittedly, I’m coming from a perspective where sometimes in philosophy every position has quite strong counter-arguments.
So I guess I feel that you jumped a bit too quickly from “strong counterarguments” to “conclusively debunked”. Like if you were writing a philosophy paper, you’d have to explain why common responses didn’t hold water.
Regarding physicalism, I’ve argued that Eliezer (and LW in general) haven’t fully engaged with the arguments for the existence of non-physical consciousness. At the same time, I think Eliezer made a really strong (and well-argued) point that if we believe in epiphenomenalism then we have no reason to believe that our reports of consciousness have any connection to the phenomenon of consciousness. I haven’t seen this point made so clearly elsewhere[1]. So even though I have my criticisms of him on this topic, I still find his writings here very impressive.
On the topic of AI Risk, while I agree with the criticism that Eliezer is too pessimistic about the possibility of us solving this problem, I kind of feel that if you’re being fair you’ve got to give him a lot of credit for taking existential risks from AI seriously when essentially no-one was arguing about it seriously, apart from maybe thinking that we’d cross that bridge when we get to it.
He’s certainly made mistakes here (like not predicting the rise of generative AI), but seeing how much support existential risks from AI now has from credible academics including two Turing Prize winners means that Eliezer is looking pretty good out of all of this, at least in my books. I mean, there isn’t a scientific consensus on this issue yet, but regardless of how it resolves, I still think it was incredibly impressive for him to realise how strong the arguments were for this being something to worry about.
At the same time, I think Eliezer made a really strong (and well-argued) point that if we believe in epiphenomenalism then we have no reason to believe that our reports of consciousness have any connection to the phenomenon of consciousness. I haven’t seen this point made so clearly elsewhere
Chalmers here says something like that (“It is certainly at least strange to suggest that consciousness plays no causal role in my utterances of ‘I am conscious’. Some have suggested more strongly that this rules out any knowledge of consciousness… The oddness of epiphenomenalism is exacerbated by the fact that the relationship between consciousness and reports about consciousness seems to be something of a lucky coincidence, on the epiphenomenalist view …”)
I liked how Eliezer made that argument more grounded and rigorous by presenting it in the context of Bayesian epistemology.
Also, that Chalmers section that I excerpted above is intermingled by a bunch of counterarguments, and Chalmers eventually says “I think that there is no knockdown objection to epiphenomenalism here.” I think Chalmers loses points for that—I think the arguments are totally knockdown and the counterarguments are galaxy-brained copium, and I say kudos to Eliezer for just outright stating that.
I also think that getting the right answer in a controversial domain and stating it clearly is much more important and praiseworthy than being original (in this context). So even if Eliezer’s point is already in the literature, I don’t care. (The fact that you can’t get academic publications and tenure from that activity is one of many big systematic problems with academia, IMO.)
My sense of the consciousness literature is that it’s a standard objection to dualism that it leads to epiphenomenalism (given reasonable assumptions about physics), and given epiphenomenalism, ‘we have no reason to believe that our reports of consciousness have any connection to the phenomenon of consciousness’, so dualism falsely implies that we don’t know that we are conscious and must be wrong. Though it’s a long time since I read this stuff. I think it’s discussed in ch.5 of The Conscious Mind under “The Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment”. I’ve just checked Chalmers’ later ‘The Character of Consciousness’ and sc.10 of ch.5 describes this as a standard objection to epiphenomenalist forms of dualism (and bear in mind the original version of that chapter goes back to the mid-90s), though he doesn’t actually cite any examples of people arguing this*. My sense is that ch.8 and 9 of Character of Consciousness are designed, among other things to address this sort of objection. My memory is that it’s discussed in Jackson’s original paper on the Knowledge Argument (the Mary the colour scientist in the black and white room thought experiment). Insofar as Eliezer thinks he has discovered something that “philosophers” have overlooked here, I think he’s just wrong. But by the same token, the general complaint “dualism entails epiphenomenalism, which is silly and self-undermining because it blocks knowledge of consciousness” is not some wild out to lunch belief of Eliezer’s; it’s well within the phil. mind mainstream! (Note that this is compatible with the original post here being right that Eliezer’s specific detailed reasoning on this topic is not good.)
What’s actually going on is that (not all) philosophers regard this as such a decisive objection to epiphenomenalist varieties of dualism or dualism in general, that the latter have definitely been refuted aren’t worth discussing (etc.) Though note that almost certainly some physicalists, maybe even many, do think this. But as long as there are still dualists who disagree, they will keep arguing about it in journals and treating dualists (relatively!) respectfully in published work: they have both selfish career incentives to do so (it makes for publications), but also, presumably they want to demonstrate the wrongness of dualism (ideally to dualists, certainly to bystanders.) There’s not much point in them taking the “this is like creationism or flat Earthism” high ground, when 1 out of 3 of their colleagues are dualists, whatever the physicalists own personal inside view credence in dualism. (Though to be clear, there are no doubt many physicalists who think dualism is wrong but not *obviously* wrong to.)
