On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 01:22:51PM -0700, meekerdb wrote: > On 8/24/2014 12:55 AM, Russell Standish wrote: > >> > >I don't think that can be the case. I don't see how it can be anything > >to be like a tree, yet trees are clearly DNA-based beings. So you > >would get skewed results if you were to reason as though you could be > >a tree. > > Exactly. It's a reductio on the pattern of argument you used to > prove ants can't be conscious. I used it to prove ants can't be DNA > based.
I don't understand. How is having DNA relevant to having consciousness? It is quite plausible that non-DNA-based forms are conscious (eg a computer running a suitable AI program), and that some DNA-based forms are not conscious (trees, for example). > > > > >The reference class cannot be larger than the class of conscious > >beings. Obviously it can be quite a bit smaller, but there must be a > >maximal reference class for which anthropic reasoning is valid, > >although it is quite controversial what it is - some suggest it may > >even be as small as those people capable of understanding the > >anthropic argument, a sizable fraction of which inhabits this list! > > That's what bothers me. If you exclude ants because they're not > conscious (and I assume you've read "Godel, Escher, and Bach") and > hence can't understand the argument, why not exclude people who > can't understand the argument? > "Ant Fugue" is about the possibility that ant _colonies_ might be conscious. My argument has nothing to say about ant colonies, even though I consider "Ant Fugue" to be just an interesting speculation, rather than a serious claim about ant colonies. Oh - perhaps you mean "can't understand the argument" as in organisms that can't understand the anthropic argument must be excluded from the reference class. This seems a rather implausible claim - just because anthropic argument has not occurred to you yet, shouldn't really exclude you. The idea that self-awareness is a necessary requirement of the reference class is a perhaps more believable claim - in order to even think anthropically requires a concept of self - but then I'm still not sure what it even means to be conscious, but not self-aware. What does it even mean to "be an amoeba", as Bruno seems to think is possible. > >But that smacks of parochialism, much like the notion of > >geocentrism. I just haven't found a convincing argument that the > >maximal reference class is not just the class of conscious organisms, > >of beings for whom there is a something it is like to be. > > > >But my question (which you haven't answered) is what you think this > >maximal reference class is from your four part classification of > >consciousness. > > If I had to pick, I'd say it was those entities who were aware of > their own thoughts and had sufficient language to formulate Bayesian > inference. > The Bayesian theory is a bit stringent don't you think. There are plenty of formulations of the doomsday argument that don't use Bayesian reasoning. Take Gott's version for example. Self-awareness, as I mentioned, is more defensible property. The question is whether non-self-aware consciousness (your koi) is a coherent concept. Attacks on anthropic reasoning will work better by choosing a reference class which is indisputably a subset of the reference class, such as all human beings, and then demonstrating a contradiction. I thought I had come up with such an example with my "Chinese paradox", but it turned out anthropic reasoning was rescued from that by the peculiar distribution of country population sizes that happens to hold in reality. AR has proved remakably resilient to empirical tests. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
