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Also, from a system of things that only exists with respect to participants will, we can hack it into a system of things with objective physical existence by pr

Also, from a system of things that only exists with respect to participants will, we can hack it into a system of things with objective physical existence by presupposing a fictitious all-knowing never-lying arbitrator who will is physical law. In other words, we can invent god as a useful linguistic fiction to rig into being the aspects of my system you've criticized as impossible to construct.

tsimionescu 4y ago
Well, that's a sixth axiom to your system - now you've added a consciousness that has vastly more power than all the others. My point was that we can't find out anything about the phsycial world by just discussing it. We each have to experience it ourselves using our own senses. We can of course later discuss to devise new ways of understanding what the world is and how it works, but even then, we need to put any theories we come up with to the test to check if they actually hold up.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  >now you've added a consciousness that has vastly more power than all the others. Superficially yes but actually no. This fictitious admin character doesn't have any actual powers, I'm simply choosing a particular "consciousness" to be a fixed and agreed upon meter stick of objectivity. All measurement systems are arbitrary. We could choose anyones POV to fix as the "objective" truth. If we both agree on the same "definer entity" then we can be in agreement about other things objectively defined relative to them. But crucially this is all still nothing more than us reaching agreement. All that really exists is still just you me and the words. So how about it. Do you believe in Bob?
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Ok, but then we might agree that there is no sun, that frogs are born from rocks and mice from leaves, that the stars are holes in the sphere of the heavens and so on - as many people did for millenia. They had consensus - and they were utterly wrong. The actual world actually exists. The world isn't any less round for members of the Flat Earth Society.
    - IIAOPSW 4y ago
      Niels Bohr supposedly kept a horseshoe in his office. A visitor asked "what's that for?" "Good luck." "Surely you don't really believe in that." "No, but they say it works even if you don't believe in it." The joke of course is quantum mechanics also works even if you don't believe in it (or so they say). If someone rejects quantum physics and embraces magic horseshoes, will anything punish them for being objectively wrong? Is there anything you can do to force them to believe the objective truth? If the answer is no to both, then what makes quantum physics the objective truth and magic horseshoes utterly wrong? Maybe there is an objective truth, but all we can have is belief about which things are objective truths. I can be contrarian and say flat earthers are correct, and there's nothing you can do to force me to agree otherwise. So if nothing eventually forces agreement on that matter, what makes one side objectively true? For the record, I do actually believe in reality. I'm just interested to see what happens when we turn the problem of consciousness on its head. Instead of assuming reality and understanding consciousness within it, assume consciousness and try to paint a picture of reality within it. This is all academic exercise.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  > My point was that we can't find out anything about the phsycial world by just discussing it. We each have to experience it ourselves using our own senses. You cite the primacy of sensation, but what more is sensation than a message from the sensory organ to the brain. Perhaps encoded in the brains internal language rather than the plain text we are used to, but messages none the less. The concept of existence-as-messages is thus not contradicted by the experience of messages from your own body. Irrespective of any underlying physical reality, I can't escape the fact that I can never test reality itself, only my perception of it. We can get a lot of mileage out of the physicalist approach, accepting as an axiom that what we perceive as reality is real. But in that ground up approach we've had terrible difficulty deriving our ourselves from physical first principles. I'm not saying its impossible or wrong to take the path from atoms on upwards to consciousness and perception. But no one has been able to make it to the end of that path. What happens if we go the other way instead, starting from the known conclusion "I'm here and conscious enough to converse" and working our way down to the perception/understanding of an inanimate reality governed by objective physical principles? Can a system only designed to represent/reason about people talking to and about people be hacked into a system for representing and reasoning in general? If we start from purely language models like GPT3 and continue to teach it the "social reasoning" of saying things we want to hear, will the language model eventually become capable of non-social reasoning as well? In the process of figuring out what we want to hear well enough to describe a non-contradictory scene to us, does GPT3 have to actually learn the rules of 3d euclidean space governing the scene? Is there any possible way to avoid scene contradictions without a full understanding of the underlying physical reality it is supposed to describe to us? If a camera feeds data to a language model, does the language model suddenly have eyes? What about pictures from the internet?
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    > You cite the primacy of sensation, but what more is sensation than a message from the sensory organ to the brain. This is false, it's a version of the homunculus fallacy. A sensory organ is something that connects the brain to the physical world. Even if you chose to model it as a an agent that sends messages to the brain, it is an agent of a different nature. The sensory agent doesn't receive messages from other agents, it receives raw input from the outside world (photons, electrical fields, chemical reactions etc). In contrast, if you were a brain in a vat with no ability to directly perceive the world or interact with it in any way, it would be impossible for you to know that "I can pass through walls" is fundamentally impossible. Even for your GPT-3 thought experiment - ultimately it is the effects of the physical world perceived directly by humans sense organs that shape what GPT-3 would utter. That is, even if it can learn what the world is like simply by talking to us, it's still learning about the real world from someone's direct experience with it. If we were all GPT-3s, with no cameras and pressure sensors and motors etc, we would be unable to reason in any sense about the world itself. We could perhaps come to agree upon some imagined world, but that could change arbitrarily much from one day to the next on a whim.

tsimionescu 4y ago

Well, that's a sixth axiom to your system - now you've added a consciousness that has vastly more power than all the others. My point was that we can't find out anything about the phsycial world by just discussing it. We each have to experience it ourselves using our own senses. We can of course later discuss to devise new ways of understanding what the world is and how it works, but even then, we need to put any theories we come up with to the test to check if they actually hold up.

