I appreciate the spirit of this post as I am not a Yudkowsky fan, think he is crazy overconfident about AI, am not very keen on rationalism in general, and think the EA community sometimes gets overconfident in the views of its “star” members. But some of the philosophy stuff here seems not quite right to me, though none of its egregiously wrong, and on each topic I agree that Yudkowsky is way, way overconfident. (Many professional philosophers are way overconfident too!)
As a philosophy of consciousness PhD: the view that animals lack consciousness is definitely an extreme minority view in the field, but it it’s not a view that no serious experts hold. Daniel Dennett has denied animal consciousness for roughly Yudkowsky like reasons I think. (EDIT: Actually maybe not: see my discussion with Michael St. Jules below. Dennett is hard to interpret on this, and also seems to have changed his mind to fairly definitively accept animal consciousness more recently. But his earlier stuff on this at the very least opposed to confident assertions that we just know animals are conscious, and any theory that says otherwise is crazy.) And more definitely Peter Carruthers (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=2JF8VWYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao) used to defend the view that animals lack consciousness because they lack a capacity for higher-order thought. (He changed his mind in the last few years, but I personally didn’t find his explanation as to why made much sense.) Likewise, it’s far from obvious that higher-order thought views imply any animals other than humans are conscious. And still less obvious that they imply all mammals are conscious.* Indeed a standard objection to HOT views, mentioned in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on them last time I checked, is that they are incompatible with animal consciousness. Though that does of course illustrate that you are right that most experts take it as obvious that mammals are conscious.
As for the zombies stuff: you are right that Yudkowsky is mistaken and mistaken for the reasons you give, but it’s not a “no undergraduate would make this” error. Trust me. I have marked undergrads a little, though I’ve never been a Prof. Far worse confusion is common. It’s not even “if an undergrad made this error in 2nd year I’d assume they didn’t have what it takes to become a prof”. Philosophy is really hard and the error is quite subtle, plus many philosophers of mind do think you can get from the possibility of zombies to epiphenomenalism given plausible further assumptions, so when Yudkowsky read into the topic he probably encountered lots of people assuming accepting the possibility of zombies commits you to epiphenomenalism. But yes, the general lesson of “Dave Chalmers, not an idiot” is obviously correct.
As for functional decision theory. I read Wolfgang Schwarz’s critique when it came out, and for me the major news in it was that a philosopher as qualified as Wolfgang thought it was potentially publishable given revisions. It is incredibly hard to publish in good philosophy journals, at the very top end they have rejection rates of >95%. I have literally never heard of a non-academic doing do without even an academic coauthor. I’d classify it as a genuinely exceptional achievement to write something Wolfgang gave a revise and resubmit verdict to with no formal training in philosophy. I say this not because I think it means anyone should defer to Yudkowsky and Soares-again, I think their confidence on AI doom is genuinely crazy, but just because it feels a bit unfair to me to see what was actually an impressive achievement denigrated.
*My own view is that IF animals are not capable of higher-order thought there isn’t even a fact of the matter about whether they are conscious, but that only justifies downweighting their interests to a less than overwhelming degree, and so doesn’t really damage arguments for veganism. Though it would affect how much you should prioritise animals v. humans.
FWIW, I’m confused about Dennett’s current position on animal consciousness. Still, my impression is that he does attribute consciousness to many other animals, but believes that human consciousness is importantly unique because of language and introspection.
In this panel discussion, Dennett seemed confident that chickens and octopuses are conscious, directly answering that they are without reservation, and yes on bees after hesitating, but acknowledging their sophisticated capacities and going back to gradualism and whether what they do “deserves to be called consciousness at all”.
Some other recent writing by him or about his views:
But Dennett thinks these things are like evolution, essentially gradualist, without hard borders. The obvious answer to the question of whether animals have selves is that they sort of have them. He loves the phrase “sort of.” Picture the brain, he often says, as a collection of subsystems that “sort of” know, think, decide, and feel. These layers build up, incrementally, to the real thing. Animals have fewer mental layers than people—in particular, they lack language, which Dennett believes endows human mental life with its complexity and texture—but this doesn’t make them zombies. It just means that they “sort of” have consciousness, as measured by human standards.
