site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

some sort of quantum non-deterministic woo inside our brains

Nothing that I've said implies this.

Do you believe that your smartphone could become conscious and experience qualia, with no hardware modifications whatsoever, if you could just find the right software to run on it? Because that's what a denial of my premises amounts to.

special and unlike a bunch of bits in ram

There is something special about human brains in the broad sense of the term, yes. Not special in the sense of non-material, but special in the sense of meeting particular requirements. I don't think you can instantiate consciousness in just any physical system.

If you had instructions for a Turing machine that perfectly simulated the behavior of a human, and you instantiated that Turing machine by moving around untold trillions of rocks in an infinite desert - would the resulting system of rocks be conscious?

Would the system of rocks be conscious?

Yes. You're simulating a human -- you can have a conversation with them, and ask them what they see, and they could describe to you the various hues that they perceive, or else be surprised that they are blind. They could ask where they are, and be upset to learn that they're being simulated through a pile of rocks and that you don't believe they are conscious. Anything less would be an incomplete simulation.

That's the beauty of the Turing machine, is that it's universal. Given enough time and space, even something as dumb as rule 110 can compute any other computable function. And the materialist perspective is that the human mind is such a function.

Do you believe that your smartphone could become conscious and experience qualia, with no hardware modifications whatsoever, if you could just find the right software to run on it?

I don't see how I could rule out this possibility. If you believe you can, why?

If you had instructions for a Turing machine that perfectly simulated the behavior of a human, and you instantiated that Turing machine by moving around untold trillions of rocks in an infinite desert - would the resulting system of rocks be conscious?

I don't see how I could rule out this possibility. If you believe you can, why?

Fair. Rocks being conscious or at least representing something that is was more or less a default for belief in many cultures across time. Ruling it out so casually is a result of a particular unique, historically rare socialization.

I think it's very unlikely that individual rocks are conscious, just as I think it's very unlikely that individual neurons are conscious, but a collection of neurons, rocks, or transistors arranged in a particular way and executing a particular algorithm may well be conscious.

I don't think you can instantiate consciousness in just any physical system.

Agreed, but in my opinion enough ram and the proper algos + processing power would be enough.

If you had instructions for a Turing machine that perfectly simulated the behavior of a human, and you instantiated that Turing machine by moving around untold trillions of rocks in an infinite desert - would the resulting system of rocks be conscious

I would argue that yes. But this stems from what I consider to be a bog standard materialist position taken to its logical conclusion. If everything we are is contained in our brains and the state of neurons, neuron connections, their internal state, all of this backed by chemical reactions and molecules, all of this underpinned on the laws of chemistry and electro-magnetism. If we could "simulate that" in varying degrees of precision we could theoretically recreate a consciousness and it would be just as "real" as the genuine thing.

Given enough time and sufficient memory, you could simulate a human brain or the entire universe on a phone. It's not obvious, at least, that the hardware/software system wouldn't be generating qualia. (That's true even with Penrose-ish quantum consciousness.) They could be p-zombies, but those are controversial.

I feel confident in asserting that it wouldn’t. But, I recognize that this is something I can’t know for sure and I could be wrong.