Sometimes I call it a phrencell, a little room of the mind. (Mixing Greek and Latin because trolling.)
I'm not certain I'm correct. I'm merely certain that I haven't been rebutted, yet, but the point isn't necessarily to be right. The point is to show that the box has an outside to go look around; the point is to show what kind of thing Decartes' pineal gland will look like in physical implementation. For example, even if I'm wrong, it's clear enough that physics doesn't have to be causally closed, and that dualism is compatible with naturalism.
One example of the machine is this:
Take an FPGA. Hook its output into its configuration register, so when it runs it re-programs itself. To its input, hook a true-random source, so it re-programs itself randomly. Ideally the FPGA will have infinite gates so it can, in principle, be programmed with any program and thus emit arbitrary bitstreams.
I imagine a pentagon of five anodes and an electron in a superposition of being about to be absorbed by all of them. If we're feeling mystic (I am) the pentagon is an oracle and the FPGA is its interpreter. It probably helps but probably isn't necessary to let the FPGA bias the oracle, for example tuning the voltages on the anodes.
I assert that the probability of the FPGA at any present time is in a state of both 100% and 0% probability. The previous input had a 0% probability, all past states had a 0% probability, but of course it's right there. Look at it. The present has a 100% probability.
Future evolution has a well-defined probability. For example, with the pentagon, the FPGA will have five possible evolutions with average 20% probability. We can just look at it and compute the probability, entirely straightforward. Except that when one of those states becomes the present, it too will have a 0% probability, because it evolved from a state with 0% probability.
The reason it has a 0% probability is because at infinite time, the (ideal) FPGA has an infinite number of possible states, which means at most infinitesimal probability for any one state, which is physically identical to zero. Which is to say it can't happen, it's impossible. Normally we can ignore things at infinity for physical purposes; parallel lines cross at infinity, so what. All particles decay by infinity - that's just physics speak for 'never.' No observer will ever observe the decay of certain particles. (Neutrons and electrons?)
However, the FPGA is, at any time, in a state bit-for-bit identical to an impossible state, because states are degenerate in time. As long as the configuration register is properly set up, the FPGA is allowed to have constant states, cyclical states, random states or chaotic states. This means the FPGA cannot know if it reached its current state by passing through infinity or not. (E.g: a constant state that might have not been constant, but happened not to be.) Which means we, as the observers, cannot know whether it passed through infinity or not. Which means everything that is true at infinity must be true now, at the present. Which means its past and current states have a probability indistinguishable from zero.
But it's still right there. Paradox.
My solution to the paradox is to say that the FPGA's future states in fact never had a probability. Quantum events look like probability because they're a special case of non-probability. Namely, if the canvas of possibilities is finite, then no matter what you do you'll converge on some probability distribution. (This is why consciousness' effects on physics are about information - bitstreams have few inherent limitations.)
Specifically, quantum objects have a quantum of consciousness and free will (with respect to physics). As it turns out, if you have 6*10^24 persons with no memory and only two options, the variations in personality and whim will cancel out and converge on some well-defined probability. If you have 6*10^24 randomly selected persons, there's guaranteed to be a representative sample of all personalities, which means you're measuring the average personality, and will do so reliably.
However, if you hook only one personality up to a randomness amplifier, none of this holds, and the true non-deterministic, non-stochastic nature of the beast emerges. (Specifically, the phrencell deliberately breaks the independence clause of independent random events.) This is why the interpreter may need to be able to bias the oracle. The oracle needs to be able to feel the circuit or it won't be able to tell what it's doing and thus shape the interpreter to its will.
Friday, July 11, 2014
Monday, July 7, 2014
Exit
@Nick_B_Steves @mr_archenemy Until you inflict a "muh shekels" on us, you're fully entitled to exempt yourself. As is the great @RiverC
— Outsideness (@Outsideness) June 24, 2014
(Referred post.)
Someone should explain Exit from the ground up. This turns out to be difficult, I tried to re-think my approach but it is probably still bad.
Among libertarian personalities it isn't necessary, we seek out justifications for Exit and large chunks of it don't need to be explained at all. For non-libertarians the thought pattern is unnatural and they're certainly not going to grab some spears and go hunting for the missing bits.
Naturally the non-libertarian thought pattern is unnatural for me so I'll likely still miss important bits, but at least I'm aware it's a problem, so I can attempt to fix it.
The essence of Exit is its purpose. Its purpose is to prevent corruption of institutions. Kindness out of the goodness of their hearts is unstable. All institutions need Gnon's discipline to keep them even halfway honest. Exit is metonymously this discipline.
Voice is the other serious candidate. Voting and letters to the editor and complaining to your congresscritter and such. Voice clearly hasn't worked. Even if you go so far as to nail a bunch of theses to a relevant door.
At this point I would try to discard exosemanic gang signs as much as possible, but apparently I'm too fond of the big-E Exit flourish.
--
The point is discipline. Exit is a good first approximation, but Exit empowers Voice and and opt-in is just as powerful as an opt-out; exit is essentially a two-syllable word for freedom of association. (Similarly, families are not normally in Exit's domain of validity, because genetics imposes its own discipline; I'm sure you can think of other exceptions.)
The essence of Exit is discipline, and the essence of discipline is survival. To truly have Exit, the institution's survival must be under the power of its putative beneficiaries. History shows this is the only way putative beneficiaries will match actual beneficiaries.
Exit is only important at the State level. To be more specific, the level of legitimized coercion. No other level is capable of sustaining non-Exit.
Exit is not absolute, but discipline obtains to the extent Exit obtains.
Exit empowers Voice, and Voice without Exit is merely the illusion of Voice. I need not explain how voting is a placebo at best. By contrast, the fact you can Exit a restaurant gives you great Voice. The restaurant needs you, and thus is willing to negotiate so you don't exercise Exit. Moreover, Exit gives you almost all the bargaining power. If the manager is unwilling to give you a good bargain, you can eat at home. The restaurant can be run according to any official mission whatsoever; since its survival depends on diners, it will be run for the benefit of diners.
Restaurants are both opt-in and opt-out. But either is enough. For example, the Amish are opt-in. Baptism is performed at age 18-21, in other words, with the full consent of the baptised. After this the new member of the community is subject to extra punishments and duties, but also has new potential and actual privileges. These privileges are enough to sell 90% of Amish children on the lifelong contract. If they were not, then the Amish would have boiled off their entire population by now, and this continuing existential threat keep their rules reasonable. (I've seen claims that incentives work through trial and error. I disagree. Dire apes suddenly become much, much better at logic when their material interest is at stake.)
Similarly, I could have no objection to opt-in slavery, or opt-out hereditary serfdom. (Especially as either would likely die a quick, gruesome death. It's entirely unnecessary to make them illegal.)
