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Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

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Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#91

Post by jkaunisv1 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #60
jkaunisv1 wrote: post #17

I find it strange that he says we have no way of imagining what post-singularity would be like. I get his point, it's so different that we can't really get it. But we have ample science fiction that still explores the possibilities and gives us a starting point for imagining it. Also surprised he doesn't mention basic income when discussing the decreasing value of the individual and the problems that could cause. He'…

> I find it strange that he says we have no way of imagining what post-singularity would be like. It's by definition - the singularity is defined as the moment when technology advances so fast that we just can't keep up with it. If you can still reasonably predict how will it look like, it's not singularity yet.

It's the moment where we lack the capacity to work at its level and control it. That doesn't preclude imagining outcomes. His whole article was about how he tries to imagine the full scope of possibilities rather than narrow down to predictions (that are often false). It's not about reasonably predicting.

As an example, we don't yet have fine-grained, ubiquitous nanotech like that featured in Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. But that book is all about imagining what it might lead to.

We extrapolate from assumptions all the time, why is this one any different?

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#92

Post by foldr »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #89
foldr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very bad argument. Indistinguishability doesn't entail identity. One obvious way to show this is to note that only the latter is a transitive relation. In other words, if A = B and B = C, then A = C; but if A is indistinguishable from B and B is indistinguishable from C, it doesn't follow that A is indistinguishable from C.

>Indistinguishability doesn't entail identity. Of course it does, by Voevodsky's Univalence Axiom ;-). >One obvious way to show this is to note that only the latter is a transitive relation. In other words, if A = B and B = C, then A = C; but if A is indistinguishable from B and B is indistinguishable from C, it doesn't follow that A is indistinguishable from C. In this case, you seem to be envisioning A, B, and C as…

>Of course it does, by Voevodsky's Univalence Axiom ;-).

I think this was a joke, right? Just asking because it's hard to tell sometimes on the internet. I didn't see how VUA was particularly relevant but I may be missing something.

It is question-begging in this context to assert that the existence of a physical isomorphism between A and B entails that A and B are identical, since precisely the question at issue in the case of P-zombies is whether or not that's the case.

I took OP to be making an attempt to avoid begging the question by arguing that in general, indistinguishability in a certain very broad sense entails identity, so that without question-beggingly assuming that the existence of a physical isomorphism entails identity, we could non-question-beggingly argue from indistinguishability to identity. In other words, rather than arguing that P-zombies couldn't differ in any way from us because they're physically identical to us (which just begs the question), the argument would be that they couldn't differ in any way from us because they're indistinguishable from us.

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#93

Post by foldr »

deciplex wrote: post #80
foldr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very bad argument. Indistinguishability doesn't entail identity. One obvious way to show this is to note that only the latter is a transitive relation. In other words, if A = B and B = C, then A = C; but if A is indistinguishable from B and B is indistinguishable from C, it doesn't follow that A is indistinguishable from C.

This isn't really germane to the p-zombie thought experiment, but: Indistinguishability does entail identity. If I have a sphere of iron X, and a sphere of iron Y which is atom-for-atom, electron-for-electron, subatomic-particle-for-subatomic-particle identical to sphere X, and I place sphere X in position A, and sphere Y in position B, then they are still distinguishable, because one is in position A and one is in p…

I think we're talking about a sense of indistinguishable/identical for which the two spheres would be indistinguishable/identical, since we're comparing a person to a P-zombie, so it's clear that we're dealing with two different individuals. I think identity in that sense is still transitive on the ordinary understanding. So e.g. if I can show that sphere A has exactly the same physical constitution as sphere B, and that sphere B has exactly the same physical constitution as sphere C, then presumably sphere A must have exactly the same physical constitution as sphere C.

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#94

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #76
foldr wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But in this last case there's absolutely no way to tell there's a difference between 2 and 3, so they may as well be just considered as one thing. Yes, that's the point. But then you lose the transitivity property, since although 2 and 3 are indistinguishable, 3 and 4 are indistinguishable, and 4 and 5 are indistinguishable, 2 and 5 are not. So the kind of operational definition of identity you have in mind yields a…

> Here's one way of drawing this out. Suppose that X linearly increases from 2 to 5 over a period of 3 seconds. Do we really want to say that there was no change in the value of X between t=0 and t=1, no change between t=1 and t=2, no change between t=2 and t=3, and yet a change between t=0 and t=3? (?!) Yeah, I get that, but what I meant in my previous comment is that you either limit the domain of t to 0-3 (and X t…

[deleted]

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#95

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #76
foldr wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But in this last case there's absolutely no way to tell there's a difference between 2 and 3, so they may as well be just considered as one thing. Yes, that's the point. But then you lose the transitivity property, since although 2 and 3 are indistinguishable, 3 and 4 are indistinguishable, and 4 and 5 are indistinguishable, 2 and 5 are not. So the kind of operational definition of identity you have in mind yields a…

