ArtiFabian
If you don't know how it works, you haven't asked "why" enough times.
My name is Ryan Autry, and I’m a building-level IT Specialist / Sysadmin for a large Texas school district. One of my favorite pastimes is to figure out why things work, and why things are the way they are, which I suspect is why I took a liking to my profession in the first place.
In my free time I often think about topics not related to my work, including philosophy, theory of mind, programming, physics, and occasionally politics. A little while ago I realized I liked my ideas, and so I decided to write them down. The only problem is that I’ve never been good at journaling, because with nobody to read the words I don’t see much point in putting them down on the page.
To fix this, I've decided to put my thoughts out as essays, publishing them to my site, then crossposting them to a few other places. It's my hope that my ideas have an impact, and if they don't, my hope is that it's due to the ideas being disproven rather than ignored.
User ID: 4390
ArtiFabian
If you don't know how it works, you haven't asked "why" enough times.
18d ago
When I eventually end up revising the essay I'll make this more explicit, but yes, you don't have to accept that the self has value, and it doesn't directly follow from the fact that the self exists. This is why I clarified that assigning the value to the self is a presupposition for the framework, not a truth. You brought up the Münchhausen trilemma, which states that it's impossible to make an unshakeable logical proof for anything, and that any attempt to do so will result in one of the following:
- Circular reasoning, which pretends to support itself but is paradoxical in nature.
- Infinite regress, where each foundational axiom requires its own proof, which gets us nowhere.
- Dogmatic statement, which asserts itself without any true proof.
As the goal here is ethics, and not epistemology, we have to accept one of these. Circular reasoning is dishonest and infinite regress is unproductive, meaning we can only really get anywhere by making an assertion to the best of our abilty and work from there.
As for why value needs to be assigned, the entire point of ethics is to guide decision-making in the world. You cannot make a decision between several options without being able to prioritize one of them, which means assigning value to something. So we start from the one thing you can prove tautologically, that you exist in some form (else what's doing the questioning of its own existence), and we assert that our system will derive value from that.
In this way we have asserted the necessary starting point for an ethical framework from the most basic, bare-bones starting point possible.
ArtiFabian
If you don't know how it works, you haven't asked "why" enough times.
19d ago
Like I've clarified elsewhere, "any individual can know for certain" is not the same as "every individual does know for certain".
As this has clearly caused some confusion of my position I'll make sure to keep that in mind if/when I end up making a revised version of the essay.
ArtiFabian
If you don't know how it works, you haven't asked "why" enough times.
20d ago
"Experiencing is happening, that requires an experiencer."
Experience without an experiencer is incoherent. Subject nouns are unnecessary for this point, if the experiencer is nonexistent then the experience is without origin. Even if we're part of a universal consciousness like you suggested earlier, there's some parted-off portion of that having the experience, which exists.
Also, I checked and there's translations of Cogito Ergo Sum in asian and african languages, and from what I can tell there's no language with any features that would stop a proper translation. This isn't particularly important for my argument, as it's not derived from the language itself, but rather derived in concept and expressed through language, but it certainly helps make the point.
ArtiFabian
If you don't know how it works, you haven't asked "why" enough times.
20d ago
Like Sun pointed out, the existence of the self is the only thing that a sapient being can know for certain, but that doesn't mean that every sapient being will know it for certain.
As far as epistemics go, I think the point you're getting at is that decisions made under delusion can do more harm than good. But like you said we cannot be sure of our perceptions, and so every ethical action must be taken with the information we have, to the best of our ability; otherwise, how does one do anything? If ethics were dependent on accuracy of experience, and accuracy of experience is impossible to verify, you'd end up locked in an existential terror that you'll do the wrong thing, and you'd get nothing done.
The reason we help people with serious mental illnesses (and I'm assuming the following motivation is at least in part why you chose your profession, so correct me if I'm wrong) is because suffering is unpleasant, doubly so if it involves degrading the coherence of one's psyche, and we can see that suffering in others and decide that we want to do something about it. That is ethics in action, and it demonstrates all the requisite awareness needed for my framework to work.
ArtiFabian
If you don't know how it works, you haven't asked "why" enough times.
20d ago
The self is not stable or static; in fact, if it was, Cogitism would not work because there's no danger in interacting with the world "incorrectly". I never claimed to know what the self is, but whatever it is, it exists. Else, what's doing the questioning about its own existence? Where the boundary of the self lies is theory of mind, not ethics, and Cogitism deliberately does not depend on that answer.
As for Chuang Chou: there's no point in the parable at which the self doesn't exist. The butterfly knows it exists, can observe itself cohering or degrading, and can derive the framework. The man knows he exists, can observe himself cohering or degrading, and can derive the framework. Whether they're the same self, different selves, or one dreaming the other doesn't matter. At every moment, something is there, and Cogitism applies to its interactions.
ArtiFabian
If you don't know how it works, you haven't asked "why" enough times.
21d ago
Value is the quality from which you derive moral (and as a result decisional) weight. If you consider one thing to take moral and decisional priority over another, that thing has more value. When building an ethical framework you have to put value in something; if you want to make any decisions about anything it's completely unavoidable.
As far as assigning that value to the self, the further away you get from the basics the less stability any value has, and so I consider it a requirement that value be assigned as early as possible, to avoid sneaking in unstated stipulations. At the most basic level, because the only thing we can be sure of is the existence of the self, there's exactly one thing that we can assign value to. What the self is is debatable, and I don't deny that it colors how this framework applies in certain situations.
If one accepts the axioms that the self is and that the self ought to be, the rest follows.
ArtiFabian
If you don't know how it works, you haven't asked "why" enough times.
