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> we are just getting fooled The same question can be asked. What are objective properties of "being fooled"? Can you see something? Yes, you can. Can you ref

> we are just getting fooled The same question can be asked. What are objective properties of "being fooled"? Can you see something? Yes, you can. Can you reflect on your ability to see? Yes. Can you think? Can you reflect on what you are thinking now? Can you reflect on your ability to think? Yes. Yes. Yes. What you are being fooled about?

danbruc 7y ago
What are objective properties of "being fooled"? Getting convinced [by your brain] that an objectively wrong fact is true. For a example an optical illusion where your brain decides that two objectively identical colors are different colors. And we can find out about this by just asking you about your perception. And you can stop getting fooled by learning about that optical illusion so that in the future some part of your brain might raise doubt about the difference the other part of your brain detects which will in turn change your answer when asked to something expressing less confidence about the two colors. Can you see something? Yes, you can. Can you reflect on your ability to see? Yes. Can you think? Can you reflect on what you are thinking now? Can you reflect on your ability to think? Yes. Yes. Yes. What you are being fooled about? I am too lazy to work through all of them, but I would tend to argue along the following line. The fact that I can see can be verified from the outside - you show me different things and then ask me about them. We do not even need something as complex as you, maybe just an LED changing brightness or color from time to time and a button I am supposed to press every time the visible state of the LED changes. After controlling for things like me sensing the current through the LED, the amount of correlation between the signals to the LED and from the button will be a pretty good indicator of my ability for some basic vision capability. But what when you claim to feel pain? How would you try to convince me that there is more to this than the pain bit getting set and in turn causing and affecting your actions? And you can of course not just appeal to me also being a human and therefore just knowing that there is more to the experience of pain.
- red75prime 7y ago
  > But what when you claim to feel pain? Decrease of performance on tasks unrelated to damaged area shows that something is going on beyond physical damage and usual stimulus processing. Worker ants, for example, continue to carry on their work even after fatal damage to their gaster. You will not continue to perform mental arithmetic with the same efficiency after your little toe has been struck by a hammer, despite it serves no purpose in doing mental arithmetic (or any purpose at all, for that matter). And if you will do, then you don't feel pain.
  - danbruc 7y ago
    That is a good point I did not think about at all, even though it is probably one of the most universal consequences of pain, even - at least to some extend - carrying over to emotional pain. The first question I had - even if not really relevant for the topic - is what the reason might be. My bust guess would be conservation of resources and at least in some situations avoiding further damage. Also in some situations the reaction is at least initially the opposite, to suppress the pain and increase performance to help getting out of the situation. But more relevant to the topic, while generally reduced performance is strongly related to pain, I have no problem imaging a robot exhibiting degraded performance due to damage in somewhat unrelated functions for the purpose of resource conservation or something along that line. It could even be a kind of overreaction - if the damage and its consequences are not well known, then be conservative and reduce performance in general. But while building something like that into a robot makes it behave more like a human, I am pretty sure that this is not what people usually think of when they say that they feel pain, i.e. most people would still say that the robot still does not really feel pain.
perl4ever 7y ago
I don't think that combining sensory input with a "CPU" is enough to make a mind. There has to be something in between, which takes the sensory input and constructs a model of "objective" reality which is not subject to free will, and can't help but be as honest as possible. But this third part is not completely isolated in practice, since evolution hasn't designed it that way. "Being fooled" would arise from the model being incorrect of itself, the "conscious" self influencing the model to not faithfully represent reality, and so on. I'd make an analogy to "Trusted Execution Technology"[1] on computers these days. It's easy to overlook except when it goes wrong. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Execution_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Execution_Technology
- danbruc 7y ago
  There has to be something in between, which takes the sensory input and constructs a model of "objective" reality [...] Isn't that what a object recognition algorithm would do? Identify regions of an image and recognize them as instances of some class of things, maybe also build up relations between them - a person walking on the side walk vs another person riding a bike that has been recognized. [...] which is not subject to free will [...] I am not sure what you mean with that. "Being fooled" would arise from the model being incorrect of itself [...] Exactly, that's my point. We are so sure that our experience of »seeing« a tree is fundamentally different from a camera »seeing« a tree and a object recognition algorithm labeling a region of pixels as a tree...but where is the evidence for that? No human has ever been a camera attached to a computer and could compare the two »experiences«. It is just our brain believing that a human is different from a camera plus computer and algorithms, so maybe our brain is just wrong in this regard, fooling us into believing that there is something more going on inside of us. I'd make an analogy to "Trusted Execution Technology"[1] on computers these days. It's easy to overlook except when it goes wrong. I was really convinced for my entire life that me »seeing« a tree involves something that a camera does not have, it always just seemed so obvious to me. But once I started really thinking about it, I noticed that I neither have evidence for that, nor that I am even able to make precise what this missing thing is supposed to be. So it is not only that I may have missed the TPM module, but I am even unable to find it when I am actively looking for it. Maybe it is just hidden very well, but my natural confidence in its existence paired with zero evidence for that, makes me at least somewhat suspicious nowadays.