(Ancap / neon hillist digression: coercion shouldn't be legitimate. It is a falsehood and is the fundamental reason empires collapse. The obvious solution, given this, makes Exit natural.)
The trick, then, is to marry legitimate coercion and Exit. But stating the problem clearly immediately solves it: if coercion can be imbued with moral legitimacy, then so can Exit. A State which disdains Exit is disdaining discipline and should be treated as if it were saying as much. (Ancap digression: families also. 'Good enough' is not good enough.)
The Catholic church immediately jumps to mind. Why was excommunication so fearsome? Because the State cooperated. To be excommunicated was to be an outlaw, lacking protection of the courts.
I repeat: only Exit from the State and State-sponsored institutions is worth worrying about. (Ancap digression: cops return runaways because having urchins around is embarrassing.)
The perception of primary Voice mitigates the sacred power of Exit, and thus discipline, and thus institutions become zombies of their former selves, interested only in devouring your flesh.
Though vitiated, Exit does somewhat exist in the modern world, but it is expensive. If you're not already deracinated, it means deracinating yourself. Real estate is monetarily and temporally expensive to liquidate, as are other important forms of wealth. Moreover, the Progressive, afeared of Exit, has seized all Anglophonia and much beyond. You cannot meaningfully leave without abandoning not only friend and family connections, but your entire culture. Rhodesia was an attempt to Exit. Germany was, twice, an attempt to Exit. (Hitler as a manifestation of cultural claustrophobia.) Progressivism is terrified of Exit, as it is of all sacred powers, and will employ every obstacle it can get away with.
Anything that Man can make, Man can unmake. Were Exit re-sacralized in place of voting, the affected States will use every tactic in their power to route around it. To truly work, this wisdom would have to be sunk deep.
--
Miscellaneous comments:
The patricians can always Exit. Kim Jong-Un's strategy: make a foreign visit. Stay instead of going back. There's a whole magazine made up of former officials. While not simple, it can't be halted. Exit is for the immediate benefit of plebeians, and only for society as a whole in the long term.
Before Luther, was paganism your only alternative to Catholicism? I notice many of Luther's reasonable objections have since been fixed.
This law can be temporarily suspended. Sudden, unexpected shocks can work, but only insofar as they are unexpected, and executing them spends the element of surprise. Capturing intellectuals as slaves, for example, will cause other scholars to hide their abilities, desolating the source.
Saturday, June 7, 2014
Property and Objective Morality
This isn't particularly new, I'm merely repairing the categorical imperative.
Sections:
1: Justification of morality per se.
2: Not-property is invalid.
3: Security.
4: The moral consequences of preferences, promises, and self-defence
5. Community consequences of moral preferences.
6. Government briefly.
7. Coercion defined exactly.
8. God, tyrants, physics, and prudence.
9. Soundbite and miscellaneous comments.
1.
Humans are similar enough that stating that one need or need not justify their actions implies that all of them need or need not justify their actions in the same way. Put another way, arguing about whether humans should have prescriptive norms is not useful. It is like arguing whether humans should have two arms: they do in fact have two arms, and no amount of rhetoric will change that fact. In either case, we see that the categorical imperative is not high philosophical theory, but a humble consequence of humans being embedded in biology.
It turns out the argument that humans need not justify their actions is self-defeating. It turns out that given that humans form norms, there is a correct norm, which is property defined as reasonable expectation of control.
The search for objective morality has been similar to the research on the problem of induction; it looks for a positive proof or argument that morality obtains. The searches are misguided for a similar reason.
When I claim that I need not justify my actions, either unilateral actions or actions upon you, I become ontologically committed to the position that you need not justify your actions either. Therefore, I become ontologically committed to the position that you may unilaterally, without justification, form a norm that you do need to justify your actions, which ontologically commits you to believing I need to justify my actions. Therefore, assuming my assertion is true, it justifies believing my assertion is false.
The belief that actions need not be justified is self-contradictory.
The statement [morality & !morality] reduces to [morality & morality], which is always true. The search for justification of morals per se will, as Hume intuited, never be successful. It's just that I cannot safely believe the opposite, and so by process of elimination, morality must obtain.
2.
Specific norms can be self-contradictory in the same way, so let's talk about reasonable expectation of control.
Property cannot be mere control as there would be no need for the word 'property,' it would simply be a synonym. Second, it would make theft meaningless - theft would simply be one valid transfer of property - and theft is not meaningless. Property is at least the expectation of control, which theft deliberately violates.
Let's talk about theft without loss of generality. If theft is the norm, then objects will be swiftly destroyed, until nobody can uphold the norm. I know where my wallet is and I control it. If instead pickpockets were endemic, I would not expect to control my wallet. I would therefore not acquire a wallet in the first place, and thus neither would the pickpockets. If theft is not suppressed directly, then it suppresses the objects it preys upon until it suppresses itself.
Similarly, as per Kant, deception cannot be a norm, because it can only exist parasitically on trust.
If property were merely expectation of control, then the thief would be proving me wrong. I thought I had property rights in my wallet, but I didn't because hey look, there it goes. Wave to the wallet, it's having a vacation. If I take the wallet back, ditto. To define theft, I must define property as reasonable expectation of control. Conversely, if I leave my wallet on a boulder all day and expect it to still be there when I get back, I'm insane. While it would be nice if I could, as a matter of fact I can't, and therefore it's not reasonable.
Note that under REC, the thief creates the normative contradiction by stealthily changing the arrangement of facts, and can, at any time before the theft, release the contradiction. This is an asymmetry you can hang moral asymmetries on.
3.
Property can grow: the act of changing an expectation from insane to reasonable is the action of securing. I could chain my wallet to the boulder.
If it were possible to physically prevent all theft, vandalism and so on, we would do so. But what man makes, man can unmake. You can chain your wallet to the rock, and I can bring bolt-cutters. We need a system of rules to know when an invalid, self-defeating norm has been advocated. This too is covered by 'reasonable.' When a reasonable amount of security has been applied, it is invalid to circumvent it.
In philosophy 'reasonable' is a weasel word. If I didn't have to use it, I wouldn't. Nevertheless, in practice e.g. English Common Law seems perfectly capable of defining 'reasonable.' Once established, the specific boundaries are not important, only that they exist. More generally, an ancap security firm would tell subscribers in advance what they will and will not consider secure, and thus what they will and will not insure.
4.
That not-property is invalid means all norms either subsume themselves under property or are themselves invalid. This is a surprisingly flexible condition.
Reasonable expectation of control implies that whatever your preferences are, you can attempt to arrange your property such that it upholds and advances them. Preferences that can be validly upheld in this way are called values. All preferences that must infringe on someone else's property are invalid. Since this logical property of the definition of property rights covers all conventional crimes, I call this set of logical properties of the world 'morality.'