To appreciate what I see to be Chalmers’ second contribution, we first need to distinguish two different illusions: the malignant theorists’ illusion and the benign user illusion. Chalmers almost does that. He asserts: ‘To generate the hard problem of consciousness, all we need is the basic fact that there is something it is like to be us’ (2018, p. 49). No, all we need is the fact that we think there is something it is like to be us. Dogs presumably do not think there is something it is like to be them, even if there is. It is not that a dog thinks there isn’t anything it is like to be a dog; the dog is not a theorist at all, and hence does not suffer from the theorists’ illusion. The hard problem and meta-problem are only problems for us humans, and mainly just for those of us humans who are particularly reflective. In other words, dogs aren’t bothered or botherable by problem intuitions. Dogs — and, for that matter, clams and ticks and bacteria — do enjoy (or at any rate do not suffer from) a sort of user illusion: they are equipped to discriminate and track only some of the properties in their environment.
I have long stressed the fact that human consciousness is vastly different from the consciousness of any other species, such as apes, dolphins, and dogs, and this “human exceptionalism” has been met with little favor by my fellow consciousness theorists. Yes, of course, human beings, thanks to language, can do all sorts of things with their consciousness that their language-less cousin species cannot, but still, goes the common complaint, I have pushed my claims into extreme versions that are objectionable, and even offensive. Not wanting to stir up more resistance than necessary to my view, I have on occasion strategically soft-pedaled my claims, allowing animals to be heterophenomenological subjects (of sorts) thanks to their capacity to inform experimenters (if not tell them), but now, my thinking clarified by Rosenthal’s, I want to recant that boundary blurring and re-emphasize the differences, which I think Rosenthal may underestimate as well. “Thoughts are expressible in speech,” he writes (p. 155), but what about the higher-order thoughts of conscious animals? Are they? They are not expressed in speech, and I submit that it is a kind of wishful thinking to fill the minds of our dogs with thoughts of that sophistication. So I express my gratitude to Rosenthal for his clarifying account by paying him back with a challenge: how would he establish that non-speaking animals have higher-order thoughts worthy of the name? Or does he agree with me that the anchoring concept of consciousness, human consciousness, is hugely richer than animal consciousness on just this dimension?
Maybe that is right. Dennett is often quite slippery (I think he believes that precision actually makes philosophy worse a lot of the time.)
He also just may have changed his position. The SEP article on Animal Consciousness at one point refers to ‘Dennett (who argues that consciousness is unique to humans)’, but the reference is to a paper from 1995. Looking at the first page of the paper they cite, I think it was the one I vaguely remembered as “Dennett denies animal consciousness for Yudkowsky-like reasons”. But having skimmed some of the paper again, I found it hard to tell this time if the reading of it as flat-out denying that animals are conscious was right. It seemed like Dennett *might* just be saying “we don’t know, but it’s not obvious, and for some animals, there probably isn’t even a fact of the matter”. (This is basically my view too, I think, except that unlike Dennett I don’t think this much damages the case for animal rights.) But even that is inconsistent with “anyone who thinks mammals aren’t conscious is totally out-of-step with experts in the field, I think.” And it’s possible the stronger reading of Dennett as actually denying animal consciousness is correct: I only skimmed it, and the SEP thinks so.
This is I think a really good comment. The animal consciousness stuff I think is a bit crazy. If Dennett thinks that as well . . . well, I never gave Dennett much deference.
I was exaggerating a bit when I said that no undergraduate would make that error.
I don’t think that Schwarz saying he might publish it is much news. I have a friend who is an undergraduate in his second year and he has 5 or 6 published philosophy papers—I’m also an undergraduate and I have one forthcoming.
