Re: faith, zombies, and crazy people

Posted by Nick Thompson on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Fwd-America-and-the-Middle-East-Murder-in-Libya-The-Economist-tp7580497p7580654.html

Glen,

 

I wrote this, this morning but failed to send it.  It’s a little out of sequence.

 

These are REALLY interesting questions you ask here (see below).  I think to the extent that Eric and I can answer them, they are answered in the "interview with and old new realist" paper I sent you.   One of our strategies is a kind of pragmatic appeal to the consequences of believing the view I am pressing on you (and which you understand precisely, I think) vs the consequences of believing the folk theory of the inner mind that is implicit in our language. I think it's evident that with either theory, one is doomed to say something absurd eventually, but that the absurdities that flow from folk-theory are way more damaging than those that flow from our alternative, if only because people so readily confuse the folk theory with simple fact, whatever that might be.  At least with our theory you KNOW when you’re saying something crazy.

 

A strength of our view is that I think it characterizes more accurately how people actually come by their views of themselves and their motives and intentions.  See Kahneman's new book for instance (Fast and Slow Thinking), or the book by Laird (FEELINGS: The Perception of Self) that we read in our “coffee house seminar”  two springs ago.  The seminar's review of that book is nearly published and you will find it on line at  Behavior and Philosophy, in a few weeks.  Attached, in the meantime is a non-final typescript.

 

Thanks for your comments,

 

Nick  

 

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 6:30 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] faith, zombies, and crazy people

 

ERIC P. CHARLES wrote at 09/19/2012 02:54 PM:

> But Glen, when you talk about the infiltrator, or the person "paying

> lip-service", you are just appealing to a larger pattern of behavior.

 

Aha!!  Excellent!  So, tell me how to classify the patterns so that one pattern is just lip service and the other is belief!  If you do that, then we'll have our objective function.  I can develop an algorithm for that and we'll be able to automatically distinguish zombies from actors.

Then we can begin building machines that try to satisfy it.

 

> Agreeing with your assertion, "faking belief" looks different than

> "belief"... if you can see enough of the person's behavior and/or see

> a close enough level of detail.

 

The former, again, sounds like memory.  The latter is something else.

It implies something about scale.  We know actions are multi-scale (anatomy, physiology, chemistry, physics).  Is there a cut-off below which we need not go?  Genes?  Chemicals? Or does the multiscalar requirements for measuring belief extend all the way down?

 

> a person who believes X

> and a person faking belief in X are distinguished by observing a wide

> variety of ways in which the people interact with the world.

 

So, in addition to memory and crossing scales, the measures are also multivalent at any one instant or any one scale.

 

> Also, for the record, one of the problems with using "moles" is that

> it is very difficult to get people capable of participating in

> cultural practices of these sorts over extended periods without

> becoming believers. The practices become normal to you, the group

> becomes "your group", and even if you can still turn them in/report on them/whatever you are supposed to do, you become sympathetic.

 

Uh-oh.  This makes it sound like not only is there a multi-scale problem, but there may also be a hybrid requirement.  The mole either continuously transitions from non-belief to belief or there's a

threshold.   I.e. some parts of our classifying predicate will be

continuous and some will be discrete.

 

I have to admit, this seems like a really difficult multi-objective selection method.  Building a machine that generates belief from a collection of mechanisms, thereby satisfying the criteria, will be exceedingly difficult, at least as difficult as artificial life and intelligence.  But this is what we have to do if we're going to continue claiming that beliefs reduce to actions.

 

--

glen

 

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org