Murder is violating your property rights in your body, (technologically inalienable, incidentally) and if it is justified for me to murder you, then it must be equally justified for you to murder me first. And so on for fraud, vandalism, rape, battery, and even rudeness.
Here's the surprising ones:
It is not valid to proselytize without an invitation. I have the right to control the contents of my brain and so do you. If I want to believe what are lies and heresies from your perspective, then I'm entitled to do so, even if your proselytizing would change my mind, and even if it would be better for me if I changed my mind. (Real intellectual property, not the unsecurable nonsense the MPAA claims.)
Promises are morally omnipotent with regard to my property. If I say you can kill me, then it is impossible to murder me. I agreed to it. Incidentally, you have full permission to proselytize to me about anything.
Absent promises and thus contracts, self-defence is absolute and unlimited. Such extremes aren't usually necessary, but they are justifiable. In a Hobbesian state of nature, if I so much as swear in your vicinity, there is no moral reason you can't immediately blow my leg off and leave me to bleed to death. By so swearing, I have stated that I don't need to justify intrusions on your otological property, which implies I don't need to justify intruding on your property generally, and thus by symmetry you have no need to justify intruding on my vital property. Any action to prevent further intrusions is justifiable.
I have not signed a contract stating I won't blow your leg off for no good reason. I have not sworn or even suggested it. We are in fact in a Hobbesian state of nature, morally speaking. I think this is bad. A main reason I wish to fully develop a theory of morality is to fix things like being in a Hobbesian state of nature.
5.
In a community who all share the same preferences, (almost) fully arbitrary religions can be justified within property rights. There is nothing Islamic that Muslims cannot validly do to each other. If you believe you should be able to swear at me without repercussion, and I believe the same, then when I swear at you the self-defence logic is not tripped. If either of us wish to claim it's wrong to be sworn at, we don't have a leg to stand on.
The problem appears when multiculturalism obtains. Muslims think they can treat Christians in the Muslim way, and Christian believe they can treat Muslims the Christian way. Both are invalid. Understandable perhaps, but immoral.
6.
Government briefly:
If I had signed a contract saying I had to pay taxes, then taxes would be completely fine. Predictable etc. I can reasonably know how much of my income will be garnished. I didn't. The government is entirely indifferent to what I prefer. By symmetry I should be able to be entirely indifferent to what government prefers. They use violence to make this not the case. Thus it must be valid for me to use violence to change their mind. Unwise, perhaps, but valid.
Every government has used a theory of legitimacy, and they were all lies. It's as if they have already intuited this theory and feel the need to pre-empt such objections. Every government has tacitly admitted it was illegitimate.
Because government is morally parasitical in the way that lies are, it becomes physically parasitical. It's inherent to the enterprise. Historically, there have been several moral advances, and in each case they have made the adoptees richer. In some cases, vastly richer. Having the first morally righteous government should follow this pattern.
7.
Coercion can be precisely defined. It is any trespass of the principles of property rights. It is to deliberately interrupt the expectation of control. Physical violence may or may not be moral violence, but if it is, it's coercion. All coercion is inherently parasitic and self-negating.
8.
Let's talk about God for a bit.
Many have wanted morality to be self-enforcing. But if it were self-enforcing, it would merely be prudence.
If God sends you to Hell, He converts the good to the prudent by force. Walking backwards from this ideal, what if an earthly entity wishes to grant themselves the power of immorality by force? If you don't have enough force to stop them, then they win. Turns out physics is unjust, because if it were just, there would be no need for morality, neither the fact of it nor a theory of it.
For morality to be able to restrain a tyrant, it would have to be meaningless. Put another way, there's broadly two kinds of humans: ones that don't need a theory of morality because they are basically decent and kind, and ones that will reject any theory because they're basically vicious. In any possible situation, the latter kind must be restrained by force. At the individual level, the purpose of a theory is for edge cases (me) and to cut off the rhetorical escape routes used by the latter kind.
Intriguingly, you must understand that morality might be a thing to be bound by it. If it never occurs to me that actions might need a justification, then I don't need to justify my actions. For example, Adam and Eve before they ate of the fruit of the tree of good and evil. It won't ever occur to me that actions upon me might need justification either. Thus, livestock.
9.
Taking sections 4 and 5 together, morality is this: do not unto others as they would have you not do unto them. Where 'self' and 'other' are defined on secured property rights. If we're talking variants on the Golden Rule, this is beyond Platinum and into Osmium or something.
This theory is mainly consistent with English Common Law and various other existent social arrangements. As in physics, the plan is not to try to overturn everything we know, but to know it more deeply and precisely, so we can take it farther and error-check what we've done so far.
Similarly, as per section 9, morality is a logical property of actions, rather than something you can physically experiment on. As a result, there can be no evidence aside from philosophy that a thing is moral, immoral, or amoral. I feel this property is a necessary condition for any theory that claims to be moral; that it can be violated without obvious consequences. (Trying to disobey gravity is just unwise.)
Nevertheless, I believe I've found Hume's Is. To repeat: non-justification is self-contradictory and/or humans form norms anyway, the fact humans are sufficiently similar, and the fact that humans have preferences. The logic has reached a state where if I do happen to be wrong, it most likely can be repaired.
Morality does require free will in some sense. Calling a rock immoral is just dumb; it can't do other than what it in fact did. This is useful backwards; if you can't negotiate with an entity to make it act otherwise than it naturally does, then it isn't a moral entity.
The combination of flexibility and power surprises me.
It worries me somewhat that it is purely anarcho-capitalist. Of course an ancap is going to work out that ancap intuitions are all correct. Nevertheless if it were purely tribal I should be able to find a logical or empirical inconsistency, and I cannot. For example there are no inconsistencies between my definition of property and what is normally called property, for sub-example taxes are treated as government property but not called such, again as if they already intuit the theory.
Sections:
1: Justification of morality per se.
2: Not-property is invalid.
3: Security.
4: The moral consequences of preferences, promises, and self-defence
5. Community consequences of moral preferences.
6. Government briefly.
7. Coercion defined exactly.
8. God, tyrants, physics, and prudence.
9. Soundbite and miscellaneous comments.
1.
Humans are similar enough that stating that one need or need not justify their actions implies that all of them need or need not justify their actions in the same way. Put another way, arguing about whether humans should have prescriptive norms is not useful. It is like arguing whether humans should have two arms: they do in fact have two arms, and no amount of rhetoric will change that fact. In either case, we see that the categorical imperative is not high philosophical theory, but a humble consequence of humans being embedded in biology.
It turns out the argument that humans need not justify their actions is self-defeating. It turns out that given that humans form norms, there is a correct norm, which is property defined as reasonable expectation of control.