Do we know what journal Eliezer was publishing in? I’d expect it not to get published in even a relatively mediocre journal, but I might be wrong.
I don’t know the journal Schwarz rejected it for, no. I f your friend has 5 or 6 publications as an undergrad then either they are a genius, or they are unusually talented and also very ruthless about identifying small, technical objections to things famous people have said, or they are publishing in extremely mediocre journals. The second and third things ares probably not what’s going on when Wolfgang gives an R&R to the Yudkowsky/Soares fdt paper. It is an attempt to give a big new fundamental theory, not a nitpick. And regardless of the particular journal Wolfgang was reviewing for, I don’t think (could be wrong though!), that the reason why it is easy to get published in the crappiest journals is because really sharp philosophers with multiple publications in top 5-10 journals drop their standards to a trivial level when reviewing for them. No doubt they drop their standards somewhat, but those journals probably have worse reviewers quite a lot of the time. (That’s only a guess though.)
More importantly, a bit of googling to me revealed that Soares, though not Yudkowsky, is a coauthor on a paper defending fdt in Journal of Philosophy. (With Ben Levinstein who is an actual philosophy prof.) That alone takes fdt well out of the crank zone in my view. J Phil is a clear top 10 journal, probably top 5. It probably rejects around 95% of the papers sent to it. Admittedly there’s a limit to how much credit Eliezer should get for a paper he didn’t write, but insofar as fdt is “his” idea (don’t know how much he developed it versus Soares and other MIRI people), this is the greenest of Philosophy green flags.
Though worth noting that the other author rejected it. It’s not clear how common it is for one reviewer to be willing to submit your paper after heavy revisions is.
Fair point that many rejected things probably received one “revise and resubmit”.
The link to your friend’s philpapers page I’d broken, but I googled him and I think mediocre journals is probably, mostly the right answer, mixed a bit with “your friend is very, talented” (Though to be clear even 5 mediocre pubs is impressive for a 2nd year undergrad, and I would predict your friend can go to a good grad school if he wants to. ) Philosophia is a generalist journal I never read a single paper in in the 15 or so years I was reading philosophy papers generally, which is a bad sign. I’d never heard of “Journal of Ayn Rand Studies” but I can think of at most 1 possible examples of a good journal dedicated to a single philosopher and my guess is most people competent to review philosophy paper either hate Rand or have never read her. (This is the one journal of the 4 that even an undergrad pub in might not mean much, beyond the selection effect of mostly only fairly talented students trying to publish in the first place.) I’d never heard of Journal of Value Inquiry either. But I did find a Leiter Reports poll ranking it 18th out of moral and political philosophy journals, do publishing in it is probably a non-trivial achievement. Never heard of History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, nor would I expected to have even if it was good. Your friend’s paper looks like a straightforward historical discussion of what Darwin himself said evolution implied about epistemology rather than a defence of an original philosophical view though.
In the UK, where I did all of my philosophy education bar a brief trip to Australia for a couple of months, Rand is not a significant presence in the wider culture in any way, so she wouldn’t naturally come up unless she already had credibility within academic philosophy. Though there were a lot of Americans around in Oxford obviously, and maybe they had read Rand.
I appreciate the spirit of this post as I am not a Yudkowsky fan, think he is crazy overconfident about AI, am not very keen on rationalism in general, and think the EA community sometimes gets overconfident in the views of its “star” members. But some of the philosophy stuff here seems not quite right to me, though none of its egregiously wrong, and on each topic I agree that Yudkowsky is way, way overconfident. (Many professional philosophers are way overconfident too!)