> Here's one way of drawing this out. Suppose that X linearly increases from 2 to 5 over a period of 3 seconds. Do we really want to say that there was no change in the value of X between t=0 and t=1, no change between t=1 and t=2, no change between t=2 and t=3, and yet a change between t=0 and t=3? (?!) Yeah, I get that, but what I meant in my previous comment is that you either limit the domain of t to 0-3 (and X t…

[deleted]

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#96

Post by foldr »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #76
foldr wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But in this last case there's absolutely no way to tell there's a difference between 2 and 3, so they may as well be just considered as one thing. Yes, that's the point. But then you lose the transitivity property, since although 2 and 3 are indistinguishable, 3 and 4 are indistinguishable, and 4 and 5 are indistinguishable, 2 and 5 are not. So the kind of operational definition of identity you have in mind yields a…

> Here's one way of drawing this out. Suppose that X linearly increases from 2 to 5 over a period of 3 seconds. Do we really want to say that there was no change in the value of X between t=0 and t=1, no change between t=1 and t=2, no change between t=2 and t=3, and yet a change between t=0 and t=3? (?!) Yeah, I get that, but what I meant in my previous comment is that you either limit the domain of t to 0-3 (and X t…

>Again, thanks for making me think and showing me the limits of my understanding.

Yes this was a fun discussion, thanks.

Your objection stands if you have (and know you have) at least one instance of every value for the quantity. So suppose that we are given a countably infinite set of variables and told that each integer is denoted by at least one of these variables, and then further given a function over pairs of variables f(x,y), such that f(x,y) = 1 if x and y differ by less than 3 and = 0 otherwise. Then, yes, we can figure out which variables are exactly identical to which others.

However, I would regard this as irrelevant scenario in the sense that we could never know, via observation, that we had obtained such a set of variables (even if we allow the possibility of making a countably infinite number of observations). Suppose that we make an infinite series of observations and end up with at least one variable denoting each member of the following set (with the ellipses counting up/down to +/-infinity):

    ...,0,2,3,4,5,6,7,9,...
In other words, we have variables with every integer value except 1 and 8. Then for any variable x with the value 4 and variable y with the value 5, f(x,z) = f(y,z) for all variables z. In other words, there'll be no way to distinguish 4-valued variables from 5-valued variables. It's only in the case where some oracle tells us that we have a variable for every integer value that we can figure out which variables have exactly the same values as which others.

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#97

Post by Retra »

ForHackernews wrote: post #85
Retra wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You believe consciousness is purely a question of information processing, and you're throwing your lot in with Skinner and the behaviorists. No, that is not at all what is happening. That's not even on the same level of discourse. >I believe that you're neglecting the "the experience of what it's like to be a human being" That experience is the information processing. They are the same thing, just different words. L…

In that case, I'm really struggling to understand your position. > What is human is encoded by information that you experience by processing it. So you're saying that it's impossible to process information without experiencing it? That the act of processing and the act of experiencing are one and the same? Do you think that computers are conscious? What about a single neuron that integrates and respond to neural sign…

>So you're saying that it's impossible to process information without experiencing it? That the act of processing and the act of experiencing are one and the same?

Yes, exactly.

>Do you think that computers are conscious? What about a single neuron that integrates and respond to neural signals?

This is a different question. No, computers aren't conscious. You need to have the 'right kind' of information processing for consciousness, and it's not clear what kind of processing that is.

This is essentially the Sorites Paradox: how many grains of sand are required for a collection to be called a heap? How much information has to be processed? How many neurons are needed? What are the essential features of information processing that must be present before you have consciousness?

These are the interesting questions. So far, we know that there must be continual self-feedback (self-awareness), enough abstract flexibility to recover from arbitrary information errors (identity persistence), a process of modeling counterfactuals and evaluating them (morality), a mechanism for adjusting to new information (learning), a mechanism for combining old information in new ways (creativity), and other kinds of heuristics like emotion, goal-creating, social awareness, and flexible models of communication.

You don't need all of this, of course. You can have it in part or in full, to varying levels of impact. "Consicousness" is not well-defined in this way; it is a spectrum of related information processing capabilities. So maybe you could consider computers to be conscious. They are "conscious in a very loose approximation."

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#99

Post by penny »

Perhaps a loss of power and relevance of the human masses will give rise to a renewed reverence for and recognition of the fading beauties of human frailty, similar to the romantic movement following the industrial revolution. In such a setting, where we hand tech and science off to the machines (or they seize it), the profit model will be in the humanities.

Re: Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman

#100

Post by penny »

Would not any human-devised outcome, no matter how intellectually superior its capacities, ultimately be secondarily dependent on the same metabolic laws as humans, even if in a different order of magnitude? I mean those delimiting laws would not disappear. Their indefatigability is powered somehow, and our fatiguability is adaptive.
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