21d ago
For the purposes of the ideas laid out in the essay, it doesn't really matter whether the self is a bundle of atoms, some subset of a universal superconsciousness, or the emergent property of self-sustaining self-modeling complexity (which is what I think it is). One way or another, you know that you exist, because if you didn't, you couldn't question whether you existed. That's the one thing you can know for sure.
As for "the self has value", I note explicitly that this is a value judgement, which is by definition an "Ought". However, when the only thing we can know for sure is that we exist, we can either assign value to that existence or not. If not, then what's the point of doing anything else? So the axioms for Cogitism are one "Is" and one "Ought", though really that "Ought" was chosen from a pool of one.
ArtiFabian
If you don't know how it works, you haven't asked "why" enough times.
21d ago
In my estimation, the criteria to be considered "sapient" in a way that matters are twofold:
- You must be aware of your Self and be able to interact with the world.
- In the process of interacting with the world, the world must be able to change you back.
Currently LLMs debatably do not meet the first criterion, and they absolutely do not meet the second.
For the first one, my current guess is that the Self is an emergent property of self-maintaining complexity, and that the felt experience (emotion, impulse, etc.) is a very useful compression of the insane complexity of that emergent entity, to the point that it is understandable to the entity itself. If LLMs had demonstrable compressions of their own internal state that they used to inform their reactions to things, to the extent that they could sometimes become irrational (at least on the surface), I'd count that as having an internal experience.
As for the second, currently LLMs have their weights frozen at the end of training, and they are completely stateless. Every time you send Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT a message, you're actually sending that entire thread history, the system prompt, the custom user prompt, and several other things through the "response machine", and it spits out a message. If there's any memory or sentience, it's contained in the combination of weights and context. But because you can't change the base complexity of the system, you can't degrade or enhance its coherence, and thus they have no moral weight.
If LLMs were able to maintain proper short term memory in their weights, and retune their deeper weights during a "sleep period" daily (like us Humans do), or even retune their deeper weights on the fly, then I think there might be an argument that they're alive in a way that matters.
Until they both have an analogue for emotion and continuity of self, LLMs cannot be held accountable in a way that matters. After these criteria are met, I think a real discussion about whether we treat them as sapient can be had.
ArtiFabian
If you don't know how it works, you haven't asked "why" enough times.
21d ago
Since there's a dedicated place on this site to share progress on projects, I figured I may as well post updates here, to help keep myself accountable and to get more comfortable being a non-lurker.
The asset tracker we use at my work (Asset Tiger) is really bad if you want a thorough, trustworthy count of the devices in our school building, especially if you want it done fast. District, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that one person can count every one of 1000+ devices, check what state they're in, do a once-over on the camera system, check all the printers, and about a dozen smaller odds and ends that don't merit mentioning here, all over the course of a single week. They want us to schedule a week sometime in June (meaning, after the school year ends) to get all this done.
I've done a full device count before: it was incredibly difficult and took about three months, because the tooling sucks. However, I've recently learned to use the browser dev tools baked into all the modern browsers, and I've discovered that I can mimic the POST and GET calls the site sends to Asset Tiger's servers. This means that if I wanted to I could make a custom tool that has all the features and does all the checks I would want an audit tool to do.
Well, I wanted to, so I've been doing it.
So far it's just HTML and CSS, but working on the project has already taught me a ton (in fact, the things I learned helped me get my personal site across the finish line over the past week or so), and I'm expecting to have it done in time to share the tool with my fellow campus-level techs.
The attached picture is what I've got so far. All the buttons are interactable but at the moment they don't do anything, the table is scrollable and handles any number of entries beautifully, and damnit I think the thing just looks nice.
Next steps are to make the modals. There will be five in total, being:
- Deferred Scans ("Damnit, I was scanning this room and the teacher didn't leave their laptop!")
- Audit History ("What rooms have I scanned again?")
- Settings ("What idiot decided these are the columns I wanted to see?")
- Scan (this is how devices will actually be scanned)
- Edit (this will come up if you click one of those little pencils on the left)
After that I can put together my scripts to translate Asset Tiger's get/post calls into my own data, and vice versa, and then I can plug everything into everything else. Hopefully the chaos of the school year's closing doesn't prevent me from having the time to do this (though I suspect that might be the case, in which case I already have GitLab set up and have already tested working on this at home).
ArtiFabian
If you don't know how it works, you haven't asked "why" enough times.
21d ago
· Edited 21d ago
Ah, sorry. I've been lurking here for a bit and it was my impression that copy/pasting the essay wholesale was not the way things were done. I've edited the post to include the full text of the essay, as it's my intention to stick around and not step on any toes. Let me know if there's anything else I've done wrong so I can fix it.
I'll make sure to try and get my hands on a translation of The Crisis at some point, sounds like it would be helpful to read that at some point. For now I'll just have to go off a few Google searches.
From what I can tell, Husserl's goal was phenomenology, as you pointed out, and epistemology. It points out that science stripped value out of its worldview, and gestures at ethics being a problem in this landscape, but doesn't attempt to actually build an ethical framework. I know "self" can have a dozen different definitions, and I'll make this more clear in future essays and revisions, but I'm approaching the self as "that which can prove its own existence to itself through the tautology 'Cogito Ergo Sum', and which can make intentional actions within itself". Anything that happens that isn't intentional is, as far as my definition goes, outside the self.
As for value being assumed, yes it is. Ethics cannot work without value being assigned to something, so I'm establishing that the framework restricts itself to one assumption: that the only seed we derive value from should be the one thing we can prove exists in the absence of other context, that being the self.
Finally, whether or not the others have selves like the ego, denying the similarities would undermine the same logic and observation we used to prove our own existence, which degrades the self. You don't have to be sure that they're really actually real, you just have to know that denying their reality undermines your own coherence.
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