As a philosophy of consciousness PhD: the view that animals lack consciousness is definitely an extreme minority view in the field, but it it’s not a view that no serious experts hold. Daniel Dennett has denied animal consciousness for roughly Yudkowsky like reasons I think. (EDIT: Actually maybe not: see my discussion with Michael St. Jules below. Dennett is hard to interpret on this, and also seems to have changed his mind to fairly definitively accept animal consciousness more recently. But his earlier stuff on this at the very least opposed to confident assertions that we just know animals are conscious, and any theory that says otherwise is crazy.) And more definitely Peter Carruthers (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=2JF8VWYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao) used to defend the view that animals lack consciousness because they lack a capacity for higher-order thought. (He changed his mind in the last few years, but I personally didn’t find his explanation as to why made much sense.) Likewise, it’s far from obvious that higher-order thought views imply any animals other than humans are conscious. And still less obvious that they imply all mammals are conscious.* Indeed a standard objection to HOT views, mentioned in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on them last time I checked, is that they are incompatible with animal consciousness. Though that does of course illustrate that you are right that most experts take it as obvious that mammals are conscious.
As for the zombies stuff: you are right that Yudkowsky is mistaken and mistaken for the reasons you give, but it’s not a “no undergraduate would make this” error. Trust me. I have marked undergrads a little, though I’ve never been a Prof. Far worse confusion is common. It’s not even “if an undergrad made this error in 2nd year I’d assume they didn’t have what it takes to become a prof”. Philosophy is really hard and the error is quite subtle, plus many philosophers of mind do think you can get from the possibility of zombies to epiphenomenalism given plausible further assumptions, so when Yudkowsky read into the topic he probably encountered lots of people assuming accepting the possibility of zombies commits you to epiphenomenalism. But yes, the general lesson of “Dave Chalmers, not an idiot” is obviously correct.
As for functional decision theory. I read Wolfgang Schwarz’s critique when it came out, and for me the major news in it was that a philosopher as qualified as Wolfgang thought it was potentially publishable given revisions. It is incredibly hard to publish in good philosophy journals, at the very top end they have rejection rates of >95%. I have literally never heard of a non-academic doing do without even an academic coauthor. I’d classify it as a genuinely exceptional achievement to write something Wolfgang gave a revise and resubmit verdict to with no formal training in philosophy. I say this not because I think it means anyone should defer to Yudkowsky and Soares-again, I think their confidence on AI doom is genuinely crazy, but just because it feels a bit unfair to me to see what was actually an impressive achievement denigrated.
*My own view is that IF animals are not capable of higher-order thought there isn’t even a fact of the matter about whether they are conscious, but that only justifies downweighting their interests to a less than overwhelming degree, and so doesn’t really damage arguments for veganism. Though it would affect how much you should prioritise animals v. humans.
FWIW, I’m confused about Dennett’s current position on animal consciousness. Still, my impression is that he does attribute consciousness to many other animals, but believes that human consciousness is importantly unique because of language and introspection.
In this panel discussion, Dennett seemed confident that chickens and octopuses are conscious, directly answering that they are without reservation, and yes on bees after hesitating, but acknowledging their sophisticated capacities and going back to gradualism and whether what they do “deserves to be called consciousness at all”.
Some other recent writing by him or about his views:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2019/00000026/f0020009/art00004
https://davidrosenthal.org/Dennett-on-Seeming-to-Seem.pdf
Maybe that is right. Dennett is often quite slippery (I think he believes that precision actually makes philosophy worse a lot of the time.)
He also just may have changed his position. The SEP article on Animal Consciousness at one point refers to ‘Dennett (who argues that consciousness is unique to humans)’, but the reference is to a paper from 1995. Looking at the first page of the paper they cite, I think it was the one I vaguely remembered as “Dennett denies animal consciousness for Yudkowsky-like reasons”. But having skimmed some of the paper again, I found it hard to tell this time if the reading of it as flat-out denying that animals are conscious was right. It seemed like Dennett *might* just be saying “we don’t know, but it’s not obvious, and for some animals, there probably isn’t even a fact of the matter”. (This is basically my view too, I think, except that unlike Dennett I don’t think this much damages the case for animal rights.) But even that is inconsistent with “anyone who thinks mammals aren’t conscious is totally out-of-step with experts in the field, I think.” And it’s possible the stronger reading of Dennett as actually denying animal consciousness is correct: I only skimmed it, and the SEP thinks so.
