Very Bad Sign #243: Many people all agree that a statement is definitely true but they can't agree on why and/or what the statement means.

Tim Tyler, the thermodynamically problematic part of the Matrix is the fact that humans had induced something like nuclear winter to deny the machines the energy of the sun. Morpheus states that the machines then used humans as a source of energy. Humans get their energy from food: no sun implies no food implies no humans.

Unknown and Hopefully Anonymous, If basing your beliefs on established science and systematically rejecting every incompatible methodology is "religion" then stick a ridiculous hat on my head and call me the Pope of Reality.

We can only speculate about what actually happened.

I -- err -- what? What actually happened is that the Wachowski brothers made a movie. No humans were enslaved in the making of this film.

I don't buy this sort of skepticism at all. Yes, we can imagine that the external world in an illusion, but the basic flaw is (like so much in philosophy) privileging our ability to imagine something over science. Whether we can be deceived in this way is an empirical matter. Yes, you can say "everything you learned about empirical science is part of the illusion," but all you've done is taken your ability to imagine an outcome and privileged that above scientific experiment. Science always trumps imagination. It is therefore, I think, impossible to formulate the skeptical thesis.

This is difficult to think about. Philosophy has given us a view of the world where perception is essentially a subset of imagination. We have pictures in our head and sometimes, if we're lucky, they correspond to the world. The scientific view of perception, however, is that it's just physics-as-usual. The philosophical story is an a priori psychology; if you reject the a priori, yet still buy that story, then you haven't doubted "all the branches and leaves of that root" sufficiently. The scientific story of perception involves photons and receptors and neurons and macromolecules and all that good stuff. It can't be used to call those things into doubt.

The correct view of all this is a (restricted) Quinean one: You have to accept the ontology of science as basic ontology. Science undermines our methods of determining other (metaphysical) ontologies (i.e., a priori reasoning); in everything we do, beginning with thought and perception, science should be our starting point. Nothing we know about thought and perception can undermine what we know about physics and chemistry and molecular biology because thought and perception are high-level areas of biology: everything we know about them is based on scientific ontology. No skeptical theses that undermines science can be constructed (science, however, can still undermine our common sense view of the world) and without skepticism epistemology reduces to neurobiology and sociology.

This is the difficult part: Even if it's empirically possible to totally deceive somebody, to run a simulation of them inside a supercomputer and manipulate their entire life and history, we still have no reason to doubt science. Personally I doubt that this is possible. I think the whole concept of a "subjectively real" simulation is a basic error of reasoning and I doubt that cognition and memory can be so arbitrarily manipulated anyway. Regardless, if my doubts turn out to be unfounded, it will be empirical science that proves them unfounded and the argument itself will only be as strong as empirical science itself. We cannot formulate this argument based on what we can merely imagine happening to ourselves.

Descartes had it backwards. If he'd thrown out "I think therefore I am" and taken the new physics and mathematics as his starting point he would have had a very powerful form of naturalism on his hands. A naturalism that doubts common sense and accepts science as the starting point of all reason. As I like to say, there's no distance between ourselves and the world, what happens at the retina is no more privileged than what happens at the microscope or the voltage clamp. We can just as easily take those as our starting point.

You can blame focus groups for that particular blunder in The Matrix movie. The original script had the machines using human brains as computing nodes, but the focus groups consisted of people too stupid to understand what they were talking about.

No matter how badly you're being tricked, there still must be something there to be tricked. So Cogito Ergo Sum applies without any need for further logical justification than the fact that you thought of it (whether naturally or induced by the deceiving demon, and regardless of the validity any further reasoning or justification) in the first place.

A more generalized idea might be "something exists".

Re: The original script had the machines using human brains as computing nodes, but the focus groups consisted of people too stupid to understand what they were talking about.

Here's what this original script says:

They discovered a new form of fusion. All that was required to initiate the reaction was a small electric charge. Throughout human history we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

• http://thematrixtruth.remoteviewinglight.com/html/original-matrix-script-13.html

Searched "On Certainty" for references to the word "probability". Found one hit, a reference to law courts.