IIAOPSW 4y ago
>now you've added a consciousness that has vastly more power than all the others. Superficially yes but actually no. This fictitious admin character doesn't have any actual powers, I'm simply choosing a particular "consciousness" to be a fixed and agreed upon meter stick of objectivity. All measurement systems are arbitrary. We could choose anyones POV to fix as the "objective" truth. If we both agree on the same "definer entity" then we can be in agreement about other things objectively defined relative to them. But crucially this is all still nothing more than us reaching agreement. All that really exists is still just you me and the words. So how about it. Do you believe in Bob?
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Ok, but then we might agree that there is no sun, that frogs are born from rocks and mice from leaves, that the stars are holes in the sphere of the heavens and so on - as many people did for millenia. They had consensus - and they were utterly wrong. The actual world actually exists. The world isn't any less round for members of the Flat Earth Society.
  - IIAOPSW 4y ago
    Niels Bohr supposedly kept a horseshoe in his office. A visitor asked "what's that for?" "Good luck." "Surely you don't really believe in that." "No, but they say it works even if you don't believe in it." The joke of course is quantum mechanics also works even if you don't believe in it (or so they say). If someone rejects quantum physics and embraces magic horseshoes, will anything punish them for being objectively wrong? Is there anything you can do to force them to believe the objective truth? If the answer is no to both, then what makes quantum physics the objective truth and magic horseshoes utterly wrong? Maybe there is an objective truth, but all we can have is belief about which things are objective truths. I can be contrarian and say flat earthers are correct, and there's nothing you can do to force me to agree otherwise. So if nothing eventually forces agreement on that matter, what makes one side objectively true? For the record, I do actually believe in reality. I'm just interested to see what happens when we turn the problem of consciousness on its head. Instead of assuming reality and understanding consciousness within it, assume consciousness and try to paint a picture of reality within it. This is all academic exercise.
IIAOPSW 4y ago
> My point was that we can't find out anything about the phsycial world by just discussing it. We each have to experience it ourselves using our own senses. You cite the primacy of sensation, but what more is sensation than a message from the sensory organ to the brain. Perhaps encoded in the brains internal language rather than the plain text we are used to, but messages none the less. The concept of existence-as-messages is thus not contradicted by the experience of messages from your own body. Irrespective of any underlying physical reality, I can't escape the fact that I can never test reality itself, only my perception of it. We can get a lot of mileage out of the physicalist approach, accepting as an axiom that what we perceive as reality is real. But in that ground up approach we've had terrible difficulty deriving our ourselves from physical first principles. I'm not saying its impossible or wrong to take the path from atoms on upwards to consciousness and perception. But no one has been able to make it to the end of that path. What happens if we go the other way instead, starting from the known conclusion "I'm here and conscious enough to converse" and working our way down to the perception/understanding of an inanimate reality governed by objective physical principles? Can a system only designed to represent/reason about people talking to and about people be hacked into a system for representing and reasoning in general? If we start from purely language models like GPT3 and continue to teach it the "social reasoning" of saying things we want to hear, will the language model eventually become capable of non-social reasoning as well? In the process of figuring out what we want to hear well enough to describe a non-contradictory scene to us, does GPT3 have to actually learn the rules of 3d euclidean space governing the scene? Is there any possible way to avoid scene contradictions without a full understanding of the underlying physical reality it is supposed to describe to us? If a camera feeds data to a language model, does the language model suddenly have eyes? What about pictures from the internet?
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  > You cite the primacy of sensation, but what more is sensation than a message from the sensory organ to the brain. This is false, it's a version of the homunculus fallacy. A sensory organ is something that connects the brain to the physical world. Even if you chose to model it as a an agent that sends messages to the brain, it is an agent of a different nature. The sensory agent doesn't receive messages from other agents, it receives raw input from the outside world (photons, electrical fields, chemical reactions etc). In contrast, if you were a brain in a vat with no ability to directly perceive the world or interact with it in any way, it would be impossible for you to know that "I can pass through walls" is fundamentally impossible. Even for your GPT-3 thought experiment - ultimately it is the effects of the physical world perceived directly by humans sense organs that shape what GPT-3 would utter. That is, even if it can learn what the world is like simply by talking to us, it's still learning about the real world from someone's direct experience with it. If we were all GPT-3s, with no cameras and pressure sensors and motors etc, we would be unable to reason in any sense about the world itself. We could perhaps come to agree upon some imagined world, but that could change arbitrarily much from one day to the next on a whim.