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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

#71

Post by TeMPOraL »

foldr wrote: post #67
TeMPOraL wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at this point I have to ask, how do you define identity? I'm pretty sure that I could use the strategy I outlined above to separate our objects into three groups - As, Ds and the rest. So how do you define that Bs are not Cs, if there is no possible way for telling the difference?

I'd define identity as the smallest relation holding between all things and themselves. If you want, you can redefine identity in terms of some notion of indistinguishability, but then you'll end up with the odd consequence that identity is not transitive. In other words, you'd have to say that if A is identical to B, B is identical to C, and C is identical to D, it doesn't necessarily follow that A is identical to D…

I'll have to think a bit more about this. Thanks for all those scenarios and making my brain do some work :).

So at this point I'm not sure if your example is, or is not an issue for a working definition of identity. To circle back to p-zombies, as far as I understand, they are not supposed to be distinguishable from non-p-zombies by any possible means, which includes testing everything against everything.

What if I define the identity test I(a,b) in this way: I(a,b) ↔ ∀i : i(a,b), where i(a,b) is an "indistinguishable" test? This should establish a useful definition of identity that works according to my scenario, and also your last example unless you limit the domain of X and Y to integers from 1 to 4. 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.

As I said, I need to think this through a bit more, but what my intuition is telling me right now is that the very point of having a thing called "identity" is to use it to distinguish between things - if two things are identical under any possible test, there's no point in not thinking about them as one thing.

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

#72

Post by p1esk »

reasonattlm wrote: post #54
neilk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A complex system with millions of nodes and trillions of potential interactions with external and internal factors, working perfectly with no oversight and no unexpected outages. Do you live in this century? P.S. I'm not saying that this is impossible, or even unlikely, but it's probably going to be something that requires constant and possibly very expensive maintenance.

Your body performs that maintenance when you are young. The damage repair approach to treating aging suggests that if we remove the fundamental differences between old and young tissue, then the body will continue to maintain itself as it does when it is young. There are not all that many types of fundamental damage. So this doesn't require maintaining the whole system; it requires removing the spanners in the works.…

Cancer is simpler than aging. We understand cancer better than aging. Yet after many billions of dollars and billions of hours of research, we still cannot "cure" cancer. A huge number of people die from it every year.

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

#73

Post by Retra »

ForHackernews wrote: post #31
Retra wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't understand how you can be so confident of this. [...] How are you measuring it? What makes you believe with such emphatic certainty that I am a conscious being and not a p-zombie? Because p-zombies are self-contradictory. The definition of a p-zombie is a contradiction. It's like saying "suppose 1 = 2 and 1 != 2. Call this a p-zombie quality." When you suppose that the behavior of a thing is separate from th…

> yet measurably identical in all aspects > behavior is the activity that you measure, and you can measure brain activity. You've shifted your definition of "behavior" now. I thought we were talking about behaviors that impact survival and are acted on by natural selection, not minute differences in MRI scans. For purposes of the thought experiment, I certainly don't care if the p-zombie has a slightly different brai…

>I thought we were talking about behaviors that impact survival and are acted on by natural selection, not minute differences in MRI scans.

I was talking about the stupidity of p-zombies. Either way, those 'minute' differences in MRI scans build up in such a way to determine the survival of the mind being scanned.

>Do you believe [...] such a robot be necessarily a conscious entity?

Yes, it would. Because in order to cause such behavior to be physically manifest, you must actually construct a machine of sufficient complexity to mimic the behavior of a human brain exactly. It must consume and process information in the same manner. And that's what consciousness is: the ability to process information in a particular manner.

Even a "sleepwalking zombie" must undergo the same processing. That processing is the only thing necessary for consciousness, and it doesn't matter what hardware you run it on. As in Searle's problem: even if you run your intelligence on a massive lookup table, it is still intelligence. Because you've defined the behavior to exactly match a target, without imposing realistic constraints on the machinery.

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

#74

Post by foldr »

Retra wrote: post #68
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.

Identity isn't what we're measuring here, it's "humanness" or "consciousness" -- things that are behaviorally distinguishable. Up to an abstract categorical similarity . Thus they only need to be indistinguishable up to some feature of similarity that allows them to be classified in the same group. That's why, for example, we don't have to worry about "A is the same as B except that it is 2 meters to the left."

OP was saying that P-zombies are "the same" as us in virtue of being indistinguishable from us. I was just pointing out that this inference doesn't go through, since two non-identical things can be indistinguishable.

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

#75

Post by foldr »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #71
foldr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd define identity as the smallest relation holding between all things and themselves. If you want, you can redefine identity in terms of some notion of indistinguishability, but then you'll end up with the odd consequence that identity is not transitive. In other words, you'd have to say that if A is identical to B, B is identical to C, and C is identical to D, it doesn't necessarily follow that A is identical to D…

I'll have to think a bit more about this. Thanks for all those scenarios and making my brain do some work :). So at this point I'm not sure if your example is, or is not an issue for a working definition of identity. To circle back to p-zombies, as far as I understand, they are not supposed to be distinguishable from non-p-zombies by any possible means, which includes testing everything against everything. What if I…

>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 relation that's so radically unlike the standard characterization of the identity relation that I don't see any reason to call it "identity" at all.

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? (?!)