The search for objective morality has been similar to the research on the problem of induction; it looks for a positive proof or argument that morality obtains. The searches are misguided for a similar reason.
When I claim that I need not justify my actions, either unilateral actions or actions upon you, I become ontologically committed to the position that you need not justify your actions either. Therefore, I become ontologically committed to the position that you may unilaterally, without justification, form a norm that you do need to justify your actions, which ontologically commits you to believing I need to justify my actions. Therefore, assuming my assertion is true, it justifies believing my assertion is false.
The belief that actions need not be justified is self-contradictory.
The statement [morality & !morality] reduces to [morality & morality], which is always true. The search for justification of morals per se will, as Hume intuited, never be successful. It's just that I cannot safely believe the opposite, and so by process of elimination, morality must obtain.
2.
Specific norms can be self-contradictory in the same way, so let's talk about reasonable expectation of control.
Property cannot be mere control as there would be no need for the word 'property,' it would simply be a synonym. Second, it would make theft meaningless - theft would simply be one valid transfer of property - and theft is not meaningless. Property is at least the expectation of control, which theft deliberately violates.
Let's talk about theft without loss of generality. If theft is the norm, then objects will be swiftly destroyed, until nobody can uphold the norm. I know where my wallet is and I control it. If instead pickpockets were endemic, I would not expect to control my wallet. I would therefore not acquire a wallet in the first place, and thus neither would the pickpockets. If theft is not suppressed directly, then it suppresses the objects it preys upon until it suppresses itself.
Similarly, as per Kant, deception cannot be a norm, because it can only exist parasitically on trust.
If property were merely expectation of control, then the thief would be proving me wrong. I thought I had property rights in my wallet, but I didn't because hey look, there it goes. Wave to the wallet, it's having a vacation. If I take the wallet back, ditto. To define theft, I must define property as reasonable expectation of control. Conversely, if I leave my wallet on a boulder all day and expect it to still be there when I get back, I'm insane. While it would be nice if I could, as a matter of fact I can't, and therefore it's not reasonable.
Note that under REC, the thief creates the normative contradiction by stealthily changing the arrangement of facts, and can, at any time before the theft, release the contradiction. This is an asymmetry you can hang moral asymmetries on.
3.
Property can grow: the act of changing an expectation from insane to reasonable is the action of securing. I could chain my wallet to the boulder.
If it were possible to physically prevent all theft, vandalism and so on, we would do so. But what man makes, man can unmake. You can chain your wallet to the rock, and I can bring bolt-cutters. We need a system of rules to know when an invalid, self-defeating norm has been advocated. This too is covered by 'reasonable.' When a reasonable amount of security has been applied, it is invalid to circumvent it.
In philosophy 'reasonable' is a weasel word. If I didn't have to use it, I wouldn't. Nevertheless, in practice e.g. English Common Law seems perfectly capable of defining 'reasonable.' Once established, the specific boundaries are not important, only that they exist. More generally, an ancap security firm would tell subscribers in advance what they will and will not consider secure, and thus what they will and will not insure.
4.
That not-property is invalid means all norms either subsume themselves under property or are themselves invalid. This is a surprisingly flexible condition.
Reasonable expectation of control implies that whatever your preferences are, you can attempt to arrange your property such that it upholds and advances them. Preferences that can be validly upheld in this way are called values. All preferences that must infringe on someone else's property are invalid. Since this logical property of the definition of property rights covers all conventional crimes, I call this set of logical properties of the world 'morality.'
Murder is violating your property rights in your body, (technologically inalienable, incidentally) and if it is justified for me to murder you, then it must be equally justified for you to murder me first. And so on for fraud, vandalism, rape, battery, and even rudeness.
Here's the surprising ones:
It is not valid to proselytize without an invitation. I have the right to control the contents of my brain and so do you. If I want to believe what are lies and heresies from your perspective, then I'm entitled to do so, even if your proselytizing would change my mind, and even if it would be better for me if I changed my mind. (Real intellectual property, not the unsecurable nonsense the MPAA claims.)
Promises are morally omnipotent with regard to my property. If I say you can kill me, then it is impossible to murder me. I agreed to it. Incidentally, you have full permission to proselytize to me about anything.
Absent promises and thus contracts, self-defence is absolute and unlimited. Such extremes aren't usually necessary, but they are justifiable. In a Hobbesian state of nature, if I so much as swear in your vicinity, there is no moral reason you can't immediately blow my leg off and leave me to bleed to death. By so swearing, I have stated that I don't need to justify intrusions on your otological property, which implies I don't need to justify intruding on your property generally, and thus by symmetry you have no need to justify intruding on my vital property. Any action to prevent further intrusions is justifiable.
I have not signed a contract stating I won't blow your leg off for no good reason. I have not sworn or even suggested it. We are in fact in a Hobbesian state of nature, morally speaking. I think this is bad. A main reason I wish to fully develop a theory of morality is to fix things like being in a Hobbesian state of nature.
5.
In a community who all share the same preferences, (almost) fully arbitrary religions can be justified within property rights. There is nothing Islamic that Muslims cannot validly do to each other. If you believe you should be able to swear at me without repercussion, and I believe the same, then when I swear at you the self-defence logic is not tripped. If either of us wish to claim it's wrong to be sworn at, we don't have a leg to stand on.
The problem appears when multiculturalism obtains. Muslims think they can treat Christians in the Muslim way, and Christian believe they can treat Muslims the Christian way. Both are invalid. Understandable perhaps, but immoral.
6.
Government briefly:
If I had signed a contract saying I had to pay taxes, then taxes would be completely fine. Predictable etc. I can reasonably know how much of my income will be garnished. I didn't. The government is entirely indifferent to what I prefer. By symmetry I should be able to be entirely indifferent to what government prefers. They use violence to make this not the case. Thus it must be valid for me to use violence to change their mind. Unwise, perhaps, but valid.
Every government has used a theory of legitimacy, and they were all lies. It's as if they have already intuited this theory and feel the need to pre-empt such objections. Every government has tacitly admitted it was illegitimate.
Because government is morally parasitical in the way that lies are, it becomes physically parasitical. It's inherent to the enterprise. Historically, there have been several moral advances, and in each case they have made the adoptees richer. In some cases, vastly richer. Having the first morally righteous government should follow this pattern.
7.
Coercion can be precisely defined. It is any trespass of the principles of property rights. It is to deliberately interrupt the expectation of control. Physical violence may or may not be moral violence, but if it is, it's coercion. All coercion is inherently parasitic and self-negating.
8.
Let's talk about God for a bit.
Many have wanted morality to be self-enforcing. But if it were self-enforcing, it would merely be prudence.