danbruc 7y ago

What are objective properties of "being fooled"? Getting convinced [by your brain] that an objectively wrong fact is true. For a example an optical illusion where your brain decides that two objectively identical colors are different colors. And we can find out about this by just asking you about your perception. And you can stop getting fooled by learning about that optical illusion so that in the future some part of your brain might raise doubt about the difference the other part of your brain detects which will in turn change your answer when asked to something expressing less confidence about the two colors. Can you see something? Yes, you can. Can you reflect on your ability to see? Yes. Can you think? Can you reflect on what you are thinking now? Can you reflect on your ability to think? Yes. Yes. Yes. What you are being fooled about? I am too lazy to work through all of them, but I would tend to argue along the following line. The fact that I can see can be verified from the outside - you show me different things and then ask me about them. We do not even need something as complex as you, maybe just an LED changing brightness or color from time to time and a button I am supposed to press every time the visible state of the LED changes. After controlling for things like me sensing the current through the LED, the amount of correlation between the signals to the LED and from the button will be a pretty good indicator of my ability for some basic vision capability. But what when you claim to feel pain? How would you try to convince me that there is more to this than the pain bit getting set and in turn causing and affecting your actions? And you can of course not just appeal to me also being a human and therefore just knowing that there is more to the experience of pain.

red75prime 7y ago
> But what when you claim to feel pain? Decrease of performance on tasks unrelated to damaged area shows that something is going on beyond physical damage and usual stimulus processing. Worker ants, for example, continue to carry on their work even after fatal damage to their gaster. You will not continue to perform mental arithmetic with the same efficiency after your little toe has been struck by a hammer, despite it serves no purpose in doing mental arithmetic (or any purpose at all, for that matter). And if you will do, then you don't feel pain.
- danbruc 7y ago
  That is a good point I did not think about at all, even though it is probably one of the most universal consequences of pain, even - at least to some extend - carrying over to emotional pain. The first question I had - even if not really relevant for the topic - is what the reason might be. My bust guess would be conservation of resources and at least in some situations avoiding further damage. Also in some situations the reaction is at least initially the opposite, to suppress the pain and increase performance to help getting out of the situation. But more relevant to the topic, while generally reduced performance is strongly related to pain, I have no problem imaging a robot exhibiting degraded performance due to damage in somewhat unrelated functions for the purpose of resource conservation or something along that line. It could even be a kind of overreaction - if the damage and its consequences are not well known, then be conservative and reduce performance in general. But while building something like that into a robot makes it behave more like a human, I am pretty sure that this is not what people usually think of when they say that they feel pain, i.e. most people would still say that the robot still does not really feel pain.

perl4ever 7y ago

I don't think that combining sensory input with a "CPU" is enough to make a mind. There has to be something in between, which takes the sensory input and constructs a model of "objective" reality which is not subject to free will, and can't help but be as honest as possible. But this third part is not completely isolated in practice, since evolution hasn't designed it that way. "Being fooled" would arise from the model being incorrect of itself, the "conscious" self influencing the model to not faithfully represent reality, and so on. I'd make an analogy to "Trusted Execution Technology"[1] on computers these days. It's easy to overlook except when it goes wrong. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Execution_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Execution_Technology

danbruc 7y ago
There has to be something in between, which takes the sensory input and constructs a model of "objective" reality [...] Isn't that what a object recognition algorithm would do? Identify regions of an image and recognize them as instances of some class of things, maybe also build up relations between them - a person walking on the side walk vs another person riding a bike that has been recognized. [...] which is not subject to free will [...] I am not sure what you mean with that. "Being fooled" would arise from the model being incorrect of itself [...] Exactly, that's my point. We are so sure that our experience of »seeing« a tree is fundamentally different from a camera »seeing« a tree and a object recognition algorithm labeling a region of pixels as a tree...but where is the evidence for that? No human has ever been a camera attached to a computer and could compare the two »experiences«. It is just our brain believing that a human is different from a camera plus computer and algorithms, so maybe our brain is just wrong in this regard, fooling us into believing that there is something more going on inside of us. I'd make an analogy to "Trusted Execution Technology"[1] on computers these days. It's easy to overlook except when it goes wrong. I was really convinced for my entire life that me »seeing« a tree involves something that a camera does not have, it always just seemed so obvious to me. But once I started really thinking about it, I noticed that I neither have evidence for that, nor that I am even able to make precise what this missing thing is supposed to be. So it is not only that I may have missed the TPM module, but I am even unable to find it when I am actively looking for it. Maybe it is just hidden very well, but my natural confidence in its existence paired with zero evidence for that, makes me at least somewhat suspicious nowadays.