As far as I understand you, you have some kind of positivist skepticism about non-operationalizable notions, and so you want to come up with some kind of stand-in for identity which can play largely the same role in philosophical/scientific discourse as the ordinary, non-operationalizable notion of identity. That's a coherent project, but it rests on assumptions that anyone who's interested in P-zombies is likely to reject.

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

#76

Post by TeMPOraL »

foldr wrote: post #75
TeMPOraL wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll have to think a bit more about this. Thanks for all those scenarios and making my brain do some work :). So at this point I'm not sure if your example is, or is not an issue for a working definition of identity. To circle back to p-zombies, as far as I understand, they are not supposed to be distinguishable from non-p-zombies by any possible means, which includes testing everything against everything. What if I…

>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 to 2-5) and there is indeed no way to tell the change between t=2 and t=3, or you don't limit yourself to that test and can distinguish the intermedate values by means of the trick I described before. In other words, either you have transitive identity or you have all the reasons to treat non-transitive cases as one (if the identity test is like the one I described in my previous comment).

> positivist skepticism about non-operationalizable notions

I think it's too late in the night for me to understand this, I'll need to come back to it in the morning. Could you ELI5 to me the meaning of "non-operationalizable" in this context?

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

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

#77

Post by decisiveness »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #62
decisiveness wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is no reason, unless you believe in magic, to think AI can't be as smart as humans." AI can be as smart or smarter than most humans in many ways, but I think it's a very real possibility that its development path won't render the human mind useless. They key difference between AI and humans is AI has the power to iterate and learn from its mistakes much faster than humans without fatigue. The methods of which…

> To assume the creation of AI with "a positive feedback loop that goes nobody knows how far" without humans first understanding how seems more of a belief in magic to me. Not really. This is pretty much a definition of a positive feedback loop. To give a very simplified example, imagine that a mind of IQ N is able to create, at best a mind of IQ N+10. So say, the smartest human alive has 150 IQ. He goes and creates…

I understand the concept of creating something exceedingly more generally intelligent than its creator, I'm simply suggesting it's not possible. Many people assume that it is, and we'll have to agree to disagree. But even if I'm wrong and it does become possible, think about how unlikely it would be for a human to accidentally accomplish this.

Also, if AI is to be smarter than humans, it will know it could potentially be wrong about anything. Armed with that knowledge, how much smarter can it really be?

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

#78

Post by TeMPOraL »

decisiveness wrote: post #77
TeMPOraL wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To assume the creation of AI with "a positive feedback loop that goes nobody knows how far" without humans first understanding how seems more of a belief in magic to me. Not really. This is pretty much a definition of a positive feedback loop. To give a very simplified example, imagine that a mind of IQ N is able to create, at best a mind of IQ N+10. So say, the smartest human alive has 150 IQ. He goes and creates…

I understand the concept of creating something exceedingly more generally intelligent than its creator, I'm simply suggesting it's not possible. Many people assume that it is, and we'll have to agree to disagree. But even if I'm wrong and it does become possible, think about how unlikely it would be for a human to accidentally accomplish this. Also, if AI is to be smarter than humans, it will know it could potentiall…

> Also, if AI is to be smarter than humans, it will know it could potentially be wrong about anything. Armed with that knowledge, how much smarter can it really be?

That's not a big leap. In fact, we humans know this already, and we've even quantified it nicely, and called it probability theory.

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

#79

Post by deciplex »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #40
ForHackernews wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, they cannot possibly exist I don't understand how you can be so confident of this. How are you defining consciousness? How are you measuring it? What makes you believe with such emphatic certainty that I am a conscious being and not a p-zombie? (or, if you prefer, a bot that easily passes the Turing test) > They are not unrelated ideas, and in fact, the ability of an organism to survive is closely tied to…

I think the TL;DR of the argument against p-zombies goes like this: if you have two things that are by definition indistinguishable by any possible measurement even in principle, they are by this very definition the same . Since there is, by definition, no way to tell if someone is a p-zombie or not, the introduction of the term "p-zombie" doesn't make any sense at all, and therefore why would you ever do that? The p…

The TL;DR argument against philosophical zombies is more like: if consciousness is non-causal (the consequence if p-zombies can exist), then the answer to the question "Why do I think I'm conscious" can not in any way make reference of the fact that you actually are conscious. Suppose we take the two parallel universes, and we run the same experiment in each, where the conscious and non-conscious doppelgangers are both asked the question "are you a conscious, self-aware human being?" Both of them will answer "yes" of course, and we can record and observe whatever we want about their brain states on so on, and get exactly the same results for both.

So, only one of the versions is correct, but it's only by coincidence! All the reasons that the conscious brain has to think it's a conscious human being, and answer "yes" to the question, are also in play in the zombie universe, which also answers "yes". The only difference is that in the "real" world the non-zombie brain happens to be right, for literally no reason at all.

And I think it's around this point you're supposed to realize the absurdity of the thought experiment.

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

#80

Post by deciplex »

foldr wrote: post #48
TeMPOraL wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the TL;DR of the argument against p-zombies goes like this: if you have two things that are by definition indistinguishable by any possible measurement even in principle, they are by this very definition the same . Since there is, by definition, no way to tell if someone is a p-zombie or not, the introduction of the term "p-zombie" doesn't make any sense at all, and therefore why would you ever do that? The p…

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 position B.

Basically, I'm not sure what the two of you mean by "the same", but I suspect you're not in agreement on it.

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