One theory (The Matrix spawned a lot of philosophy talk, and even books) was that, unbeknownst to the machines themselves, they couldn't simply kill off the humans - for ethical reasons. I mean, there are obviously more efficient ways to generate energy, but the robots couldn't kill off their creators - so they came up with this elaborate scheme of harvesting energy from their bodies, and never thinking much about how they were actually losing energy in the process.

I had thought of that particular plot hole solution. In fact, however, most violations of thermodynamics and other physical laws seem to occur within the Matrix, not outside. That is, the rules of the Matrix do not add up to normality.

There actually is a cover in the movie, though: the human energy source is "combined with a source of fusion". This is, as one review stated, like elaborately explaining how a 747 is powered by rubber-bands and then mentioning that this is combined with four jet engines.

"Very Bad Sign #243: Many people all agree that a statement is definitely true but they can't agree on why and/or what the statement means."

Do you mean very bad for the person rejecting the statement? Such a consensus would seem to suggest that there are many reasons for affirming its truth, and many different ways it can be interpreted which are still true.

Eliezer: I think that the folk here do agree on why "cogito" is true and on what the statement means, though of course, almost all meanings gloss over some confusion. I agree with elementary school students about what 2+2=4 means and why it is true even if I can ground it in number theory and they can't.

Laura: Evolutions are stupid and goal-less and produce structures with functional roles. No conflict with Brandt there. OTOH, evolution produces facts about the world, not facts about the features of structures in the space of physically possible structures, but the major confusion about qualia seems to be that we don't understand how qualia bearing structures can be present in the space of possible structures or how within that space they are distinguished from non-qualia bearing structures. It seems likely that if we answer this question we will also know how evolution in some environments could select for those structures at which point the question would have dissolved.

I always saw I think therefore I am as a definition of to be. What it basically says is that "Thought exists" and that when you are referring to yourself, ultimately, you are referring to these thoughts that you are certain exist. When you say "I walk", you mean "those thoughts of which I am certain perceive, through senses, that they are attached to a body that is walking".

It also means that those thoughts of which you are not certain, such as "we must allow the use of brains to think about thinking" are not part of you; they are a separate object. You are the presence of this thought, not its result.

Some problems are hard to solve, and hard even to define clearly. It's possible that "qualia" is not referring to anything meaningful, but unless you are able to explain why it feels meaningful to someone, but isn't really, I don't think you should demand that they stop using it.

Having said that, here's my attempt at an operational definition of qualia.

Doug S: Cite? I'd love to believe that. It would also explain how humans can subvert the matrix, if they are themselves running the simulation.

Eliezer: Any universe with a reasonable notion of energy and probability will have statistical mechanics. In a sense it is far deeper than most of the physics that gets studied. The fact that gas expands when you heat it is due to the form of the density of states. The fact that you can get heat engines, and that they have a maximum efficiency of T_2 - T_1 / T_2 is stronger than that.

"I think it's cleaner to build the foundation around the basic laws of physics." I think it's more honest to build the foundation on the observer, over the course of their life arc, encountering different experiences.

• hmm, there's this thing called language I'm speaking and this thing called thoughts I'm thinking.
• hmm, there are these things called scientists, and this body of thought called science. This is what they've purported to discovery about reality.
• hmm, these are the tiny handfuls of experiments I've done myself over the course of my life.

which apparently has for many lead to

• ... ... [death/permanent lack of conscious experience].

That's my interaction with science, and I think gives the scope of most or all of our interactions with science, and determining the nature of reality generally. Reality seems big and messy, internally and externally. It seems humans past and present have figured some (even many) things out about reality, but as an individual passing through we have limited opportunities to confirm these discoveries. There seems to be a strong motivation to express undue certainty about reality to increase one's status, as well perhaps to have strong belief in things just to ease one's mind or as an aesthetic, but that doesn't make the strong beliefs justified.

But that, not physics, seems to me to be the honest starting point. For Einstein, for Witten, for Eliezer, and for me.

@bigcitylib

In general I think it is safe to say that OB and its readers do not consider themselves philosophers and are not conversant with those systems of thought. It's helpful at this point to recall Deleuze's critique of philosophy here at OB, its repressive role in the history of thought.