If God sends you to Hell, He converts the good to the prudent by force. Walking backwards from this ideal, what if an earthly entity wishes to grant themselves the power of immorality by force? If you don't have enough force to stop them, then they win. Turns out physics is unjust, because if it were just, there would be no need for morality, neither the fact of it nor a theory of it.
For morality to be able to restrain a tyrant, it would have to be meaningless. Put another way, there's broadly two kinds of humans: ones that don't need a theory of morality because they are basically decent and kind, and ones that will reject any theory because they're basically vicious. In any possible situation, the latter kind must be restrained by force. At the individual level, the purpose of a theory is for edge cases (me) and to cut off the rhetorical escape routes used by the latter kind.
Intriguingly, you must understand that morality might be a thing to be bound by it. If it never occurs to me that actions might need a justification, then I don't need to justify my actions. For example, Adam and Eve before they ate of the fruit of the tree of good and evil. It won't ever occur to me that actions upon me might need justification either. Thus, livestock.
9.
Taking sections 4 and 5 together, morality is this: do not unto others as they would have you not do unto them. Where 'self' and 'other' are defined on secured property rights. If we're talking variants on the Golden Rule, this is beyond Platinum and into Osmium or something.
This theory is mainly consistent with English Common Law and various other existent social arrangements. As in physics, the plan is not to try to overturn everything we know, but to know it more deeply and precisely, so we can take it farther and error-check what we've done so far.
Similarly, as per section 9, morality is a logical property of actions, rather than something you can physically experiment on. As a result, there can be no evidence aside from philosophy that a thing is moral, immoral, or amoral. I feel this property is a necessary condition for any theory that claims to be moral; that it can be violated without obvious consequences. (Trying to disobey gravity is just unwise.)
Nevertheless, I believe I've found Hume's Is. To repeat: non-justification is self-contradictory and/or humans form norms anyway, the fact humans are sufficiently similar, and the fact that humans have preferences. The logic has reached a state where if I do happen to be wrong, it most likely can be repaired.
Morality does require free will in some sense. Calling a rock immoral is just dumb; it can't do other than what it in fact did. This is useful backwards; if you can't negotiate with an entity to make it act otherwise than it naturally does, then it isn't a moral entity.
The combination of flexibility and power surprises me.
It worries me somewhat that it is purely anarcho-capitalist. Of course an ancap is going to work out that ancap intuitions are all correct. Nevertheless if it were purely tribal I should be able to find a logical or empirical inconsistency, and I cannot. For example there are no inconsistencies between my definition of property and what is normally called property, for sub-example taxes are treated as government property but not called such, again as if they already intuit the theory.
Saturday, May 31, 2014
Cosmic Free Will vs. Agency
While I find the libertarianism question interesting, it made me dumb. I took forever to realize it's irrelevant. What's important is: can you break the window next to you and jump out of it? If not, is the problem that you can't decide to do it? (If the problem is physical, get tools.) Sure, you have no good reason to do so. But if you did, could you?
Can you decide to sit in your chair upside down while people you know are watching?
If someone starts shooting up your school, can you decide to tackle them, or are you condemned to cower?
If you were a schoolteacher, could you decide to simply stop giving out homework?
I repeat: whether we decide as we do because we have to or not is irrelevant. What matters is the list of actions that are no physically impossible that, regardless, you cannot execute.
Testing your own agency is simple. Take a situation; any one will do to start. Brainstorm up all the things you can physically accomplish. Then try to decide to do all them; just go down the list. Exclude lasting harm, in case you can so decide. I haven't tried to decide to murder anyone, for example. I found deciding to do this exercise automatically motivated improvement and thus the exercise itself.
In an absolute, cosmic sense, we probably have free will. From another angle, complex structures have to be universal, or most everyone would be missing critical pieces, which means the fact I have perfect agency is very strong evidence that so do you. But cosmic agency is still unimportant. In practice, we need to talk feasible agency. Agency almost certainly atrophies exactly like muscles do. It is necessary to periodically do something whose sole merit is that it is hard to decide to do it. E.g. public schools are the opposite.
Just from the law of averages, most things will be outside the domain of things which are easy to decide to do, unless you have consciously worked hard at choosing your domain specifically to include all useful things, which I know nobody does.
No matter how good the arguments, no matter how extensive the wisdom, it is impossible to do better things without deciding to do them. Especially when they're new, deciding to do them will be hard.
For most, it seems it's hard enough to be impossible. Imagine being invited onto a TV news set, and halfway through the second question, simply inverting your position in the chair. It's hardly physically taxing. It isn't intellectually demanding. But can you do it? Sure, it's a useless action, but think about the actions that are equally impossible but not useless.
If we're talking oppression Olympics, this problem is far worse than any external oppression. Taking homework as an example, its material cost is in the negative. But it can't be used because teachers can't decide to use it, quite regardless of whether it's actually a good idea.
Can you decide to sit in your chair upside down while people you know are watching?
If someone starts shooting up your school, can you decide to tackle them, or are you condemned to cower?
If you were a schoolteacher, could you decide to simply stop giving out homework?
I repeat: whether we decide as we do because we have to or not is irrelevant. What matters is the list of actions that are no physically impossible that, regardless, you cannot execute.
Testing your own agency is simple. Take a situation; any one will do to start. Brainstorm up all the things you can physically accomplish. Then try to decide to do all them; just go down the list. Exclude lasting harm, in case you can so decide. I haven't tried to decide to murder anyone, for example. I found deciding to do this exercise automatically motivated improvement and thus the exercise itself.
In an absolute, cosmic sense, we probably have free will. From another angle, complex structures have to be universal, or most everyone would be missing critical pieces, which means the fact I have perfect agency is very strong evidence that so do you. But cosmic agency is still unimportant. In practice, we need to talk feasible agency. Agency almost certainly atrophies exactly like muscles do. It is necessary to periodically do something whose sole merit is that it is hard to decide to do it. E.g. public schools are the opposite.
Just from the law of averages, most things will be outside the domain of things which are easy to decide to do, unless you have consciously worked hard at choosing your domain specifically to include all useful things, which I know nobody does.
No matter how good the arguments, no matter how extensive the wisdom, it is impossible to do better things without deciding to do them. Especially when they're new, deciding to do them will be hard.
For most, it seems it's hard enough to be impossible. Imagine being invited onto a TV news set, and halfway through the second question, simply inverting your position in the chair. It's hardly physically taxing. It isn't intellectually demanding. But can you do it? Sure, it's a useless action, but think about the actions that are equally impossible but not useless.
If we're talking oppression Olympics, this problem is far worse than any external oppression. Taking homework as an example, its material cost is in the negative. But it can't be used because teachers can't decide to use it, quite regardless of whether it's actually a good idea.