Actually, insofar as Eliezer has said “don’t listen to silly philosophers, they don’t even get the devastating objections to dualism that I outline here”, I actually think he has made the same mistake that you correctly diagnose Omnizoid as having made on FDT. As you say very often in philosophy all known views face objections that look, on their own devastating, but it’s also not clear that there is a further, different alternative that doesn’t face those objections**. In the clearest cases of this, logical paradoxes like the liar or the sorites, we can show to a fairly high standard of rigor that actually something that seems obvious and maybe even a “conceptual truth” must be false. So at least in those cases, the answer “dumb philosophers have missed an alternative that avoids all problems” is not very plausible. But in cases where things are murky and less rigorous there is always a temptation to take the objection that feels most convincing to you and go “how could anyone possibly endorse view X, given objection Y”, even if all the known alternatives to X face big problems too. This should be resisted, but not many people seem to be very good at resisting it, not even professional philosophers.
*Maybe people said it all the time in conversation but it didn’t really make it into print by the mid-90s, because pre-Chalmers few people defended dualism at length?
**In my personal view there often is such an alternative: namely “there is no determinate fact of the matter who is right on this issue, because the meaning of our terms isn’t precise enough to settle it”. But that’s not usually what philosophers as a group think about most of the disputes.
Some counterarguments are sufficiently strong that they are decisive. These are good examples.
I have read quite a lot of philosophy. Less than academics—I’m currently an undergrad—but my major is philosophy and it’s my primary interest, such that I spend lots of time reading and writing about it.
How long have you been studying philosophy? My views sometimes changed quite radically in grad school: I used to think problem of evil was “decisive”, but now I think multiverse theodicies might work. I used to think Moore’s proof of the existence of the external world was question-begging garbage as an undergrad, but then I read Scott Soames’ account of its historical significance in grad school one day, and decided, no, actually Moore was totally right, and it’s a deep insight. I used to buy Chalmers’ 2-d zombie argument against [lol I originally idiotically wrote for here] materialism, and then one day at a conference in either my 2nd year of masters or 1st year of PhD, I decided that no, actually, I am now a physicalist. When I was an undergrad, I had idealist sympathies at one point, but now I think idealism is the dumbest view ever.
Have you read much philosophy?
The criticisms you made of FDT don’t seem like especially devastating criticisms (I admit I might be biased as someone who has argued for an FDT-like theory myself, though notably with important differences).
Admittedly, I’m coming from a perspective where sometimes in philosophy every position has quite strong counter-arguments.
So I guess I feel that you jumped a bit too quickly from “strong counterarguments” to “conclusively debunked”. Like if you were writing a philosophy paper, you’d have to explain why common responses didn’t hold water.
Regarding physicalism, I’ve argued that Eliezer (and LW in general) haven’t fully engaged with the arguments for the existence of non-physical consciousness. At the same time, I think Eliezer made a really strong (and well-argued) point that if we believe in epiphenomenalism then we have no reason to believe that our reports of consciousness have any connection to the phenomenon of consciousness. I haven’t seen this point made so clearly elsewhere[1]. So even though I have my criticisms of him on this topic, I still find his writings here very impressive.
On the topic of AI Risk, while I agree with the criticism that Eliezer is too pessimistic about the possibility of us solving this problem, I kind of feel that if you’re being fair you’ve got to give him a lot of credit for taking existential risks from AI seriously when essentially no-one was arguing about it seriously, apart from maybe thinking that we’d cross that bridge when we get to it.
He’s certainly made mistakes here (like not predicting the rise of generative AI), but seeing how much support existential risks from AI now has from credible academics including two Turing Prize winners means that Eliezer is looking pretty good out of all of this, at least in my books. I mean, there isn’t a scientific consensus on this issue yet, but regardless of how it resolves, I still think it was incredibly impressive for him to realise how strong the arguments were for this being something to worry about.
That said, when I studied philosophy, I never took a philosophy of consciousness subject.
Chalmers here says something like that (“It is certainly at least strange to suggest that consciousness plays no causal role in my utterances of ‘I am conscious’. Some have suggested more strongly that this rules out any knowledge of consciousness… The oddness of epiphenomenalism is exacerbated by the fact that the relationship between consciousness and reports about consciousness seems to be something of a lucky coincidence, on the epiphenomenalist view …”)
I liked how Eliezer made that argument more grounded and rigorous by presenting it in the context of Bayesian epistemology.
Also, that Chalmers section that I excerpted above is intermingled by a bunch of counterarguments, and Chalmers eventually says “I think that there is no knockdown objection to epiphenomenalism here.” I think Chalmers loses points for that—I think the arguments are totally knockdown and the counterarguments are galaxy-brained copium, and I say kudos to Eliezer for just outright stating that.
