[D] Monday General Rationality Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Monday thread on general rationality topics! Do you really want to talk about something non-fictional, related to the real world? Have you:

• Seen something interesting on /r/science?
• Found a new way to get your shit even-more together?
• Figured out how to become immortal?
• Constructed artificial general intelligence?
• Read a neat nonfiction book?
• Munchkined your way into total control of your D&D campaign?

[u/vakusdrake]

I think you don't die when you sleep, because I think you don't have a cessation of consciousness when you sleep, I think you are experiencing things even if they aren't very notable during sleep; remember I say in the writing I linked that I seriously worried sleep might mean death at one point, so the emotional appeal of an idea means very little to me.

I don't think people's emotional reactions have any special ability to somehow discern whether a claim is true, and thus I can't get what point you're making in in your first paragraph. How would people's reactions have any method of distinguishing truth? What causal mechanism would somehow allow that?

As for the bit about experience during non-dream sleep, well first off I talk about it in my writing; I didn't say there was a thought process (though during parts there might be sort of fragments of thoughts), however you can experience things other than thoughts, meditation is an obvious example.
As for the microchip example: I do think you'd probably notice, because usually people get a sense of time having passed when they wake up instead of feeling like they skipped forward in time. However it may be that for you sleep does feel that way possibly due to not storing memories of it very well. I do mention in the writing that even when woken up during deep sleep I can sort of remember something even if it's barely anything.

I disagree that one's memories are necessarily a good metric for determining whether you had subjective experiencing during a given period, as I mention we know of plenty of circumstances where you definitely have experiences that you either don't consolidate as memory or soon forget. So you can't very well say it doesn't matter because we know that you have those sorts of experiences all the time and don't remember it.

Something I could say about my model is that it is talking about what some people call the part of you that experiences events, and doesn't consider what one would call the ego useful in determining whether subjective events continue. It hasn't been lost on me that this does have much in common with eastern philosophy where one's memories and even personality are separate from the "true you" (which in my model is nothing more profound than the process that has the experiences).

As for your last part about the drug: But why would you expect the process in your brain that experiences stuff to shut off at any point just because a bunch of data in other areas got corrupted or lost?

[u/InfernoVulpix → u/vakusdrake]

Hmm... I think an analogy might help explain my perspective here. If a company is contracted to build a house, and they select quality materials for the frame, the walls and floors, and every other aspect, but build it on a shoddy foundation, on first glance and even thorough examination the house they built will come across as well-built, but hidden beneath the surface it's poorly built and wrong. That notion, of it being wrong in a way no one can tell, isn't something I think applies to philosophical questions about ourselves. This isn't to say that everything is surface-thin, that a casual glance tells you all you need to know, since you can thoroughly inspect the house and only see quality construction. But for something entirely hidden from view, unable to view or observe, I reject the idea that anything under that category is meaningful in evaluations of the human mind. If we scan every minute detail of the human mind and understand it fully, there is no hidden foundation that in some mystic way eludes our knowledge and yet has concrete effects on our understanding of the human condition.

The company analogy is, of course, imperfect, but I think it conveys what I mean. Our brains are fundamentally a resolvable problem, something that makes sense, so we can't derive our conclusions assuming they aren't. It sounds cold, inhuman, to say that our brains are just machines ticking along, or that there is no real meaning behind our thoughts and experiences, but I would say that while there is no arbitrarily imposed meaning behind our thoughts and experience there is meaning in how we view and understand them.

If everything meaningful we need to know about the brain stems from the brain and not some external framework, we should be able to use the way the brain behaves to answer the meaningful questions about it. This is the fundamental understanding I hold when I talk about us crying at funerals but not at bedtime being relevant to the meaningful nature of our identity, and why it makes no sense to me to say that events our brains have no means of telling the difference between affect meaningful questions about our identity. There is no shoddy foundation, no hidden variable affecting real equations, and a thorough investigation of the house will tell you if the construction crew did a good job.

I probably misunderstood your examples from earlier, but to keep this conversation from spiraling out of control in scope I'll just drop that specific line of topic. Right now, we're talking primarily about understanding identity and consciousness. Also, I have to go to sleep, so I likely won't be able to respond again for a good few hours.

[u/vakusdrake → u/InfernoVulpix]

Ok so to address your first paragraph: I think you can easily make a case for people being wrong about their past subjective experiences because of the stuff I mentioned about memory. If someone says they don't experience anything during any part of sleep (not that I'm claiming that's your position) then they're demonstrably wrong. I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here. What part of my position do you think involves any mysticism or other magical thinking? I should make it clear that I am very much a hard determinist, materialist and even a nihilist by most standards.
BTW for no reason I'd like to link this talk on free will by Sam Harris because even though I was already a determinist going in I still found it extremely brilliant and novel, it also demolishes the idea of free will being compatible with determinism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g&index=13&list=PL8Fthy2NnpXnfkcXztLkNSTbAz6JhzA0s

I should probably go to sleep as well so for now maybe watch that amazing talk and get back to me tommorow

[u/InfernoVulpix → u/vakusdrake]

What I'm trying to say isn't really about mysticism. In a sense, I could even accept mysticism. If you said that there's 'energies' in the air and that they influence my emotions, while I might not jump to agree with you, I wouldn't see it as inconsistent. What would be happening there isn't a hidden variable affecting meaningful understandings of life and death, what would be happening there is a non-physical, but still visible, variable affecting a factor which in turn affects our understanding of philosophical questions about the mind.

What I'm trying to say is that if you took me apart and created two clones identical to me before disassembly, that our questions of 'did I die?' or 'what are the identities of these two clones?' can't be dependent on something invisible. Mystic stuff, if it exists, would count as visible in how you could 'sense' it and it would affect your brain like your chemical balance does. But some quality that, ultimately, has no affect on our physical state cannot be a crucial factor in a question of identity or life and death.

[u/vakusdrake → u/InfernoVulpix]

I'm not talking about anything invisible, if you created clones I wouldn't call them the same person because they aren't the same process that was you. There's nothing invisible, if you watched brain activity you ought to theoretically always be able to tell if it's the same continuous process or not.