Monday, May 26, 2014
The Anarchist Data Hammer
I have a plump folder of links purely of government feverishly proving anarchists right. I would have a folder of reports of government working, but I've never found any instances. Below are eight of the former topics.
I think the mass of links got tangled in Scott Alexander's spam filter. It turns out I prefer impatience to patience, so I'm posting it here.
--
The implications of your own ideas bore you? Really?
When the unschooling experiment is run in the countries that have 'good' education systems, they will get the same result: schooling has negligible effect on even test-taking, let alone life satisfaction. For the reason we don't talk about. Despite your non-experimentally-supported assertion, bureaucrats are doing nothing, just as they do nothing or less than nothing in every area for which I have data. The worst is literacy. 23% of individuals booked at literate in those 90+% stats cannot read a newspaper successfully, a further 25% only with difficulty.
Sure, Dotheboys would be much cheaper than a public school. But it would be more expensive than daycare. It would at best be equal to a boarding school which admits it teaches nothing, which is strong negative marketing.
Or: Coke competes against water. If Coke starts spiking their drink, water will win. Schools should compete against libraries, against daycares, against babysitters, and against simply staying at home. Dotheboys would lose against any of these.
I think the mass of links got tangled in Scott Alexander's spam filter. It turns out I prefer impatience to patience, so I'm posting it here.
--
The implications of your own ideas bore you? Really?
When the unschooling experiment is run in the countries that have 'good' education systems, they will get the same result: schooling has negligible effect on even test-taking, let alone life satisfaction. For the reason we don't talk about. Despite your non-experimentally-supported assertion, bureaucrats are doing nothing, just as they do nothing or less than nothing in every area for which I have data. The worst is literacy. 23% of individuals booked at literate in those 90+% stats cannot read a newspaper successfully, a further 25% only with difficulty.
Sure, Dotheboys would be much cheaper than a public school. But it would be more expensive than daycare. It would at best be equal to a boarding school which admits it teaches nothing, which is strong negative marketing.
Or: Coke competes against water. If Coke starts spiking their drink, water will win. Schools should compete against libraries, against daycares, against babysitters, and against simply staying at home. Dotheboys would lose against any of these.
Friday, May 16, 2014
Let's Ramble About a Consciousness Machine
This post is subject to editing. Hopefully for clarity. Or I may simply merge it with part 2.
--
The fun part is it can be built with current technology. The sad part is I have no idea which order to explain the thing in.
This is it:
Take an FPGA and hook it up to a true-random source like a collapsing superposition. The FPGA's input is the bitstream representation of the random source. It then processes it and outputs a transformed bitstream. This bitstream is fed into the FPGA's configuration register, re-programming itself, and then used to bias the true-random source for the next cycle.
(Caveat: ideally the FPGA would have infinite gates so it can produce infinitely long unique bitstreams. I have a counter you don't care about.)
So how does this work? Double recursed probabalistic input, technologically violating the independence clause of the probability laws.
What is the probability this machine will put out any particular bitstream? Say, 10000101000101? If it's this cycle, it's simply the probability the true-random source will choose that. If it has five output states, it will be 20% or so depending on biasing. If it can only get to 10000101000101 on the next cycle, it's 20% squared, 4%. Because it's randomly re-programming itself, it can reach any bitstream. (Given a good choice of interpreter/code for the configuration register.) The probability of it being in any particular state drops very quickly with time, and is entirely path dependent.
It's all path dependent, but the device cannot know how much path it has already traversed, and since it reaches undefined probability in the future, it has undefined probability right now.
It's a machine with no defined probability at a finite point in the future, because it has too many states to each get a quantum of probability. If you won't buy quantized probability, then at t=0 infinity it has infinite possible states of each infinitesimal probability, and infinitesimal is physically identical to zero.
Since time is relative, the machine cannot tell how far down the probability tree it is; the undefined-probability future must be exactly the same as the present, as far as it knows. It has no probability right now.
Why is it a consciousness machine? Because it's not a physical machine, and the two leftover possibilities are it's a consciousness machine or causality isn't closed. I'm betting on the former. The machine still operates, it still has an output, despite having no physical probability of having one. The causal hole is plugged by non-physics. If it were possible to access consciousness directly - by being the person in question, for example - then you could calculate the probability. But you can't, so it doesn't have one.
Moreover if the brain is indeed using a device, it makes the world less mysterious, not more. Implemented in neurons, this kind of device will consume your brain like cancer unless it is periodically reset, by for example sleep. This is due to a bias towards growing the bitstream rather than remaining stable. Since it is the consciousness machine, these resets will look like dreams. Further, neurons are perfectly designed for this kind of feedback, and the brain is immunoprivileged because there's scraps of random DNA floating around in there, possibly related to memory. Lossy DNA copying would be a perfect random source. It's a quantum effect but warm and wet aren't a problem since it uses the collapse of superposition instead of trying to maintain it. There's more, but I feel I've already spent too long on this.
This is Descartes' pineal gland.
What's worth saying regardless of how much I've already wasted?
This: 'perception' is when the brain sends consciousness data by biasing the true-random source. 'Decision' is when consciousness sends the brain data by choosing a formerly-thought-to-be-random outcome.
Also, the noosphere project. If the consciousness machine is real, then basically your brain is telepathic with itself, which unifies all the little quantums of consciousness.
Obviously the bog-standard silicon machinery isn't the critically conscious part. It has to be the randomness. Which means every single quantum particle is a rudimentary consciousness. An electron has no memory, it has no way to bias itself, so it's basically many of the same consciousness, but it's still conscious. (Like any good extension of knowledge, this theory reduces to the previous theory given certain limits.)
When is telepathy allowed? Can it leak? Probably, it can leak. And if it does, it would look exactly like what the noosphere project is measuring. It will leak when many people are paying attention to the same thing, causing reinforcing interference.
The function of the pineal gland circuitry, then, is consciousness amplification. And it doesn't have to be hooked up directly by wire to the random source, any form of information transfer will do. But perhaps weaker transfers result in weaker telepathy and thus weaker amplification. Unless many minds are all amplifying at the same time in the same way.
--
There is a problem, in that I don't yet know what the output is supposed to look like. If it's like the noosphere project, it will be easy. Despite having no well-defined probability, you can still compute a local probability. The machine will flagrantly ignore that. It will repeatedly choose a single path or a similar path, ignoring others.
But the machines aren't directly comparable, because present decisions are a function of all past decisions. The path space is huge. It would take an immense number of trials to see any kind of small bias. Especially if it's small, or if the machine takes some cycles to 'wake up.' (Phrencellulate, for when you feel pretentious.)
