[extropy-chat] Qualia bet with Eliezer

[Robin Hanson]

At 11:59 AM 11/29/2005, Brent Allsop wrote:
>If I defined quale to be a property or piece of information that could not
>be adequately described or communicated by abstract communication based only
>on the physics of cause and effect?  ...
>Finally - how is this for a stab at the specification of terms of a bet?:
>
>I claim that before the end of 2015, you will admit the following:
>
>1. There are qualia or phenomenal properties (as I've defined above.)
>
>2. I was blind and stupid not to realize this sooner - and had I only
>thought about this more rigorously as many people less intelligent than
>myself (such as Brent Allsop) have done I would have noticed what should
>have been long ago blatantly obvious.
>
>3. The discovery of qualia or phenomenal properties (which I once thought
>did not exist) which scientific evidence is now showing us do indeed exists
>is the most significant scientific discovery made to date and will more
>profoundly effect our future than any other thing we've so far discovered.
>
>If you will agree to pay me $100 if you, in your judgment, admit to all of
>these before the end of the year 2015 then I will agree to pay you $100 at
>the beginning of 2016 if you have not yet admitted the above and paid me.
>
>If not Eliezer, is there anyone else that would be willing to take such a
>bet?

I am willing to accept a similar bet.  $100 may not be enough for me to bother
to remember the bet and track you down if I win, so how about $1000 or $10,000?

But if you are going to accept my judgement regarding whether I win the bet,
its seems proper that I should make clear to you my current opinion.

We are made of parts which have causal (really correlational) relations with
each other.  We can probe and understand this stuff by changing some things
and seeing how other things vary.  By now we have pretty elaborate knowledge
of these relations, and can understand a lot but not all of the 
causal relations
between the parts of our brains and the world.  That is, we know a lot about
how our brains work.

We also believe that at least part of the things we are made of are in addition
capable of feeling, of having "an inner life."  At any one moment one part of
our brain feels it has strong reasons for believing this about itself, and we
then presume that other parts of our brain now and at other times 
also have such
inner life.   We similarly presume that other people whose brains are 
similarly
constructed have similar inner lives.

But, probing can only ever really tell us about causal relations, not about
inner lives.  Since probing is all we will ever have to work with, we 
will never
get any more data about inner lives.  And we must accept that these 
inner lives
cannot be the cause of our believing we have inner lives.  So all we will only
ever have are our naked presumptions.

I also think it is rather unlikely that there are specific particles 
or particle
properties that correspond to these inner lives.  So we are unlikely to find
missing causal inputs into our brains coming from some new "qualitrons."  More
likely this ability to feel and have an inner life is true of all matter,
appropriately arranged.

So in a sense I already agree with your #1, and if so can never agree with #2,
but disagree pretty substantially with #3.   I'm willing to bet against #3 at
even odds, and probably at even stronger odds.  Nothing interested will be
discovered here, though our presumptions may slowly change as beliefs do in
philosophy, as a result of realizing the implications of different assumptions.



Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323