This is I think a really good comment. The animal consciousness stuff I think is a bit crazy. If Dennett thinks that as well . . . well, I never gave Dennett much deference.
I was exaggerating a bit when I said that no undergraduate would make that error.
I don’t think that Schwarz saying he might publish it is much news. I have a friend who is an undergraduate in his second year and he has 5 or 6 published philosophy papers—I’m also an undergraduate and I have one forthcoming.
Do we know what journal Eliezer was publishing in? I’d expect it not to get published in even a relatively mediocre journal, but I might be wrong.
Thanks!
I don’t know the journal Schwarz rejected it for, no. I f your friend has 5 or 6 publications as an undergrad then either they are a genius, or they are unusually talented and also very ruthless about identifying small, technical objections to things famous people have said, or they are publishing in extremely mediocre journals. The second and third things ares probably not what’s going on when Wolfgang gives an R&R to the Yudkowsky/Soares fdt paper. It is an attempt to give a big new fundamental theory, not a nitpick. And regardless of the particular journal Wolfgang was reviewing for, I don’t think (could be wrong though!), that the reason why it is easy to get published in the crappiest journals is because really sharp philosophers with multiple publications in top 5-10 journals drop their standards to a trivial level when reviewing for them. No doubt they drop their standards somewhat, but those journals probably have worse reviewers quite a lot of the time. (That’s only a guess though.)
More importantly, a bit of googling to me revealed that Soares, though not Yudkowsky, is a coauthor on a paper defending fdt in Journal of Philosophy. (With Ben Levinstein who is an actual philosophy prof.) That alone takes fdt well out of the crank zone in my view. J Phil is a clear top 10 journal, probably top 5. It probably rejects around 95% of the papers sent to it. Admittedly there’s a limit to how much credit Eliezer should get for a paper he didn’t write, but insofar as fdt is “his” idea (don’t know how much he developed it versus Soares and other MIRI people), this is the greenest of Philosophy green flags.
Okay yeah, fair. Here’s my friends publication record https://philpeople.org/profiles/amos-wollen
Though worth noting that the other author rejected it. It’s not clear how common it is for one reviewer to be willing to submit your paper after heavy revisions is.
Fair point that many rejected things probably received one “revise and resubmit”.
The link to your friend’s philpapers page I’d broken, but I googled him and I think mediocre journals is probably, mostly the right answer, mixed a bit with “your friend is very, talented” (Though to be clear even 5 mediocre pubs is impressive for a 2nd year undergrad, and I would predict your friend can go to a good grad school if he wants to. ) Philosophia is a generalist journal I never read a single paper in in the 15 or so years I was reading philosophy papers generally, which is a bad sign. I’d never heard of “Journal of Ayn Rand Studies” but I can think of at most 1 possible examples of a good journal dedicated to a single philosopher and my guess is most people competent to review philosophy paper either hate Rand or have never read her. (This is the one journal of the 4 that even an undergrad pub in might not mean much, beyond the selection effect of mostly only fairly talented students trying to publish in the first place.) I’d never heard of Journal of Value Inquiry either. But I did find a Leiter Reports poll ranking it 18th out of moral and political philosophy journals, do publishing in it is probably a non-trivial achievement. Never heard of History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, nor would I expected to have even if it was good. Your friend’s paper looks like a straightforward historical discussion of what Darwin himself said evolution implied about epistemology rather than a defence of an original philosophical view though.
Philosophia has I think a publication rate decently below 50%.
I believe that to be true, and to be a very good sign of what kind of an ivory tower philosophy has become.
Or a sign that knowing about philosophy decreases support for Rand.
In the UK, where I did all of my philosophy education bar a brief trip to Australia for a couple of months, Rand is not a significant presence in the wider culture in any way, so she wouldn’t naturally come up unless she already had credibility within academic philosophy. Though there were a lot of Americans around in Oxford obviously, and maybe they had read Rand.
Fixed link