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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33485 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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I'm not particularly sure how to respond to this. I can assure you that there is definitely something that it is 'like' to be me, because I have direct, unmediated experience of that thing. I experience qualia, but moreover, those qualia are not free-floating but are attached to a particular consciousness. I am more confident of this than I am of even the existence of an external world. How could I not be? Subjective experience precedes all else.

I presume that other human beings are also subjects of experience by analogy - they seem similar to me, so I assume that they are.

But I don't know how to get from this to a super-agent. I am definitely an agent. Other human beings are almost certainly agents as well, insofar as I recognise a similarity of kind between us. Germany? Where is the agent? Where is the consciousness or ego?

It's possible that we're talking past each other. My point is that there is no unified 'thing' that is Germany that possesses subjective experience. Therefore, because my understanding of the term 'agency' is inextricably connected to subjective experience (and thus will, desire, etc.), there is no agent that is Germany.

It's true that the overall concept or category of Germany contains many things that are agents. In that sense there is a distribution of qualia across Germany. But all of those qualia are attached to particular conscious agents - and none of them are attached to something called 'Germany'. Because Germany does not have a mind.

I think we may actually agree on this much?

In terms of how exactly you model the behavior of Germany- If you're modeling the qualia of Germany the same way you model the qualia of a single person, you are indeed doing it inaccurately. Ideally you should model its qualia in concept as being distributed via media and upbringing and being executed in an ecosystem by a collection of human agentic systems that are also doing lots of other things.

But translated into plain English, this really sounds to me like... you just agree with me. Germany is a collection of many independent human agents that we might model - in a way that I would describe as fictional or metaphorical - as a single giant agent. But that's just a model.

I'm not sure what the machine learning analogy even contributes here.

I'm hoping we agree that individual people have minds, and conscious, subjective experience.

I hope we also agree that Germany does not have conscious, subjective experience.

If you grant that agency has something to do with thought or desire or intentionality, things that can only exist in the mind, I'm not sure how you can avoid the conclusion that people have agency and countries do not.

We might conveniently model countries as having agency, and I think that's a necessary simplification since our brains are pretty well-optimised for modelling the behaviour of other people, animals, etc., and not for giant concepts like countries, so countries-as-agents can be a useful shorthand for us. But the country itself? It does not have the kind of agency that you or I have.

Mmm, yes, we mostly agree. I think the difference is in our understanding of the term "agent"

for me the agent is the construct that makes choices and does things. When I think "agent" I think reinforcement learners selecting a policy. I think min-max searching through a game tree. A human agent becomes a different agent if you separate it from its cybernetics. That is- the policy I follow is inextricably linked to the tools I have for processing information about the world. My collective systems output different choices about what to eat if my collective systems include internet access.

You could destroy most of my agency by removing all of my cybernetics and putting me in solitary confinement. But I would still have qualia. So qualia and agency seem highly separable to me. Agency is about processing information and outputting choices in the pursuit of a goal. qualia is about having an experience.

And the stuff about identity... It doesn't really matter if I'm a brain in a jar and this body is a remote controlled robot, or if I'm a brain in this body. What matters is how the brain is hooked up to the things it controls and how it sees itself as being able to control them and having goals relating to them. So in theory- a brain can be hooked up to Germany and see itself as Germany- and then it really would be Germany. In reality there is no such brain hooked up like that. But there are millions of brains hooked up in tiny ways like that such that each of them really is a little piece of Germany. I agree that it's a different architecture of agency. So it's not 'the kind of agency that you or I have' but it's the same category in my ontology... They're both agency to me.

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