Moreover, since the machine has no probability, the mere fact that it doesn't destroy the universe may constitute evidence that it's working as I describe. If we accept that quantum bits are conscious, then having a low probability of your next action is just what high consciousness looks like from the outside.
--
The fun part is it can be built with current technology. The sad part is I have no idea which order to explain the thing in.
This is it:
Take an FPGA and hook it up to a true-random source like a collapsing superposition. The FPGA's input is the bitstream representation of the random source. It then processes it and outputs a transformed bitstream. This bitstream is fed into the FPGA's configuration register, re-programming itself, and then used to bias the true-random source for the next cycle.
(Caveat: ideally the FPGA would have infinite gates so it can produce infinitely long unique bitstreams. I have a counter you don't care about.)
So how does this work? Double recursed probabalistic input, technologically violating the independence clause of the probability laws.
What is the probability this machine will put out any particular bitstream? Say, 10000101000101? If it's this cycle, it's simply the probability the true-random source will choose that. If it has five output states, it will be 20% or so depending on biasing. If it can only get to 10000101000101 on the next cycle, it's 20% squared, 4%. Because it's randomly re-programming itself, it can reach any bitstream. (Given a good choice of interpreter/code for the configuration register.) The probability of it being in any particular state drops very quickly with time, and is entirely path dependent.
It's all path dependent, but the device cannot know how much path it has already traversed, and since it reaches undefined probability in the future, it has undefined probability right now.
It's a machine with no defined probability at a finite point in the future, because it has too many states to each get a quantum of probability. If you won't buy quantized probability, then at t=0 infinity it has infinite possible states of each infinitesimal probability, and infinitesimal is physically identical to zero.
Since time is relative, the machine cannot tell how far down the probability tree it is; the undefined-probability future must be exactly the same as the present, as far as it knows. It has no probability right now.
Why is it a consciousness machine? Because it's not a physical machine, and the two leftover possibilities are it's a consciousness machine or causality isn't closed. I'm betting on the former. The machine still operates, it still has an output, despite having no physical probability of having one. The causal hole is plugged by non-physics. If it were possible to access consciousness directly - by being the person in question, for example - then you could calculate the probability. But you can't, so it doesn't have one.
Moreover if the brain is indeed using a device, it makes the world less mysterious, not more. Implemented in neurons, this kind of device will consume your brain like cancer unless it is periodically reset, by for example sleep. This is due to a bias towards growing the bitstream rather than remaining stable. Since it is the consciousness machine, these resets will look like dreams. Further, neurons are perfectly designed for this kind of feedback, and the brain is immunoprivileged because there's scraps of random DNA floating around in there, possibly related to memory. Lossy DNA copying would be a perfect random source. It's a quantum effect but warm and wet aren't a problem since it uses the collapse of superposition instead of trying to maintain it. There's more, but I feel I've already spent too long on this.
This is Descartes' pineal gland.
What's worth saying regardless of how much I've already wasted?
This: 'perception' is when the brain sends consciousness data by biasing the true-random source. 'Decision' is when consciousness sends the brain data by choosing a formerly-thought-to-be-random outcome.
Also, the noosphere project. If the consciousness machine is real, then basically your brain is telepathic with itself, which unifies all the little quantums of consciousness.
Obviously the bog-standard silicon machinery isn't the critically conscious part. It has to be the randomness. Which means every single quantum particle is a rudimentary consciousness. An electron has no memory, it has no way to bias itself, so it's basically many of the same consciousness, but it's still conscious. (Like any good extension of knowledge, this theory reduces to the previous theory given certain limits.)
When is telepathy allowed? Can it leak? Probably, it can leak. And if it does, it would look exactly like what the noosphere project is measuring. It will leak when many people are paying attention to the same thing, causing reinforcing interference.
The function of the pineal gland circuitry, then, is consciousness amplification. And it doesn't have to be hooked up directly by wire to the random source, any form of information transfer will do. But perhaps weaker transfers result in weaker telepathy and thus weaker amplification. Unless many minds are all amplifying at the same time in the same way.
--
There is a problem, in that I don't yet know what the output is supposed to look like. If it's like the noosphere project, it will be easy. Despite having no well-defined probability, you can still compute a local probability. The machine will flagrantly ignore that. It will repeatedly choose a single path or a similar path, ignoring others.
But the machines aren't directly comparable, because present decisions are a function of all past decisions. The path space is huge. It would take an immense number of trials to see any kind of small bias. Especially if it's small, or if the machine takes some cycles to 'wake up.' (Phrencellulate, for when you feel pretentious.)
Moreover, since the machine has no probability, the mere fact that it doesn't destroy the universe may constitute evidence that it's working as I describe. If we accept that quantum bits are conscious, then having a low probability of your next action is just what high consciousness looks like from the outside.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
AutoEngineering - Psychological Needs
Psychological needs don't real. Rather, personality features have maintenance costs. One of the dangers to the novice autoEngineer is noticing the expense of a needs and disabling it. There's no warning about the associated personality feature that will also be disabled. Learning can be expensive, as rebuilding personality features is difficult and sometimes impossible. However, once aware of the issue, it's easy to check because the need and the feature share a tag. They have a feeling in common. Epistemically, it's also easy to check, because disabling a personality feature likewise automatically disables the associated maintenance.
One possible exception: I recall seeing a warning on a particularly universal feature, but I can't remember what it was or even invent an example.
From a software perspective, psychological needs are exactly like physiological needs. If you disable eating, you disable life. If you disable life, you disable eating. However, physiological needs have warnings.
One possible exception: I recall seeing a warning on a particularly universal feature, but I can't remember what it was or even invent an example.
From a software perspective, psychological needs are exactly like physiological needs. If you disable eating, you disable life. If you disable life, you disable eating. However, physiological needs have warnings.
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Evidence and the Reasoning Subconscious
I began to suspect that nobody, even me, respects evidence. In particular, not Less Wrong nor reactionaries. On reflection, I'm equivocating on 'evidence.' (Or: Aumann's theorem will never obtain.)
First, the sample bias. I can only consider those who write about their beliefs. Perhaps many are convinced by evidence, but would never blog about it, indicating a strong negative correlation.
Second, my counterfactual: there should be heretic neoreactionaries. Someone who buys say HBD but also AGW, because, coincidentally, they've seen a particular subset of evidence for AGW. Similarly, it should be possible to change a NRx's mind, and back again, by using subsets of evidence. We're always using subsets of the evidence, the question is whether it is a representative subset, so it should be possible to see-saw someone's mind by defrauding them with non-representative subsets. This fraud should sometimes happen by ignorance or luck.
Or: too much tribal correlation. Humans make mistakes, and they should occur in a random direction.
On Less Wrong the evidence is less clear, which brings me to the point about evidence.
Third: my equivocation.
