Philosophical Positions

This is an evergreen list of philosophical positions and beliefs I generally hold.

Consciousness

• Since I am a materialist, I accept the conclusion of “If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious”.
  • I believe there is likely a wide spectrum of consciousness, with humans merely sitting at a local optimum for consciousness. I accept that there is “something it is like” to be both a dog and the United States of America; that is, that both may have genuine qualia.
• I am an illusionist with respect to the hard problem of consciousness.
• I believe integrated information theory is directionally correct as a mathematical framework for consciousness, although the specific details are probably wrong, due to critiques like the unconscious expander.
• As a corollary to the previous three bullet points, I reject the existence of p-zombies; that is, creatures identical to humans but lacking conscious experience.
  • In particular, by the three points above, consciousness just is an illusion produced as a side effect of sufficiently complex information-processing systems, in which case it would not be possible to have a creature identical to humans in information-processing capability but lacking qualia.
• As an additional corollary, I’m agnostic as to whether large language models (LLMs) are merely “stochastic parrots” or may be conscious; indeed, in the theory above, the distinction is not particularly meaningful!
• However, I’m also broadly a Gopnikist with respect to LLMs — that LLMs are a novel cultural technology, not a form of intelligence.
  • Do note that the question of large language model understanding is subtly different from the question of large language model consciousness.
• I find the overfitted brain hypothesis fairly convincing. It argues that dreams are an attempt to fight “overfitting” in a statistical sense by generating noisy, out-of-distribution data, similar to how deep neural networks can benefit from training on noisy or corrupted inputs.

Epistemology

• I am broadly a pragmatist in the James-and-Peirce tradition.
  • I am quite fond of the example of a man circling a tree trying to catch sight of a squirrel that is also circling the tree. Does the man go around the squirrel or not? James argued that it doesn’t matter, because it depends on what you mean by “go around”, and once you clarify that, there’s no “practical” difference between the positions!

Political

• I am generally a supporter of a broad public domain with relatively limited copyright.
  • As my go-to example: I believe Batman should already be in the public domain in the United States.
• We should not attempt to colonize Mars. Send more drones instead.
• I’m a supporter of neurodiversity, which I would broadly define as the view that differences in mental functioning (including “mental illness” such as autism, ADHD, or bipolar, but also other conditions like synesthesia, aphantasia, or dyslexia) are natural, that differences in mental functioning are gradations or spectra with no hard cutoff between “normal” and “abnormal” functionality, and that stigmatizing and medicalizing differences in mental functioning is generally counterproductive (albeit potentially productive in individual cases).
  • Notably: Mental illness may still be a disability or potentially destructive, and medicalization (including medication) may be useful or necessary in many cases — but not in every case!

Programming

• I strongly prefer statically-typed languages and will almost always choose a statically-typed language over a dynamically-typed language.
  • I don’t have a strong empirical reason for this preference; it just matches how my brain works.
• I believe software engineering really is a form of engineering, thanks to Hillel Wayne’s “Are We Really Engineers?” crossover project.

Other Tools

• Checklists are great. We should use more checklists.
• Spaced repetition is great. We should use more spaced repetition systems.