this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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I see. I really appreciate you taking the time to tell me how you see things. It's been very interesting to me to read it.
I get anxious about asserting things I am not confident in. Do you ever wonder if holding onto something that you know you don't understand could end up being harmful?
I totally get not understanding how to make a steel beam happy. No reason to put effort into that.
My personal view is that matter inherently experiences since I experience and I can't find a magical hard line between me and rocks. Also I belive there is no smallest bit of matter, so there really isn't a way to compare the amount of interactions a system could have. Both are infinite. Therefore I have no real way to make a logical hierarchy. So I just interact how I can with respect for whatever I understand. I don't think elephant's are greater than ants.
Full respect for how you see things BTW. Our differences are basically faith based assumptions about the universe.
I get not being able to find a magical hard line between A person and a rock. I do think there is actually a clear distinction: computation. Rocks are not computing anything; brains and arguably bacteria are computing things. I think consciousness is more like computation than matter -- this fits with my intuition that you could upload someone's mind onto a computer (one neuron at a time, maintaining continuity), and that simulation of you is still you.
If you think all matter experiences equally, then shouldn't creatures with larger mass be worth more?
I agree with you on experience is computation. To me any interaction/change is computation. A ball rolling down a hill is a complex interaction with computation. Humans are a very specific and interesting reaction that feel in cool ways.
To me more matter could be worth more if more matter meant more interactions. Yet if matter is infinitely devisable then the amount of possible interactions is infinite. If matter is continuous rather than discrete then I don't know enough about the math of infinities to compare organisms. My rudimentary knowledge says they are equivalent infinities but I'm not confident.
However, if more interactions means more worthy, then at near any scale that would benefit those with resources and those in an environment that already suits them. It would favor heat over cold. Change over stability. Anxiety over calm. Psychedelics over alcohol. Those with access to more calories. It gets really weird when applied at different scales IMO.
So in summary: I don't think we can compare how much two systems compute. If we could, then using that comparison to assign moral worth still has a ton of very odd outputs.
Measure theory was discovered to be able to say that a rock twice as large as another rock can be accurately described as being twice as large as another rock, even if it's not discrete. (Detractors will point to the paradox that something can be cut up and reassembled to have more measure with a finite number of cuts, but the cuts have to be infinitely complex so it doesn't apply in reality.)
I agree a rock can be bigger than another rock. Yet 2 times infinity is not greater than infinity.
Edit: So my point is the interactions may be considered equal.
Edit: to be more pointed, measurement theory only applies to things that we know the shape of. The shape of anything in reality seems infinitely complex to me. Even if we can smooth the atoms out, there is still the EM field being perturbed by the orbiting electrons.
Measure theory can still describe the volume of fractal shapes, for instance using squeeze theorem if you can find an iterative upper and lower bound. Just because something's surface area isn't well-defined doesn't mean the volume isn't. Similarly, the coastline problem may preclude meaningfully measuring a country's perimeter, but its (projected) area is still measurable.
Wouldn't you agree that surface area is more important to computation and interaction than volume? Things interact at their surface. Therefore computation is infact subject to the coastline paradox?
If you actually try to measure the top surface of a country you run into the same issues as measuring the coast: infinite complexity.
Those projected volumes are practical to calculate, but must be interacted with through the surface.
True, but I don't agree with you in the first place that number of physical interactions is a good way to measure computation (for instance, I would consider the heat-death of the universe to be the end of computation.). I also am not sure that computation is a particularly good proxy for moral weight, I just think that without it there is no consciousness.
First, a minor correction:
This is an easy mistake to make, heat death is actually a very cold noninteracting state, so your point doesn't contradict physical interaction being computation. Though I trust that you really don't see interaction and computation as the same.
Edit: just looked up some heat death info, there is actually quite a range of ideas there so I guess I can't be confident on which one you meant.
In the beginning you said that experience rate was an important factor for moral weight, has that changed? If it hasn't, how do you reconcile that with:
Also, for my own curiosity: how do you distinguish interaction from computation?
I don't see why computation is tied to experience rate. You already pointed out examples of what appear to be higher amounts of computation in the brain not apparently tied to experience rate.
I think computation is meaningful, whereas interaction can be high-entropy and meaningless. I would probably need to consult E.T. Jaynes to have more precise definitions of the difference between these notions.
I actually would say that high interaction is high computation is high experience rate. I don't see how they are separated.
I'd be extremely curious to see how you define "meaningful" in this context. This seems to drive your moral hierarchy. Correct me if I'm wrong of course.