On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > People make predictions based on past experience. > That's induction. Flash a bright light at a snail, wait 2 seconds and then give it a mild electrical shock. Repeat this several times. Then you will note that the snail will start to retreat into its shell as soon as the light flashes even before the electrical jolt is sent. If you then change tactics and flash the light but give no shock the snail will learn to ignore the light. And the snail can thank induction for all of this survival enhancing behavior. Induction is a good rule of thumb that works more often than it fails, but even when it fails and the prediction is wrong people still feel like people , and although I don't know it for a fact I have a hunch snails would still feel like snails. So why do we keep talking about the accuracy of predictions as if they have something to do with consciousness? > > > You can say to the rat, "personal pronouns have no meaning when there are > multiple copies of you, and therefore it is nonsensical to predict that you > will get the reward", but the rat won't care, > If I'm the rat I care who gets the reward and I care what the bet is. And what exactly is the bet anyway? > > > and I think most humans won't care either. > Maybe so who knows, humans do a lot of silly stuff for superstitious or religious reasons, voting for Trump for example, but I thought we were talking about the nature of reality not human irrationality. John K Clark -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