OB in the main seem to consider themselves scientists, but altho I agree you are quite correct here to namecheck Wittgenstein, they do not overall view the world as he did - split coarsely between the analysis of language & concepts and the discovery of fact, or between philosophy and science.

I do think you have an excellent point that EY would benefit from reading PI (Philosophical Investigations), especially of course Sec. 561, where Wittgenstein discusses the meanings of "is."

That might resolve his concern about its supposed ambiguity.

A more general note to the blog might be that Descartes took his cogito from Augustine's formulation in City of God. There really is no doubt about its intended meaning - that commentators here might not know it or be able to articulate it doesn't make the statement itself meaningless or nonsense.

It's crucial to remember that the Cartesian project is to ultimately uphold the Sorbonne and Catholic doctrine; this is why his Dedication is to the theologians there. He himself was a devout Catholic his entire life and believed his Method extended Catholic thought and served to refute Skepticism.

I've always taken cogito as "Here are some thoughts bouncing about. They must be causally related to some set of existent phenomena." which I think is pretty safe.

Would the humans would have "scorched the sky" if they had believed it would harm them more than the machines? Presumably they had food stockpiles - or some other means of surviving.

Anyway, this is a story told by Morpheus in the movie. We can only speculate about what actually happened. There is no need to hypothesize violations of the laws of thermodynamics.

Robin there's no logic to trust. Even though we might use the phrase "therefore," in reality we are not performing a process of reason, but just changing our perspective on a fact. Looking at the same data askance. That's my way of thinking about it anyway.

My version is "there is experience, therefore something is", but some year after I also understood that there is no reason even to trust that logic, no matter how bullet-proof it sounds...

A hard question for me is still, what is the functional role and underlying mechanism of qualia in the timeless mathematical structure of the multiverse. And what is the minimal structure required for qualia. And I mean qualia in the direct phenomenal sense, not defined as anything epiphenomenal. I am perfectly aware of and a great fan of the Anti-Zomibe principle. Still this basic question just does not disolve for me.

[I'm probably going to be the latest in a long line of people saying something like this, but I hope my wording, at least, makes this worth existing.]

"I think, therefore I am" is, in fact, deductive reasoning. The definition of "I am", as thought in the first person, as far as we can comprehend it, means "I think".

"I think, therefore I think" Or, more simply, "I think". The statement itself, as we are thinking it, cannot possibly be false - no matter the Demons we posit, we cannot be in simultaneous states of comprehending and not thinking.

"I am", by our very definitions, must be true for everyone who is reading this, as you are reading it. Because you are reading it.

I'm sorry, Eliezer, but I think you are mistaken if you think you can disprove "I am", thought in the first person.

One of the benefits I've drawn from Less Wrong so far - via posts like The Simple Truth - is more solid foundations for my beliefs. Since I study physics, I wasn't particularly worried about philosophical arguments against the scientific method anymore - science seemed to work, after all - but of those doubts that remained, many more still got (apparently) dispelled or dissolved.

That said, I never had doubts that fundamental. Could anybody really live that way? I don't have a coherent mental model for such a situation. Take Mad-Eye Moody in HPMoR with his constant paranoia, as in "Unless, of course, that's what they want you to think." - could such a character really function in the real world? Could they eat food without starving themselves to death out of paranoia? If you are paranoid about both X -> Y and X -> ~Y, how do you decide whether to do Y or ~Y? (It seems more plausible to me that Moody doesn't actually exhibit doubts that fundamental, than that he or anyone else could function properly despite those doubts.)

Effectively, of course, this is a sort of faith (metaphorically at least). Like many philosophers, you seem to have the implicit assumption that the Total Skeptical argument should be assumed false... just because. Seems a pretty good case for being a Total Skeptic.

In addition, to an extent it is possible to take Doubt further than you do, if in a minor way, without running into true pragmatic difficulties. The argument goes like this:

-What if my senses are a total illusion? If memory and Induction remain unquestioned, the conclusion here is that you have a consistent world you can affect to affect yourself and your "well-being" in terms of pleasure and pain anyway. A potential argument for selfishness.

For an AI there is no reason that isn't mind-bogglingly stupid to program this as part of their core philosophy. However, for human beings it is at least credible enough to consider.