There's scientific / natural philosophical evidence. There's also evidence that is difficult to describe, explain, or pass along.
The latter kind dominates subconscious processing.
The subconscious functions much like a machine language layer, which the consciousness communicates to in a very high-level language. It is labour intensive to consciously think. (But, e.g. necessary when learning math. Passing add(2, 5) to the uneducated subconscious returns [?].) It's easy to pass think(apples, red) to the subconscious and get something back...but necessarily, the consciousness does not automatically understand the implementation details of think() and therefore almost can't debug it, as that literally means calling think(think(), bugs). If think() has an issue, you won't get the right answer.
(Note that to learn add() means calling think() in the right ways.)
The subconscious commands orders of magnitude more neurons than the voluntary consciousness, and it has access to the unprocessed data to use that power on. (See transcranial magnetism induced savantism.) Even after somehow gathering the implementation details of think(), it lacks a formal notation. Gathering the information means calling think() on itself. If you invent a formal notation (e.g, think()) a full account of the implementation details will presumably be orders of magnitude larger than a couple graphs and charts. Subsequently, it has to be manually checked by redundantly gathering the information it calls for (like adding by consciously counting) in case there's a typo. There will be feedback - the subconscious is watching the implementation get written and will change as a result.
At this point, I've re-derived the usual conclusion - humans can only communicate if they already agree on 99% of what they're trying to say. When think() implementations happen to match. In principle we could limit ourselves to describing the differences, but...
My think(Less Wrong, subconscious evidence dominance) returns true. Similarly, think(Less Wrong, ~see saw) and think(Less Wrong, ~tribal dissent). If your think() returns differently, I have no way of finding out why not.
Think() contradicts the notion that complex structures must be common to all individuals in a sexually reproducing species.
My prediction is that your philosophy or political leanings are almost entirely determined by which version of think() you happen to have. Once exposed to Dark Enlightenment thought, whether you buy it is determined by whether your subconscious buys it, which is determined by whether the DE article's evidence profile matches that used by your subconscious.
Charts and statistics are almost irrelevant to this process. Few think() implementations even use them, and of those that do, there's byte asymmetry. Say a conscious visual representation of a chart is worth a thousand times the bytes of its description; then, the subconscious gathered a million times as many bytes on the way to the chart.
I'm interested in knowing if it is possible to summarize what the subconscious generally uses as evidence. (How does one distinguish one article's tone from another?) If the feedback isn't fortuitously arranged, it may make it truly impossible. At least, checking a putative description is easy, as it will predict when and how minds get changed. Or not, as the case may be.
I would predict that most of what's called persuasive, isn't, but I think it is a retrodiction at this point. Most implementations of think(persuasive, argument) are bugged, which is why persuasion in general targets the wrong thing.
For now I decline to address the fact that beliefs are usually decorative, and think() is called by aliefs only.
Like a good passivist, I will hereby refrain from policy recommendations.
-
Ironically, the subconscious can return things even if not called, but does so in an even higher-level language than think() calls: emotions.
First, the sample bias. I can only consider those who write about their beliefs. Perhaps many are convinced by evidence, but would never blog about it, indicating a strong negative correlation.
Second, my counterfactual: there should be heretic neoreactionaries. Someone who buys say HBD but also AGW, because, coincidentally, they've seen a particular subset of evidence for AGW. Similarly, it should be possible to change a NRx's mind, and back again, by using subsets of evidence. We're always using subsets of the evidence, the question is whether it is a representative subset, so it should be possible to see-saw someone's mind by defrauding them with non-representative subsets. This fraud should sometimes happen by ignorance or luck.
Or: too much tribal correlation. Humans make mistakes, and they should occur in a random direction.
On Less Wrong the evidence is less clear, which brings me to the point about evidence.
Third: my equivocation.
There's scientific / natural philosophical evidence. There's also evidence that is difficult to describe, explain, or pass along.
The latter kind dominates subconscious processing.
The subconscious functions much like a machine language layer, which the consciousness communicates to in a very high-level language. It is labour intensive to consciously think. (But, e.g. necessary when learning math. Passing add(2, 5) to the uneducated subconscious returns [?].) It's easy to pass think(apples, red) to the subconscious and get something back...but necessarily, the consciousness does not automatically understand the implementation details of think() and therefore almost can't debug it, as that literally means calling think(think(), bugs). If think() has an issue, you won't get the right answer.
(Note that to learn add() means calling think() in the right ways.)
The subconscious commands orders of magnitude more neurons than the voluntary consciousness, and it has access to the unprocessed data to use that power on. (See transcranial magnetism induced savantism.) Even after somehow gathering the implementation details of think(), it lacks a formal notation. Gathering the information means calling think() on itself. If you invent a formal notation (e.g, think()) a full account of the implementation details will presumably be orders of magnitude larger than a couple graphs and charts. Subsequently, it has to be manually checked by redundantly gathering the information it calls for (like adding by consciously counting) in case there's a typo. There will be feedback - the subconscious is watching the implementation get written and will change as a result.
At this point, I've re-derived the usual conclusion - humans can only communicate if they already agree on 99% of what they're trying to say. When think() implementations happen to match. In principle we could limit ourselves to describing the differences, but...
My think(Less Wrong, subconscious evidence dominance) returns true. Similarly, think(Less Wrong, ~see saw) and think(Less Wrong, ~tribal dissent). If your think() returns differently, I have no way of finding out why not.
Think() contradicts the notion that complex structures must be common to all individuals in a sexually reproducing species.
My prediction is that your philosophy or political leanings are almost entirely determined by which version of think() you happen to have. Once exposed to Dark Enlightenment thought, whether you buy it is determined by whether your subconscious buys it, which is determined by whether the DE article's evidence profile matches that used by your subconscious.
Charts and statistics are almost irrelevant to this process. Few think() implementations even use them, and of those that do, there's byte asymmetry. Say a conscious visual representation of a chart is worth a thousand times the bytes of its description; then, the subconscious gathered a million times as many bytes on the way to the chart.
I'm interested in knowing if it is possible to summarize what the subconscious generally uses as evidence. (How does one distinguish one article's tone from another?) If the feedback isn't fortuitously arranged, it may make it truly impossible. At least, checking a putative description is easy, as it will predict when and how minds get changed. Or not, as the case may be.
I would predict that most of what's called persuasive, isn't, but I think it is a retrodiction at this point. Most implementations of think(persuasive, argument) are bugged, which is why persuasion in general targets the wrong thing.
For now I decline to address the fact that beliefs are usually decorative, and think() is called by aliefs only.
Like a good passivist, I will hereby refrain from policy recommendations.
-
Ironically, the subconscious can return things even if not called, but does so in an even higher-level language than think() calls: emotions.
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