I also think that getting the right answer in a controversial domain and stating it clearly is much more important and praiseworthy than being original (in this context). So even if Eliezer’s point is already in the literature, I don’t care. (The fact that you can’t get academic publications and tenure from that activity is one of many big systematic problems with academia, IMO.)
(I am not a philosopher of consciousness.)
My sense of the consciousness literature is that it’s a standard objection to dualism that it leads to epiphenomenalism (given reasonable assumptions about physics), and given epiphenomenalism, ‘we have no reason to believe that our reports of consciousness have any connection to the phenomenon of consciousness’, so dualism falsely implies that we don’t know that we are conscious and must be wrong. Though it’s a long time since I read this stuff. I think it’s discussed in ch.5 of The Conscious Mind under “The Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment”. I’ve just checked Chalmers’ later ‘The Character of Consciousness’ and sc.10 of ch.5 describes this as a standard objection to epiphenomenalist forms of dualism (and bear in mind the original version of that chapter goes back to the mid-90s), though he doesn’t actually cite any examples of people arguing this*. My sense is that ch.8 and 9 of Character of Consciousness are designed, among other things to address this sort of objection. My memory is that it’s discussed in Jackson’s original paper on the Knowledge Argument (the Mary the colour scientist in the black and white room thought experiment). Insofar as Eliezer thinks he has discovered something that “philosophers” have overlooked here, I think he’s just wrong. But by the same token, the general complaint “dualism entails epiphenomenalism, which is silly and self-undermining because it blocks knowledge of consciousness” is not some wild out to lunch belief of Eliezer’s; it’s well within the phil. mind mainstream! (Note that this is compatible with the original post here being right that Eliezer’s specific detailed reasoning on this topic is not good.)
What’s actually going on is that (not all) philosophers regard this as such a decisive objection to epiphenomenalist varieties of dualism or dualism in general, that the latter have definitely been refuted aren’t worth discussing (etc.) Though note that almost certainly some physicalists, maybe even many, do think this. But as long as there are still dualists who disagree, they will keep arguing about it in journals and treating dualists (relatively!) respectfully in published work: they have both selfish career incentives to do so (it makes for publications), but also, presumably they want to demonstrate the wrongness of dualism (ideally to dualists, certainly to bystanders.) There’s not much point in them taking the “this is like creationism or flat Earthism” high ground, when 1 out of 3 of their colleagues are dualists, whatever the physicalists own personal inside view credence in dualism. (Though to be clear, there are no doubt many physicalists who think dualism is wrong but not *obviously* wrong to.)
Actually, insofar as Eliezer has said “don’t listen to silly philosophers, they don’t even get the devastating objections to dualism that I outline here”, I actually think he has made the same mistake that you correctly diagnose Omnizoid as having made on FDT. As you say very often in philosophy all known views face objections that look, on their own devastating, but it’s also not clear that there is a further, different alternative that doesn’t face those objections**. In the clearest cases of this, logical paradoxes like the liar or the sorites, we can show to a fairly high standard of rigor that actually something that seems obvious and maybe even a “conceptual truth” must be false. So at least in those cases, the answer “dumb philosophers have missed an alternative that avoids all problems” is not very plausible. But in cases where things are murky and less rigorous there is always a temptation to take the objection that feels most convincing to you and go “how could anyone possibly endorse view X, given objection Y”, even if all the known alternatives to X face big problems too. This should be resisted, but not many people seem to be very good at resisting it, not even professional philosophers.
*Maybe people said it all the time in conversation but it didn’t really make it into print by the mid-90s, because pre-Chalmers few people defended dualism at length?
**In my personal view there often is such an alternative: namely “there is no determinate fact of the matter who is right on this issue, because the meaning of our terms isn’t precise enough to settle it”. But that’s not usually what philosophers as a group think about most of the disputes.
I should have been clearer.
I wasn’t claiming Eliezer’s point was original, just especially clear and well-argued.
Then again, maybe if I looked into the literature I’d find others making this point in an even clearer and better argued fashion.
Cool, that makes sense.
Some counterarguments are sufficiently strong that they are decisive. These are good examples.
I have read quite a lot of philosophy. Less than academics—I’m currently an undergrad—but my major is philosophy and it’s my primary interest, such that I spend lots of time reading and writing about it.
How long have you been studying philosophy? My views sometimes changed quite radically in grad school: I used to think problem of evil was “decisive”, but now I think multiverse theodicies might work. I used to think Moore’s proof of the existence of the external world was question-begging garbage as an undergrad, but then I read Scott Soames’ account of its historical significance in grad school one day, and decided, no, actually Moore was totally right, and it’s a deep insight. I used to buy Chalmers’ 2-d zombie argument against [lol I originally idiotically wrote for here] materialism, and then one day at a conference in either my 2nd year of masters or 1st year of PhD, I decided that no, actually, I am now a physicalist. When I was an undergrad, I had idealist sympathies at one point, but now I think idealism is the dumbest view ever.