site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 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.

14
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Furthermore, once you start digging into their inner workings this lack of "knowing" appears to be a fundamental weakness of the Large Language Model architecture. At the end of the day it's still just a regression calculating the next most plausible word (or in the case of GPT-4 string of words) based on the correlations found in it's training data.

At the end of the day human brain is still just a bunch of biochemical reactions, how can biochemical reactions "know" anything? Does Stockfish "know" how to play chess?

In 2014, there was this xkcd comic, claiming that it would require a team of researchers and five years to automatically tag images of birds. A month later, Flickr showed a working prototype. In 2023 I can train a model that recognizes birds by putting a bunch of images in two folders and hitting "Run". The resulting model will have different failure modes than human pattern recognition: it will ignore some obviously birdlike images and claim that what most humans will agree is a kettle is obviously a bird. But does that mean it doesn't understand what a bird is? A model can predict you sex from your retinal fundus photo, something no human can do, does it matter if it doesn't "understand" what it's doing?

At the end of the day human brain is still just a bunch of biochemical reactions

I will never not point out that this is materialist mythology supported by nothing. And that nobody who makes this claim, not to mention nobody at all, can explain how and why the unspecified biochemical reactions produce consciousness, agency, though or qualia.

The brain is not a computer. And the only reason people believe it is is based on metaphysical assumption rather than logic or evidence.

It is not a computer for the same reason it isn't a clock, or a ship, or a river. These are metaphors. The map is not the territory.

I see no reason why biochemistry should not be able to produce consciousness, agency, thought and qualia. In the modus-ponens-modus tollens sense: "clearly they can, because they do." Where is the actual contradiction?

Don't multiply entities beyond necessity. Clearly brains have something to do with qualia. Why not "A causes B"? Why should I look beyond this intuitively obvious structure?

I mean it could.

But if you want to argue that this is the most parcimonious theory, you have a lot more legwork to do.

A lot of other things in your body also have similar effects. There has been a lot of hay recently made about other parts of your nervous system being more influential in your experience than previously thought, for instance.

But let's just leave the exact seat of consciousness problem aside since it's still ultimately within the body in this conception.

A harder problem is that none of the chemical processes as we currently understand them should generate this behavior.

Now they do of course, but in no ways that are predicted by the laws we understand. The fact that death is permanent is very weird for instance and it seems much more parsimonious to say the link between the body and the soul has been severed than that the extremely complex computer has been broken in a subtle way that can't be repaired.

If consciousness was simply a property of certain arrangements of matter, you wouldn't really expect nature to select the ones that can be bricked. But of course both theories are equivalent in practice.

All this really is just pointless arguing about which theory of a mysterious phenomenon is the most elegant. It's not inquiry. It's the same sort of rotten masturbatory behavior physics has fallen pray to in its absence of new discoveries.

I believe the most honest thing to do here is to be humble and admit that we don't know how consciousness works and stop ourselves from making assumptions on top of theories that haven't been tested by experience.

Now they do of course, but in no ways that are predicted by the laws we understand.

I don't understand this. Everything the body does is hard to predict by the laws we understand. We don't understand consciousness, sure, but we also don't (fully) understand cell biology, DNA assembly, protein folding etc. either, and nobody is suggesting those require new forces or laws.

the extremely complex computer has been broken in a subtle way that can't be repaired.

How would this not also apply to death of the body? It seems to me postulating a separate soul does not meaningfully reduce complexity here. Most deaths are not a failure of the brain.

If consciousness was simply a property of certain arrangements of matter, you wouldn't really expect nature to select the ones that can be bricked.

Sure, but that's not a "death" thing. Once you know that organisms stop being able to procreate at a certain age, it seems necessary that they will die after, as nothing would select against it. The weird thing here is menopause, not death.

I believe the most honest thing to do here is to be humble and admit that we don't know how consciousness works

Sure, but we can place constraints well before we have operational understanding. Few people know how almost anything works; again, they don't see a need to postulate novel physics.

Anyways, I don't understand either why you see the need to add entities, nor what adding entities even gives you. What is the mind doing that physics clearly does not suffice for?

what is the mind doing they physics clearly doesn't suffice for

Qualia.

There's no explained reason for me to be experiencing existence.

There's no explained reason for lots of things that we don't invoke the need for new physics for. What makes qualia unique?

I think this is gesturing at the common philosophical stance "I see no way that materialism could even in theory give rise to qualia". That of course has the problem that it's equally difficult to see how any set of laws would give rise to qualia; as such, it's just hiding the confusion of qualia outside of physics.

Well I don't know I can imagine a few possible set of laws that could actually do that.

And I don't see no way for materialism to be true at all, it's quite possible that it is. I just don't pretend it's more likely than other speculative theories when we're bereft of evidence.

Do you apply this same logic to any other system we don't totally understand? Also, can you give an example for a law that makes qualia easier to explain?

More comments